Comments

5 responses to “The New York Times shutting down its Tor Onion Service”

1. 2025/03/16

   Dima Pasechnik ?? ??

   @alecm NYT has reached the status of "just read The Onion" instead. So, indeed, Tor is no longer needed.
2. 2025/03/17

   qbi

   @alecm What do you think would have been a better strategy for growth and adoption?
   1. 2025/04/02

      alecm

      I believe that the Tor Project made a mistake by leaving relationships with big deployments in the hands of engineering and research and development staff. E.g. my observation of Tor’s attempted relationship with the BBC suggested that Tor saw the BBC onion service as a playground opportunity for Tor to experiment with large deployments and new technologies, rather than to solve a trust and availability problem for the BBC “as a customer”. This is not an effective way to build trust and reputation as a provider of enterprise services… Which is what we are talking about. My subsequent personal relationship with Tor similarly reflects Tor’s internal toxic tendency to ignore the context of the outside world unless something that is happening which threatens internal plans or public reputation.

      Reply
   2. 2025/04/02

      alecm

      So, yes, to your point: hire and retain some people who know how to talk to corporations and goal them with growth, have them manage relationships with the corporations treating the latter as “customers”, and keep the nerds developing useful product but isolate them from these solution focused relationships.

      Reply
3. 2025/04/25

   Drew

   Sad.

   The benefits of onion routing and onion services should not be ignored.

   Like being beyond the reach of those who poison and spoof the layers of the Internet which are vulnerable to as much.

   And the predicted upcoming benefits to more onion-sites with regards to (D)DOS protections.

   Etcetera… Onions are hardy, so maybe they’ll grow a new one.

   Reply