.Onion Gets a Boost From IETF, IANA: Now It's a Special-Use Domain

An anonymous reader writes: As tweeted by Jacob Appelbaum, the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority today listed .onion as a special-use domain, and the IETF approved a Draft RFC for the domain describing its intended uses. As described on the Facebook Over Tor page, "Jointly, these actions enable '.onion' as special-use, top-level domain name for which SSL certificates may be issued in accordance with the Certificate-Authority & Browser Forum 'Ballot 144' — which was passed in February this year. ... Together, this assures the validity and future availability of SSL certificates in order to assert and protect the ownership of Onion sites throughout the whole of the Tor network."

Comments

SSL certs for .onion is awesome

[iTrawl]

Having the host of the .onion be verified in the real world, while keeping their users anonymous is a good thing. You really don't need to know _where_ in the world I am or what my IP address is when I come to your website. You might even be able to track my persona as usual, and serve me "relevant" ads as usual, but with no clue as to who I am or where I come from (unless I tell you), and that's fine too, while I can regenerate my persona (erase cookies and the like) at any point and start over.

What about Terry Wrist? You should get better at infiltration. Thinking everybody might be Terry Wrist and tapping them accordingly is just lazy, and the real Terry Wrist might still get away because you didn't look in the right place.