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.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."
Area man pretends to give a shit.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Holy crap, I haven't read TFA of course, but does this mean they have devoted a top-level domain to parody news?
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. Polar Scope Align for iOS
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.
"Everybody's naked underneath" -- The Doctor
Y'know, a .theonion domain would be really useful: all satire websites could use it, and we could program browsers to add "[THIS IS SATIRE YOU MORON]" whenever my relatives paste a .theonion URL into Facebook.
Y'know, a .theonion domain would be really useful: all satire websites could use it, and we could program browsers to add "[THIS IS SATIRE YOU MORON]" whenever my relatives paste a .theonion URL into Facebook.
Which would immediately ruin all the fun when someone gets Onioned.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
I don't know. Given past situations, people will manage to miss all the signs and post it as fact anyways.
The .onion domain is more geared towards websites run as hidden service so they cannot be identified. If you already use TOR, you can browse regular or hidden service websites anonymously already. The .onion domain protects the hidden service websites from being discovered. For example, SilkRoad ran as a hidden service which made it harder to trace who ran it (but it was eventually discovered by other social engineering means).
That makes SSL for .onion useless. SSL is for authenticating the operator's identity of the website. Why would a website simultaneously choose to be identified and not identified at the same time? That's oxymoron.
I once had a signature.
In recent elections here in the US, we've been reading of studies showing that the voters who are most knowledgeable about the candidates and the issues are those who follow various satirical news sites. The Daily Show, the Colbert Report, the Onion, and even Wait Wait Don't Tell Me have been named as being highly correlated with informedness. So yes, it makes sense at least minimal sense to have a satire/parody/humor top-level domain.
Of course, Poe's Law applies even here, and we'll continue to see articles posted as fact, even when they're clearly labelled as satire by their URL.
What I'm looking forward to is someone setting up an actual news site there that specializes in stories that really seem like parody or saire, but are actually true. The world has enough such stories to keep at least a small team of journalists busy.
(And I do expect a reply to the above saying "correlation is not causation", so don't disappoint me ...)
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.