Bentasker.co.uk now available as a Tor Hidden Service

Hidden Services have had something of a bad rap in the media of late, whilst it's undoubtedly true that some host some unpleasant material, the same can equally be said of the World Wide Web.

Hidden Services do have the potential to bring a much higher level of privacy to the end-user, and aren't always about hiding the origin from the user (or an attacker). The cryptography used in Tor's transport is arguably much stronger (and easier to change if found to be broken) that is available for HTTPS.

To that end, I thought it would be wise to configure the site to be multi-homed, that is to be accessible via both methods.

Because both are run by the same back-end, updates will appear on both at the same time.

So, you can now access BenTasker.co.uk at either

A link to the .onion has also been added to the Privacy bar on the left.

 

Why use Tor?

There may be a number of reasons that you might choose to connect to my site via the Hidden Service;

  • You don't want me (or my ISP) to know your source IP
  • You don't want your ISP/Government to know you're visiting my site
  • You're privacy conscious and don't fully trust HTTPS

There are any number of perfectly valid reasons you might have for visiting via Tor - but the point (and the reason for the change) is that as a site operator, I should be allowing visitors to make their own choice about the level of protection they feel they require.

I've certainly seen a proportion of traffic come via Tor exit nodes, so presumably at least some visitors have reasons for wanting to stay anonymous, accessing the Hidden Service takes the exit nodes out of the equation and hopefully provides a better level of privacy for those who desire it.

 

For those who are interested, the process I went through to get the site working as both a hidden service and a www-front can be found here.