Onion V3 Address is live

Ben Tasker

2020-08-17 14:40 (updated 2020-08-18 12:56)

My site has supported using V3 Onions at the transport layer for quite some time, having implemented Alt-Svc headers to allow Tor to be used opportunistically back in October 2018.

What I hadn't got around to, until now, was actually support direct access via a V3 hostname. I'd put a reasonable amount of effort into generating a personalised V2 address, and making sure it was documented/well used.

However, V2 Onions have been deprecated, and will start generating warnings in a month. Total discontinuation of V2 support is scheduled for July 15th 2021.

So, I figured I should get V3 support up and running, and have today launched the service.

Address Change

With immediate effect, Tor users can access my site via

http://e26whn2524322mkxb3cbyk27ev2ihhq2biz35hty7gzgsyrwrygq27yd.onion/

The old address (http://6zdgh5a5e6zpchdz.onion/) will continue to work for a while, but will eventually redirect to the V3 Onion name. Of course, July next year, it'll stop working entirely as the Tor network will not longer route V2 Onions at all.

Video Playback

For reasons unrelated to Tor, it wasn't previously possible to play back videos embedded in my site when accessing via the V2 Tor hostname. As of today, videos (such as the one here) should now play correctly for users accessing via the V3 Onion.