[tor-dev] Proposal 204 and next-gen HS addresses (was: Proposal status changes the last 17 months)

[Nick Mathewson]

On Fri, Nov 15, 2013 at 7:42 AM, Lunar <lunar at torproject.org> wrote:
> Nick Mathewson:
>> 204  Subdomain support for Hidden Service addresses [FINISHED]
>>
>>      This one allows an (ignored) foo at the front of
>>      foo.bar.onion, for subdomain support.  Sadly, I bet it will
>>      never see much use with the introduction of longer onion
>>      addresses in our next-gen hidden service design.
>
> Could you elaborate on that last statement?
>
> AFAIK, this feature has not been advertised at all yet because 0.2.4 is
> still unfortunately not stable.

Well, it's not *officially* stable, but it's sure the Tor I would
recommend to all my friends nowadays.

> The initial idea was to be able to support access through a single
> hidden service to mass-hosting platforms, think of all blogs at
> *.wordpress.com or *.noblogs.org. Why would the longer onion addresses
> be a problem in that regard?

So, suppose that I have a blogging platform running as a hidden
service. The base hostname might be something like
"cmktn5wni9uinp1niixoh8gzf2oqkcwckcexwe8zutfn5uu7zbb.onion".

Individual blogs might be at:
technology.cmktn5wni9uinp1niixoh8gzf2oqkcwckcexwe8zutfn5uu7zbb.onion,
lemurs.cmktn5wni9uinp1niixoh8gzf2oqkcwckcexwe8zutfn5uu7zbb.onion,
drama.cmktn5wni9uinp1niixoh8gzf2oqkcwckcexwe8zutfn5uu7zbb.onion

My thought had been that the long addresses are likely to make people
a bit disinclined to use even longer addresses.  But I guess we'll
see; there's no reason to actually remove the feature.
-- 
Nick