[tor-dev] prop224: Ditching key blinding for shorter onion addresses

[Razvan Dragomirescu]

I agree with this, I don't really see the point of making .onion names easy
to remember. If it's a service you access often, you can bookmark it or
alias it locally to something like "myserver.onion" (maybe we should make
it easier for users to do just that - an alias file for .onion lookups,
allowing them to register myserver.onion and point it to
asdlataoireaoiasdasd.onion or whatever).

If it's a link on a Wiki or in a search engine, you just click on it, you
don't care what the name is. The only time you'd have to remember an actual
.onion address is if you heard it on the radio or saw a banner on the side
of the street while driving and had to memorize it in a few seconds. Or
maybe if you have to read the address _over the phone_ to a friend (as
opposed to mailing him the link).

What is the exact use case of this? I'm not saying it's useless, I just
don't see the point, maybe I'm missing something.

Razvan

--
Razvan Dragomirescu
Chief Technology Officer
Cayenne Graphics SRL

On Sat, Jul 30, 2016 at 9:44 PM, Lunar <lunar at torproject.org> wrote:

> George Kadianakis:
> > this is an experimental mail meant to address legitimate usability
> concerns
> > with the size of onion addresses after proposal 224 gets implemented.
> It's
> > meant for discussion and it's far from a full blown proposal.
>
> Taking a step back here, I believe the size of the address to be a
> really minor usability problem. IPv6 adressses are 128 bits long, and
> plenty of people in this world now access content via IPv6. It's not a
> usability problem because they use a naming—as opposed to
> addressing—scheme to learn about the appropriate IPv6 address.
>
> While I do think we should think of nicer representation for the new
> addresses than base32, and we should adress that, working on a naming
> system sounds like an easier way out to improve onion services
> usability than asking people to remember random addresses (be them 16 or
> 52 characters-long).
>
> (I now plenty of people who type “riseup” in the Google search bar of
> their browser to access their mailbox… They don't even want to/can't
> remember
> an URL. Hardly a chance they will remember an onion address, whatever
> its size.)
>
> Maybe it would be worthwhile to ask the UX team for input on the topic?
>
> --
> Lunar                                             <lunar at torproject.org>
>
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