[tor-dev] OnionGatherer: evaluating status of hidden services

[Massimo La Morgia]

Dear members of the Tor community,

we are a research group at Sapienza University, Rome, Italy. We do research
on distributed systems, Tor, and the Dark Web. As part of our work, we have
developed OnionGatherer, a service that gives up-to-date information about
Dark Web hidden services to Tor users.

OnionGatherer is implemented as a Google Chrome extension coupled with a
back-end service running on our servers. As the user surfes the Web,
OnionGatherer collects all the URLs from the page and adds a green bullet
next ot the URL if the hidden service is up and running, an orange one if
the system are currently evaluating the address' status or a red one if the
hidden service is down. The status of the hidden services is pulled from
our servers, which keep track of all the services found by the users and
constantly monitor their status. When a new hidden service is found,
OnionGatherer checks its status in real time, informs the user accordingly,
and adds it to the database.

We believe that OnionGatherer can be very useful to Tor users that are
interested in surfing the Dark Web. Indeed, hidden services are born and
shut down very frequently, and it is often time consuming and frustrating
to check manually which services are still active.

We kindky ask if you can help disseminate our project ---the largest is the
number of users of  OnionGatherer, the largest the database and the best
the service we can provide. Currently the software is in Beta version and
released on GitHub at the following link:

client: https://github.com/rfidlabsapienza/onionGatherer-ChromeExtension
server: https://github.com/rfidlabsapienza/onionGatherer-Server

Any feedback or issue are really appreciated.
Thanks in advance. Best regards,

The research group:
A. Mei, J. Stefa, M. La Morgia, S. Raponi
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