[tor-dev] The case with Tor2Web

[George Kadianakis]

Hello!

It's a semi-secret that tor2web traffic has been blocked from the Tor
network when we introduced the DoS subsystem this March [0]. The reason
is that a big part of the DoS traffic was coming from one-hop clients
continuously hammering onion services.

This is something that we've been considering doing for a while (for
security and code-complexity reasons), and it just happened naturally
during the DoS incident.

As part of this, and since the DoS subsystem is going to stick around,
we are planning to permanently kill the Tor2Web subsystem of Tor, in an
effort to simplify our codebase and our feature list.

If you've been relying on tor2web for something, please consider
switching to a normal 3-hop client indeed. This is a heads up so that
you can let us know if that won't work for you, or you need help
transitioning out.

Cheers and hope we are not making you sad.

[0]: https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/24902
     https://blog.torproject.org/new-stable-tor-releases-security-fixes-and-dos-prevention-03210-03110-02915