[tor-onions] Renaming Rendezvous Single Onion Services

[micah]

Ah, the hardest problem in computer science, naming!

Alec Muffett <alec.muffett at gmail.com> writes:

> Single* Hop Onion Services (*singleness not guaranteed)

> On 23 Feb 2016 3:14 a.m., "Paul Syverson" <paul.syverson at nrl.navy.mil>
> wrote:
>
>> If you want to underscore in the name specifically the not-hidden
>> property, then I suggest the best would be 'Rendezvous Located-Onion
>> Service'. And Single Onion Service, would be 'Located-Onion Service'.

The problem with both 'Single Hop' and 'Rendezvous Located' is that it
requires that you know enough about tor to understand what those
mean, before you can understand that you don't get a certain property
that you might be expecting. These describe the technology, instead of
telling you what you get.

The "Hidden" services name was good because it told you what you
got. Now we have come to recognize that there is a valid use case for
these that doesn't involve being 'hidden' so there is a move to change
the name to "Onion" services instead.

At the same time, there is this effort to create RSOS and Single Onion
Services. Does it make sense to continue to push for a broadening of the
term Hidden->Onion Services, while also trying to individually name
these different types of services? If we keep "hidden services" and then
call these "non-hidden services" that might be the clearest.

However, the functional differences between RSOS and Single Onion
Services are not obvious enough to me to come up with a distinguishing
name for each that an admin with only a surface level understanding of
tor would be able to make a choice based on the name alone.

Single Onion seems easy to describe as a "non-hidden onion service", but
the difference between RSOS and Single Onion Services perhaps too subtle
to give a functional name. Could we just call RSOS "non-hidden onion
service behind NAT" or "non-hidden onion service with unreachable OR
port"?

micah