[tor-onions] Renaming Rendezvous Single Onion Services

[Ann O'Nymous]

Tim Wilson-Brown - teor:
> Hi Kate,
> 
> Aaron and others currently favour "open onion services".
> 
> What do you think?

I remain persuaded by Paul Syverson's arguments for using names that
reflect design. Design is unambiguous and reliably accurate, unless
there have been substantive coding or merging errors. Conversely,
functionality, usage and applicability by threat model are all
ephemeral. Bugs and unforseen vulnerabilities can make such names
inaccurate and misleading, or even ironic.

Consider how "hidden services" fared against the CMU jerks. But there's
no irony when you call them "onion services". It's just that they
exploited a bug that allowed relays to readily message each other across
shared circuits. That is, onion circuits got pwned, and so did "hidden"
services and their users, but it was still accurate to call them "onion"
services.

> Tim
> 
>> On 28 Feb 2016, at 18:30, Tim Wilson-Brown - teor <teor2345 at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> Hi Kate,
>>
>> As we talked about at your press session, can you help us name a new "Hidden Service" variant?
>>
>> If we call the overall feature "Onion Services", we need to come up with names for a new variant:
>> * "Single" Onion Services: a service where the client is anonymous and the server is not (like Facebook)
>>
>> We already have:
>> * "Hidden" Onion Services: a service where the client and server are anonymous (like SecureDrop)
>>
>> We might also want names for two different implementations of "Single" Onion Services:
>> * "Rendezvous" Single Onion Services: a service where the server only makes connections out, so it can be behind a NAT
>> * "Extend" Single Onion Services: a service that opens a port that Tor clients can connect to via Tor
>> But that's not as important, as it's very likely that we'll only end up with one of these alternate implementations in a tor release.
>>
>> I've forwarded part of a tor-onions mailing list discussion below.
>>
>> Tim
>>
>>> Begin forwarded message:
>>>
>>> From: Alec Muffett <alec.muffett at gmail.com <mailto:alec.muffett at gmail.com>>
>>> Subject: Re: [tor-onions] Renaming Rendezvous Single Onion Services
>>> Date: 25 February 2016 at 14:17:00 GMT+1
>>> To: tor-onions at lists.torproject.org <mailto:tor-onions at lists.torproject.org>
>>> Reply-To: tor-onions at lists.torproject.org <mailto:tor-onions at lists.torproject.org>
>>>
>>>
>>> If we do end up choosing a feature-based name, I think we could start with a base name like:
>>> (With credit to a thesaurus antonyms section...)
>>> * Visible Service
>>> * Obvious Service
>>> * Overt Service
>>> * Open Service
>>> * Revealed Service
>>> * Known Service
>>>
>>> Then we could add "Onion" to distinguish Tor services when necessary in context.
>>>
>>> We can also add:
>>> * "Rendezvous", or
>>> * "Extend" / "(OR)Port" to distinguish between the different onion services.
>>>
>>>
>>> I'd suggest that the general goal is to convey the value proposition and avoid abstract or ambiguous terms that require further explanation.  Running through the list of suggestions:
>>> visible: begs the question "to whom?" and whether a traditional HS is not "visible"
>>>
>>> obvious: not bad, but begs grammarians to criticise it
>>>
>>> overt: i like this; I like "flagrant" too.  both of them speak to the concept that this is the complement of a "hidden" service
>>>
>>> open: very good, traditional, positive word, but with overloaded meaning (the open service is closed for maintenance)
>>>
>>> revealed: not bad, but grammar again.  "overt" is better.
>>>
>>> known: same criticism as "visible"; if you're shooting for this you might want to consider "attested" instead?
>>>
>>>     -a
>>>
>>>
>>>
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>>
>> Tim Wilson-Brown (teor)
>>
>> teor2345 at gmail dot com
>> PGP 968F094B
>>
>> teor at blah dot im
>> OTR CAD08081 9755866D 89E2A06F E3558B7F B5A9D14F
>>
> 
> Tim Wilson-Brown (teor)
> 
> teor2345 at gmail dot com
> PGP 968F094B
> 
> teor at blah dot im
> OTR CAD08081 9755866D 89E2A06F E3558B7F B5A9D14F
> 
> 
> 
> 
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