[tor-talk] Possible solution to next-gen onion services UX disaster

[Jonathan Marquardt]

On Sun, Mar 12, 2017 at 01:50:09PM -0400, Lolint wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I just thought about a possible (partial) solution to solve the "UX disaster" of next-gen onion services, namely the very long addresses. Tor Browser already ships with HTTPS
> Everywhere, and one can easily write rules that redirect from http or https to onion services, as an example,
> 
> https://www.whonix.org/wiki/Forcing_.onion_on_Whonix.org#Adding_the_user_rule
> 
> If there was a possibility to add all the famous and most used onion services (facebook
> for example) into those rules then that effectively solves the UX problem for most of these
> onion services, since the user will no longer have to bother about finding the right onion
> addresses.
> 
> What do you think?
> 
> Thx
> 
> --Jeff

You're not exactly the first person to come up with this sort of idea. There 
already exist things like this:

https://github.com/Someguy123/hiddeneverywhere

One of the main problems with this of course is that you have yet another list 
that needs to be maintained centrally.

There are many ways one could think of to link regular domains their onion 
counterparts. I am not sure which would be the best. If you have this as a 
browser plugin, you also only solved the problem on the application layer, for 
just this one application.

I had the idea once to link domains using TXT records in the DNS, however 
given that DNS is not secure at all, I'm not so sure if that's a smart thing 
either.
-- 
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