Dev.SN

In our ongoing commitment to our users privacy, we've introduced the ability to reach this site through Tor directly. Without further adue:

• SoylentNews (this page): http://7rmath4ro2of2a42.onion
• Development Site: http://skgmctqnhyvfava3.onion
• Wiki: http://kvs3xgkasyoqd4hx.onion
• Site Status: http://kvs3xgkasyoqd4hx.onion

Since these services are accessible directly in the Tor Network, and do not need to pass through an exit node, it should be considerably faster to access SoylentNews via the onion links than going through directly. There are a couple of caveats you should be aware of though using this service.

When you browse us through tor, a bit of magic happens on the backend (a process I like to call auto onioning), which causes the page to be rewritten with our normal links rewritten as tor links. For instance, a link to our wiki will get automatically replaced with its onion equivalent. Unfortunately, the process is bi-directional (a side-effect of mod_substitute), so if you post a link that we have an auto-onion entry for, it will cause the onion link to show up on the main index. Auto-onioning is only applied for users coming in from tor, and not for regular visitors. We'll probably do tweaks to Slash to get it to de-onion links as they come in, but just be aware of it for now.

Furthermore, as the final hop to varnish is in the Linode data centre, users from tor will always show up with a consistent IPID. This allows user accounts to work properly while being onioned. At the moment, we don't support SSL through tor as we've not created the necessary CA and self-signed certificates. This is on the TODO list, and should show up sometime this week (we'll announce it when we do).

The consistent IP however means that staff can see if a user is coming in from tor due to the consistent IPID. While we do not publish our IPIDs publicly, you should be aware that any of us can check to see where a given post is coming from. Furthermore, our rate limiting software works on an IP basis. We've tested tor with several users at once and didn't trip the rate limiting, but if people start getting 429 errors, we'll modify the rules to give nitrogen (the tor relay) more requests per second in an attempt to keep it up.

Furthermore, when using tor, you're still using the old and dingy IPv4 protocol (shockingly, tor does *not* support IPv6 hidden nodes which surprised me; it is our only backend component that doesn't support it). This service should be considered experimental, and may go away, break in two, eat your children, or render the user sterile. You have been warned.