Tor2web (pronounced "Tor to Web") is a software project to allow Tor hidden services to be accessed from a standard browser without being connected to the Tor network. It was created by

Aaron Swartz Aaron Hillel Swartz (; November 8, 1986January 11, 2013), also known as AaronSw, was an American computer programmer, entrepreneur, writer, political organizer, and Internet hacktivism, hacktivist. As a programmer, Swartz helped develop the we ...

and Virgil Griffith.

History

Tor is a network which enables people to use the Internet anonymously (though with known weaknesses) and to publish content on "hidden services", which exist only within the Tor network for security reasons and thus are typically only accessible to the relatively small number of people using a Tor-connected web browser.

and Virgil Griffith developed Tor2web in 2008 as a way to support

whistleblowing Whistleblowing (also whistle-blowing or whistle blowing) is the activity of a person, often an employee, revealing information about activity within a private or public organization that is deemed illegal, immoral, illicit, unsafe, unethical or ...

and other forms of

anonymous Anonymous may refer to: * Anonymity, the state of an individual's identity, or personally identifiable information, being publicly unknown ** Anonymous work, a work of art or literature that has an unnamed or unknown creator or author * Anonym ...

publishing Publishing is the activities of making information, literature, music, software, and other content, physical or digital, available to the public for sale or free of charge. Traditionally, the term publishing refers to the creation and distribu ...

through Tor, allowing materials to remain anonymous while making them accessible to a broader audience. In an interview with ''

Wired Wired may refer to: Arts, entertainment, and media Music * ''Wired'' (Jeff Beck album), 1976 * ''Wired'' (Hugh Cornwell album), 1993 * ''Wired'' (Mallory Knox album), 2017 * "Wired", a song by Prism from their album '' Beat Street'' * "Wired ...

'' Swartz explained that Tor is great for anonymous publishing, but because its focus is not user-friendliness and thus not many people would install it, he wanted to "produce this hybrid where people could publish stuff using Tor and make it so that anyone on the internet could view it". The software developed by Swartz and Griffith is today considered version 1.0. Since then, it has been maintained and developed by Giovanni Pellerano from the Hermes Center for Transparency and Digital Human Rights as part of the GlobaLeaks Project, with financial support from the Open Technology Fund. Version 2.0 was released in August 2011, and version 3.0 is in beta .

Operation and security

Rather than typical

top-level domain A top-level domain (TLD) is one of the domain name, domains at the highest level in the hierarchical Domain Name System of the Internet after the root domain. The top-level domain names are installed in the DNS root zone, root zone of the nam ...

s like .com, .org, or .net, hidden service

URL A uniform resource locator (URL), colloquially known as an address on the Web, is a reference to a resource that specifies its location on a computer network and a mechanism for retrieving it. A URL is a specific type of Uniform Resource Identi ...

s end with .onion and are only accessible when connected to Tor. Tor2web acts as a specialized proxy or middleman between hidden services and users, making them visible to people who are not connected to Tor. To do so, a user takes the URL of a hidden service and replaces .onion with .onion.to. Like Tor, Tor2web operates using servers run voluntarily by an open community of individuals and organizations. Tor2web preserves the anonymity of content publishers but is not itself an anonymity tool and does not offer any protection to users beyond relaying data using HTTP Secure (HTTPS). Since version 2.0, a privacy and security warning is added to the header of each web page it fetches, encouraging readers to use the Tor Browser to obtain anonymity.

References

External links

* {{Tor hidden services Dark web Tor (anonymity network) Free software programmed in Python Software using the GNU Affero General Public License

History

Operation and security

See also

References

External links