The Badge Says OFFLINE, the Site Works Fine: Inside Onion Status Whiplash
Circuits rotate every ten minutes, introduction points shed load, guards drop. Why one failed probe means almost nothing on Tor - and how we retry before believing it.
Tor network
56 postsnotes from running a 24/7 tor client: outages, weird latency spikes and other things that make badges jump.
latest notes
newest firstArti gains ground: why the Rust rewrite of Tor matters more than ever
The Rust rewrite of the tor client has reached client feature parity. What memory safety buys, how the transition is tracking and why relays will be the last to move.
The v3-only era: life after legacy onion addresses disappeared
Four years after Tor pulled the plug on v2 onion services, we look back at why the old addresses died, what v3 fixed, and how the ecosystem settled.
The long goodbye of v2 onion addresses: how Tor retired a 16-character era
From SHA-1 collisions to the October 2021 cutoff: how the Tor Project deprecated v2 onion services, and why thousands of sites initially stayed behind on legacy addresses.
Tor Browser 13 and the Mozilla rebase: what really changed under the hood
Tor Browser 13 was more than a visual refresh. Its rebase onto Firefox ESR 115 changed how the anonymity browser absorbs security fixes on desktop and Android.
Snowflake bridges explained: how volunteers become temporary Tor relays
Snowflake turns thousands of volunteer browsers into disposable WebRTC proxies that stand in front of Tor. How the design works, what limits it, and why censors struggle to keep up.
Obfs4 bridges explained: hiding Tor traffic in plain randomness
How obfs4 bridges hide Tor traffic inside random-looking bytes, where to request bridge lines from BridgeDB, moat or email, and why active probing still lets censors find them.
WebTunnel explained: how Tor hides inside ordinary HTTPS traffic
WebTunnel disguises Tor bridge connections as everyday HTTPS traffic. We explain how the pluggable transport works and what performance it costs.
How onion services work: introduction points, rendezvous relays and the six-circuit handshake
Every .onion connection is a small choreography of descriptors, introduction points and a rendezvous relay. Here is how the six-circuit handshake works, in plain language.
OnionBalance and the hard truth about DDoS protection for hidden services
OnionBalance spreads onion services across backend instances, but it is not a DDoS shield. How frontend-backend balancing really works, where it failed in 2023-2024.
HSDir Stress: Why Descriptor Churn Makes Onion Sites Flicker Offline
Onion services can be healthy yet unreachable. We explain how hidden service directories store descriptors, why republishing rules matter, and what overload does to reachability.
Circuits Expire Every Ten Minutes. Your Guard Should Not.
Tor rebuilds circuits every ten minutes but keeps the same guard relay for months. Research shows why switching guards early makes deanonymization more likely.