If you are an onion site administrator, you must upgrade to v3 onion services as soon as possible.
As we announced last year, v2 onion services will be deprecated and obsolete in Tor 0.4.6.x. As of April 2021, Tor Browser Alpha uses this version of Tor and v2 addresses no longer work in this and future versions of Tor Browser Alpha.
When Tor Browser stable moves to Tor 0.4.6.x in October 2021, v2 onion addresses will be completely unreachable.
Why are we deprecating v2 onion services? Safety. Technologies used in v2 onion services are vulnerable to different kinds of attacks, and v2 onion services are no longer being developed or maintained. The new version of onion services provides improved encryption and enhanced privacy for administrators and users.
It's critical that onion service administrators migrate to v3 onion services and work to inform users about this change as soon as possible.
We are excited to announce that three new members are joining the Tor Project’s Board of Directors: Alissa Cooper, Desigan (Dees) Chinniah, and Kendra Albert! Each new member comes to Tor with a different set of expertise that will help the organization and our community.
Alissa Cooper is a Chief Technology Officer and Fellow at Cisco Systems and served in a variety of leadership roles in the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). We are excited that Alissa is joining the Board, her expertise will help Tor continue to mature as an organization.
Desigan Chinniah is a long time supporter of Tor. He is a creative technologist with a strong background in the Free Software movement as well as in the industry with his experience as an investor and on product. We are looking forward to his contribution to the Board and to Tor.
Kendra Albert is a public interest technology lawyer with a special interest in computer security and in protecting marginalized speakers and users. They serve as a clinical instructor at the Cyberlaw Clinic at Harvard Law School, where they teach students to practice law by working with pro bono clients. We are also honored to have Kendra with us and their legal expertise will be a big bonus to Tor.
This action was held on Foundation and resulted in a final bid of 500 Ethereum (ETH), roughly $2M USD at the time of the auction, with the proceeds going towards the Tor Project and our work to improve and promote Tor.
Check the status of Tor services with status.torproject.org
The Tor Project now has a status page which shows the state of our major services.
You can check status.torproject for news about major outages in Tor services, including v3 and v2 onion services, directory authorities, our website (torproject.org), and the check.torproject.org tool. The status page also displays outages related to Tor internal services, like our GitLab instance.
(May 10) Tor 0.4.6.3-rc is the first release candidate in its series. It fixes a few small bugs from previous versions, and adds a better error message when trying to use (no longer supported) v2 onion services. Full changelog.
What We're Reading
"GCHQ’s mass data interception violated right to privacy, court rules," The Guardian.
The Tor Project is a US 501(c)(3) non-profit organization advancing human rights and freedoms by creating and deploying free and open-source anonymity and privacy technologies, supporting their unrestricted availability and use, and furthering their scientific and popular understanding.
