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from the an-onion-site,-not-the-onion-site dept.
In many parts of the world, like North America, using Wikipedia is taken for granted; hell, there are even Twitter accounts to track government employees editing the internet's free encyclopedia while on the clock. But in other places, like Turkey or Syria, using Wikipedia can be difficult, and even dangerous.
For example, Wikipedia is still blocked in Turkey after the government restricted access to the site during a crackdown on dissident elements after a failed coup. Syrian-Palestinian digital activist and Wikipedia editor Bassel Khartabil is believed to have been executed by the Syrian government. To make using Wikipedia safer for at-risk users, former Facebook security engineer Alec Muffett has started an experimental dark net Wikipedia service that gives visitors some strong privacy protections. The project is unofficial; for now, Wikipedia isn't involved.
The service is accessible through the Tor browser, which routes your connection through several "hops" around the world to hide your location from anybody trying to track you. The normal version of Wikipedia is already accessible through Tor, but to get there a user's traffic has to exit the private Tor network, opening them to surveillance at the point where their traffic becomes unencrypted. Instead, Muffett has created what's known as an onion service for Wikipedia on the Tor network. That means your traffic never leaves the safely encrypted confines of Tor, keeping it hidden.
"Onion sites are considered to be about 'anonymity', but really they offer two more features: Discretion (e.g.: your employer or ISP cannot see what you are browsing, not even what site) and trust (if you access facebookcorewwwi.onion you are definitely connected to Facebook, because of the nature of Onion addressing)," Muffett wrote me in an email.
"The code is free and libre," he added. "I am doing it because it's worth doing."
[...] An onion service for Wikipedia has been a point of discussion in the Wikipedia community for a while, but Muffett seems to be the first person to actually create one. He pledged on Twitter to "keep it running for a few days," but with enough community support one could see Wikipedia on Tor becoming permanent.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 27 2017, @04:01PM
By the sound of it, what we're talking about it is a Tor exit node with a built in web proxy, presumably in a country that has a a known positive stance of civil rights. This is really kind of forcing Wikipedia to create its own Tor node, since the proxy will allow for inline content transliteration. What this guy did, is technically referred to as a "man in the middle attack".
While he "may" have positive intentions, how long that will last when his local intelligence agency knocks on his door with a trungeon and German shepard remains to be seen. If the guy understands Tor, then he should understand why this architecture is bad. Proxifying an outbound node probably qualifies as computer trespass in many jurisdictions. Though there is a lot of this kind of hanky panky that goes on on TOR. (read the admins mailing list if you don't believe me) I wouldn't be surprised if 50% of output nodes were doing some janky shit with transient data.
Wikipedia on TOR: Good Idea.
Proxifying Wikipedia from TOR: Bad Idea.
If you aren't running your own node, your exposing your traffic to what this guy is doing. My expectation is that Wikipedia will respond by going TOR natively. It will be interesting to see how TOR scales after that.