| Title | A Dark Web Version Of Wikipedia | |
| Date | Monday November 27 2017, @10:18AM | |
| Author | Fnord666 | |
| Topic | ||
| 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.
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