Guardian Launches Tor Onion Service

The Guardian website is now available to Tor users as an “onion service”, at the address:

https://www.guardian2zotagl6tmjucg3lrhxdk4dw3lhbqnkvvkywawy3oqfoprid.onion

The Tor network helps conceal its users’ locations, which makes tracking their internet activity much more difficult. Tor also makes it harder for internet service providers to identify what their users are accessing. This means users can bypass censorship in parts of the world where access to independent news might be difficult or if certain websites and services are banned.

Guardian readers have always been able to access https://www.theguardian.com using tools such as Tor Browser. These browsers route their communications over the Tor network – thereby concealing the reader’s location. But the browsers’ communications have to exit the Tor network for the final leg of the journey in order to get to the site on the normal world wide web.

The introduction of a Guardian onion service means that the entire communication pathway between a reader and the Guardian takes place within the Tor network, thereby avoiding potential risks with the “hop” between the Tor network and the world wide web service. An example of such a risk could be that the “exit node” – the gateway between the normal web and the Tor network – could contain malicious software or be located somewhere that is subject to censorship.

Our onion service also promotes anonymity in other ways. We hope to minimise the digital breadcrumbs that get left by reader activity and that could help malign actors from identifying them. Users of the Guardian’s onion service will not be able to create Guardian accounts or sign in to their existing account (if they have one). And the site does not include any third-party advertising or sharing of information with third parties.

Our onion service also disables the scripts that normally run in readers’ browsers. Some Tor users already disable scripts for security reasons. By disabling them for all users of our onion site we hope to ensure that everyone has the same experience and protections. This should also help with performance on the Tor network, which is usually much slower than conventional web browsing as Tor network relies on volunteers to donate bandwidth. We hope that our modern server side rendering tier will provide a good user experience on our onion site. However, some complex, interactive content may not work as efficiently.

If you already access https://www.theguardian.com using the Tor Project’s Tor Browser, you should now see a message in your browser’s location bar showing “.onion available”. This gives you the option to use the Guardian’s onion service instead.

Since 2014, the Guardian has published a SecureDrop site as an onion service, to allow whistleblowers to get in touch securely. For more about our SecureDrop onion service, please see here.

For more information about the Tor network please visit https://www.torproject.org/.

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