What is Onion Land?
Posted on: March 13, 2010
Many people stumbling across this blog may not yet be aware of the sheer awesomeness that is Onion Land. Put simply, Onion Land is what the Internet was once thought of as being: anonymous, uncensored, and free.
But really, what is Onion Land? Onion Land is built on top of a revolutionary technology called Tor. Tor gives you anonymity while you browse the web; not the kind of anonymity that 4chan gives, but real, honest-to-goodness anonymity of the kind that infuriates law enforcement agencies. When using Tor, you are really anonymous.
Onion Land, though, is not the anonymity given to you, the web browser, by Tor, though. Onion Land is the community that exists on Tor’s Hidden Services. Hidden Services are just that: hidden. What differentiates a hidden service from a normal server on the Internet is that the owner of the service can not be identified. This creates an unprecedented opportunity for free speech, more so even than the use of Tor to post to the ‘vanilla’ Internet (like I’m doing now) because not only is there no fear of repercussions for the poster, but indemnity is also granted to the person running the service, be it a chat room or a forum.
Here are some links to get you started:
- The Hidden Wiki contains links to get you started in Onion Land. You need to be using Tor to view it.
- Onion Forum (Tor-only) is one of the oldest and by far the most active site in Onion Land. It’s pretty cool; check it out.
- The Circle IRC is the de-facto hub of the real time Onion Land community. Come on in and join us. You’ll have to have your IRC client (Pidgin is a good choice) configured to use Tor to log on. Instructions for mIrc, Pidgin, and various other programs can be found on the The Onion Router Wiki on noreply.org.
- The Circle‘s web site (again, Tor-only) also has some nice stuff.
March 29, 2010 at 1:29 am
itd be cool if you wrote a post or series of posts about possible ways in which anonymity can be compromised with tor. like timing attacks or dns leaks or something about one entity controlling a large amount of nodes. i hear that last one a lot from people who scoff at my tor usage, “oh the fbi runs some nodes so your not really anonymous”