How to Geek: “Website addresses that end in “.onion” aren’t like normal domain names, and you can’t access them with a normal web browser. Addresses that end with “.onion” point to Tor hidden services on the deep web. Lots of deep web sites contain very nasty things, and many of them are likely scams or illegal. You should probably avoid freely browsing .onion sites—instead, use this only if you have a specific site you want to access for a good reason. Sites that use the .onion top-level domain are privacy-focused websites that are only accessible using the Tor network. Tor—”short for the onion router”—is an anonymizing computer network. It’s partially funded by the US government, and is designed to help people in countries where Internet access may be censored or monitored. When you connect to Tor, your internet activity is sent through the Tor network, anonymizing your Internet activity so it can’t be snooped on, and so that you can access websites that may be blocked in your country. So, when you access Google.com through Tor, your request bounces from Tor relay to Tor relay before it reaches an exit node. That exit node then contacts Google.com for you, and it sends you back the data Google responded with. Google sees this as the exit node’s IP address contacting it instead of your IP address. But that means that “last mile” of traffic can be snooped on by an organization monitoring or even running the exit nodes—especially if your traffic is unencrypted. A .onion address points to a Tor hidden service, which is a server you can only access through Tor. This means that your browsing activity can’t be snooped on by someone watching the Tor exit nodes. It also means that someone hosting a website can hide that server using the Tor network, so no one can find it—in theory…”

Posted in: Censorship, Civil Liberties, Cybercrime, Cybersecurity, Privacy, Search Engines