this post was submitted on 05 Aug 2024
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Tor - The Onion Router

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Why are onion services not widely used? (lemmy.dbzer0.com)
submitted 3 months ago by fran@lemmy.dbzer0.com to c/tor@lemmy.ml
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It amazes me that onion sites aren't everywhere. They are easy to spin up, you don't have to pay anything and can run it from your own home. No need to purchase a domain, worry about expiration, have an open port. Built-in DoS protection. Anonymity and authentication by default. No need to configure HTTPS. Sure, uptime is on you and there is some latency/bandwidth limits to be considered, but once you are over that, onions are a solution to many problems and the benefits are enormous.

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[–] 0x0@programming.dev 4 points 3 months ago (17 children)

and can run it from your own home.

A risk most people aren't willing to take lightly?

[–] fran@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 points 3 months ago (1 children)

If you don't share the onion link with others and just use it for yourself, no one ever discovers it, unlike the public internet where you get crawled by port scanners all the time. Also there is a public key whitelist feature if you want to restrict who connects.

[–] VirtualOdour@sh.itjust.works 3 points 3 months ago (2 children)

That's actually a really useful feature for me, how much processor does it need? Can a raspberry pi run it?

[–] fran@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 3 months ago

The Tor client itself is lightweight. It's the application you want to run behind the onion service (http server, etc.) that is probably going to limit you in terms of hardware. You can run an onion service on a Raspberry Pi. Any version in fact, even the first one.

[–] aviation_hydrated@infosec.pub 1 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

I think OnionShare can run on an RPi, which is a FOSS prebuilt web service

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