Hi guys.
I was trying to access a New York Times’ link by Onion just to make some tests and when I paste the link in browser I got a suggestion which said “.onion available”.
So when I clicked on it a message appeared saying something like “some sites have .onion support etc” and the link turned into it: www.nytimes3xbfgragh.onion
I want to know what this really mean and what is the difference between a normal link and Tor link.
And sorry for my ignorance, I’m new into this topic.
Clearnet / the Internet you’re familiar with:
Websites on the TOR network have URLs like the one you linked, .onion and are only available when connected to TOR.
The reason it’s .onion is because TOR stands for “the onion router”, named so because the network are essentially layered like an onion (in a sense).
This is a (i think) new feature that makes using TOR easier.
Certain websites, NYT in this case, have setup a .onion url for their website. This is fairly easy todo, and it just means that their website is not only accessible through the clear web, but also through TOR. I guess NYT just has some setting that tells the TOR browser that they have a onion site available.
The Difference:
A “normal” url (clearweb) may look like the following
If you click on this url, your computer is going to (simplified) look up the address by asking different servers for each part of the url (.org, .wikileaks). These servers (DNS) basically have a looong list of names and the ip addresses behind them (How does a DNS work {simple})
The ip adresses are handed back to your browser and the browser then requests the website.
In TOR urls are generated in a cryptographic way. These requests do not go through DNS but through Nodes, which are routers all over the planet created by volunteers. When you make a request, you get (somewhat) randomly redirected through multiple of these nodes. This article explains routing again. Have fun!
Edit: Hopefully not too much…