> There is no need to pay this cost for a service whose ownership is not actually hidden.
DuckDuckGo is being irrational? Keybase? Riseup? Sorry, but I don't see how knowing the owner of a service can immediately disqualify the service from having the privilege of a hidden service. The only thing limiting Facebook is the stress that may be placed on so many connections at once on a single onion. It should not cost too much out of actual resources to run one single gateway, especially when Facebook is a very successful business and can afford to invest in something that may expand their audience even more.
I'm not saying anything for or against Facebook's ethics in general; I am a little hesitant given their history to trust them at all, but this is admittedly a huge step in shedding light on what Tor actually is. It's not just for drugs or child pornography; it can actually be used by the everyday Joe wanting to check on his friends and see if there's a party nearby. What people seem to miss is that Tor provides IP anonymity. Yes, encouraging users to be more careful about their browsing habits is a good thing, but if people want to give out their personal information, in the end that cannot be stopped. If the website owner wants to disclose his or her identity, that cannot be stopped. Tor provides anonymity of IP addresses and nothing else.
> DuckDuckGo is being irrational? Keybase? Riseup?
Yes.
There just isn't any really solid technical reason to do this. The closest I saw was something like "newspaper dropbox wants to force people to use Tor and an onion address is the easiest way to do that", but again, they could just identify traffic from exit nodes and block anything that isn't coming from there, if there were better tools for it.
DuckDuckGo is being irrational? Keybase? Riseup? Sorry, but I don't see how knowing the owner of a service can immediately disqualify the service from having the privilege of a hidden service. The only thing limiting Facebook is the stress that may be placed on so many connections at once on a single onion. It should not cost too much out of actual resources to run one single gateway, especially when Facebook is a very successful business and can afford to invest in something that may expand their audience even more.
I'm not saying anything for or against Facebook's ethics in general; I am a little hesitant given their history to trust them at all, but this is admittedly a huge step in shedding light on what Tor actually is. It's not just for drugs or child pornography; it can actually be used by the everyday Joe wanting to check on his friends and see if there's a party nearby. What people seem to miss is that Tor provides IP anonymity. Yes, encouraging users to be more careful about their browsing habits is a good thing, but if people want to give out their personal information, in the end that cannot be stopped. If the website owner wants to disclose his or her identity, that cannot be stopped. Tor provides anonymity of IP addresses and nothing else.