The New York Times launches a Tor version of site

Exterminator

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Oct 23, 2012
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Runa Sandvik, Director of Information Security at the New York Times, has announced via the news outlet’s Medium blog that the website will be accessible as a Tor site. The aim of the action is to allow readers to access the website despite monitors or blocks trying to prevent them. By having an onion domain, it bolsters security for those connecting.

In her post, Sandvik didn’t explicitly name any state for deploying censorship, however, it’s likely the onion service was set up in order to get Chinese readers connected. On its website, the New York Times showcases three languages to read its content in, English, Spanish, and Chinese. A quick look-up on Greatfirewallofchina.org reveals that the website is blocked, which means the website has an interest in setting up other methods for readers to access its content.

In the blog post, Sandvik writes:

“The New York Times’ Onion Service is both experimental and under development. This means that certain features, such as logins and comments, are disabled until the next phase of our implementation. We will be fine tuning site performance, so there may be occasional outages while we make improvements to the service. Our goal is to match the features currently available on the main New York Times website.”

In order to access the New York Times’ onion site you must install the Tor Browser and point it to the following URL https://www.nytimes3xbfgragh.onion/. If you’re a regular Tor user, and reader of the New York Times, using the onion URL will make your connection more secure.

Source: NYTimes (Medium)
 
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Deleted member 65228

I can understand the drive for them to do this, but personally I don't like the idea. Readers in foreign countries where censorship may be applied can be subverted via use of a proxy or VPN... In terms of privacy, well the deep web is not 100% either.
 

Prorootect

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Nov 5, 2011
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Maybe this is only an excuse, so that the readers in this way could not already give comments not politically agreeing with the line of the magazine, comments who might not have liked the editorial staff of this Fake News magazine?

My opinion only ...
 

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