2013
09.30

Botnet still slowing down Tor but situation is getting better

As you can see here

Tor Connections

The number of botnet clients using the Tor network is still around 3.5 million, but the next picture shows that overall network performance is getting better again:

Tor Performance

Browsing .onion sites like the hidden wiki is still slower than usual, and often sites dont load at all.

What you can do is:

1. Dont use .onion.to and other web proxys, install the Tor browser bundle from torproject.org

2. If a site fails to load, hit “new identity” in Tor/Videlia and then refresh the site, after it loaded once its usually working fine.

 

2013
09.04

Check out this new hidden wiki alternative

There is a new site listing .onion hidden services, which contains much higher percentage of working links than the hidden wiki:

OnionDir, located at:

http://dirnxxdraygbifgc.onion/

Or with web proxys:

http://dirnxxdraygbifgc.onion.to/

http://dirnxxdraygbifgc.onion.lu/

I especially like that you can just copy and paste all the links to some text file to keep some personal bookmarks of tor hidden services.

So far all links seem to be working, which is also a bonus since the hidden wiki is a mess these days since Freedom Hosting went down.

Will OnionDir become the new hidden wiki? We think at least it has the potential to be a nice alternative.

Tell us what you think.

OnionDir Hidden Service Directory

 

2013
09.03

Tor network under huge DDOS

The Tor network is under a huge DDOS right now, as you can see on the following statstics from the Tor project:

Tor DDOS

New Tor Users

Seems like noone really knows whats going on, it could be new users, or a large botnet trying to DDOS the Tor network.

But traffic on our Tor relay has trippled and most hidden services including the hidden wiki seem to be down / not working.