HSDir Stress: Why Descriptor Churn Makes Onion Sites Flicker Offline
Onion services can be healthy yet unreachable. We explain how hidden service directories store descriptors, why republishing rules matter, and what overload does to reachability.
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newest firstCircuits Expire Every Ten Minutes. Your Guard Should Not.
Tor rebuilds circuits every ten minutes but keeps the same guard relay for months. Research shows why switching guards early makes deanonymization more likely.
Why Onion Latency Swings Wildly: What Weeks of Monitoring Actually Show
Circuit builds, relay congestion and quiet guard rotations explain most onion latency swings. Probes over weeks show why a hidden service feels instant at noon and crawls by midnight.
Reading Tor Metrics graphs: what the curves actually count
Tor Metrics charts look authoritative, but user numbers are modeled estimates rather than counts. What the curves really measure, their blind spots, and how not to over-read them.
Why Volunteer Tor Relay Operators Are Quietly Quitting
Hosting bills, legal worry and burnout are thinning the ranks of volunteer Tor relay operators. Here is why they leave, and what a shrinking relay base means for network health.
Running a Tor relay: what first-time operators need to know
Guard, middle or exit: a practical guide to running your first Tor relay, covering bandwidth costs, abuse handling and the legal basics every new operator should understand.
Native onion support in mainstream browsers: what Brave, Firefox, Chrome and Apple actually deliver
Brave ships Tor windows, Firefox blocks onion leaks behind a flag, and Chrome and Apple do nothing. What native .onion support really means for your safety.
The Onion-Location Header: How Clearnet Sites Point the Way to Their Onions
The Onion-Location header promised to make .onion mirrors discoverable at a click. Years on, adoption among major clearnet sites remains stubbornly thin.
Congestion crises: what happens to the tor network when the world tunes in at once
From the 2020 pandemic surge to election nights and wartime spikes, here is how the tor network absorbs sudden global demand - and why it sometimes slows to a crawl.
When the Onion Goes Dark: A Short History of DDoS on Tor
From the 2020 marketplace wars to proof-of-work defenses, we trace how DDoS attacks on onion services shaped Tor's architecture and why they remain so hard to stop.
Arti adoption status at the end of 2024: client parity reached, relays still waiting
Arti closed 2024 with client-side parity with C Tor, growing embedded and mobile use, and relay support still on the bench. Where the Rust rewrite stands.
Tor on Android: how far the mobile anonymity push has come, and where it still falls short
Tor Browser for Android has grown from an alpha experiment into a first-class release, while Orbot keeps evolving. But gaps in fingerprinting defenses and VPN-over-Tor limits remain.