Twitter lets its privacy- and security-protecting Tor service expire

Twitter has allowed the certificate for its Tor Onion site to expire, effectively ending a privacy- and speech-protection service it introduced last year. Visiting Tor-specific onion site addresses will now prompt a warning that the site’s certificate of authenticity has expired; Moving on from that point (which is highly not recommended) Twitter currently provides an error page. The certification expired on March 6, two days before the site one year launch Birthday.

Twitter no longer has communications department to ask about change, but Tor Project confirms service lapse ledge, “The Onion site now appears to have no plans for renewal. The Tor Project has reached out to Twitter to bring the Onion version of the social media platform back online,” Communications Director Pavel Jonoff said in a statement. Rely on onion services for an extra layer and guarantee that they’re accessing the content they’re looking for, they have one less way to do it securely.” You can still use Tor. You can visit Twitter.com via a running browser, but you won’t get the added benefits that the Tor-specific Onion site provides.

Onion sites, sometimes called hidden services or “dark web” sites, must be accessed through a browser that uses the anonymous and encrypted Tor network. (This keeps a user’s web traffic and point of origin secret, and it also lets users avoid government censorship efforts, such as those in Russia and China.) The services’ perks include an extra layer of security and good-faith encryption to separate Help is included. users from malicious botnets. While The Onion’s sites are far from mainstream, you can get access to Facebook, Reddit, and many major news organizations, among other sites. Twitter has, so far, been a welcome addition to their ranks.

Despite the Tor Project’s efforts to reach out to Twitter and revive the service, its future doesn’t look bright. Security engineer Alec Muffett, who helped launch the service last year, said “the people who built it – at least everyone I interacted with – are all gone.” ledge Twitter direct message. “I’m pretty sure it’s going to stop working altogether at some point, unless Elon takes an interest.” Twitter has slashed its workforce in several rounds of layoffs, including members of core operational teams, and has problems with the basic stability of its main site, let alone its Tor alternative.

I’m sad that Twitter’s The Onion site will be shutting down for the time being. It was launched by a pre-Musk version of the company that emphasized global free speech and privacy, and probably didn’t contribute much to Musk’s current goal of increasing Twitter’s revenue. But it’s still a shame to see it happen — so happy almost-first birthday, Onion Twitter, it was good while it lasted.