The New York Times is Now Available as a Tor Onion Service

Published in
3 min read Oct 27, 2017

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Illustration by Kevin Zweerink for The New York Times

Updated: February 12, 2022

During the fall of 2021, The New York Times rebuilt it’s existing Onion service, added the “Onions Por Favor” service to the public New York Times website, and issued a new V3 Onion address.

As with our previous Onion Service, visitors will not be able to create Times accounts or log in to their existing Times account via the V3 Onion service.

The current address for our Onion Service is https://www.nytimesn7cgmftshazwhfgzm37qxb44r64ytbb2dj3x62d2lljsciiyd.onion/

The Times would like to thank the TOR Project and Alec Muffet for their support during this process.

Original post from Oct. 27, 2017:

Today we are announcing an experiment in secure communication, and launching an alternative way for people to access our site: we are making the nytimes.com website available as a Tor Onion Service.

The New York Times reports on stories all over the world, and our reporting is read by people around the world. Some readers choose to use Tor to access our journalism because they’re technically blocked from accessing our website; or because they worry about local network monitoring; or because they care about online privacy; or simply because that is the method that they prefer.

The Times is dedicated to delivering quality, independent journalism, and our engineering team is committed to making sure that readers can access our journalism securely. This is why we are exploring ways to improve the experience of readers who use Tor to access our website.

One way we can help is to set up nytimes.com as an Onion Service — making our website accessible via a special, secure and hard-to-block VPN-like “tunnel” through the Tor network.

This onion address is accessible only through the Tor network, using special software such as the Tor Browser. Such tools assure our readers that our website can be reached without monitors or blocks, and they provide additional guarantees that readers are connected securely to our website.

Technology

Onion Services exist for other organizations — most notably Facebook and ProPublica, each of which have created custom tooling to support their implementations. Our Onion Service is built using the open-source Enterprise Onion Toolkit (EOTK), which automates much of the configuration and management effort.

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.

Over time, we plan to share the lessons that we have learned — and will learn — about scaling and running an Onion Service. We welcome constructive feedback and bug reports via email to onion@nytimes.com.

Finally, we would like to extend our thanks to Alec Muffett for his assistance in configuring the Enterprise Onion Toolkit for our site.

Runa Sandvik was the Director of Information Security at The New York Times

This post has been updated to reflect the current address for our Onion Service. The previous URL has been deleted.