On March 4, 2025, the New York Times shut down its .onion site which it had launched in 2017. Is tor dead? tor published metrics speak to a volume of activity that doesn’t look like a big drop. It might just be that there is so much less publicity about it nowadays that it feels like that. Also, it seems to have lost its status as anything but a place for criminals. Maybe. One theory is that many of the onion proxy networks are run by the fbi. I don’t know.
I did some research:
In short — Tor isn’t dead at all.
Its code-base, funding, and user-base are still moving forward, but the hype cycle and many clearnet “onion directories” have stagnated, so a newcomer who googles for .onion links mostly meets blog-posts frozen in 2014-2018. Behind that veneer, Tor Browser 14.5 shipped two weeks ago, the network still serves ~2.4 million daily users, and the project’s 2024 fundraising goal was met. What changed is (a) the way journalists talk about Tor, (b) a big technical migration that broke most older onion addresses, and (c) law-enforcement pressure that discouraged public link-lists.
No comments:
Post a Comment