Twitter launches privacy-preserving Tor service amidst Russian censorship

Twitter simply struck a blow towards authorities censorship, even when the tech big will not come out and say so immediately.

On Tuesday morning, Alec Muffett, a cybersecurity skilled with an extended historical past of working with the Tor community, introduced he’d introduced abilities to bear at Twitter. Particularly, Muffett wrote that he’d helped the corporate launch a censorship-resistant manner for customers to entry the social media platform — even when authorities officers in, say, a rustic like Russia, wished to stop that.

Tor works by sending customers’ web site visitors via random servers, and encrypting that site visitors at each step. This implies a web site cannot see who particularly is looking it, and an ISP cannot see what websites its clients are viewing. Tor is nice, to place it bluntly, for doing issues you want to preserve to your self.

“That is presumably crucial and long-awaited tweet that I’ve ever composed,” wrote Muffett. “On behalf of @Twitter, I’m delighted to announce their new @TorProject onion service, at: https://twitter3e4tixl4xyajtrzo62zg5vztmjuricljdp2c5kshju4avyoid.onion/”

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Customers outfitted with the free Tor browser will now have the ability to entry Twitter’s onion website immediately from wherever on this planet the place Tor works. That Twitter now has its personal Tor website provides a layer of safety past what a person would get just by going to Twitter.com with a Tor browser.

“Onion providers’ location and IP handle are hidden, making it tough for adversaries to censor them or determine their operators,” Tor explains. “All site visitors between Tor customers and onion providers is end-to-end encrypted, so you don’t want to fret about connecting over HTTPS.”

This isn’t Muffett’s first effort at mixing privateness and social media. He constructed Fb’s Tor website, and in 2021 helped the New York Instances rebuild its personal onion website.

We reached out to Twitter with a bunch of questions on its new Tor service, however the firm declined to deal with our particular questions.

“Making our service extra accessible is an ongoing precedence for us,” replied an organization spokesperson, who additionally pointed us towards Twitter’s checklist of supported browsers — which now contains the Tor browser.

“I am delighted to have assisted @Twitter engineers of their adoption of #OnionServices & #OnionNetworking from @TorProject,” added Muffett, “offering better privateness, integrity, belief, & ‘unblockability’ for individuals all world wide who use @Twitter to speak.”

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Certainly, the addition of a Twitter onion website comes at a very noteworthy time. On Feb. 26, Twitter mentioned its service was being “restricted for some individuals in Russia,” and that it was “working to maintain our service protected and accessible.”

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Tuesday’s announcement, which might enable Russians to entry Twitter’s web site within the face of presidency restrictions, seems to be a part of that work — even when Twitter will not make that connection specific.