Ah, the hardest problem in computer science, naming!
Alec Muffett alec.muffett@gmail.com writes:
Single* Hop Onion Services (*singleness not guaranteed)
On 23 Feb 2016 3:14 a.m., "Paul Syverson" paul.syverson@nrl.navy.mil wrote:
If you want to underscore in the name specifically the not-hidden property, then I suggest the best would be 'Rendezvous Located-Onion Service'. And Single Onion Service, would be 'Located-Onion Service'.
The problem with both 'Single Hop' and 'Rendezvous Located' is that it requires that you know enough about tor to understand what those mean, before you can understand that you don't get a certain property that you might be expecting. These describe the technology, instead of telling you what you get.
The "Hidden" services name was good because it told you what you got. Now we have come to recognize that there is a valid use case for these that doesn't involve being 'hidden' so there is a move to change the name to "Onion" services instead.
At the same time, there is this effort to create RSOS and Single Onion Services. Does it make sense to continue to push for a broadening of the term Hidden->Onion Services, while also trying to individually name these different types of services? If we keep "hidden services" and then call these "non-hidden services" that might be the clearest.
However, the functional differences between RSOS and Single Onion Services are not obvious enough to me to come up with a distinguishing name for each that an admin with only a surface level understanding of tor would be able to make a choice based on the name alone.
Single Onion seems easy to describe as a "non-hidden onion service", but the difference between RSOS and Single Onion Services perhaps too subtle to give a functional name. Could we just call RSOS "non-hidden onion service behind NAT" or "non-hidden onion service with unreachable OR port"?
micah