Roger Dingledine:
On Wed, May 04, 2016 at 07:34:38AM +0000, Colin Childs wrote:
Just to clarify, the feedback I received was that "Onion Service" is generally the preferred term; however "Onion site" could be used as a sub-class of "Onion Service" to refer exclusively to websites. Due to this, the user manual[1] has been changed to use the term "Onion Service".
Right. Onion site is a fine name for an onion service that is served by a webserver (akin to the word 'website').
The phrase onion site, like the word website, reinforces the "consumer" model of the Internet. Onion services are inherently better at being peer-to-peer (that is, bidirectional rather than unidirectional) compared to ordinary Internet services, because they ignore NAT, and because their addressing scheme is independent from static IP addresses.
As Yawning pointed out, Ricochet is a great example of an onion service, but there's no webserver serving pages, so my Ricochet client is not an onion site.
At least, that's the terminology we seem to have converged on. There is still time to change it if people feel strongly enough.
That said, we are still very inconsistent about how we use these terms in many other places.
Agreed. I had an idea to do the terminology switchover on the Tor website just before the 32c3 onion services talk, and then announce it there. I didn't get enough momentum to do it then, but I'm still a fan.
--Roger
Thanks for clarifying. I didn't realize before now that we were using onion services and onion sites distinctly, but it makes sense given the use cases. In any case, let's be consistent, and I think we should also have a glossary of terms in the support docs.
Alison