[tor-onions] Renaming Rendezvous Single Onion Services

[Aaron Johnson]

Hello onioneers,

We’ve had several naming discussions for single onion services at this point. They started out as “encrypted services”, then they shifted to “direct onion services”, and most recently “single onion services” seems to be winning. I have been collecting all the suggested names at <https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/org/sponsors/SponsorR/Terminology <https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/org/sponsors/SponsorR/Terminology>>. I have added all terms in this discussion to that wiki page. 

That page also includes other suggested terminology name changes for onion services. The broader “hidden”->”onion” shift seems to have been successful since this was first created, so that’s encouraging! It does seem that everybody still isn’t satisfied with “single onion services”, though.

A couple of points I would make:
  1. I think it’s really useful to keep “onion services” as a broad term that includes all onion flavors, including hidden, single, etc.
  2. I think the “rendezvous” adjective is not going to be used outside of discussions by developers. Therefore we need not worry about how ugly or confusing the qualifier “rendezvous" is, and we should feel free to attach it when necessary to make the distinction in our technical documents and discussions. At most, in my opinion, enabling rendezvous for single onion services will be a minor configuration option to be considered when setting up your single onion service. Probably, in my opinion, the non-rendezvous variety of single onion services will never get implemented, because the performance cost of including the rendezvous is incredibly minor, while (i) the cost of splitting the anonymity set of services even further is *not* minor, and *(ii) the advantage of enabling NAT-punching is widely useful.

> open: very good, traditional, positive word, but with overloaded meaning

For what it’s worth, I like “open onion services” for the reasons Alec stated. “Known” and “overt” seem fine to me, but I like the sound and connotation of “open” better.

Best,
Aaron
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