[tor-onions] Renaming Rendezvous Single Onion Services

Alec Muffett alec.muffett at gmail.com
Wed Mar 9 15:51:31 UTC 2016


On 9 March 2016 at 06:38, Aaron Johnson <aaron.m.johnson at nrl.navy.mil>
wrote:

>
> How about “exposed" onion services? It’s less ambiguous than “open”, is an
> antonym to “hidden”, is short and nice to say, and suitably indicates a
> lack of protection for the onion service.
>


This is why you should never geeks - including me - decide branding issues.
 :-)

"Exposed" is a case in point; it's a negative concept.  People die of
exposure. You might be naked and exposed. The word "expose" generally is
associated with connotations where "exposure" is a bad thing.

Sorry Aaron, but the very example you cite is about "indicating a lack of
protection".

That's not how I feel about the Onion sites I run, at all; in fact the
onion "technology" (call it that for the moment) adds value to what is
otherwise a normal, safe, secure "public" site.

I've written elsewhere that if people use a site over Tor then they
probably have a good reason to do so.  The reason for running a public
onion site is so that those people have a better experience and enjoy the
benefits of end-to-end authentication.

They are experiencing a positive benefit from onion services, rather than a
negative one; thus they should be using a kind of site with a positive
name, rather than a negative one.

All qualitative labels will have this problem: Free, Libre, Open, Closed,
Hidden, Public, Private ... all of these describe an abstract intent,
rather than a technology.  Such qualitative label-names are inevitably
presumptuous of {some} implementer's intent.

One can at least support "NonHidden" because it is the inverse of Hidden,
but if "Hidden" is to be deprecated (?) then that seems silly. "Overt" is a
variation of the same, the word literally means "not hidden".

David says that this is "going to be part of the ABI" - in which case I am
amazed that we're having this discussion because config file contents are
free to be disjoint from branding, and can be as insane as you like.

But regards branding: get someone who's qualified in Marketing and who
understands Tor to read everything in this thread and in Trac, let them
pick, and abide by what they say.  It's faster and simpler than expecting
consensus by adding geeks.

It nothing else, Brooks' Law applies.

    -a

-- 
http://dropsafe.crypticide.com/aboutalecm
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