Scanning for onion service availability

Secure The News (STN) is a project by Freedom of the Press Foundation to track and advocate for security and privacy technologies in news organizations. I’ve been working a bit on expanding the scope of STN from its original goal, HTTPS adoption, to how news sites treat Tor users.

The first expansion is to scan for onion service availability using the the Onion-Location header (or its presence in a <meta> tag in the site’s page content). This is used by Tor Browser to alert users to the presence of an onion service.

📈 Leaderboard: https://securethe.news/

📝 Blog announcement: https://freedom.press/news/onions-side-tracking-tor-availability-reader-privacy-major-news-sites/

🐿️ Code: https://github.com/freedomofpress/securethenews