This is a very poor answer and, while I'm pretty sure that you're just trolling, Tor is important enough that your 'claim' really needs to be rebutted.
Consider a service like SecureDrop. Armed with SecureDrop, journalists and dissidents/whistleblowers can communicate in a more secure way.
Or, consider a publication like Propublica. They set up a hidden service so that they could talk about censorship in China...and hopefully allow Chinese citizens to read it without ending up in serious legal trouble.
Statements like yours are the problem and I seriously hope that you take the time to educate yourself. Ignorance may be funny to you, but it makes it more dangerous for legitimate activists and journalists to use Tor.
Why is a hidden service needed? If someone can access onion websites, they can access any site. All Propublica would need to do is make sure they don't block tor exit nodes (some CDNs like cloudlfare will).
I don't see what benefits there are of having a hidden service if you don't need to hide. The only thing would be encouraging/enforcing safe usage, but that doesn't enable anything, only forces people to use security that was already available.
(To be clear, I'm only talking about hidden services, not tor in general.)
>If the anonymous user connects to a part of ProPublica that isn’t SSL-encrypted—most of the site runs SSL, but not yet every page—then the malicious relay could read what the user is viewing.
So using a hidden service was easier to set up than enforcing SSL on every page?
>Or even on SSL-encrypted pages, the exit node could simply see that the user was visiting ProPublica. When a Tor user visits ProPublica’s Tor hidden service, by contrast—and the hidden service can only be accessed when the visitor runs Tor—the traffic stays under the cloak of Tor’s anonymity all the way to ProPublica’s server.
The exit node sees that someone visited Propublica, not who, or what was fetched. (Assuming it's over SSL.) That really doesn't seem like sensitive information.
I've always interpreted "darknet" to mean the content itself, rather than Tor. That would make the parent comment's question entirely reasonable, without saying anything about the usefulness of Tor.
That's a good interpretation and I'd do well to keep that possibility in mind. Sorry if I came across as too aggressive.
Based on the context, I assumed that the parent was talking about needing Tor to access the Darknet. If that's the case, the parent would be talking about Tor hidden services. While there are some really shitty hidden services, there are also some amazing applications - SecureDrop is one example.
Consider a service like SecureDrop. Armed with SecureDrop, journalists and dissidents/whistleblowers can communicate in a more secure way.
Or, consider a publication like Propublica. They set up a hidden service so that they could talk about censorship in China...and hopefully allow Chinese citizens to read it without ending up in serious legal trouble.
Statements like yours are the problem and I seriously hope that you take the time to educate yourself. Ignorance may be funny to you, but it makes it more dangerous for legitimate activists and journalists to use Tor.