The “.onion” extension, which provides access to platforms in the Tor network, which you can often hear while researching concepts such as ‘dark web’ and ‘deep web’, which we cannot access with the standard DNS offered by internet providers, continues to be adopted by some major platforms.
For example, Twitter started to offer access to the platform via the ‘.onion’ domain name last year. But the company did nothing in the time it was supposed to renew its domain name. Twitter’s ‘.onion’ service was thus terminated by itself.
There may be no such thing as “Certificate not renewed by mistake”:
When you try to access Twitter’s website with the .onion extension, you see an error message that the extension is no longer verified. It is also stated that the certificate has expired as of March 6th.
On the other hand, The Tor Project, the architect of the .onion extension, announced that it had previously informed Twitter that the certificate was about to expire. But Alec Muffett, who helped the company with Twitter’s service last year, gives a clue as to why no action was taken:
“The people who built it – at least everyone I interacted with – are all gone (fired or out of business).”
What did the .onion extension bring to Twitter?
The features offered by the .onion extension to Twitter consist entirely of the extension and the advantages offered by the Tor network. Because the Tor network is an encrypted network that is accessed completely anonymously, it allows users to hide their location and identity information. This was actually seen as a measure of Twitter against censorship.
Of course, it is useful to make a big warning at this point: Many of the links with the .onion extension may belong to platforms established by malicious people.
- Twitter’s .onion domain was as follows:
twitter3e4tixl4xyajtrzo62zg5vztmjuricljdp2c5kshju4avyoid.onion
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