I am happy to announce the availability of my website as an Onion hidden service at http://kushal76uaid62oup5774umh654scnu5dwzh4u2534qxhcbi4wbab3ad.onion/. This is a complete different instance than the regular https://kushaldas.in.

The .onion hidden service addresses are generated based on the hash of the public key. It means the Tor browser will take you to the right service which has access to the private key. The Onion services are always inside the Tor network, means you are not exiting the circuit/network. It is also end-to-end encrypted. These features together help to have confidentiality and integrity. If you want to read more about how the Tor hidden services work, read this document.

Things different on this site

• This website has all the resources local to the server. Saptak helped to identify the external resources. Anwesha and I both wrote two different versions of the Python scripts to make things available locally. It was a fun programming problem.
• No user-tracking JavaScript in the site.
• No Disqus comments either. As it would require to load external Javascript, which in turn can be used to identify users.

Visiting the site using Tor Browser

Just in case you never encountered any .onion address before, you can visit these addresses using the Tor Browser. Download the latest version of the site. Remember to download Tor Browser only from the official website. Because my service is using version 3 of hidden service, you will need at least Tor Browser 7.5 to visit it.

Here are a few quick tips for using Tor Browser:

• Do not install any plugin on the browser. They can be used to find your IP address.
• Do not change the default browser window size. Browser window size can be used as metatdata to identify the users.
• Use https versions of the websites you want to visit. The Tor Browser uses HTTPS Everywhere plugin to help you with that. As I mentioned earlier, the onion hidden services are already end-to-end encrypted, and you don't get out of the Tor network, you can use them without the SSL certificates.

You can find more tips on the Tor project website.

Btw, DuckDuckGo also provides the search engine over a hidden service which you can use all the time.