How Do Tor Users Interact With Onion Services?

Onion services are anonymous network services that are exposed over the Tor network. In contrast to conventional Internet services, onion services are private, generally not indexed by search engines, and use self-certifying domain names that are long and difficult for humans to read. In this paper, we study how people perceive, understand, and use onion services based on data from 17 semi-structured interviews and an online survey of 517 users. We find that users have an incomplete mental model of onion services, use these services for anonymity and have varying trust in onion services in general. Users also have difficulty discovering and tracking onion sites and authenticating them. Finally, users want technical improvements to onion services and better information on how to use them. Our findings suggest various improvements for the security and usability of Tor onion services, including ways to automatically detect phishing of onion services, more clear security indicators, and ways to manage onion domain names that are difficult to remember.Comment: Appeared in USENIX Security Symposium 201

Exploring Futures of Infinite Data Storage through Speculative Design

Forgetting is often described as an undesirable sin of our memory, depicted as a completely uncontrollable action. If one desires to forget, it is to erase unimportant or unpleasant information. Moreover, the general mental model of memory suggests that we first remember and lastly forget. Thus, the linear memory model suggests a one-way dynamic from remembering to forgetting. This mental model of memory has been projected into the digital space design, where one remembers by acquiring data and forgets by deleting it. However, the advent of infinite data storage scenarios provides new opportunities to re-establish how we forget and remember using data repositories. I discuss a possible paradigm shift: how forgetting a memory can help remembering in longer terms by presenting a speculative design artefact, the Horcrux Ear. It was created using Research through Design approach that develops a new understanding of these processes’ temporality and spatial dimension of memory. This paper aims to contribute to the debate over the relationship between forgetting and remembering, its role in the infinite data scenario, and the relationship between human and computer memory. Further, it illustrates the circumstances in which: 1. Forgetting important memories is a desirable action; 2. Forgetting is a controllable action; 3. Forgetting is data creation rather than data deletion; 4. Forgetting is a means to remembering rather than the last step in the linear memory model