Runa Sandvik, Director of Information Security at the New York Times, has announced via the news outlet’s Medium blog that the website will be accessible as a Tor site. The aim of the action is to allow readers to access the website despite monitors or blocks trying to prevent them. By having an onion domain, it bolsters security for those connecting.
In her post, Sandvik didn’t explicitly name any state for deploying censorship, however, it’s likely the onion service was set up in order to get Chinese readers connected. On its website, the New York Times showcases three languages to read its content in, English, Spanish, and Chinese. A quick look-up on Comparitech"s Blocked in China tool reveals that the website is blocked, which means the website has an interest in setting up other methods for readers to access its content.
In the blog post, Sandvik writes:
“The New York Times’ Onion Service is both experimental and under development. This means that certain features, such as logins and comments, are disabled until the next phase of our implementation. We will be fine tuning site performance, so there may be occasional outages while we make improvements to the service. Our goal is to match the features currently available on the main New York Times website.”
In order to access the New York Times’ onion site you must install the Tor Browser and point it to the following URL https://www.nytimes3xbfgragh.onion/. If you’re a regular Tor user, and reader of the New York Times, using the onion URL will make your connection more secure.
Source: NYTimes (Medium) | Image via idigitaltimes
