New York Times shut down Tor Onion service

&gt; deepened our understanding of reaching audiences that might otherwise be blocked from accessing our journalism &gt; Users who wish to continue reading Times journalism where their access to the main website may be blocked can do so through WhatsApp or Telegram.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.is&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.is&#x2F;</a> is still the de-facto way to read NYT articles...

WhatsApp and Telegram are hardly replacements for Tor access. A government can block them easily.<p>The onion service&#x27;s days were numbered after they fired Runa Sandvik. I&#x27;m surprised it lasted this long. Looking at the pay and current labor disputes, it seems like the New York Times isn&#x27;t a good place for a skilled software engineer to work these days.<p>They&#x27;ll keep running SecureDrop over an onion service, right...?

&gt; Users who wish to continue reading Times journalism where their access to the main website may be blocked can do so through WhatsApp or Telegram.<p>elsewhere,<p>&gt; Apple Says It Was Ordered to Pull WhatsApp From China App Store<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;2024&#x2F;04&#x2F;18&#x2F;technology&#x2F;apple-whatsapp-china-app-store.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;2024&#x2F;04&#x2F;18&#x2F;technology&#x2F;apple-whatsapp...</a>

Journalists speak truth to power, meanwhile the NYT aligns itself with power at every opportunity. For example, they knew the NSA was spying on us but never ran the story to protect GW&#x27;s chances at reelection. Presumably they didn&#x27;t want to be seen as anti-establishment with the new powers and are reverting to their time-proven behavior. NYT will lick the boot when presented, same as ever.

Chilling effects and all that.<p>Complying in advance with the expectation of attacks on first amendment rights only emboldens autocrats and smooths their path to total control.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;lithub.com&#x2F;resist-authoritarianism-by-refusing-to-obey-in-advance&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;lithub.com&#x2F;resist-authoritarianism-by-refusing-to-ob...</a>

Despite the symbolism, does this change anything about their reachability from Tor?<p>Is there any practical advantage to a website in being explicitly reachable as a hidden service on Tor, as opposed to simply not blocking exit node IPs?

Reddit still has an onion service but is defacto unusable

If my life or my freedom would be at stake, I wouldn&#x27;t rely on TOR for anonymity.

They started serving an expired TLS certificate on 2024-12-08. I inquired about it a few days after but never heard back.

Another act of bending the knee, just like when they axed Chris Hedges in the patriotic military invasions.

Would be interesting to see statistics of how many unique visits per day through onion on NYT was made.

related<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=43246274">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=43246274</a>

&gt; we are now taking these learnings and applying them to building out our main page and signature products<p>I&#x27;d love (genuinely, this is not a snarky comment) to read more about either (learnings, application) or of course both.

Isn&#x27;t it a paywalled service? How do people use it? they access it anonymously and then pay with a card?

NYTimes lost any and all credibility when they hired a literal Israeli Military Intelligence propagandist to write the their headline shock inducing piece on 40 beheaded babies, infants in ovens, and mass rape.<p>These have all been widely been debunked, including by Israeli media. But NYT never retracted their propaganda piece. This gave a free hand for the IDF, with U.S backing, to commit mass murder on an industrial scale in Gaza.<p>How are they even relevant anymore, and why do people pay to consume literal foreign propaganda? The purpose of the news media is to inform, but these guys are doing the complete opposite.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;x.com&#x2F;zei_squirrel&#x2F;status&#x2F;1761740292015767736" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;x.com&#x2F;zei_squirrel&#x2F;status&#x2F;1761740292015767736</a> <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;theintercept.com&#x2F;2024&#x2F;02&#x2F;28&#x2F;new-york-times-anat-schwartz-october-7&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;theintercept.com&#x2F;2024&#x2F;02&#x2F;28&#x2F;new-york-times-anat-schw...</a>

Good riddance. We The People will continue to build open and decentralized&#x2F;anonymous platforms that don&#x27;t spread government propaganda.