The New Oil

I'll keep this one brief: there's a lot going on behind-the-scenes at TNO and there's always more to do, but I'm incredibly excited to announce that one of my longtime goals has finally come to fruition: The New Oil is finally available as a Tor hidden service, aka a “.onion” domain. Over the years I've had several readers write in to inform me of all kinds of small issues with accessing the site, from being falsely flagged on VirusTotal to CDN misconfigurations to being to straight-up blocked by foreign ISPs. A hidden service is the holy grail for any privacy site such as myself: privacy-respecting, secure, and capable of bypassing censorship in even the harshest regimes. With this new offering, readers from anywhere in the world will be able to safely, securely, and anonymously access The New Oil's website, ISPs and other obstacles be damned.

While hidden services are riding a fine line of potentially being “out of scope” given my target audience, the required costs (in time, maintenance, technical proficiency, and finances) are quite low, and given that TNO explicitly states that we are not an adequate resource for high-threat-model individuals, I feel like this is a service we can confidently offer to give our readers an extra layer of privacy – even from ourselves (trustworthy though I may feel we are). That said, I am certain there is room for improvement, and if any of the more experienced readers out there see ways that we can offer our readers even more protection, please open an issue on GitLab or GitHub.

To access our new Hidden Service, simply navigate to TheNewOil.org in the Tor Browser as we already have the automatic redirect set up, so your browser will either automatically redirect you or at very least offer to redirect you depending on your settings. If you'd rather go there directly, you can find us at vyrgfx4jz2lnejqduons56ph5xtsrtaoo7ovny53dd7okyzhfsgkzbad.onion. Thank you to everyone who made this possible and helps make The New Oil a little better everyday. I look forward to many more privacy-friendly moves like this in the future!

You can find more recommended services and programs at TheNewOil.org, and you can find our other content across the web here or support our work in a variety of ways here. You can also leave a comment on this post here: Discuss...