It amazes me that onion sites aren’t everywhere. They are easy to spin up, you don’t have to pay anything and can run it from your own home. No need to purchase a domain, worry about expiration, have an open port. Built-in DoS protection. Anonymity and authentication by default. No need to configure HTTPS. Sure, uptime is on you and there is some latency/bandwidth limits to be considered, but once you are over that, onions are a solution to many problems and the benefits are enormous.
and can run it from your own home.
A risk most people aren’t willing to take lightly?
If you don’t share the onion link with others and just use it for yourself, no one ever discovers it, unlike the public internet where you get crawled by port scanners all the time. Also there is a public key whitelist feature if you want to restrict who connects.
That’s actually a really useful feature for me, how much processor does it need? Can a raspberry pi run it?
Running an onion service is generally much less risky legally speaking than a Tor exit node.
Sorry but for someone who knows just what the Wikipedia intro says about TOR, and having used it like once, I just thought it takes forever to load broken sites just for the benefit of some allegedly improved privacy. I figured it is only useful to people who want to browse illegal sites, but does this mean that any hidden website is illegal? Just for the sake of argument if someone hosts an old-fashioned HTML site about his fucking hobby, will they face legal repercussions just for serving it as a hidden webpage? I can’t fathom that.
You don’t. The tor service connects out to a node. This is also nice because it means you can run it behind nat and firewall and whatnot without problems.
Is it legality or security? I personally wouldn’t want a public facing service on my home network without extensive hardening
