The British Broadcasting Corporation, or BBC for short, is the UK's leading public media organization, the world's first state-established broadcaster, and the largest news media outlet in the world.
In October 2019, in a purported effort to combat censorship, BBC News made a mirrored version of its website available on the Tor network, allowing safer access to it through an anonymous Tor browser. At the time, the news organization was publishing its international version on the network, offering coverage in multiple languages, including Arabic, Farsi and Russian.
At the time, although the BBC's official URL: https://bbc.com/news loaded properly when accessed through the Tor browser, BBC News reported that using the ".onion" top-level domain prevented spoofing and preserved end-to-end encryption, making it a more secure way to access the news site. The v2 domain name used to launch the Tor network at the time was: https://bbcnewsv2vjtpsuy.onion
According to BBC officials.
The BBC is not the first leading organisation to have a direct presence on the Tor network. Facebook has been there since 2014; the implementation of the social media platform on the network was built by Facebook engineer Alec Muffett, who later left Facebook and subsequently assisted the New York Times in setting up their own Tor site.
As a result of his experiences, Alec created the Enterprise Onion Toolkit (EOTK), which makes it easier for any organisation to set themselves up on the Tor Network.
With help from the BBC Online Technology Group, Alec prototyped a solution based on the EOTK for the BBC World Service. The BBC has an unusually complex domain name configuration, and the prototype proved that the EOTK could handle this complexity well.
The implementation for the BBC was carried out by the Open Technology Fund (OTF) and Alec continues to be a key contributor. The OTF is one of the leading Internet freedom organisations in the world, who have found prominence through funding and vetting numerous information security and internet freedom projects.
At the end of September this year, the BBC officially launched its v3 domain: https://www.bbcnewsd73hkzno2ini43t4gblxvycyac5aw4gnv7t2rccijh7745uqd.onion As usual, the BBC thanked Alec Muffett for his work on EOTK and helped them to complete the migration, and the BBC updated the Onion address on its official website in October: https://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/internet/entries/936e460a-03b3-41db-be96-a6f2f27934e6.
In early November, with the Tor Project abandoning the V2 Onion service altogether, the BBC also officially dropped its v2 domain name.
BBC v3 domain name.
https://www.bbcnewsd73hkzno2ini43t4gblxvycyac5aw4gnv7t2rccijh7745uqd.onion
Minnet.
https://www.bbc.com
Expired v2 domains.
https://bbcnewsv2vjtpsuy.onion