The New York Times Launches Dark Web v3 Onion Domain in October

The New York Times (abbreviated as NYT or NY Times), is an American newspaper based in New York with a global reach and readership. According to Wikipedia, the New York Times was founded in 1851 and has won 130 Pulitzer Prizes, more than any other newspaper. It ranks 18th in the world and 3rd in the U.S. by circulation. In contrast to the Wall Street Journal's status as a conservative flagship newspaper, the New York Times is the number one pro-liberal newspaper in the United States.

On October 27, 2017, the New York Times announced an experiment in secure communications that launched an alternative way for people to access the New York Times website by offering the nytimes.com website as a Tor Onion service.

At the time, it set up nytimes.com as a Tor Onion service - allowing the Times website to be accessed through a special, secure, unblockable VPN-like "tunnel" over the Tor network. The address for the v2 Onion service that was set up at the time was: https://www.nytimes3xbfgragh.onion

According to the announcement that year:

This onion address is accessible only through the Tor network, using special software such as the Tor Browser. Such tools assure our readers that our website can be reached without monitors or blocks, and they provide additional guarantees that readers are connected securely to our website.

Onion Services exist for other organizations — most notably Facebook and ProPublica, each of which have created custom tooling to support their implementations. Our Onion Service is built using the open-source Enterprise Onion Toolkit (EOTK), which automates much of the configuration and management effort.

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.

Like the BBC, the announcement ends with the New York Times thanking Alec Muffett for his help in configuring the Enterprise Onion Toolkit for the New York Times site.

In October, the New York Times launched its v3 domain name: https://www.nytimesn7cgmftshazwhfgzm37qxb44r64ytbb2dj3x62d2lljsciiyd.onion and officially dropped its v2 domain name.

New York Times website v3 domain name:
https://www.nytimesn7cgmftshazwhfgzm37qxb44r64ytbb2dj3x62d2lljsciiyd.onion
Clearnet:
https://www.nytimes.com
Expired v2 domain name:
https://www.nytimes3xbfgragh.onion