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A comment on The New York Times Is Now Available as a Tor Onion Service. Parent comment

Re:The New York Times Is Now Available as a Tor Onion Service by dtech on Saturday October 28, 2017 @12:14PM (#15575585)
> guess in theory a browser _could_ support something like that, but it'd be pretty unusual.

Websites redirect all the time, there's 3 HTTP status codes for it.

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Re:The New York Times Is Now Available as a Tor Onion Service by Ajedi32 on Saturday October 28, 2017 @03:22PM (#15576386)
An HTTP redirect is a completely different thing from a CNAME record in the DNS.

If you visit https://onion.nytimes.com/ and it sends you a 301 redirect to https://nytimes3xbfgragh.onion/ then yes, I'm pretty sure that'd work fine. However, if you perform a DNS lookup on `onion.nytimes.com` and receive in response a CNAME record pointing to `nytimes3xbfgragh.onion`, I seriously doubt the browser is going to respond to that by establishing a new Tor circuit to the named hidden service. Rather, it's most likely just going to do what every other DNS client does when it receives a CNAME record; it'll try to look up `nytimes3xbfgragh.onion` in the DNS. (And fail, because `.onion` is not a valid TLD in the regular DNS system.)

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