Is there any way to download a .onion site? (to browse it locally)

And what’s the best way to download normal websites if HTTrack takes too long

Have you tried using Wget to download .onion websites?

I feel like this is genius. Is this genius? Probably not, it would take too long to download the entire site. You’d have to download and forget it for a while, making tor even less usable. But once you’ve downloaded it, it becomes even more private and a whole lot faster.

Of course, latency and anonymity are inversely correlated. Tor is (relatively) low latency, which in turn makes things like timing/correlation attacks possible.

You could make something far, far more private than Tor if all of your operations took a high random amount of minutes/hours to do. It just doesn’t exist because nobody would ever use it. The #1 complaint about Tor is speed/latency, even though high speed and low latency is ironically the main benefit of Tor over any competition.


Anyways, something like https://archiveweb.page/ might be useful. You can also just use any tool like HTTrack as long as it’s behind a Tor proxy and can resolve .onion domains.

Tor is (relatively) low latency, which in turn makes things like timing/correlation attacks possible .

I assume you mean that high latency makes timing/correlation attacks possible? And Tor is low latency precisely to address that problem?

And I’m not sure how it’s related to this thread or my comment.

That would be the opposite of what I said.

high speed and low latency is ironically the main benefit of Tor over any competition

You say here that low latency is the main benefit of Tor?

But here you say it’s what makes attacks possible

Tor is (relatively) low latency, which in turn makes things like timing/correlation attacks possible .

Low latency means it is easier to know when some thing occurs. As an example - Tor low latency allowed you to open a webpage that had X amount of data within 15 seconds.

That means if you know in that 15 seconds who in the world recieved X amount of data you found the person.

The higher the latency the less accurate it becomes as it is easier to find some one in that 15 second window of time than say 60 seconds. Or 120 seconds.

If you run a Tor Bridge you can select the Mode to 2, the default is 0. This messes with the packet sizes and timing obfuscation for obfs4, but because of that it also slows (higher latency) the connection.

$ torsocks -a 127.0.0.1 -P 9150 wget -r -k -l 0 -p -E -P ./local_copy http://xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx.onion

Not exactly sure of details but there exists an anonymous communication trichotomy between strong anonymity, low latency and high bandwidth. It might be possible to make 2 of these be acceptable but impossible to satisfy all 3 at the same time. Tor provides some anonymity, but for its use case of web browsing and other fast applications it gives priority to low latency and high bandwidth over strong anonymity, making Tor more vulnerable to traffic analysis than it should be. Some other anonymity networks pool, shuffle, delay and shape packets to strengthen anonymity, but these techniques increase latency.