so let's talk a little bit more about dot onion domains.
in the last video, we established that there are 56 characters that they're used for hidden or onion services and you need the tor proxy to access them.
but let's discuss a little bit more about the nuances related to.
onion urls or.
onion domains.
if you were to access a website, say dark web academy on a web browser like chrome, all you need to do is type in darkwebacademy dot com and it takes you to the website.
so the url or the domain you're accessing here is darkwebacademy dot com.
and that url is broken up into several key components.
there's the website name.
this is going to be something like dark web academy or facebook or google.
and then you're going to have the top level domain or the tld.
this is that dot com portion.
and there's many other top level domains that exist.
you probably know of a few of them, but there's.
co dot org dot net site dot pizza.
there are so many of these available nowadays.
you don't even really need a dot com to be established.
although that's what a lot of people are familiar with is still dot com from the early internet days.
onion domains operate a little bit differently, only because of the 52 characters and they end in.
onion.
so domain like this, this being the link actually for onion link hub.
onion.
and you can see that these are a lot harder to remember.
and this is why services that catalog or provide onion urls are useful because they're too long.
so for onion link hub, you can see that we can access onion link hub dot com in a chrome browser, but if we try to access the onion url in anything other than tor, it won't work.
in this example, you can see that the tor service is working and we're on the onion link right there.
but if you were to access on chrome that onion link, it's not going to work.
but on the tor browser, if you were to access onionlinkhub dot com, it works just fine.
so really the tor browser can be used for regular internet browsing as well as browsing dot onion links.
but something like chrome cannot be unless you configure the tor proxy on chrome, which we don't really cover that in this course.
it's pretty easy to figure out though, if you just google it.
but those are the major differences to understand something like tor in the tor browser can be used to access any internet website, while something like chrome, you're only going to be able to access those known top level domains it supports.
and it's not going to be able to access onion sites.
now that doesn't mean these onion sites aren't indexed by something like google.
if you were to google.
onions, it actually can index them and does find them, but you can't successfully connect to them without having the tor proxy configured.
so now we have an understanding of how tor creates circuits.
we understand what dot onion sites are.
now let's talk about how onion routing falls short and where some flaws exist in the onion routing protocol as a whole.