open 20 onion bookmarks in tabs. tails, tor browser, onion circuits
An onion site under DDOS published 20 onion links. After trying them manually for a while, I put them all into a bookmark folder and selected open all in bookmarks, hoping to find one that would connect. This did work on occasion. Watching onion circuits showed unexpected behavior. A large number of circuits were being opened. Some showed four links. clicking on 4 link circuit almost always caused it to disappear. The guard node switched to a new one on new circuits after a while. After this, all onion sites became unreachable, with many circuits opening and failing when trying a single not overloaded site. Restarting tails was required to reach regular onion sites.
I didn't intend to DOS the network myself, but it looks like that was the result. Perhaps this should be rate limited at the source.
Also, if I hadn't had onion circuits window open, I wouldn't have realized that something was wrong in my tor client. Some of the reported unavailable sites could be due to the user's tor client in a similar state.
Trac:
Username: anon52569