Allow hyphens in hidden service names?
https://blog.torproject.org/blog/crowdfunding-future-hidden-services#comment-91980 makes an interesting suggestion:
It would also be nice, if we lengthen the service addresses to accomodate
more security, to allow hyphens or some other divider character in the name
that will be ignored. This would allow names to be more memorable, even in
their current form. These characters should probably be stripped off in the
TBB from any Host: headers, at least, to resist using them as a client
fingerprinting side-channel. There is precendent for this sort of thing:
gmail ignores periods (.) in the "username" portion of its email addresses.
I bet there are complications that we haven't thought of -- the different versions of the Host: header is an interesting fingerprint, and similarly I would worry about different versions of the same name being handled differently by some caches, Tor's mapaddress to virtual addresses, etc.
Also, if we indeed make hidden service names much longer, then the Shallot approaches will be much less effective at making them mostly memorable.
But I figured we should have an actual ticket where we make some decisions, rather than letting it get lost as an old blog comment.