On Wed, Feb 13, 2008 at 09:51:30AM -0800, Seth David Schoen wrote: > Jan Reister writes: > > > The italian wikipedia entry for "The Onion Routing" has a weird section > > The title of that article should probably be either "Tor (anonimità )" or > "The Onion Router" (not "Routing"). My understanding is that the > principle of operation of Tor, as well as the name of the original > predecessor research project, is "onion routing", whereas the name "Tor" > was chosen as an acronym for "The Onion Router". >
Err no. That's exactly wrong. It is in fact "The Onion Routing". When Roger started to work with me on this c. 2001 or 2002, he told people he was working on onion routing. There have been various other efforts since we started onion routing in the mid nineties that are versions of onion routing (as well as various things that people call "onion routing" that I, as the coiner of the expression, think are very different from onion routing). "Onion routing" to some extent rapidly became the bandaid, xerox, jello, aspirin, (google ?)... of anonymous communcation. So people would ask him when he said this, "Which one?" He would tell them, "No, _the_ onion routing, the original project from NRL.", or something like that. (Roger feel free to correct. I think it is Rachel who actually noted its appropriateness as an acronym---and Roger who then turned it into the proto-acronym it is today.) "The Onion Router" would make no sense in any case. It would imply that there was one amongst the c. 2K onion routers currently out there carrying traffic that is the genuine article. HTH, Paul
