It would be great if Polipo, the caching proxy tor2web uses, was modified to support tor2web requests natively. This would greatly simplify setup, eliminating the use of Privoxy and nginx and allowing web requests to be passed directly to Polipo.
The change would be quite simple. We only need Polipo to treat requests of the form:
GET / HTTP/1.x Host: foo.tor2web.org
as if they were of the form:
GET http://foo.onion/ HTTP/1.x
Support the NLnet Project: Speed Up Tor Hidden Services.
It would be great if Privoxy (the HTTP proxy most commonly used with Tor) could rewrite requests to *.tor2web.com to be requests to *.onion. This would allow people with Tor installed to get the full security guarantees of Tor when following links to tor2web services. It would also make it easier to run a tor2web proxy, since Privoxy would handle all the necessary rewriting.
Right now the only way to access hidden services is by using the Tor client, which routes all Internet traffic through the Tor network and so slows down normal Internet usage. It would be nice if one could run the Tor client in a mode where it only handled *.onion requests (i.e. requests to hidden services). That way users could transparently access hidden services without any degradation in normal Internet service.
STATUS: Roger doesn't want to build a generic TCP proxy into Tor.
Right now when a client connects to a hidden server, both parties pick a "rendezvous point" and create anonymous connections to it, so that neither side knows the others identity. The identity of tor2web proxies, however, are public, so there is no point in disguising their identity.
If Tor had an option to allow the tor2web proxies to select themselves as rendezvous points, it could significantly speed things up.
STATUS: Roger says he's hesitant to support this.