Tor Project discussion lists have become characterized by a a tone of dismissiveness, knee-jerkedness, when critiques are presented. This is pretty common in such fora as they age and lazy old-timers put down newbies as if a sport, shooting fish in a barrel, or as in this instance, flogging a dead horse. Occasionally, again as in this instance of critiquing Hidden Services, a thoughtful response is provided rather than a putdown. The more experienced Tor contributors are not as susceptible to putdowns as the middling and bottomers, certainly not as offensive as the Tor Project promoters, funders and fans. It would be helpful to distinguish between those who know onion-routing in depth and those who advocate its use with what often appears to be primarily public relations and advertizing disdain toward critics and inquirers. Reviewing the depth of research at the Naval Research Laboratory on network security and anonymization indicates that serious research has been done long before Tor Project appeared. Three of those researchers are affiliated with Tor Project and keep it from being dubious flim-flammery in which posing and pontificating front for technical inexperience. Tor Project is more like a sales operation for scientific and engineering endeavors. And in that role it boosts and promotes, sounding sometimes like snake oil, another overused cliche, than the skeptical and inquiring research at scientists and engineers at the NRL. Tor fora suffer the same consequences as this one, producing mostly shallow bullshit, mea culpa, with occasional leads for pursuing offline endeavors requiring much time for lasting fruition. Chat and mail lists, like reader comments and polls, have become promotional gimmicks, run by PR hustlers with about as much knowledge of discussion topics as salespeople usually have. One clue to unreliability is when a former engineer takes over sales and deploys promotional hyperbole as the principal marketing tool on fora, at talks, with speeches, articles, interviews, fund-raisers, documentaries, books, parties, conferences, 2P2, F2F, debates, all aimed at dominating a niche. In Tor Project's case, propaganda for illusory anonymity has become its main product, as befits an org established and funded by the USG for that purpose. Naval Research Laboratory should not be demeaned to the level of the all too slick Tor Project. And chattering on Tor fora should not to be confused with substantial contributions to helping protect the non-technical public from technical exploitation by sales and advertising gimmickery. NSA is far from being alone in this USG-sponsored dual-use, dual-purpose, duplicity. Layered security like onion-routing is cloaking how things work with How Things Work for Dummies.