Interestingly enough, outlook.com is the only free email service that let me sign up over Tor. I access it securely, and it's just for verification purposes. Every service needs an email address.
1) Trust. I trust the Tor developers and nodes much more than HideMyAss, which is a single point of failure.
2) Looks like a good suggestion, I'll have to check that out if I ever start a Tor hidden service.
3) The main factors are having control over the HTML, and differentiating the site from just another wordpress blog. Anyone can start a Wordpress blog using Tor, and that wouldn't make a very interesting blog post.
This was done mostly as an excercise and experiment. If the goal were just to publish sensitive articles, I would use a free blogging platform.
Great points. I would definitely do something like this if my life were on the line, or I needed to leak something about my government, for example.
But the convenience of Tails persistence is really tempting. I can just unlock it with a really long master password, and have access to my SSH keys, passwords (Keepass), Electrum bitcoin wallet, packages, source code, etc.
But yes indeed, a live CD, a simple blog hosted on Wordpress or Tumblr, random MAC address, and Tor on coffee shop Wifi over a long-range antenna would provide almost guaranteed security.
P.S. It's no fun without stats. 25,000 page views is a success, I think! And $25 USD in bitcoin donations. Now I just need to work on anonymously converting or spending them.
That's what really excited me about this challenge. I heard about how DPR got caught from a StackOverflow login, and I wanted to see how difficult it would be to maintain anonymity.
It turns out that it's really fucking difficult. Also, it kind of sucks that I couldn't talk to any of my coworkers about being on the front page of Hacker News!