> The blog post makes casual reference to the "enormous social value" of hidden services and claim they're worried about "secret police repressing dissidents", but doesn't cite any actual examples.
I'll give you one:
Russia currently has laws that, among other things, require the author of a blog to register personal information with the government if the blog has more than 3,000 daily readers[1]. The law is specifically intended to prevent anonymity.
When working as intended, hidden services enable those blog authors to protect their identity and ensure the government doesn't harass, arrest or kill them.
It's much, much easier for them to just write a Wordpress or Blogger blog, hosted in the USA where Russia can't get access to the logs. Or in any other jurisdiction that won't respond to Russian requests for their data.
The big advantage is - anyone can read your blog. Not just people who are willing to download and use the Tor browser.
Most famous cases of dissent in recent times have preferred to play jurisdictional arbitrage rather than use Tor. Snowden is being kept safe by Russia, his information was published by a British newspaper that then shifted reporting to New York to avoid the UK government goons. Apparently for now that's good enough.
This is why I talked about specific examples of hidden services being used in this way and actually getting real traction - I can't think of any.
I see your point about hidden services severely limiting the practical accessibility of the content. But isn't it a good idea to use Tor rather than HTTP(S) to compose that blog in such situation?
In theory yes, in practice most people I know in places with strict firewalls use commercial VPNs rather than Tor (faster, easier).
Also if you're hosting on a site like Wordpress or Blogger all the government sees is an SSL connection to wordpress.com or google.com. They don't get to see if you're reading or composing. So in practice it's probably good enough.
I'll give you one:
Russia currently has laws that, among other things, require the author of a blog to register personal information with the government if the blog has more than 3,000 daily readers[1]. The law is specifically intended to prevent anonymity.
When working as intended, hidden services enable those blog authors to protect their identity and ensure the government doesn't harass, arrest or kill them.
[1] http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-28583669