Tor and emerging darknet?

The Tor Project may still have several shortcoming that makes it somewhat impractical, but it is an amazing technology and it looks very promising as a technological guarantee for a free and uncensored internet.

Part of it is how easy Tor actually is to use. If you are running Firefox and install the Tor bundle you can toggle anonymous surfing instantly with the included Tor Button add-on, you don't have to do any fiddling with settings.

After recent developments in Iran as well as Chinas attack on free internet the people behind Tor seem to have collected a lot of information on how Tor is used to circumvent censorship and what problems there are.

They have added something called bridges which is basically a hidden non-public entry point to the network, they make it very difficult to block access to the Tor network (it would usually be done by blocking the public list of relays).

They also have something called hidden services now which I tested today and it was also surprisingly easy to use.
You can set up a web-server or any other form of service anonymously within the Tor network and not only access the internet but also publish to it anonymously.
Hidden services are only accessible from within the Tor network, but with the Tor Button active they work like any other URL for the client.

There are some issues with Tor, such as the poor latency and malicious exit nodes. It is also still vulnerable to various forms of traffic pattern analysis.
Exit nodes spying on your traffic can be pretty easily avoided by end-to-end encryption (like SSL). The others problems will take some more resources to solve, more bandwidth for relays in particular.

Still this kind of technology is a shining hope when the freedom of the internet seems to be under constant attack from governments all over the world.