Check if Tor Onion Service is alive (python stem get_hidden_service_descriptor)

This article will show how to check if a given Onion Service (ie some .onion address) is alive or dead. Why? Lots of Onion Services are “here today, gone tomorrow”. If you encountered a large list of Onion Services and want to quickly check to see which are still alive, the best way to do that is by querying the Tor network’s Hidden Service Directory (HSDir). Of course, you could just paste the…