WE KILL PEOPLE BASED ON METADATA (this site is available as an .onion service)

tldr: http://7ze37n6jnngvwurvtlafprl3nvdsxjiaqaluzztqhl2o5vigi3fj5lyd.onion/, and use https://www.torproject.org/.

why tor

in the relatively non-fascist[yet] country of the uk, the reasoning is moreso “the government shouldn’t be able to see every domain this one visits[replace “government” with “anyone with the means to monitor a public wifi network” / “ISP, mobile or otherwise”]“. large scale censorship isn’t[yet] a concern[unless you’re on a mobile network that requires you to send your ID to visit porn sites], at least for major sites.

secondary to that is “sites shouldn’t see who it is”. maybe random news site and its 1254 partners don’t deserve to see a semi-permanent identifier that is shared across every other site. (not that an IP is the only way to identify a user, browser fingerprinting is still a fuck. but you have to solve both).

in addition: onion services are just kinda fucking cool. hosting a service that allows one to be sent messages, for example, in an E2EE way that doesn’t leak an IP is nice. yeah, TLS with an IP certificate is close, but it’s still tied to an IP (and can be attacked anyways, either through a bad CA or through taking control of the IP for a bit), onion services need to be transmitted once.

lastly, the more normal users of tor there are, the less arguments like “oh tor is only used by criminals therefore we can and should block it” hold weight. (and the less inclined companies are to block it).

so anyways say hi through onionshare: http://yjmjri3aa2rbxgo2qb4anbrvpdzqb6wg7ft5jpffso62s3645wwjtkqd.onion/. might keep this as a contact method, unsure. not set up permanently, but the keys are saved. if it doesn’t work, check on the homepage to see if one is listed there.

run a snowflake proxy.

https://snowflake.torproject.org/. the browser extension is the simplest way to do it, but the standalone client is also reasonable. (all the traffic gets proxied to a tor server, you’re not directly proxying to any websites, so this is safe to do (assuming you’re not in a place where simply supporting tor users is dangerous, but in that case you’re likely to be blocked anyways).

the onion

the onion site should have parity with the clearnet site, but seeing as the clearnet is being hosted on apache, and the onion site is using caddy, there might be a bit of jank. (specifically, one known bit is that redirects from old URLs weren’t replicated, but seeing as no links to the onion site with those urls ever existed, that’s fine :) . if the site layout changes then new redirects will be made for both.)

the caddy side has a lot of systemd hardening on it in order to forbid it from doing shit it shouldn’t be doing.

it is slowly working on a webserver built to use extremely low privileges but that still needs a lot more work. (it works right now if you have something else handling the encryption, but it doesn’t kill connections yet, so can be easily DoSed)

the plan for that is to make a webserver that is set and forget, accessible via 2 onion sites, one for general access and one for an “admin” console to update the files easily (using client auth), so that the server can be entirely firewalled off, and doesn’t need to be touched beyond package updates.