I recently spun up a .onion mirror of this website.
Why? Because why not. And also because I can. Oh, and free speech and anti-censorship and all that jazz.
I'd like to pretend that it was some grand technological challenge, but if I'm being entirely candid, it was like 3 commands and 4 lines of configuration.
If you, too, would like to become a member of the dark web, here's how I did it:
https://flower.codes/2025/10/23/onion-mirror.html
https://archive.ph/WADPR
This discussion was created by hubie (1068) for logged-in users only. Log in and try again!
Spinning Up an Onion Mirror is Stupid Easy
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(Score: 5, Funny) by namefags_are_jerks on Sunday November 02, @06:42AM
Oh heck. Don't let Big Web discover that small personal blogs/file servers/etc. can be run for free on a RPi over a residential dynamic-NAT broadband connection, without the hassle of webhosts, domain name registration and perpetual renewal costs...
And best of all, a hostname like ssklr68aslhjfgfmr45rtfgfdsfrtr.onion keeps the plebs out.
(Score: 4, Disagree) by turgid on Sunday November 02, @10:24AM (9 children)
Never use TOR. Who uses TOR and what for? Do you want to get yourself a label?
We know that in the UK they store every connection made on the Internet from every client to every server for at least one year as they are legally required to do, and if your client should inadvertently connect to something bad, resources permitting, you'll get a knock at the door in the middle of the night and the opportunity to explain yourself down at the not-so-local nick and perhaps a few years free board and lodgings.
The also know where your VPN connection is going. There are also free speech issues [youtube.com] but not the ones the Alt-Wrong [youtube.com] want you to believe.
Just because you're paranoid, don't think they're not after you (or anyone who is an easy way to improve operational KPIs).
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 2, Disagree) by turgid on Sunday November 02, @10:51AM (7 children)
Someone disagrees which is always interesting. Would you care to put my mind at ease? Improve my understanding of the situation, please?
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 3, Insightful) by shrewdsheep on Sunday November 02, @11:09AM (6 children)
I haven't modded you but still disagree with you. Given your sig, wouldn't you think it is important to stand up and get a label, just out of principle?
Using tor is an additional tool to be used or not to be used for your benefit. Can an additional tool be harmful? In fact it can, but life means treading carefully.
(Score: 5, Informative) by turgid on Sunday November 02, @11:38AM (2 children)
Given your sig, wouldn't you think it is important to stand up and get a label, just out of principle?
There's standing up and then there's getting a criminal record, losing your job and losing your house.
It's important to choose the right hills to die on. I understand that TOR was invented ostensibly for noble reasons, to give people living under oppressive regimes a reasonably secure and anonymous way of using the Internet and the Web.
However, as with all tools, the tool isn't good or evil, but the human beings using it are, to reduce it to simplistic terms.
In the UK we are now in a situation where peaceful, legitimate protest is increasingly difficult. The laws keep being tightened [libertyhumanrights.org.uk]. Oh look. there's that pesky ECHR that the Faragists want us out of [goodlawproject.org].
We are in a situation now in the UK where mainly retired people, who have paid off their mortgages and have secure pensions, feel safe to protest since the almost inevitable criminal record and jail time [independent.co.uk] will affect them less seriously.
Just one of many.
Interestingly, I found SMIDGE [smidgeproject.eu], which is some sort of project to push back against the irrational belief and spreading of Alt-Wrong misinformation among the middle-aged.
We live in a very challenging environment. Adapting, resisting the Alt-Wtong mass delusions, and staying out of jail, holding down a good job and keeping a roof over your head is becoming increasingly difficult. To adapt and survive, we must stay ahead of the curve.
Don't let the fascists label you a criminal.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 4, Interesting) by VLM on Sunday November 02, @02:18PM (1 child)
Like the UK
(Score: 5, Touché) by turgid on Sunday November 02, @02:59PM
No comment.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 5, Informative) by turgid on Sunday November 02, @11:42AM (2 children)
This would be funny if it weren't so serious [theguardian.com].
Grown, responsible adults in positions of power actually belief this nonsense and publicly spread it.
Let that sink in.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 3, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 02, @03:42PM (1 child)
Some even believe the magical sky fairy is sending his human son to earth to check you don't touch your pee-pee too much.
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 02, @04:08PM
"It's mine, and I'll wash it as fast as I like!"
(Score: 3, Informative) by c0lo on Sunday November 02, @12:15PM
Active darknets [wikipedia.org]
HTTP tunneling [archlinux.org]
https://www.youtube.com/@ProfSteveKeen https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 1) by shrewdsheep on Sunday November 02, @11:13AM (3 children)
... but I fail to penetrate the layers of TFS. Where is the onion address?
(Score: 5, Informative) by janrinok on Sunday November 02, @11:34AM (2 children)
It isn't referring to a copy of SN on the dark web. It is a quote from the person who made a copy of HIS site. The first of the links is to his site, and the second of the links is an archive of the same site.
We do have our own onion address though: http://soylentqarvi3ikkzpp7fn4m5pxeeonbv6kr4akgkczqethjfhmalhid.onion [soylentqarvi3ikkzpp7fn4m5pxeeonbv6kr4akgkczqethjfhmalhid.onion]/
[nostyle RIP 06 May 2025]
(Score: 2) by slon on Sunday November 02, @11:38AM (1 child)
Dziękuję
English is not my mother language
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Sunday November 02, @01:31PM
Gezundheit! :)
Pas de problème.
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. I have always been here. ---Gaaark 2.0 --
(Score: 5, Interesting) by ShovelOperator1 on Sunday November 02, @02:42PM
I am still doing a similar thing, using an old RPi version 2 or similar, and I succeeded with quite poor home Internet connection. It is more reliable than some cheap hostings, and I use Tor to bypass CGNAT. This is rarely written, but Tor builds a part of a similar networking stack on top of the existing network stack, and in this land CGNAT is not a problem.
A very important step is to install some software for bandwidth limiting and configure it properly. Especially when having upload bandwidth like 100kB/s.
If this is not configured, Tor will happily eat all bandwidth it will get. This is related to two things.
First, when You access the address, doesn't matter random or generated (the program to bruteforce an address to something which fits a regexp is called mkp224o) it is out there and is known.
Next, when You publish it openly, it's also known even more widely.
The result - Your website will get two kinds of bots visible in logs (if they are enabled). There are not so many AI scraping bots in the Tor environment, but there is an enormous army of bots trying to access login pages of Wordpress, MS net servers and services or popular shopping CMSes. Even if the page is a static one, made using FrontPage 2003 on Wine and "distilled" (read: made readable on anything other than IE6) with a regex-ridden Perl script. Second type of bots crawl pages looking for e-mail addresses, and instead of spam, you will get a nice full log of faulty authentications with nearly made-up passwords in these e-mail addresses. Obviously, IP-based countermeasures will not work.
The solution I found is to limit the bandwidth to the sane level (this has to be tuned per website, some websites won't work if there's no 1MB/s, smaller, static ones will fly with few dozens of kB/s) and to pass the onion address on a website as text with a fake dot, using utf-8 character of different codepoint (but the same or similar symbol) for it. This will limit more stupid robots.