Jake, with a slice of onion

Jake Thoughts — 18 Sep 2020 18:01:25 -0400 Link to onion site

When I saw this onion website (Coarse Enigma) I knew I had to do the same thing. So I did! The articles on Coarse Enigma are of much much higher quality than mine, by a large margin, I fully recommend the reader to check it out.

The hidden service/relay (I am aware this has a certain risk) was quite easy to set-up; just install nginx and tor. The config file for tor basically tells you what to do. For Nginx you have to search-engine the right phrase but basically it is easy too. The hard part, I suppose, was dealing with random errors that seem to make no sense. After messing around with this distro for sometime I can intuitively just 'know' what is wrong when these things happen. If you asked me to explain why I chased down y instead of x, I would be unable to tell you.

I've done what I could to reduce the footprint the website for the tor network. Plainly speaking, images are the biggest drain. When I see the folder-size of my original website it is less than 4MiB with the image directory consisting of well over half of that. 90% of pages are less than 10KiB, with a notable exception of 2020.html which currently sits at around 12KiB (publishing more entries is sure to increase this, obviously.) For the hidden service, the entire folder-size of the website is less than 1MiB, as a result of purging all my lovely banners in favor of one (RIP in peace) and dithering the remaining images. Some images, like the NEET girl on the front page, dithering actually increased her size from ~20KiB to ~60+KiB, for some reason. Prolife tip: do not save dithered .jpg files; dithered .jpg NEET girl with quality set to 1: 8.7KiB (setting quality above 1 increases file-size unpreditably), dithered .png NEET girl with compression level 9: 6.1KiB. Due to the changes, I effectively have two very similar websites but sort of different.*

My VPS has my personal information and I paid with a credit card; if the spooks want to me to have an accident all they have to do is ask the VPS provider for my information, should I say something spooky and not government-friendly. As such, I've decided that the onion site will mirror my non-spooky-website, more or less, since the VPS links directly back to me pretty clearly. The VPS cost money, not as much as one would expect, but perhaps a good amount depending on economic factors, so when/if I go homeless/dead for unknown reasons and I can no longer afford to pay the VPS, the onion site will probably go down. The main site, where it costs ~$0.33 a month, will last a long time I hope. I do know what I would do if I wanted/needed to host a site more securely:

• Get a raspberry pi.
• Get an internet connection from 'somewhere'.
• Install the software (nginx, tor, etc)
• Design the website in a very conservative manner, making sure I use proper English, spell correctly, don't say things like 'I like the burger🍔 joint at x,y,z', don't post ANY images pulled from the web or from phone, etc
• Harden the pi

Alternatively, other things:

• Pay for a VPS with crypto-coins
• Do above where applicable

I am amazed at how little I needed to spend just to get an onion site to work (nothing, I didn't spend a dime). You don't even need to be a relay to have a hidden service.

Overall, this was a lot of fun, and would do again..... 10/10 experience.

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*Authors Note: This paragraph was written when the author has/had a verrry slow tor speed. Upon visiting each site at various times the author noticed that sometimes the onion site loads faster than the clearnet site and sometimes the onion site takes a full minute or more to load after the clearnet site loads. The author will upload the slimmed down site regardless. Jake's Thoughts (onion link) Coarse Enigma #how-to-dither-an-image-to-1-bit-black-and-white For more dithering information