State of the Fringe Forum

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Æternaeon
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State of the Fringe Forum

Post by Æternaeon » Sun Nov 02, 2014 5:37 pm

Just recently caught wind that Zoklet is down. I'm sure this is old news to many, but for me it seems a bit lousy. When &T went down, I kind of just laughed because it was such a joke anyway, but now most of its clones have tanked as well or morphed into shells of their former self.

The fringe forum seems to be dying, guys. For you younger users here, you might not really know what a lot of this means. The internet used to be a lot more of a "wild west" with anything-goes talk at a lot of places. Things you can't just walk up to most people and talk about because they'll think you're crazy and probably turn you in. This was always the draw of the fringe forum.

What are the details on the Zoklet close down? What forums are left?

I feel like we need to do something. I don't know what. But this luxury of seeking out our peers may come to a close soon if we do nothing. Think about the importance of these places to you and your life. Even if it's not a regular thing anymore, I know they've changed my life.


Edit: Found this from an informational article:
This month, Zoklet finally closed its doors, with its owner, known as Zok, citing health concerns, mounting surveillance, and legal fees as the cause. “Over the years, I’ve been contacted and questioned by the FBI, secret service, local law enforcement, lawyers, and nosy reporters… It has not been a fruitful adventure,” he wrote in a post. (This nosy reporter did try to approach Zok, but received no reply.)
Let's face it, we all knew well before Snowden that spooks were looking at everything. At first, we laughed it off that nobody would be paying attention to the small timers wanting "revenge" but now it's pretty clear that we're all a subject of interest just for being at places like this. If you run a place like this, you have it even far worse. It's getting to the point that if you grow to a certain point you'll be discouraged from continuing by government harassment.

In order to survive, the fringe forum must adapt. While methods of surveillance have gotten crazy, so have methods of rendering it useless.

I propose brainstorming a way to produce a "cloud forum" that can be accessed by anyone but also isn't really ran by any particular person. No individual is responsible for the existence of the forum, there is no head to cut off yet the forum isn't so underground as to be impossible to find. While we may not necessarily USE this method ourselves, it's time we find ways this can be done before there's no longer and discussion or interest in doing such a thing and the fringe forum dies completely.
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Xanatos
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Re: State of the Fringe Forum

Post by Xanatos » Mon Nov 03, 2014 7:22 am

We've taken extra precautions beefed up security for just this purpose. And with the recent demise of 4chan (see the GamerGate scandal), it's not just government spooks we need to worry about either.
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Re: State of the Fringe Forum

Post by Ghost » Mon Nov 03, 2014 4:17 pm

This is the first I've heard of Zoklet going down, which shows how little I've been on the intertubes lately. It was no &Totse, but it stood for the same thing, and for that reason alone I was a member there. Back in the early 2000's I thought that there would always be some site out there where you could freely exchange information of any sort, but I guess what was unthinkable back then has finally come to pass.

I'm not the most tech savvy person in the world, and my IRL job has kept me busy/traveling quite a bit, but whatever support I can give to a project like this, I will. The internet is the perfect place for the free exchange of ideas, and it needs someplace where that can happen. How would you like to begin planning something like this? Perhaps some brainstorming sessions over Skype, or here in chat?
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Re: State of the Fringe Forum

Post by Æternaeon » Tue Nov 04, 2014 3:05 am

Either would suffice, I wager. Just as long as it's real-time to keep the ideas really flowing.

I thought about this matter a lot today, and redoubled my own determination that something needs to be done. I might even go on a limb and say that these supposed trouble havens are actually a good thing, as they present a community for people to go to who are outcasts in their own local region. I know when I was much younger and first joined &T and the pursuit of knowledge, I don't care how nerdy it may sound, I much preferred the similar minded people online to the living, faceless wallpaper that comprised the kids in town.

To clarify Xanatos, it's not ONLY about the security, but just keeping the population and interest alive. Period.
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Re: State of the Fringe Forum

Post by Secant » Tue Nov 04, 2014 11:40 pm

Oh, didn't know about Zoklet. Guess Zok closed up shop for the same reasons Jeff Hunter did, can't really blame him for that. I hope he makes a clean break of it, for his own sake.

Now I'm all nostalgic for the &Temple, thanks assholes. I'll just be over here pondering this celtic knot pattern...

As for the fringe forum of the future, I see this as problem more of obfuscation than of distribution. It's hard to have a "cloud" style forum since the purpose of a forum is to concentrate discussion in one place. And, there needs to be some person or group providing infrastructure (e.g. a web server and bandwidth). However, we can mitigate or remove the threat to the administrators by obfuscating the forum in some way.

Using a Tor hidden service seems like the most obvious solution to me. IIRC Æternaeon and I have experimented with freenet, which would be a truly distributed system, but is also beyond the reach of most people. Tor is a little better known and understood, even though the hidden service itself would not be distributed.

Also, who's to say that trouble havens don't exist? They're just hidden now that we have the software to do it. Nobody discusses fringe topics on the open web anymore. Knowing the technology is just the price of admission to fringe discussions, I guess you could say that the open web has become gentrified. NONET is a relic in that respect, and we miss out on a users who are interested but don't want to join because of our lack of security features (SSL, etc).

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Re: State of the Fringe Forum

Post by Æternaeon » Wed Nov 05, 2014 1:27 am

Perhaps you are right, and that we should simply accept that the times have forced the fringe forum to go underground. In a way I suppose this is nothing new. The old days of &totse didn't involve simply punching in a web address but rather going through the old BBS system and it survived long enough to reach the early true internet. Still, I think merely evacuating suddenly to a heavily encrypted method would kill activity off just as fast as nobody would be up to speed on how to browse that way. Survival of the fringe forum in that manner would depend on the assumption that lots of like-minded individuals browse for things on Tor or Freenet.

I wasn't around for the BBS &T days but again I'd like to draw a comparison. I have no doubts those days had a much higher intelligence level and that opening up just brought in a waterfall of stupid. But hey, I was also on the same river and I made it there too. So did a lot of us. I don't have an answer, just thinking out loud here. The proposal is feasible in my mind, but needs refined.
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Re: State of the Fringe Forum

Post by Secant » Tue Nov 11, 2014 12:27 am

Agreed, a hidden service would cut off a bunch of users. So, we should confine ourselves to standard web technologies, and make them as secure and distributed as possible.

A web site can still be relatively secure even without using Tor. It's the distributed part that's hard. It's difficult to provide a web service without there being some organization in charge, so there will pretty much always be a head to cut off. For example, even though Facebook uses a CDN to serve their content from thousands of servers across the globe, there is still one organization behind the whole thing - if Facebook fails, the CDN will be shut down. DNS names in particular are tricky, since only one organization can own a name.

FMS on Freenet is a good contrasting example - each user inserts their messages into the collective pool, and peers retrieve, store, and forward the message. So, after the message is posted, no one person owns it and there is no single point of failure. This is only possible because of Freenet's unique design, though, it doesn't apply to standard websites. You'd have to do something crazy to replicate that for a real website, and even then there would be a single point of failure in the domain name.

I guess we have to ask ourselves: what's the goal? Is it resiliency, in case the person running the place is compromised? Is it simply to defeat passive monitoring? Or active, aggressive monitoring? Is it to be as effective as possible at facilitating fringe discussion? Realistically, it's all of these and more. But in what proportion?

Another important topic (which has come up with respect to NONET in the past) is how to attract and retain users. Obviously, I don't really know the answer to that question. I don't think anyone does really.

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Re: State of the Fringe Forum

Post by Xanatos » Tue Nov 11, 2014 10:07 am

We could always try my free hookers idea from years ago. http://nightops.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=599
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Re: State of the Fringe Forum

Post by mib » Wed Nov 12, 2014 2:25 am

8chan allows users to create their own boards, and seems 'open' for the time being. But I don't think they support Tor or anything like that.

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Re: State of the Fringe Forum

Post by Æternaeon » Thu Nov 13, 2014 1:28 am

Just chiming in that I'm still checking in. No new ideas here, though.
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Re: State of the Fringe Forum

Post by Secant » Thu Nov 13, 2014 10:16 pm

Xana has something here. We can have our own forum, with blackjack! And hookers! In fact, forget the forum!

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Re: State of the Fringe Forum

Post by Æternaeon » Sat Nov 15, 2014 3:17 pm

http://www.businessweek.com/articles/20 ... redecessor

We're obviously nowhere like this website, but just a thing of semi-relevance.
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Re: State of the Fringe Forum

Post by Xanatos » Sun Nov 16, 2014 9:00 am

I remember reading about that. T'was a shitstorm.
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Re: State of the Fringe Forum

Post by Lynx » Sun Nov 16, 2014 10:23 pm

mib wrote:8chan allows users to create their own boards, and seems 'open' for the time being. But I don't think they support Tor or anything like that.
Please, can we not transition to eany chan whatsoever? They don't last overly long thes days either.
8Chan is under close investigation for very well based pizza accusations, and it may actually prove to be way too free for the feds to like it. Creating a board there will get us a "different" sort of platform, albeit not more reliable, we'll get an imageboard. Not what I had in mind when I thought of a fringe forum. Also, archiving the site and moving it to a hidden service is better than leaving it here to die. I don't think that will happen anytime soon, thank gosh.
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Re: State of the Fringe Forum

Post by Æternaeon » Sat Nov 22, 2014 2:35 am

I think we as a community are safe in the sense of not being shut down or members being investigated as although we claim to admit to tall tales, there's really nothing happening because of the existence of the site. We're not wheeling and dealing things back and forth. Anything that might happen, happens at the personal level at our individual locations. Not across the board. NONET is more about information, storytelling, and socializing. It's not a swap meet.

However, death of personal messengers is also a concern of mine. It used to be that if shit shut down, you could just communicate with your friends via messenger and eventually he-knows-him, she-knows-him, etc. and boom everyone's back together. Now, centralizing is the fad on social networks and this doesn't exist. There's Skype of course, but less people use this as a text messaging device and thus less users likely have this at all. I'm sure some of us have social profiles, however nobody is dumb enough to link this world with that if you know what I mean. You keep your shit separated.
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Re: State of the Fringe Forum

Post by Secant » Mon Nov 24, 2014 1:36 am

That's a good point about centralized social networks vs. distributed chat services. Maybe it would be more productive to consider the community to be a mesh or one-to-one connections via some distributed chat system, rather than a group around some single resilient connection point. Central points (forums, etc.) could be used by the community for as long as they last, but the community would survive and live on to congregate elsewhere.

I have a friend whom some of you probably know, he's a fan of jabber/OTR. It's basically a AIM-like chat protocol supported by standard IM clients (e.g. pidgin). It's easy to set up and quite safe when OTR is used to encrypt the chat. If anyone is on jabber, I added my account to my user profile if you want to chat.

Also, Skype is not a good example because it became centralized after being bought out by Microsoft. They made some pretty fundamental changes. It's well known to be backdoored and is not suitable for private conversation.

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Re: State of the Fringe Forum

Post by Æternaeon » Wed Nov 26, 2014 3:29 pm

I personally use pidgin which supports OTR as does another former member here, we speak pretty regularly on it. My AIM user should still function on there for those who know it, but I can make a new account specifically for NON and run that.
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Re: State of the Fringe Forum

Post by vonunov » Wed Dec 03, 2014 11:00 pm

As for the issue of losing new users, maybe we could do some kind of clearnet gateway forum from which "good" users are picked to receive the directions to the darknet forum. Of course, the more we try to hide it, the faster it'll get leaked to the public forum. But maybe it doesn't have to be anything secret. But if it's not secret, what's the point? It's a little harder to stumble across, I guess. Are we going for true security or just plausible deniability for everyone?

After a quick check, it doesn't look like there's any prominent peer-to-peer forum software. I wonder how security would work on this. Might be issues with stuff like injecting bad information into the database, but then I guess the checks against everyone else's version would take care of that. Anyway I'm not sure if anyone has actually done it.

If it were something like that, not darknet but just decentralized, what do you think?
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Re: State of the Fringe Forum

Post by Secant » Thu Dec 04, 2014 2:42 am

This forum isn't really big enough to sustain a discussion split between a public area and a closed area - there's something like 3.4 posts per day now. Either the private side would see no activity (why have it?) or the public side would have no new content (new users aren't enticed). I still think that we can be "secure enough" using standard web technologies, without having to exclude anyone. Encryption technology is pretty good these days, when it's set up correctly.

The only P2P forums I've ever seen are Frost and FMS, both part of freenet. They only work because they take advantage of freenet's distributed design. FMS has the best way to handle security - you build a "web of trust", which is just a list of users with trust assignments. You'll only see a message if it comes from someone whom you trust, or someone you trust trusts, and so on. Others will only see your posts if they trust you, or they trust someone else who trusts you. It's kind of ingenious actually - the content is self-policing. But there are pretty severe drawbacks though. You're not guaranteed to see all of the posts in a discussion, for example. And due to freenet's design, it's easy for old content to fall off and become irretrievable.

Now how would something like FMS work outside of freenet? Not sure.

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