The Hidden Wiki is the name used by several censorship-resistant wikis operating as Tor hidden services that anyone can anonymously edit after registering on the site. The main page serves as a directory of links to other.onion sites. An important adjunct to the Java Advanced Imaging (JAI) API is a set of image encoder/decoder (codec) classes, which have been packaged with JAI since the release of JAI 1.0. The encoders and decoders for several popular image storage formats have been implemented. The image formats supported by these ancillary codec classes are: BMP, GIF (decoder only), FlashPix (decoder only), JPEG, PNG, PNM. Keystroke-logging computer viruses let crooks steal your passwords, and sometimes even read your e-mails and online chats. Recently, however, anonymous criminals have added insult to injury.
Internet directory | |
Available in | English |
---|---|
Commercial | No |
Registration | Optional |
Current status | Ambiguously forked |
The Hidden Wiki is the name used by several[1] censorship-resistant wikis operating as Tor hidden services that anyone can anonymously edit after registering on the site. The main page serves as a directory of links to other .onion sites.
History
The first Hidden Wiki was operated through the .onion pseudo top-level domain which can be accessed only by using Tor or a Tor gateway.[2] Its main page provided a community-maintained link directory to other hidden services, including links claiming to offer money laundering, contract killing, cyber-attacks for hire, contraband chemicals, and bomb making. The rest of the wiki was essentially uncensored as well and also offered links to sites hosting child pornography and abuse images.[3]
The earliest mention of the hidden wiki is from 2007 when it was located at 6sxoyfb3h2nvok2d.onion.[4]
A well known iteration of the Hidden Wiki was founded some time before October 2011, coming to prominence with its associations with illegal content.[5]
At some point prior to August 2013, the site was hosted on Freedom Hosting.[6]
In March 2014 the site and its kpvz7ki2v5agwt35.onion domain was hacked and redirected to Doxbin.[7] Following this event, the content began to be mirrored to more locations. During Operation Onymous in November 2014, after its Bulgarian hosting was compromised, the site served a message from law enforcement.[8]
Mirrors
There are several .onion websites hosting mirrors and forks of the Hidden Wiki, as such there is no longer one single official Hidden Wiki.[1] Many are hosted for accessibility reasons, due to frequent downtime and instability of the main wiki, while others were launched in order to filter links to child pornography.[9][10]
See also
References
- ^ abDeepDotWeb (15 November 2015). 'The Hidden Wiki Seized (Old Domain)'. Archived from the original on 28 June 2015. Retrieved 20 June 2015.
- ^Gallagher, Sean (23 October 2011). 'Anonymous takes down darknet child porn site on Tor network'. Ars Technica. Retrieved 10 February 2012.
- ^Williams, Christopher (27 October 2011). 'The Hidden Wiki: an internet underworld of child abuse'. The Daily Telegraph. Retrieved 25 January 2012.
- ^Karsten. 'Length of new onion addresses'. Retrieved 10 March 2018.
- ^Williams, Christopher (24 October 2011). 'Anonymous hacktivists target child abuse websites'. Retrieved 8 August 2015.
- ^Howell O'Neill, Patrick (4 August 2013). 'An in-depth guide to Freedom Hosting, the engine of the Dark Net'. Retrieved 3 August 2015.
- ^'The Hidden Wiki Hacked, WikiTor Fills The Gap'. DeepDotWeb. March 14, 2014. Archived from the original on 19 March 2015. Retrieved 29 March 2015.
- ^DeepDotWeb (15 November 2014). 'The Hidden Wiki Seized (Old Domain)'. Archived from the original on 28 June 2015. Retrieved 20 June 2015.
- ^Millanta, Luke (6 May 2013). 'Peeling the Onion: A look at the Tor Project'. PC Authority. Retrieved 24 March 2015.
- ^Mead, Derek (12 March 2014). 'A Hacker Scrubbed Child Porn Links from the Dark Web's Most Popular Site'. VICE Motherboard. Retrieved 24 March 2015.
External links
- Guide to Tor hidden services and elements of the Tor network at Wikibooks
Retrieved from 'https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=The_Hidden_Wiki&oldid=933994476'
Developer(s) | TorChat Developers |
---|---|
Initial release | November 2007 |
Stable release | 0.9.9.553 (15 September 2012; 8 years ago) [±] |
Preview release | 2.0-alpha-14 / 22nd of July, 2012 |
Repository | |
Written in | Object Pascal |
Operating system | Linux, Microsoft Windows |
Available in | Multilingual |
Type | |
License | GPL v3 |
Website | github.com/prof7bit/TorChat |
TorChat is a decentralized[further explanation needed] anonymous instant messenger that uses Toronion services as its underlying network. It provides cryptographically secure text messaging and file transfers.[1] The characteristics of Tor's onion services ensure that all traffic between the clients is encrypted and that it is very difficult to tell who is communicating with whom and where a given client is physically located.
TorChat is free software licensed under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL).
Features[edit]
In TorChat every user has a unique alphanumeric ID consisting of 16 characters. This ID will be randomly created by Tor when the client is started the first time, it is basically the .onion address of an onion service. TorChat clients communicate with each other by using Tor to contact the other's onion service (derived from their ID) and exchanging status information, chat messages and other data over this connection. Since onion services can receive incoming connections even if they are behind a router doing network address translation (NAT), TorChat does not need any port forwarding to work.
![Falkovideo Falkovideo](/uploads/1/2/6/3/126370829/111812889.jpg)
History[edit]
The first public version of TorChat was released in November 2007 by Bernd Kreuss.[citation needed] It is written in Python and used the cross-platform widget toolkit wxPython which made it possible to support a wide range of platforms and operating systems.
The older Windows versions of TorChat were built with py2exe (since 0.9.9.292 replaced with pyinstaller) and came bundled with a copy of Tor readily configured so that it could be run as a portable application right off a USB flash drive without any installation, configuration or account creation.
Between 2008 and 2010 weren't any updated packages, resulting in the bundled version of Tor becoming obsolete and unable to connect to the Tor network,[2] which was the reason for the appearance of forks that basically just replaced the bundled Tor.exe with a current one.[citation needed] In December 2010, an official update finally became available that, among some minor bugfixes, also again included an up-to-date Tor.exe.[citation needed]
Forks[edit]
A fork was released for OS X in the summer of 2010 by a French developer. The binary (a Cocoa application) and source-code (Objective-C) bundled in a Xcode 7 project can be downloaded on SourceMac.
A rewrite of the TorChat protocol in Java was created in the beginning of 2012, called jTorChat on Google Code. Containing the latest Tor.exe, it is meant to emulate all the features of the original TorChat protocol, as well as extending the protocols for jTorChat-specific features. Filesharing, while implemented in the original TorChat, is not yet implemented in jTorChat. A new capability in jTorChat is the broadcast mode, which allows a user to send messages to everybody in the network, even if they are not in their buddylist. Also buddy request mode is implemented, which allows a user to request a random user in the jTorChat network to add them. At this stage jTorChat is designed to work effectively on Windows without any configuration, however since its written in Java, it can run on any platform supported by both, Tor and Java itself, making it very portable. The project is actively seeking Java contributors, especially to help debug the GUI interface.
As of 5 February 2013, developer Prof7bit moved TorChat to GitHub,[3] as a protest against Google selectively censoring access to TorChat download to certain countries.[citation needed] Prof7bit has switched to working on torchat2, which is a rewrite from scratch, using Lazarus and Free Pascal.[citation needed]
Security[edit]
In 2015 security analysis[4] of TorChat protocol and its Python implementation was conducted. It was found that although the design of TorChat is sound, its implementation has several flaws, which make TorChat users vulnerable to impersonation,communication confirmation and denial-of-service attacks. Despite the flaws found, the use of TorChat might still be secure in a scenario where the peer's onion address does not become known to an adversary interested in attacking the person behind the TorChat address.
See also[edit]
References[edit]
- ^'Interview with Bernd Kreuss of TorChat — Free Software Foundation — working together for free software'. Fsf.org. Retrieved 2014-01-28.
- ^'Tor project blog'. Blog.torproject.org. Retrieved 2014-01-28.
- ^https://github.com/prof7bit/TorChat
- ^http://kodu.ut.ee/~arnis/torchat_thesis.pdf
![Falkovideo Falkovideo](/uploads/1/2/6/3/126370829/418082669.png)
External links[edit]
Wikimedia Commons has media related to TorChat. |
Falko Video Part 2
- TorChat on GitHub
- jtorchat on GitHub
Falke Video
Retrieved from 'https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=TorChat&oldid=985743250'