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Comment by noduerme | Hacker News Reader

On a purely technical level, suppose you currently wanted to start a site like wikileaks that hosted all this insider pirated leak shit. Where would you host it? Think of your top 10 onshore options and then all your offshore options. Could anyone even launch that site now in 2022? Is there still a nuke shelter in Denmark and a basement in Norway willing to physically protect you? Realistically, how would you do it and maintain any reasonable uptime when one government or another was dedicated to shutting you down?

Ten years ago you could do it and possibly even change the world. Today it's not possible. Even hint at it, you're toast... it's that you couldn't even get an access point to try (without being murdered before if you uploaded something).

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Just host the data on the darknet somewhere with hundreds of cheap VPS as internet facing fronts. Some countries still have strong protection laws for journalists (e.g. scandinavian countries, iceland) where these VPS would probably stay up for a while.

afaik wikileaks archive is still available as torrents and on Tor onion. Both protocols are extremely compromised..

How is Tor compromised?

If someone controls your entrance and exit nodes they read your traffic. A substantial enough minority of network nodes have always been controlled by the government that Tor is not and has never been anything other than a massive sting operation.

Citation needed?

It isn't.

To be honest your best bet is probably obtaining a stolen credit card, sticking it up on one of the big cloud providers and then rest safe in the knowledge the second you release the data it's going to be copied a thousand times over by journalists and political operatives. If you really want to continue your campaign, just continually pop up with new stolen credit cards on various cloud providers, the barrier to entry is so low now.

So I'm trying to pretend you realistically have something huge to expose... and want to make it through the week or possibly the rest of the month without going to jail. Booting up a site on Amazon with a stolen CC is probably not that smart.

>> it's going to be copied a thousand times over by journalists

not really if it's a fucking terabyte of data

Probably hours of up time is good enough, and let's say you're Assange or Snowden or Manning, I think the assumption should be that you're either fleeing the country or facing life in jail. They're gonna get you no matter where you distribute the information.

The big cloud providers have encountered this many times, and are experts at combatting drive-by fraud like this.

The largest and default "big cloud provider" in the US is also a retailer and might be the best organization in the world at detecting and preventing credit card fraud.

I would sell it on Amazon as "baby formula". That way I could even make a profit! Only half joking.

If you tried that nestle would sue you for not killing enough new mothers.

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