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Comment by sanskritical | Hacker News Reader

I recommend Anna's Archive get a Nostr account. Once they finally have a solid court order to seize domains, generally the rate at which they get seized accelerates greatly. Nostr is the only decentralized manner (no, Mastodon/fediverse is dependent on domain names, which are getting seized by courts in relation to this -- it is not decentralized at all when it comes down to it) that people can reliably use to have a latest content feed distributed.

"Check Wikipedia to evade the court order" just encourages legal action against Wikipedia. Even linking to copyright violations is, under current court precedent, able to bring civil liability upon third parties. It is draconian and our framers would have considered it a clear First Amendment violation, but unfortunately the current jurisprudence says that is the law.

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Tor and I2P is a better fit. Nostr is very weird. It sells itself as decentralized, but basically all frontends provide same several relays.

When those relays get subpoenas and remove your resource, you're done. You can use some unknown relays to publish, but who's gonna use them as clients outside of the defaults? It's effectively designed for shadowbans.

Many clients automatically seek, or prompt an action in 1 click to retrieve content from additional relays that a Nostr pubkey announces if said content is referenced but not available on already subscribed relays. As a publisher, you announce what relays you are currently publishing to in your identity metadata. So even if you don't specifically subscribe to a smaller relay, you can still access the content on it.

Tor and I2P are great technologies. ZLibrary, for example, runs an excellent Tor hidden service and it is usually the most reliable way to access news from the site. However, this did not remain true for a while when two of the operators were arrested. Tor and I2P require you to have infrastructure online. The point of "check Wikipedia for news" is that you can have something persist even if you do not have your servers online. Nostr is the best technology available in this category.

Where does the nostr pubkey announce it? Let's say you are banned from main default relays. Is there any side channel?

You announce all the relays you publish to to the relays you are publishing to. If someone quotes your post in a post of their own, in many clients subsequent readers will be able to retrieve your content from the relays which they don't currently follow. Relay discovery mechanisms grow progressively better. I don't know of any pubkey ever banned from major relays. The operator of Damus, one of the more successful clients in history and one of the main default relays, openly engages with dissident personalities in a welcoming manner. You could probably get a "filtering transparency report" from him and others and ask if they've blacklisted any specific pubkeys and why. I am unaware of any that are currently blacklisted, and generally the network seems to defer to WoT mechanisms by clients to blacklist content.

Regardless, this remains a far more resilient persistent source of information that you don't operate than "check Wikipedia".

I still don't get how to bypass a theoretical block, you need to access at least one of the current major relays or a side channel to find a follower, only аfter that you can re-translate the new set of relays. The autosub is good, but IMO the current major operators have an Elusive Joe situation because nostr is very small. Things will change as soon as people with money and government connections see it as a problem.

I totally agree with the Wikipedia argument though.

I think relay discovery by clients has improved by leaps and bounds and will continue to do so. Previously you had to give some complicated "follow me at such and such relay" thing. These days you can just tell people your npub and things seem to "just work". I don't know what's going on under the hood, I can only say that clients figuring out which relays have content seems to have improved drastically.

Check NIP-65[1], this is the key to the latest Nostr client's automatic discovery feature.

[1] https://nips.nostr.com/65

To improve user experience, Nostr clients typically pre-load several large relays. In fact, Nostr also supports using NIP-19[1] pointers to pass custom relay hints to the client, similar to the tracker in BitTorrent and Magnet. Furthermore, I believe that with Let's Encrypt now offering free and widespread IP certificates, domain dependency issues will be further alleviated on Nostr.

[1]: https://nips.nostr.com/19

See https://how-nostr-works.pages.dev/#/pathological

Tor, sure. i2p requires some proxy config in your browser and you need to run a service in the background explicitly. I wish they'd release a dedicated client like Tor does.

Pretty sure the whole concept of i2p is that every user also contributes to the network, which is why the config

I'm not sure why that would require more friction or why my comment was downvoted: i2p is harder to use than Tor. Adoption will be hindered by it, even in tech circles. I want to fire up an executable and maybe click through one prompt but not have to remember all the configuration steps the next time I want to use i2p.

They work on that, https://geti2p.net/el/blog/post/2025/10/16/new-i2p-routers

The current focus are new rust and go implementations, but embedding lib for applications is also in the roadmap.

I also agree on hindrance. I don't understand why they don't provide a simple docker-compose at least for daemon deployment for immutable management with controlled scopes. There is an image in the dockerhub, but no proper instructions. People have to spend several hours to ensure that everything works correctly.

Both require daemons that offer SOCKS (other other protocols) proxies for browsers to route through.

If you're talking about the Tor Browser bundle, I2P has this: https://geti2p.net/en/download/easyinstall

There's always Freenet...

Freenet is promising but it's not even fully done. Experimental stage. I am also skeptic of their more usage of LLM generated code these days.

Freenet (aka Hyphanet) is 25 years old... it's been "stable" for decades. Biggest problem is that content is sort-of hosted locally and considering how much child porn and other criminal content is in its darker corners tha can be risky.

It's also incredibly slow.

Stable and yet never used in live env. It's being rewritten and not at all stable. I don't expect it to become the standard anyway.

I'm old enough to remember when there were more nodes for Freenet than Tor. I don't hink you have much experience with darknets.

Darknet term is mostly used to refer onion services, which have been around since 2004. Freenet was never meant for anonymity, both have separate goals.

Better have a .onion. It's almost impossible to seize and you control the keys. YOU ARE THE OWNER, not some for-profit registrar. Onions should be the default, it's secure (you own the keys), decentralized and far better than relying on CAs for encryption.

Tor and I2P are great technologies. ZLibrary, for example, runs an excellent Tor hidden service and it is usually the most reliable way to access news from the site. However, this did not remain true for a while when two of the operators were arrested. Tor and I2P require you to have infrastructure online. The point of "check Wikipedia for news" is that you can have something persist even if you do not have your servers online. Nostr is the best technology available in this category.

> It's almost impossible to seize and you control the keys. YOU ARE THE OWNER

This also remains true for Nostr.

But furthermore, as an operator of several Tor hidden services corresponding to public web services. I can assure you that many users, especially those on mobile devices, will stop using your service in large numbers if you direct them to a hidden service. iPhones don't allow background processes without special dispensation from Apple so the Tor/I2P circuit dies every time someone switches between apps. It's also an extreme development challenge, as they don't allow subprocesses either, and then of course your app will have to abide by the GPL at least for I2P (nonstarter for some). "Just ruin your experience for all iOS users and switch to the GPL for all your client code" is not a realistic suggestion. Not that Annas-Archive has a their own client app.

Operational excellence is of course dependent on the operator but I would still think it's far easier to bring up onion as it's disposable and works behind NAT'ed VMs which makes it further easy to run.

I don't know anything about Nostr since it does not focus on anonymity and isn't as old as Tor (more than 2 decades of research and application), I wouldn't rely on Nostr for anything serious.

Laundering the code through OpenAI to see if the GPL sticks through training, would make for an interesting court case if you asked ChatGPT to write an I2P clients "from scratch" for a closed source iOS client.

If they can't figure it out anything else, I think Tor is the most plausible tech to be used. What are the alternatives if these other services don't provide enough traffic to sustent the download speed of the files? Something old like USENET certainly can't be used anymore.

I hope they follow the same pathway of The Pirate Bay or Rutracker.

I’ll never use Tor because I have no idea what the Tor client is actually doing. Is it enabling someone to use my network connection for cybercrime without my knowledge? No thanks.

Clients are never used as relays in TOR. You never route anyone's traffic until you setup it yourself. And you can't miss that part, and it's not a default, and requires additional configuration.

Also relays (not exit nodes) are pretty safe to operate and running them is a decent thing, supporting free internet instead of a corporate ads machine, let's not frame it as a "crime support".

> Also relays (not exit nodes) are pretty safe to operate and running them is a decent thing, supporting free internet instead of a corporate ads machine, let's not frame it as a "crime support".

Well the purpose of using Tor is to prevent any network operators from knowing who you're talking to. Which AIUI is primarily a concern if either you're not allowed to talk to whoever ("great firewall" type things), or you risk getting in trouble for talking to whoever (Silk Road etc, or disfavored politics).

I guess if you're worried about hacks and doxxing rather than LE? Or if you only call things crime when they should be illegal rather than when they formally are?

LE relies on opsec failures which is very clear on their busts. They are incompetent hypocrite fools.

Using Tor browser and running a Tor node are different things, by using the browser you are not contributing to the network, you're just accessing it. If you're worried about someone using your network connection for cybercrime you shouldn't run a Tor node (although there is significantly less risk with a relay node), but you shouldn't worry about using regular Tor.

> by using the browser you are not contributing to the networK

That's false to some extent. Tor's promise comes from it's vast population of users. The more users it has, the better it is to improve everyone's anonymity. So in a way, even by using it, you are helping Tor network. And please, save the "criminal" bs (meant for the original comment).

This response stretches "pedantic correction" to new levels.

Why? The utility of any network grows with the number of participants, even that of inherently asymmetric networks that strictly distinguish "producers" and "consumers". (More eyeballs make the network more valuable to content providers.)

This might not be how courts determine culpability of redistributing any potentially illegal content, of course.

>This might not be how courts determine culpability of redistributing any potentially illegal content, of course.

Which is precisely the point of this discussion.

Might as well argue "By protecting the environment you're supporting the drug trade, because people that a climate catastrophe would wipe out will be able to be drug users".

It's literally outline by Tor Project team, if you care to even read from official sources.

This here response continues to stretch "pedantic correction" to new levels.

What's "literally outlined" I'd guess is that the utility of the Tor network increases with adoption which nobody ever doubted.

What is discard is the tenuous over-stretched argument in this thread regarding fears of legality, that went like this:

GP: Using Tor browser and running a Tor node are different things, by using the browser you are not contributing to the network, you're just accessing it.

P: That's false to some extent. Tor's promise comes from it's vast population of users. The more users it has, the better it is to improve everyone's anonymity. So in a way, even by using it, you are helping Tor network.

As if that what was discussed...

You are being pedantic and annoying. Why would you even respond in off-topic response? Your comments have served nothing to the topic on-hand.

Tor doesn't work like this. i2p, however, does. At least by default.

As others have mentioned, that's not what Tor does by default. Just because you don't know how it works doesn't mean that it's generally unknowable.

And conversely, it's enough to visit a random website running WebTorrent or just a plain HTTP DDoS attack to possibly "use your connection for cybercrime".

Since RFC 3514 unfortunately never gained traction, distinguishing good, bad, and illegal traffic remains difficult.

Namecoin has had all the DNS issues fixed since 2011. It is one of the few real and useful applications of bitcoin based technology.

Somehow it never got too the attention it deserved.

It was also the first known "altcoin"

Namecoin sounds very promising, first time hearing about it.

>It's almost impossible to seize and you control the keys. YOU ARE THE OWNER, not some for-profit registrar.

You may own the keys but the non-profit The Tor Project owns the network. And when they decide to shut it down your "ownership" of the domain keys doesn't matter in the slightest. You might think this is a silly scenario but actually it happened in 2021/2022 when the tor project unilaterally decided to kill the entire Torv2 network and all domains were made inoperable. All links between sites, everything that made .onion a web, was lost.

The Tor Project does this whenever they feel that there's a security issue. It will happen again.

As someone that spent 10 years building completely legal community sites on the .onion network with the delusion of ownship it really hurt me. I'm never using .onion again. It is not a place to try to build communities. It is only for people that need 'security' as a highest priority and don't care if everything gets wiped out.

They didn't provide any migration path from v2 to v3?

They did not. And many apps (Ricochet Messenger comes to mind) were not visited by a web browser. So it isn't like you could announce an HTTP 302 and just seamlessly transition.

They don't own the network. The people who run the relays do. v2 wasn't shutdown in an instant. It was necessary and you could have just redirected your users to v3 and tell them to use it instead but you had to whine about your short-commings on Tor?

It's not only for high-security. It's for the state-of-the-art anonymity.

All the links between .onion sites broke when the relay and other infrastructure operators started running the broken (no Torv2 support) releases the Tor Project put out. All the writings of sites about each other. Everything that made it a web.

It doesn't matter that it was technical possible to try to manually reach out to random visitors of my sites and try to tell them that the entire domain name was changing. That didn't fix the web or links aspect at all.

How are we supposed to discover official .onion adresses though ? Is there some kind of DNS for that ?

The same way you discover official clearnet domain names, i.e. by using a search engine, getting url from a friend, etc.

I highly doubt nostr’s suitability as a petabyte DFS/CDN.

This is a discussion on whether or not it is better to use it to announce new domain names post-suspension than Wikipedia, not if it can sustain petabytes of data.

Given the archives use of BT, probably better to just use BEP-44 on mainline DHT if you want to store an arbitrary address somewhere - or use something like IPNS, or .onion as others have mentioned.

As nostr relies on gossip, there is no guarantee you will have access to latest address.

I am unaware of an app that sees present day use for communicating short messages that uses BEP-44 or mainline DHT. Nostr works today for millions of people. These services have normal people using them, not Hacker News commentators that are extremely sophisticated -- imagine telling someone who only knows how to use normal web services and apps they install from the app store to "just retrieve a BEP-44 message from the DHT".

I’m not aware of any laypeople who use nostr either.

But if you are going to build some nostr-based “resolver” into a browser you could instead use any of the other protocols - 2 of which are designed specifically for resolution, and the other already having a robust resolver implementation built on top of it?

I quite like nostr, but let’s not pretend it solves every problem.

> Once they finally have a solid court order to seize domains, generally the rate at which they get seized accelerates greatly.

Given that most ccTLDs live in different jurisdictions, that's not really a huge problem.

> Given that most ccTLDs live in different jurisdictions, that's not really a huge problem.

The copyright-industrial complex is internationally very well-connected.

That may be, but you can't just keep going to the same US court for warrants.

As long as there is centralization, there is always an avenue for abuse with money. The DNS root itself is heavily influenced by a group of allied nations, through the ICANN if I'm right. That can be used to exert pressure on TLD registries, including ccTLD registries. Of course, that cannot be used for surgical control single domains like Anna's Archives'. But DNS blocking is an old technique by now. The copyright cartel needs to get it banned only in a few populous countries to destroy the value of a domain. We can keep finding workarounds. But at some point, they won't have to worry about people who can actually do that.

For what it's worth, that doesn't seem to ever have worked.

Trying to understand nostr, I looked up its Wikipedia page...

> In 2024, in an article reporting on the project's funding, Business Insider claimed to have identified fiatjaf, and had found two websites previously published by this person to disseminate the work of Olavo de Carvalho, a far-right conspiracy theorist.

That... seems extremely irrelevant. If fiatjaf is contributing something useful and significant to the commons, why does it matter that he used to spread far-right conspiracy theories in the past?

> As a result of its ability to quickly and discreetly create accounts and publish posts to relays, Nostr can propagate spam much more easily if left unchecked. A notable example includes a case where multiple protocol bridges have been used to conduct spam waves on the Bluesky social network (itself connected to a competing protocol, the AT Protocol) by creating posts on Nostr, bridging the post to ActivityPub and bridging it again to Bluesky.

Surely they also had to create a Bluesky account for that? I don't see how Nostr is to blame here. Perhaps Bluesky forgot to use anti-spam measures when bridging things over from other sources? That's kind of on Bluesky, no?

This reads like a smear campaign against Nostr. I don't think I have the necessary Wikipedia karma to get it amended, but gee do I have opinions on this...

You don't need "karma" to edit Wikipedia.

Some pages have 'semi-protection' or 'extended semi-protection', where a user must have a Wikipedia account which must have made a certain number of edits and be older than a specified time period.

However, this isn't one of them.

You can edit it immediately, either with or without creating an account.

> This reads like a smear campaign against Nostr.

It's well known that corporations and governments pay people fulltime to edit Wikipedia. Wikipedia has a whole article detailing the extent of it:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conflict-of-interest_editing_o...

Of course, these days the people paid to do this have learned not to do edits from their own corporation or government office's announced IP blocks. But in times passed finding many of this category of edits was as simple as sorting edits on Wikipedia by the originating IP address and looking for which ones came from institutionally announced subnets.

Point being, massive amounts of capital and intelligence resources have been dedicated to censoring social media. There's nanny employees in every single social media company making sure "important" complainers are heard and their desires to silence voices fulfilled. I follow a large number of people on Nostr that have been banned from every other platform. Facebook. Twitter. Bluesky. "Free speech" sites like Gab and ActivityPub servers that advertise "free speech". But Nostr has the same entrance requirements and cryptographic sovereignty that Bitcoin provides. Generate a keypair and you can publish. People that want to find your content can simply subscribe to your public key. This results in a subversion of countless state and corporate capital expenditures. If people use Nostr, they will permanently lose the ability to moderate content in this oppressive manner. They absolutely do not want this to happen.

> Nostr can propagate spam much more easily if left unchecked.

Nowhere have I had a worse problem with spam than Twitter and Facebook. For all the alleged vulnerability of Nostr to spam, it has not currently materialized as an issue.

Note that filtering out actual spam without a centralized moderator is one of the most solved problems on the Internet. If you've ever installed Spamassassin or other well subscribed to Bayesian filters on an email server, you know that you never see spam ever again. In actuality, spam is a much bigger problem when you are dependent on fickle human moderation.

Definitely a smear campaign, ironically one that seems to be organized by left-leaning individuals on Wikipedia, Business Insider, etc.

Which is bizarre to me because aren't these the people that would want the ability to disseminate information in the face of fascism?

They are attacking their own side (again.) When will idealists learn that this is not the way?

The defining feature of fascism is these kind of tyrannical public-private partnerships. It was the entire basis of Mussolini's fascism. They are the literal fascists.

Redifining fascism as meaning "racism and anti-semitism" (certainly attitudes which by the current definition far predate fascism) has been one of the most clever acts of sleight of hand by the regime, giving it unlimited freedom to enact the most totalitarian form of fascism ever conceived.

> left-leaning individuals

Here we go again.

As a 'left-leaning individual' it's funny because if you look up anti-war left leaning outlets and such on Wikipedia, they don't tend to have exactly glowing entries on there. Wikipedia and the other outlets described as 'left-leaning' are neoliberal institutions. Believe me that there's no love for these on the left.

When it's convenient for smears, neoliberals are left but then at other times it's the communists etc. In other words, 'left-leaning' is a grab bag of what one doesn't like these days, rather than any really meaningful group.

> Wikipedia and the other outlets described as 'left-leaning' are neoliberal institutions.

What exactly do you think 'neoliberal' means?

I do agree Wikipedia is not 'left-leaning', mainly because 'right' and 'left' are bullshit names that don't mean anything. But it doesn't even have the power to act in a situation that would make it neoliberal.

Neoliberal as in prominent decision makers/editors etc, such as Jimmy Wales express the sort of free market and foreign policy philosophy that has been mainstream since about the 80s.

It means that entries on individuals, countries etc. are broadly in line with what you'd read in any mainstream media outlet and so is its outlook on 'Western civilization'.

That doesn't mean it's not a good project, or that it has some great power, just that its 'gatekeepers' are not exactly dissidents of any sort.

> express the sort of free market and foreign policy philosophy that has been mainstream since about the 80s

Let's see:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laffer_curve

Right on the introduction it clearly says that any argument based on the curve is pseudo-science.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_Consensus

Is biased in claiming the consensus is a contentious topic, instead of only a tiny well founded minority ever supporting it. But it's the same bias you will see in any history book.

If we go extreme in another direction, this one has the same bias of representing fringe views as equally represented in a debate:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communism

If we go here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Management_science

There's a clear neoliberal bias. But if instead we go here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_administration

There's a strong modernist bias, with a secondary classical liberal one. What is about exactly the same bias you would see on the main literature of both subjects.

So, no, except for behaving like an encyclopedia and reflecting the literature biases, I fail to see how the wiki is neoliberal as a whole.

> What is about exactly the same bias you would see on the main literature of both subjects.

I think you just answered your own question.

Why do out single out the neoliberal one if each subject clearly has a different bias?

It absolutely does. It's full of editorial decisions. What content is on there, what is cut. What editors consider germane, etc.

It can absolutely act in a way that makes it neoliberal.

> aren't these the people that would want the ability to disseminate information in the face of fascism?

Everybody wants free speech — but only for opinions they agree with. And they are against censorship — unless the "right people" are censored.

Recently, the left has been far more authoritarian, labeling everything they don't like as "far right hate speech", pushing to make dissent illegal, and demanding censorship. I guess the pendulum will swing the other way eventually.

It's not really a left VS right issue, but an authoritarian one. Free speech can be uncomfortable, that is the point. "Free speech, but…" does not work.

> Recently, the left has been far more authoritarian

I'm not sure how a reasonable comparison of authoritarian behavior seemingly assigns more weight to random Wikipedia contributors lumped together as "leftists" compared to the literal government currently controlled by the right that is routinely threatening to pull FCC licenses for critical speech among other intentionally speech chilling threats.

I'd say the pendulum has already swung the other way, while swinging much, much further and more openly than nebulous mob demands for "cancel culture", over zealous Twitter moderation of hate speech or whatever else the previous go-to examples for the left were. Before 2025 showed what a truly authoritarian anti-free speech policy looks like when wielded by those with actual legal power and zero shame.

> That... seems extremely irrelevant.

I find it pretty relevant who is behind what.

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