2025-01-09 Domain Change and Preparations for 2025
- *Important:** The new domain for auragem is now auragem.ddns.net. The previous domain name completely disappeared from my freedns account (for some unknown reason). While I have gotten the auragem server back up and running with the new domain, the misfin server will not be accessible for a while as I change over my misfin certificate. Note that auragem will always be available over a Tor Onion Service:
Varilib
AuraGem is announcing Varilib over Tor to provide for resources that will educate and help protect vulnerable people in the US under the second Trump administration. It is only accessible over Tor. Resources will include:
- LGBTQ+ material that has been banned in Florida, Texas, Iowa, and other places, with special emphasis on Trans material.
- Black History material that has been banned in Florida and other places
- News from anti-Trump resources on a wide political spectrum, from the anti-Trump center-right to the left.
- Movies, TV Shows, and Books that are vulnerable to banning.
- Religious resouces for all vulnerable religions, including progressive Christianity.
- Resources for setting up Tor, FreeNet and HyphaNet, I2P, and protecting yourself online.
- Ways that others can help out - collecting physical media that's prone to banning, setting up Free Little Libraries or digital libraries, boycotting companies that fuel Trump's Fascism, and setting up local community events and protests.
- January 6 Committee documents and other official US resources during Biden's administration.
Currently, the site has some Standard Ebooks, but more material will be coming within the next week.
Tor
Tor is a censorship-resistant network that hides your IP address from the destination server. This can be used with any website on the internet through exit relays (relays where traffic exits the network at a given point), or it can be used with onion services - servers that are hosted on the network itself (and therefore do not require an exit relay).
The simplest way to get Tor is to download the Tor Browser. This will work with HTTP(S) websites, and it also has plugins to block Javascript.
You can also install Tor itself and use it with other applications (for example, Gemini browsers). To do this, there are two options:
- Setup application to use SOCKS proxy.
- Install and use torsocks or torify to launch the application (`torsocks lagrange`). This works with applications that do not support SOCKS.
Some applications will have a different SOCKS setting for hostname resolution (for example, curl's `--socks5-hostname`).
Torifier is a Windows application that can route all network traffic on your computer, including DNS requests, through Tor without needing to configure each application. It also emulates system-wide support for .onion names and blocks UDP requests. Install it here:
Torrenting
Torrenting is a way of distributing files across multiple computers for more efficient downloading. It should NOT be used with Tor, as it will slow down the Tor network. It can, however, be used with I2P.
In order for torrenting to work, each computer requesting access to a file needs to get a list of IP addresses to other computers that have the file. This is done through multiple methods:
- Trackers
- DHT - Distributed Hash Table
- PEX - Peer Exchange
Trackers are centralized servers that host IP addresses of computers requesting and seeding files. Most of them are publicly available, which means they are not great for anonymity. There are some private trackers, but they usually require an invite.
DHT is a hash table that is distributed across multiple computers. It is also publicly available.
PEX is a way to exchange peers between peers that are already connected to each other.
You can also use I2P for better privacy while torrenting. Here's a tutorial on how to connect Bittorrent to I2P:
PeerBlock and I-Blocklist
Many companies track torrents and which IP addresses are requesting files to determine who is illegally downloading or sharing pirated content. To help fight against this, you can use the PeerBlock application to block your torrent client's connection to all company ip addresses. I-Blocklist provides lists that you can use from within PeerBlock.
PeerBlock can also be useful for blocking spam and other bad actors on the internet.
Note: If you want to setup your own Tor Onion Service or run a bridge or relay, then go to the Tor project website, which provides a lot of documentation:
Tails is a Linux OS that routes all network traffic into the Tor network: