Torpark
Torpark, a luscious park filled with rare and beautiful Greyhat Onion Blossoms, is located just outside Beijing in the Tor foothills of China. Notable as perhaps one of the only locales on earth where the typical methods of Internet surveillance do not work, for reasons possibly explained by the bizarre electro-magnetic patterns of the region. Some argue these patterns are due to the strange, rich, iron ore found in the hills and nearby mountains. Regardless, it is because of this odd location that certain bloggers in China, neighboring Iran, and North Korea are able to commit things to the Internet that would otherwise gain the notice of the authorities, and possibly result in lengthy imprisonment, torture, or even death. Because Torpark is a beautiful garden in China, the American government hates it... The American government hates gardens.
How It Is Used
As there are several Internet cafes located in and around the park, some evidence has been collected which suggests that the series of tubes in and around the Torpark region become twisted, and in some cases may actually exist in a quantum state. IP addresses become untraceable much as a proxy, and the content of communication over the tubes is impossible to determine -- leaving the spying authorities breathless and red-faced in frustration and drunkenness.
Due to the complete lack of traceability, human-rights workers, journalists, and those who don't wish to use google.cn for their Tiananmen Square information frequently, although somewhat covertly, make trips to visit Torpark to communicate with the outside world.
Like all current low latency anonymity networks, Tor is vulnerable to correlation attacks from attackers who can watch both ends of a user's connection.
Tutorial
First, you will need to download the Tor package. This includes Vidalia, Tor, and Privoxy. Tor is the program allowing you to connect to the onion network, Vidalia is the GUI for that program, and Privoxy helps you apply it plus it also blocks cookies and other detection scripts.
Run Vidalia, and it will start Tor in the background. There will be a little onion icon in your taskbar. Right click and press start; Tor is running if the onion is green. Privoxy should be running as well. Leave all this running basically all the time. You are now apart of the Tor network.
Now, to actually make it do something: Download the Torbutton extension for Firefox, or otherwise just point at the proxy 127.0.0.1:8118. The said IP:Port is your localhost computer address. This will run your browser through Privoxy, which will block all the unwanted stuff, and utilize Tor (PROTIP: Tor is slow).
In mIRC, type /tor before connecting to the server, and that will do basically the same thing automatically. You can whois yourself in IRC, you can go to whatismyip.com in the internets, and you will see you are anonymously connected.
Misuse
Sadly, there are a few, misguided individuals who visit Torpark to further general unpleasantness, vandalism, ad hominem attacks, and misguided attempts to "correct" information which appears about them on ED. Whatever their motivations, their continued activities generate irritation in the outside world, and a growing movement believes they should be reported to the Chinese government, which could endanger a number of innocent lives.
Consequently, due to aforementioned vandalism, the Chinese government coerced and used brute force to strong arm the proprietors of several Internet cafes near the park. Noble establishments such as 4chan, Bantown, and AOL Instant Messenger have all seen policy changes regarding access to their services from visitors originating from within Torpark. Effectively, quite a bit of strain on the relationships among said visitors, the management of notable cafeterias, and the gookernment has been evidenced.
Lore
core.onion
core.onion was an infamous free speech zone which intended purpose was to ghettoize un-American radicals, as not to creep out God-fearing law-abiding citizens. It was basically a chan, except for the lack of images and forced anon.
TL;DR
Generally, there were no noteworthy events except for factional struggles between cults each noteworthy person established around themselves.
There are trace amounts of lulz because tor was so lulz-starved that a lulz-drop was like a fucking oasis to a torizen.
Unfunny user tries to evoke lulz by imitating the wikipedoese style of castrated prose, trying to sound eloquent and shit while still having irrelevant hyperlinks in the text like ED usually does.
Pedos and Anti-pedos
Statistics say that about 8/10 of all threads and posts consisted of pro-pedo point of view. Simply put, someone went on and on citing reliable studies how sex with old, sweaty, drooling, obese men lacking any sense of personal hygiene is beneficial to the children. Then, invariably replies appeared which vehemently and categorically dispelled wild and irresponsible rumors such as that children benefit from fornication with adults.
Because of forced anon, moreover, lack of any kind of identification (there are no IP addresses on Tor, or anything, actually, every incoming connection regardless of source is the same), the prevailing opinion was that both pro-pedos and anti-pedos were actually one person whose sole purpose was evoking lulz.
There was once a thread with an image in the initial message. It was some female from the neck down. A discussion ensued, when upstanding individuals instead of fapping, pointed out that the female was of indiscernible teenage/young adult age and it was a pro-pedo trick to make people admit they were attracted to child pornography. Once again, it's unknown whether it's actual drama or it was all written by the same person.
Other than that, there was some guy who called everyone who disagreed with him a CIA/NSA shill or snitch. There were people saying such inspirational phrases such as "If we all spat on the state it would fucking drown" while sitting their lazy asses in front of a computer bought by their parents' money. Either ELF/ALF/FARC/IRA/ETA/PLO and other freedom fighter organizations didn't have a presence on tor or they didn't reach out to any torizens despite that unless they fucked up badly nothing about them could ever be identified, so there is no point in concealing one's presence..
Interpretation
There is an interpretation of everything being drowned with pro-pedo shit and discussions between political philosophers. Since there was no possiblity of 1984-ish censorship and monitoring, Brave-New-World-esque style of censorship was established. If there was 999/1000 shit of content everywhere, no one would care enough to tediously filter it, thus achieving the same result as censorship through violence.
It's supported by the fact that if pedos were so convinced of their superior morality they would just fuck toddlers instead of preaching to normal people. That argument makes no sense, even if someone is convinced an act is moral, they may still abstain from doing it for fear of consequence from those who ban it, rather than personal reservations about the morality.
Jamon
Jamon was the owner of the core.onion site. He tried expressing his ideas, but never actually succeeded in building a cult of personality around himself like Mixie did. He always whined on his blog (which no one really read) about how Matt plagiarized his ideas.
First he went batshit insane and made core.onion replace the string "jamon" with "janitor". Surprisingly, people found new, clever ways of writing "jamon" (like "JAM <newline> ON" or Perl one-liners) without invoking the word filter. He didn't attempt to filter additional terms, because the poor sod must have realized by the time that for the filter to be effective he must have either implemented strong AI or given a positive answer to the halting problem. Also exists the matter of steganography, which could have been used, had the community given a fuck about his histrionics.
Then he replaced the indispensable service that core.onion was to the community with a generic page giving links to other sites, but not Mixie's. He posted a thread to reddit saying how tor is useless because "one can't do a revolution without getting their hands dirty". Some argue that it's a strange way to rationalize the fact that pedos fucking ruined everything. Incidentally, the comment was seriously downvoted and soon disappeared into oblivion.
Matt
Whenever historians and investigative journalists approached witnesses for comment, "Matt" was described quite laconically as "the guy Jamon is so pissed off at".
Mixie
Now that an unusual one. Either an effeminate man or a tomboy. Jamon called it a "sissy boy". The thing is, it never identified its gender, always dodging the question to the best of its abilities. Because of torizen demographics, a self-identified a trap basement dweller is better than a nothing to a bunch of people of very specialized fields of expertise incidentally unable to support themselves financially.
Adding insult to injury, "Mixie" once bragged about parsing HTML with regular expressions. It might actually prove that it's a woman, because men actually know that as per Chomsky hierarchy only a context-free language or more powerful can parse graph structure. This hypothesis doesn't, however, point out it could have gotten internets in the kitchen.
"Mixie" has/had a hidden service containing useful dynamic web pages, such as a forum where the color of the text was very close to the color of the background.
"Mixie" identified itself as a "cat, but not a furry". Some argue that all humans who self-identify as cats are furries, yet no conclusive proof can be drawn. Perhaps it will remain a mystery for all eternity.
onionforum.onion
This is a very standard internets forum. On the English boards it was pretty polite and civilized, which is kind of counterproductive since on Tor anyone can do anything they want without legitimate authorities intervening. On non-english boards people involved in counterculture bragged how they're going to blow up their school with gas canisters, steal firearms and murder innocent people, etc. Fortunately because of troubled nature of youth, no such thing ever happened.
Why is it so fucking slow?
Tor is so fucking slow it's unbearable. Tor is even slower when connecting to hidden services (those .onion sites no one knows where they are located) compared to browsing the internets with it. But even then, it's still slow as fuck. No matter what kind of tuning one can do, it's still fucking slow. Misinformed people point out it's because there aren't enough people providing bandwidth, but in reality only the initial TCP handshake is slow; once it connects one can stream mp3's over it.
keli
He is/was the biggest source of lulz on tor. Despite forced anon, he started prefixing his posts with "[keli] " which infuriated regular community members. First people submitted such childish and insulting posts such as "[keli] i like to fuck toddlers", but then got subtler and it wasn't possible to distinguish between the real "keli" and others who prefixed their posts in the similar style. Or was it all the same person? Perhaps the entirety of human activity on Tor is a deed of but one person.
People hated keli because he was anti-pedo. Specifically, he didn't support their God-given rights to boast about fucking toddlers, exchange pictures of toddlers being fucked (by themselves and other people), try to "convert" others to the cause of fucking toddlers, fuck toddlers, et cetera. Because of thisz keli was universally hated. He also ran a radio station playing shitty music.
FSK
aka "agorist" or "formalist". Actually a sane person, despite being a fringe, social darwinist. He also self-admitted to not being able to pay for his living conditions despite being over thirty years old. Historians lack information about this individual, first-hand accounts describing his vices and inequities in form of gossip, flames and harassment are utmostly required.
CP
There are a bunch of sites with CP. They advertised themselves openly, not to mention were available without any cookies, payment, registration, fucking anything. While historians couldn't have broken legitimate law made by legitimate authority, thus assume the sites only allege their containing CP. One of these sites was aptly named "TorPedo".
An actual chan
There's a chan ran by a Misery on a toy computer with a 1GB PIO hard disk that constantly breaks. There's a board that's called "Jailbait", but again, legitimate law can't be broken in pursuit of historical truth, thus assume it's just called JB. antisocial individuals flooded the chan with SICP which must have caused Misery and his 1 GB PIO hard disk much pain.
Conclusion
Despite total anonymity (unless you're not familiar with TCP/IP networking) there's not much drama. Maybe it's because completing a HTTP request to a hidden service took over a minute thus negating instant gratification.
A promising alternative that promises total anonymity, actual drama and instant gratification is I2P. So far it's fast, can even be used to share data almost as fast and regular Internet, but it hasn't been verified that users can't be tracked down by the legitimate authorities.
Still, right now I2P contains no drama, just a bunch of technically-inclined middle-class white males. But the potential is here, since it can be "raided" with relative impunity.
Photo Tour
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Tube map of area around Torpark. "Mahn-tor" is the romanization of the Chinese characters representing "Torpark". This map was created by Weeaboos. -
Chinese blogger, Torpark visitor. -
Beautiful -
Onion field outside of Torpark.
See Also
External Links
- Tiananmen Square History
- Torpark Management Homepage
- Tool for getting around TorBlock
- A completely unbiased visitor review of Torpark.
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Torpark is part of a series on Visit the Trolls Portal for complete coverage. |
| Featured article November 26, 2006 | ||
| Preceded by Buzzboard |
Torpark | Succeeded by Crap |