Onionland

Onionland is a hidden place on the internet, also known as a darknet by the more 1337 among us, accessed by Tor. OpDarknet was somewhat successful in ridding it of the more obvious CP, though we all know it was just added back after the shitstorm settled.

The Hidden Wiki

The Hidden Wiki was something of an quasi-Google for Onionland, largely acting as a link and general info repo. The index was absolutely flooded with links to sites the most people couldn't give a shit about. If you didn't already know where you where going, what with those long ass, typically indecipherable onion URLs, you stopped here first to get an address. Naturally enough, CP was present in abundance, causing impotent rage among the rank and file Anonymous, who quite ineffectively tried to remove it with simple wiki vandalism. It wasn't until the Doxbin crew arrived, with far more advanced wrecking methods available, that even the Hidden Wiki staffers put down their child rape fapbait and began to take notice. Doxbin even went so far as to steal their onion key and effectively hold the site hostage until they could find more responsible people to take over.

Due to the nature of Tor routing, all visitor IP addresses are shown in logs as originating from localhost, making both banning and user creation a laborious process. Dependent on allowing users edit access to maintain the wiki, this put no small measure of strain on the admins' kiddie diddling down time.

• Current status: Unknown

Silk Road

Ah, yes, that site that enabled the rather convenient if completely moronic practice of mail order drugs, delivered straight to your mailbox. If you weren't so paranoid as to say "fuck that shit" to drugs and other highly illegal goods being delivered straight to you by unknown parties and federal fucking postage, you might have ended up with a sweet deal... provided you weren't scammed, or The Man got to your stash first. All things considered, it definitely contributed to the rise of bitcoin among old and new users alike, so that's something.

Again, due to Tor routing, there was nothing to stop a scammer from re-registering, or for admins to know that an old, respected account had not been sold or otherwise compromised. Paranoia begets paranoia that way.

• Current status: BTFO by feds using incredibly simple exploits, which they repeated on successor sites. Moral of all this? Stay away from Javascript, kids. It's bad news.

Doxbin

Reviled and beloved my many for numerous reasons, Doxbin was the go to source for leaked personal info. "More dox than a phone book." While not exactly keen on personal privacy, the Doxbin crew was alternately praised and condemned (mostly praised) by various parties for their crusade against CP in Onionland. This is, perhaps, a more lasting legacy than Doxbin's stated purpose.

• Current status: Feds finally located and cracked the Funhouse, at which point the team appeared to have stepped back. Source code was handed over to friends and researchers, however, so there may or may not be mirrors floating around.

Security

• For the love of whatever deities you hold dear, never simply use Tor Browser. It simply isn't secure. No, shut up, it isn't.
• Never use Javascript. It's the language of vulns.
• A USB bootable OS like Tails is a better option. It certainly isn't perfect, but anything beats Tor Browser.
• A better option is a 2 step solution like WhoNIX, a pair of virtual machines. One acts as user interface, while the other ensures that only Torified traffic gets through.
• A bit on the extreme side is configuring 2 computers rather than virtual machines, as performing a jailbreak out of hardware is much more difficult than breaking software.

See also

• Onion routing
• The Gentleman/logs

Links

• 2010 http://oniondigest.wordpress.com/2010/03/13/what-is-onion-land
• 2011 http://area51archives.com/index.php?title=Onionland
• 2012 http://b2cloud.com.au/general-thoughts/entering-onionland

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