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Articles on privacy, self-hosting, and the open web.

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New. August 2026

What We Learned Running Services Through Nym

Mixnet Field notes

NymDrop, N2Usenet, and an IRCv3 connector exposed the same gap between mixnet privacy and dependable service infrastructure. These are the structural problems we found in the network path.

New, May 2026

Nym vs Tor: The Right Tool for a Surveillance-Heavy World

Mixnet Privacy

Tor protects against local surveillance. Nym protects against a global passive adversary. A technical comparison of routing models, traffic analysis resistance, and how the NYM token changes the economics of Sybil attacks.

Gemini Protocol: Simplicity as a Privacy Feature

Gemini Privacy

The modern web is a surveillance platform dressed as a publishing medium. Gemini strips it back to text, TLS, and nothing else, and that constraint is the privacy guarantee. Our capsules: gemini://virebent.art and hidden archives.

IRCv3: What Changed, and Why It Matters

IRC Protocol

IRCv3 added SASL authentication, Strict Transport Security, message tags, server-side history, and capability negotiation, all backwards-compatible. What the new extensions actually do, and why IRC is still the right foundation.

Privacy & Surveillance

A Commitment to User Privacy

Privacy

What our infrastructure choices actually mean in practice, and what we cannot protect you from even if we wanted to.

Understanding Metadata: The Hidden Layer of Your Digital Communications

Privacy

Encrypting content is not enough. Metadata — who, when, how often, how much — tells its own story that most encryption tools ignore.

NSA, Espionage, and Cryptographic Backdoors

Privacy Cryptography

The Dual EC DRBG standardization process is a documented case of deliberate cryptographic sabotage. Here is what it tells us about trusting NIST-blessed curves.

Beyond Blockchain: Why the Cypherpunk Movement Must Return to Its Roots

Privacy

Crypto became a financial instrument. The original project — cryptographic tools for individual autonomy — got stranded. An argument for going back.

Self-hosting & Open Source

Why Choose Open-Source, Self-Hosted Solutions

Self-hosting

A practical comparison of self-hosted vs. hosted-SaaS tradeoffs for privacy-sensitive workloads. Not ideology, just threat modeling.

A Digital Resistance Manifesto: Why We Choose Static HTML/CSS

Self-hosting

Static sites have no attack surface, no dependency chain, no JavaScript framework that quietly calls home. The case for boring infrastructure.

Why We Block Search Engine Crawlers

Self-hosting

We block Google, Bing, and most commercial crawlers. Not because we have something to hide, but because indexing by advertising platforms is not a neutral act.

Anonymous Networks & Usenet

The NNTP Revival: Decentralized Alternative to Social Media

Usenet

Usenet predates the web and survived every prediction of its death. Why the NNTP protocol is having a quiet moment in 2024, and why that matters.

VFACE and Identicons — Pseudonymous Identity for N2Usenet

Usenet

How deterministic identicons, Ed25519 identity material, SHA-256 fingerprints, and the Face: header help anonymous identities resist impersonation while preserving pseudonymous continuity.

Posting to Usenet Anonymously with NeoMutt and Mail2News over Tor

Usenet Privacy

Configure NeoMutt to post to any newsgroup through the virebent.art mail2news .onion gateway. No account, no IP, no clearnet. Just torsocks, swaks, and an ephemeral From address.

Configuring Implicit TLS on Port 563 with systemd and Certbot

Usenet Sysadmin

Step-by-step: NNTPS on port 563 with INN2, systemd socket activation, and automatic certificate renewal. Notes from a real deployment.

Tor & Anonymity

Enhancing Tor Anonymity: Randomized Circuit Length

Tor

Default Tor circuits use three hops. Randomizing that length can reduce some correlation attacks. The tradeoffs and how to configure it.

Tor Extended Hop Risks: Why More Hops Can Mean Less Anonymity

Tor

The naive intuition is wrong: adding hops increases the probability that one of them is adversarial. The math behind why three is not just a default.

AnonMesh — Rethinking Anonymous Networks, Part 1

Anonymity

A design exploration for a mesh-based anonymous communication layer that doesn't rely on a directory authority or fixed node topology.

Tools & Projects

Right-Click Cryptography: Building a Crypto Tools Menu in Openbox

Tools Linux Cryptography

Age and Minisign key generation accessible via right-click context menu in Openbox. How minimal desktop environments enable auditable cryptographic workflows.

Nofuture.Go: Post-Quantum Key Generation and Secure Text Encryption

Tools Cryptography

A Go tool for generating post-quantum keypairs and encrypting text blobs using non-NIST primitives. Design rationale and usage notes.

Pollux: Digital Privacy and Online Anonymity as Fundamental Rights

Tools

Pollux is a research and indexing project. This article covers the political and legal framing that motivated its design.