As of recently, I've decided to put my efforts towards a safe, private, and censorship free Steem network. I built a service to help people obtain anonymous steem accounts, and also helped raise money for RiseUp which is an organisation dedicated to helping journalists and whistleblowers have secure communications.
Now, I present to you the first STEEM Tor RPC Node, and seed. It has all plugins enabled, and is equivalent to using STEEM.WS ran by the wonderful @jesta. The server is located in Germany, has 32GB of ECC RAM, and a recent 8-core Xeon processor. It also has a 1 gigabit connection, so it can handle a large amount of load without problems.
This means you can use it to seed your own STEEM node (port 2001) without leaving the TOR network, and can also use it for more anonymous STEEM services using tools such as Piston or SteemJS, and possibly cli_wallet too.
steemnodexfkk6vz.onion
Want to test it out without TOR? The RPC is available on port 80, which means you can use gateways such as onion.to
Example (with the CURL command line utility):
curl --data-binary '{"id":"1","method":"get_accounts","params":[["someguy123"]]}' https://steemnodexfkk6vz.onion.to/
Let's help to keep the STEEM network open and free to all. I'll be continuing on a few more anonymity/privacy projects to help keep STEEM open for everyone, rather than driven by a centralised platform.
Okay what does this mean for us non-techie people?
TOR is a privacy network which helps people communicate safely and privately, bypassing censorship. It's used by a wide range of people, including whistleblowers and journalists (such as Edward Snowden) to protect themselves from government censorship and attacks.
The TOR node will allow on STEEM:
- More services that may otherwise be censored, as their communications with STEEM are kept within TOR (a privacy network)
- People in oppressed countries will be able to connect to STEEM via TOR without problems.
- Some people may also use it for enhanced privacy
- It could also be used by STEEM witnesses to protect their location, however the latency may prevent that.
Wow great job! You have certainly earned my vote, thanks for helping everyone be safe :D
A big round of applause for @someguy123
Excellent work. There is no point in using Steemit if the Stasi grab you before you collect your first earnings. What you have done will make it easier for those living in oppressive countries.
Was really happy to see this post. I've just recently become very proactive in maintaining my online privacy due to strangers on the Internet infringing on it and taking advantage of me. It's so important for everyone to keep their guard up, the web is a free for all. One simple miss steak can mess up your whole life.
Another great contribution, @someguy123! You've got my upvote and witness vote!
BTW, what hosting services are you using, if you don't mind sharing? I might consider being a witness and want to know any operational costs of running a high availability node publicly instead of an old tower in my closet for mining.
Could you expand on this for a non-techie audience?
Refresh. I've added a section for that. Thanks for reminding me :)
Great stuff. With the path you're taking right now, for whatever it's worth you've got my support!
Very interesting. Well done! +1
Good post and good job. Thanks for that post it helpful for the members.
someguy on fire :)
@someguy123
Thank you for adding the track still alive to RadioSteem
Thats what led me to you and first thing I see is Steem + Tor = New follower
Thanks (:
that certainly adds value to STEEM
The onion site is not working here:
11 eof_exception: End Of File
stringstream
{}
th_a sstream.cpp:109 peek
{"str":""} th_a json.cpp:478 from_stringNope, that's normal. This is an RPC node and seed. If you're looking for Steemit over TOR, that's coming soon ;)