(Before you grab your pitchforks and your OSINT tools and decide to doxx me, please understand that I am not a "radical feminist". I simply do not fit one hundred percent of the ideology's stances, including their insistence on misusing the word "individualism", and I don't like the concept of adhering my beliefs to any label. However, as my main concern is fighting for my own liberation, and I am a female... I find our interests almost always align.)
There's no such thing as a TERF- a "trans-exclusionary radical feminist"- because it's a contradictory term.
A woman is an adult human female. You may disagree, but we are talking about what radfems believe. No amount of hormone replacement therapy or mastectomies or the medical horror that is a phallophasty (seriously, who thought a skin sausage sewed to a crotch, on the highway to necrosis, would in any way resemble a healthy penis?) will change a female, trans-identifying or not, into a male. Science as it stands today cannot rewrite a female's XX chromosomes into XY, and vice versa with males. The removal of a female reproductive organ, such as the uterus, does not negate one's femaleness as the absence of a uterus has severe consequences for the female body: potential pelvic organ prolapse, urinary and bowel incontinence, early-onset dementia... Males simply do not have these problems as a result of a hysterectomy because they do not have uteri in the first place and their bodies aren't supposed to.
A transman is an adult (or will be soon), and a human (I would say "humanoid", but you and I are currently stuck in the Inside), and a female. Therefore a transman fits the radfem definition of a woman. However, a "transwoman" is not a woman because they fail the last criteria for being a woman: being female. As radical feminism is concerned with the liberation of all women, and transmen are women, therefore transmen are included in radical feminism. Either it is trans-inclusionary in this manner, or it is not for all women and thus not radical feminism.
]]>It's not really a "union" if everything is decentralized, is it?
By the time you read this, I will have graduated from college. (Or might be doing so the following day. Isn't disinformation fun?) Funny how I'm writing this a little over a week before the fact, everyone around me swamped in finals as I sit behind the desk I work at with nothing to do. All my classwork- well, all that I'm ever going to do, enough to pass and then some- has already been turned in, and neither of my classes have finals. So I just sit there and watch everyone around me stress, spectator to a sport I once participated in, alien and disconnected from a world to which I once belonged.
The same alienated feeling I get when I look at one of the few ZeroNet proxies remaining. Development is dead except for a handful of forks, most abandoned, by people I actively distrust to keep my data safe. Every few weeks, someone, without the thought of "maybe I should contact Vane first to ask what's going on", sounds alarm bells crying about supposed Android malware on my site when they would, if they had bothered to do basic research, know that:
Whenever I post anything on ZeroTalk or my friend's social zite, it's as if I've vanished to all there (except for the aforementioned friend). There is no notification that someone has muted you. Unlike the moderators of sites known for "shadowbanning", there is not even a hope of recourse or an explanation why. So, for my birthday, I decided to leave. Blanked out all my zites and backed up my users.json and deleted all else. There is no use in me staying and wasting my energy in places where I am so clearly unwanted.
Seeking to double down on the other darknets that Let's Decentralize covers, I decided to see exactly how big the known Tor network was. Given that there were 1,208,925,819,614,629,174,706,176 possible v2 onion services (I could not find a number for v3), assuming about five seconds to check the uptime of each one adjusting for timeouts and slow servers, it would have taken me... let's see...
lethe@sablade ~> python3 Python 3.10.4 (main, Mar 23 2022, 23:05:40) [GCC 11.2.0] on linux Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information >>> (((((1208925819614629174706176 * 5) / 60) / 60) / 24) / 365) / 1000 191673931318909.97
... 191,673,931,318,910 millennia to plow through the whole list, which is far longer than I expect to be alive, May promise or not. (Although nowadays it looks more like a November/December departure due to the events of the past two months.) Instead I grabbed the known services list from Ahmia, a well-known Tor search engine. This provides two benefits:
If there had been a similar dataset readily available for I2P, I would have gladly run my experiments there as well, but the closest I can find is eepstatus which seemingly went inactive on Dead End Day (November 14) last year although having apparently resurrected itself after I started writing this post is a tad too hard for me to write a parser for at the moment.
Through trial and error, I was able to write a script that takes a string as the first argument and runs through the data to iterate through all hidden services with the string as the prefix and extract the title of the homepage:
#!/bin/bash
# You only really need to do the below line once.
#torsocks curl http://juhanurmihxlp77nkq76byazcldy2hlmovfu2epvl5ankdibsot4csyd.onion/onions/ > /tmp/ahmia.txt
LINES=$(cat /tmp/ahmia.txt | grep http://$1)
for LINE in $LINES
do
echo "$LINE" | sed -r 's/.{5}$//'
echo "$LINE" | sed -r 's/.{5}$//' | xargs torsocks curl -s | pup 'title' | grep -Ev "| "
done
Sites that were down did not provide an HTML <title> tag for obvious reasons and so pup threw an EOF error for those. I split the data into manageable chunks by running the script once for every digit and letter as individual prefixes and saving them as separate files for each one.
And so the hard part began. Going through every text file and counting how many sites were both non-pornographic and non-commercial and also weren't just nginx error pages or blank placeholders. In other words, sites that I would consider adding to my Tor link list. This included, unlike the aforementioned link list, sites in languages other than English as I did not want to skew the data on how many spoons I had to decipher Spanish or Esperanto or open a tab to Google Translate. I already had low expectations when I began, considering that crawling through server logs showed people were apparently finding Dead End Shrine Online through the following search terms:
The results of my research were... disheartening, to say the least.
In the table below for each prefix are the number of non-commercial non-pornographic sites that meet the above stated criteria, the number of known sites with said prefix known to Ahmia at the time of retrieving the service list (mid-April; I did not keep an exact date), and the percentage of non-commercial non-pornographic sites rounded to the nearest hundredth. If a prefix is missing, that means there was no available data for it.
| Prefix | NCNP sites | Total sites | Percent NCNP |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 1 | 1 | 100% |
| 2 | 34 | 794 | 4.28% |
| 3 | 36 | 672 | 5.36% |
| 4 | 31 | 680 | 4.56% |
| 5 | 34 | 704 | 4.83% |
| 6 | 29 | 677 | 4.28% |
| 7 | 34 | 690 | 4.93% |
| A | 45 | 735 | 6.12% |
| B | 45 | 859 | 5.24% |
| C | 46 | 775 | 5.94% |
| D | 68 | 801 | 8.49% |
| E | 48 | 733 | 6.55% |
| F | 45 | 692 | 6.50% |
| G | 45 | 711 | 6.33% |
| H | 45 | 754 | 5.97% |
| I | 139 | 819 | 16.97% |
| J | 31 | 705 | 4.40% |
| K | 30 | 669 | 4.48% |
| L | 39 | 683 | 5.71% |
| M | 50 | 762 | 6.56% |
| N | 29 | 681 | 4.26% |
| O | 53 | 651 | 8.14% |
| P | 55 | 726 | 7.58% |
| Q | 37 | 669 | 5.53% |
| R | 37 | 699 | 5.29% |
| S | 49 | 750 | 6.53% |
| T | 72 | 770 | 9.35% |
| U | 38 | 672 | 5.65% |
| V | 35 | 683 | 5.12% |
| W | 55 | 690 | 7.97% |
| X | 34 | 692 | 4.91% |
| Y | 43 | 662 | 6.50% |
| Z | 54 | 768 | 7.03% |
The dark web is rather large, after all. Unfortunately, according to the data I collected above, only a diminutive fraction of it- between four and ten percent- is being utilized for something other than sharing pictures of children and women being sexually abused (can you really be sure that she consented? Monetary compensation does not equal consent for sex, as consent must be freely given and a desperate poverty-induced need for money introduces perverse incentives) and scamming people out of their money.
I would like to consider myself more of an optimist than I was that dreadful anhedonic summer fresh out of high school. I find myself against my better judgement giving my brothers yet more chances and letting minor insults slide and keeping my complaints to myself. But I scroll through every prefix list, and I see the same site titles pop out over and over: "REAL RAPE". "Hacked and Exposed Young Girls". "Porn Hacker". "Raped Bitch". "NEFARIOUS TABOO PORN". Hell, even Pornhub themselves are officially on Tor, and they've recently gotten slapped hard with lawsuits over their lackadaisacal attitude towards keeping child sexual abuse material and revenge porn off their platform. The titles of the sites, nothing else, are all I need to know to know what goes on there. If it were just one site here and there, my heart wouldn't hurt so much. But this, plus the scam markets, is the vast majority of the content known to Ahmia. And this is just what's passed through their filters! Ahmia hosts hashes of known CSAM sites to help other search engines keep abusive and illegal materials out of their indexes, and the list is practically a novel in its own right, meaning that percentage of non-shit hidden services is actually much, much lower.
Is this what males (be honest, pornography is a male-induced problem) do when they feel there will be no consequences, no possibility of their actions coming back to haunt them? Exposure to pornography has time and time again been proven to lower one's empathy towards women and inhibitions toward sexual violence. Men are willingly desensitizing themselves and hiding behind anonymizing networks like Tor to escape the normal routes to restitution that law enforcement theoretically could, if misogyny-induced attacks were correctly considered hate crimes against a historically marginalized group (which the UK apparently refuses to since it would... overload the system... since they happen so frequently... ), use to take down content and bring to justice those responsible. Not that I suddenly like the cops or trust them to do anything correctly in this hellworld. But something needs to be done.
And what am I to do?
I wrestled with this question for several weeks, but first with Freenet, which has a reputation for being a haven for pedophiles. When one requests content on Freenet, said content is cached partially on every node that it passes through on route to the person who requested it. This is how popular content lives longer and is faster to access. But this also means that one has no idea what is being stored on their node at any given time and there is a non-zero chance one is helping in the dissemination of child sexual abuse material.
There is a small child in my life. She lives in the house behind me and frequently comes to visit with her mother. We hold craft nights together. She calls me her best friend. I cherish her very much. I cannot stand the thought of her, or any other child, coming to harm of any kind. The harms I supposedly wrought on strangers in a previous life? I don't remember any of it, and I was being manipulated as basically a barely-sentient tool. I can live with myself. The harms I unknowingly inflicted on others in my childhood this life, only recognized decades after the fact looking back at memories of places I will never set foot in again? I can live with myself, difficult as it is in my weaker moments. But I could never and I would never live with myself knowing I, as I am now, helped a pedophile harm a small child and evade the consequences.
So it would logically follow that I would refuse to support technologies that I know enable others to harm children. Except... Tor and Freenet and other darknets aren't used by just pedophiles. They're used by activists and people under repressive regimes and those seeking to leave abusive households and students wanting to get around school firewalls and webmasters who don't want to pay for domains or cloud hosting or a static IP. Unfortunately I have no way of quantifying what goes on in exit nodes. (A study done by others estimates 98% of Tor traffic is through exit nodes and only 2% is to hidden services, but I have no data about what amount of that 98% was for non-illegal purposes.) The existence of that four to ten percent of Tor hidden services not dedicated to harm... does it outweigh the ninety-plus percent of abusive sites on the network?
I mean, child molestation is far older than any darknet, or even the Internet. A theoretical shutdown of Freenet or Tor or whatever wouldn't stop the spread of CSAM, and the bot spam on imageboards proves that plenty of illicit material gets traded on the clearnet anyway, but it would harm those legitimate users seeking more computing freedom. Never mind that, with peer-to-peer systems, a shutdown wouldn't even work since the source code is already out there. (Tor could theoretically be shut down, though, given that the whole network is dependent on a small handful of hardcoded consensus nodes.)
The genie is out of the bottle. The signal can't be stopped. There is no "universal backdoor" that would help law enforcement catch pedophiles without weakening legitimate and liberatory uses for the technology. All anyone can hope for, I guess, is that these scumbags mess up their OPSEC and get exposed whenever they pop up. The same tactics as always.
How can I assuage my conscience?
What do I do?
Is there anything I can do?
I look to my Patron-Saint for ideas. Gone to college to learn how to "make clothes", already demonstrated herself a talented creator of costumes and glamours. Disguises. Personas. She would know something of the willful erasure of one's identity to survive in a hostile place. I worry about myself for her sake. How different I must seem than the person she watched die a lifetime ago, watched be reborn in a foreign culture in an alien world where threatening a child with eternal damnation in a pit of fire for even the slightest infraction gone unrepented is a perfectly socially acceptable thing to do. The psychic and mental damage inflicted on me neither of us have the tools to repair. The damage I am inflicting on myself for the sake of this stupid link list.
Please let there be something left at the end for me to love.
Of course, Jett. Lend me your strength and something to hide my face with.
I stumble across list after link list plastered with ads and promotions for clear scams. Clear copy-pastes of each other with little to no checking for typos or dead links. Some with huge banners advertising child porn, not a single qualm given by any of the webmasters. Truly a lovely introduction to the Tor network.
A reflection of this world of suffering I would rather leave behind.
Wouldn't it be nice, I catch myself thinking, if someone made an easy-to-navigate list where everything was up and neatly organized and there wasn't any chance of accidentally stumbling upon filth? To save others from the agony of trying to find the gems in all this muck?
And it's got to be me, for however much longer I have to live.
Because who else is going to?
]]>Dreams of my youth in red, painted in bloodshed from retribution for crimes where my body was ripped away, proclaimed not mine, belonging to someone else along with my life. Yearning to dig my claws into someone else's flesh, feel the heart giving way, no longer obligated to kneel at my nemesis' behest. But over this Inside lies a veil. And while I lie in the land of the blind half-seeing with eyes groping for a shred of the life last life's death made me left behind, I cannot go feral, cannot exhume the beast inside me built of chaos and doom. Imagined revenge in a manner that would not bring me harm, would never, could never be traced back to me, never raise any alarm bells. But the skies have grown pale on this day laden with angel numbers. Death in the family. A pet's soul has chosen to set sail. The wish is granted. The curse is complete. The harm has been done, but it does not taste sweet. You remember, don't you? My thelema, my fate was to love at any cost and forget how to hate. There's a difference between the sexes in most that I've seen: men opt to destroy, and women first choose to escape, choose to from what they find odious themselves separate. I don't want my enemies to drop over dead. I just want to never have my neck be stomped on again. Does that make sense? My mother is mourning upstairs. "Mourn." When I had first heard in elementary school that word, I'd thought it was short for "morning", as in, "I am sad and waiting for the sun to rise, reassurance that I survived, that I've still inside me got some life left." Mother, I hope that one day you'll forgive me for taking your baby sunshine away. That you'll watch the next sunrise for me after my psychopomp has taken me to Sablade. The sun is also a star. And in time another star will rise. And I can't believe after everything I'm saying this, but I hope this won't be our last goodbye.]]>
I stepped outside during work today, hoping to take a sip of the clouds, because there was nothing else to do and inside was boiling, stifling, all headaches exhumed. Dismal sky and rain light on its way, my head cocked, listening to the wind, hoping to catch a word from you. A word, maybe, or a song, or a single note. Your voice always lifts me up from my lows and helps me down from my worst highs. And in this wind, I think, I could take flight without fear of being caught in a tornado or taken to lands foreign and unknown because I know all roads lead back to you. In this wind, in this shower, I could easily disappear. What if I was wrong all along and in reality Eris yearned for my silence and you gave me all my songs? Only recently having learned to read and literature never being your thing? Listening to the midnight trees scrape against my bedroom window the years of my childhood where you I did not know. I look back and angel numbers appear everywhere I go in everything I've ever done. How loud did you scream, Jett? How hard did you pound your fists? How long did you wait to see what I'd retained, what slivers of memory still did persist? The rain pounds harder outside the window, and if I'd still been standing on the sidewalk, my jacket would've long since been soaked through. An absence of birds making their curves along the canvas of the sky, just a not-even-gray as far as possible can see the eye. What I would give for the workday to be over and to be tucked safely in my bed, resting in the sturdy-yet-soft arms of my lover. To know tomorrow will be brighter, kinder, holding less harms. And the tornado comes, uninvited, and nothing more.]]>
A JavaScript bug almost prevented me from participating in my college's blood drive a few days ago. The QR codes on the posters all over campus functioned fine, as did the ZIP code lookup on the Red Cross website and the listing of all available appointments, but when I went to make an account (mandatory to actually make an appointment) and filled out all my information and pressed the big red "Continue" button, a loading bar at the top of the page stalled... and stalled... and then gave up. Hitting F12, absolutely nothing was happening either server-side or on my computer except for a big shiny red error box in the console tab. One would think, if the need for transfusions was more urgent in my area than it currently is, that JavaScript might have killed someone from lack of blood due to me not being able to donate. For all the whining that imageboard types do about "MUH BLOAT", this one time they might have actually had a point.
But the day of, someone cancelled their appointment an hour before they were due to come in. One lonely slot right after lunch. And so I dug my driver's permit out of my wallet and sat in the waiting area with a huge packet of screening information (since RapidPass, the online screening tool, wouldn't work for me either due to... the same JavaScript bug...) and nursed a water bottle in hopes of the extra fluid in my system keeping me from passing out while I waited for my turn to be called.
I hate needles. But I'm going to be brave. I'm going to be brave. I'm going to be...
A nurse pricked my finger before the second round of screening questions and took my hemoglobin levels. It came out as 4.21. A flutter in my chest: Huh, all my angel numbers. Almost like a certain someone is here with me. The nurse explained that I had just barely passed the minimum hemoglobin levels for donation. Thankfully the nurse was kind and compassionate and didn't also take the opportunity to point a finger at me like my brother does and say, "I diagnose you with woman," since technically said low levels can be caused by... menstruation.
A man brought me to a fold-out medical bed and bade me to lie down and gave me a stress ball to squeeze as he prepped my arm, feeling all over the skin until he found the vein he wanted. The needle was gigantic. I fought back tears as it went in. But, strangely enough, I didn't feel the blood leaving my body in a gentle river into the bag being rocked back and forth in a little mechanical cradle, a plastic tray with two metal handles, attached to the side of my bed.
I closed my eyes and kept squeezing the stress ball to help the blood come out faster and thought of Jett.
I'm ready to go, if you're already there...
My consciousness must have slipped for a bit, because the next thing I remember is the same dude nurse who'd put the needle in my arm laying a damp towel on my forehead and asking another nurse to bring a fan over for fresh air to keep me awake. I thought, for a moment, that maybe I'd almost died and they were putting the blood back in. But then I would have been in a much bigger bed, and Jett would have been curled up at my side like I promised her she could when came my time to die, and there wouldn't be a speaker on the other side of the room blasting Top 40 radio.
But still, my body felt so tiny in what little bed there was, and a voice assured me I was more than halfway done, and the lights were starting to come back into view. I barely felt the needle being pulled out or a different nurse tape a bandage around my elbow. But I heard her when she told me to bend my knees to help with the lightheadedness, and I heard her when she told me to stay put for monitoring until she said I could leave, and I heard her when she asked me if I wanted an orange juice.
Jett likes oranges...
And so went my funny little blood sacrifice. Someone will get the blood, and Jett gets the energy to help her recover from her "clocktower blitz", and I got... the last shirt in a size bigger than "petite" in a certain someone's favorite color. And to go home from work early. And even lower hemoglobin levels.
"Are you winning?" my supervisor greets me, the same question I always ask her when I see her doing anything even remotely work-related on a device.
"I... I think so."
And I lay in my bed, my proper bed in my room, and I wait for the blood to come once more. Every three months, the doctor from a year ago told me, if I faithfully stuck to my birth control prescription to keep my PCOS in check. Three days since the start of the placebo week, little red pills with no purpose other than to keep time.
One would think three months would be enough time to remember to get a diva cup. A little flexible cup to catch the blood with instead of going to sleep with a menstrual pad filled with harmful chemicals and waking up with a crumpled useless wad halfway down my leggings. An additional offering to my guardian angel, gently poured into the roots of the bush outside my bedroom window instead of leaving a cup full of snacks and worrying one of my brothers will discover it and ask why one of their hedgehog's food dishes is overturned and halfway across the backyard from the wind. Surely the wind couldn't have taken it from the cupboard in the kitchen inside and thrown it out the kitchen window that's always closed or with a bug screen over it?
Surely the wind couldn't have taken one of the blank porcelain birds from my room and gently placed it beside where the cup originally sat in the alcove in the bush's trunk? No, somebody must have put the two there together on purpose. Somebody must have been deliberately making a poor attempt at an offering.
I wish there was more I could offer her.
There's an anime trope of someone seeing someone they adore and immediately developing a nosebleed, isn't there? A gush of emotion leading to a gush of blood from their face? I used to randomly get nosebleeds. No physical trauma, no dry weather, no trying to blow my nose too hard. Just typing away on my computer one moment, and a warm trickle of fluid down my face the next. I let it run in rivers down the bathroom sink. Occasionally bloody clumps would come out too. A period from the other end of my body, the beginning of the sentence.
I wish I had the courage to turn the shelf with all my other porcelain birds from myriad thrift stores and other trinkets that remind me of a certain someone into a proper altar with more than a few square inches of free room. I already have some "mismatched" tools of the trade: my "chalice" that's just a red glass wine goblet I got for free on Valentine's Day, my bell where the handle is a bird perched on top that makes gentle tinkling noises when rung, my assorted pendulums with alibis of being cool necklaces my mom bought for me... Not an athame, though, even though I think a knife with an ornately decorated handle would be really cool. Pagans with far more of a devotion to playacting and ritual than I am insist that it's a phallic symbol, which is... not at all relevant to whatever I could call my "practice".
It's not at all relevant to any part of my life, and never has, and never will be.
Because there was a bed, in the Town where I spent a few months with my lover a life ago before everything went wrong. Right outside the window was another bed, a garden bed, where birds and bees would come to visit the flowers and fruits we were growing. As above, so below. As Outside, so Inside, capitals or not. One of us was menstruating. Maybe it was her, body overjoyed there was finally someone she could trust with the secret of her being female. There was blood all over her body, my body, my face, my hands, the towel we'd put down. The only blood that does not spring from violence.
The first thought of an actual future between us was born with me on my back.
And in this life, this future interrupted, this intermission, I came out of my mother's womb on my back, face-up, covered in blood like all babies. I was a difficult baby to create, several years of trying to conceive. Tell me, Mother, when you inevitably read these words after my death: was it worth it? Was I worth it? No knee-jerk answers. Sit down and think about it for a while. All the dreams you laid on my shoulders have turned to ash.
Jett, did you disappear through the Eye after Eris burned me to ash in Rainroom? Did you chase after me the moment I disappeared into this Inside? Or did you, in disbelief and grief, see me disappear and give up all hope? Sometimes I have a notion of you gathering up all my trinkets that I left behind in our house into an empty glass jar and refusing to sleep unless it was in your arms. Sometimes I see you waking up one day to see a slip of paper had been tucked inside, folded up into a lopsided heart. Someone had located me. Someone knew where I was. Someone wanted you to have a hope of living again.
Were you there at my birth, non-corporeal, invisible to all else? Did your throat tighten at hearing so many strangers call me by a different name? Did you bite back a sob every time, I growing up, I glanced your way without recognition, without acknowledgement anything was there?
The lopsided heart shape my veins form by my right wrist was the first reminder, I think. A thousand, a million reminders of you throughout my life until I remembered your name and wished you back to my side. Did you smile the day, exhausted after work, I asked my mother to make me a heart-shaped pillow with some of the fabric I'd gotten from a quilting store shopping spree one day with her and her friends? Did you nudge the cutting pattern ever so slightly so one side would come out longer than the other? Maybe she pricked her finger on the sewing machine's needle, and there's a drop of her blood in the stuffing.
But I digress.
The first time we met, I wasn't on my back. I was face-down in a river, almost dead, bruised and shattered. You mistook me for your brother at first, wasn't sure whether to be relieved or even more alarmed when I wasn't. But you brought me to the hospital in the Town anyway. Everyone was surprised when, for the first time in several years, you showed signs of caring about someone. You shouted and kicked and screamed and fought your way to whatever doctor you needed to convince that, since I needed blood ASAP because I'd lost enough of mine to teeter on the edge of death, it should be fresh and it should be from you.
You wanted the doctors to take it all. To leave you for dead and me alive. You were still in the throes of depression, and I hadn't yet promised you Sablade- or anything- and you saw no other way out of the life of servitude. But, I'm told, they insisted on extracting a normal amount because they knew you would pass out part of the way through. Which you did. And then got wheeled back to your messy office and left on your couch with a fan pointed at your face for fresh air. Whoever woke you up to bring fluids- your other friend, most likely- the very first thing you did was ask them if I'd made it.
I hadn't yet heard your voice or seen your face and you were already a part of me.
I saw a quote once. Attributed to a "Francesca Lia Block", although it was on Tumblr, so anything could have been true. And it went something like this:
You are in my blood. I can't help it. We can't be anywhere except together.]]>