Last weekend I presented with two friends (huertanix and Caroline Sinders) at the first ever Radical Networks conference. Our talk was originally called 'Blogging on the Darknet' but after a questionably productive co-working session we changed it to 'I Will Follow You Into the Darknet', after a Death Cab for Cutie song. Caroline even wrote lyrics for it. I sort of hate the term 'darknet' but until the Tor Project settle on a nomenclature for location-hidden services (and their related -ome1) it'll have to do. And that is how terms become accepted. Sorry, world.
Anyway, the slides are here (warning: gifs, dank memes) and there is a video recording here, and have an embedded version too:
Full disclosure: we didn't practice and most of our working sessions devolved into expeditions into giphy, in case that wasn't obvious. I think the last section could have done with being an interactive/hands-on workshop, but we only had an hour slot. And then @brianloveswords turned (the technical part of) our talk into two commands. Also, in case there was any uncertainty, I'm not an opsec professional. Do those even exist?
The rest of the conference was really good, although I missed a lot of Saturday due to occupying a table of cannolis and devising grandiose schemes. Events like this are great for inspiring ideas, so my todo list is ever-growing. In an attempt to avoid the lure of shiny new projects, I'm disallowing myself from starting new things before I've cleared some of my backlog. Let's see how well that goes.
Relevant to this website, one result of the conference was (after much discussion of TLDs) learning that .io belongs to the British Indian Ocean Territory, which has an unpleasant colonial history: the native Chagossians were forced out by the British in the 60s/70s so that the USA could set up a military base, which has apparently been used in the CIA's rendition (and torture) program! It's unclear how much actually having a .io domain contributes to any of this, of course, but I'm ashamed I didn't know any of this before. It's easy to forget that country TLDs come with political baggage.
[1] An awful idea which just occurred to me is 'onion'-ome, after genome and proteome and transcriptome and epitranscriptome and connectome and interactome and literome, etc. In the grim future of Hello Kitty, everything is an ome.