---
title: "Going Dark: Running a Tor relay and a dark web version of this site"
layout: post
image:
  feature: header_tor.png
doi: "https://doi.org/10.59348/p54v6-ses57"
archive: "https://wayback.archive-it.org/22123/20241101171236/https://eve.gd/2025/02/06/going-dark-running-a-tor-relay-and-a-dark-web-version-of-this-site"
---
Dark times at the moment. Authoritarianism is on the rise everywhere and censorship regimes become ever more common. None of the material on my blog is particularly sensitive. Some two decades out-of-date information security stuff, posts about English literature, some posts about health, and posts about scholarly communication. It's not really the kind of stuff that will get me in trouble. Nonetheless, I am troubled by the rise of privacy invading regimes worldwide and I wanted to do something about this.

What is Tor? From [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tor_(network)): "Tor is a free overlay network for enabling anonymous communication. Built on free and open-source software and more than seven thousand volunteer-operated relays worldwide, users can have their Internet traffic routed via a random path through the network."

So, my small contribution is twofold:

1. I am now running a Tor relay. I am not brave enough to run an Exit Relay, but this guard/middle relay will help the network with bandwidth without exposing me to much legal risk. I run the ["onionsfrommartin" relay](https://metrics.torproject.org/rs.html#details/17F56C1F7945505BFF419032D67956EEAF685919).

2. This site is now available as a dark web/hidden service/onion service site. The site is available at [http://lz7fxwg7lcc6pyehczacrunyu2gk32dcxcierwtjxqnyil3ohrfdcfyd.onion](http://lz7fxwg7lcc6pyehczacrunyu2gk32dcxcierwtjxqnyil3ohrfdcfyd.onion), which is only available via Tor (obviously). The hosting arrangements for the Tor site are completely different to the public domain-name-based site, so they should have independent resilience.

A small act of defiance with a probably-too-techy angle to it, but we've got to start somewhere.