HackThisSite.org News: Six-Strikes, Tor, VPNs, And You


by: HackThisSite Staff, 07:03 pm Sunday March 10th, 2013

First and foremost, many of you are already aware that the Six Strikes regime has begun and is already claiming many victims. The immorality and unethical nature of this largely anti-due process is so very blatantly obvious that we need not even go into any more detail than acknowledging it.

As a brief update to the inner-workings of HackThisSite, we have decided to offer up to 40% of our entire available bandwidth to the Tor proxy system. We have chosen not to host an exit node (with the exception of allowing isolated exit traffic into our own network only), but instead setup an entry and middleman proxy. Thus far, we have seen a consistent 40Mb/s average of traffic through this node, and we are quite pleased to be participatory in this endeavor of ensuring information remains private. If you wish to use our Tor node as an entry point, you may specify it in your configurations using the following IP addresses:

DNS: tor.hackthissite.org
IPv4: 198.148.81.167
IPv6: 2610:150:8007:0:198:148:81:167

Next, in collaboration with a few community members, we are working to detail a new Staff Blog series of articles regarding proxying and routing traffic through anonymous VPNs. Hopefully this will help users in further securing and anonymizing their traffic with greater ease, and will continue to keep prying eyes from looking at things they shouldn't.

Also, as an interesting addition, some time ago a community member on our forums recommended we implement the HSTS protocol -- and we did. Most all modern browsers (except Internet Explorer, of course) support this feature and do so unnoticed. The long and short is that it tells a compatible browser to attempt to force and sustain HTTPS-only connectivity, even if the website tries non-HTTPS communication. Due to this Strict-Transport-Security HTTP header, we have noticed our web traffic change dramatically to a 70% SSL, 30% non-SSL split, a polar-opposite from before the implementation of this header flag.

We cannot recommend using HTTPS everywhere enough, and we encourage you all to encrypt everything, both over the internet and locally on your hard drives as well. In this era of unlimited spying, even if you have nothing to hide, you should guard your privacy with your life at all costs. If you let people take that from you, you've lost everything.