Darkweb services that are legal to use and protect your privacy. Search engines, email, operating systems and more.
This is a continuation of “Do we need to move to the darknet to protect out privacy? Here’s how it can be done.”
Here are more darkweb services that are completely legal to use, and are better alternatives for your privacy.
VormWeb
VormWeb began in 2020 as an alternative clearnet search engine. But they had some difficulty making that successful. They found some underground popularity by focusing on darknet search instead.
VormWeb’s developers are determined to greatly improve the darknet search experience. Because of the relative anonymity of the Tor Network, .onion websites can be the kind of “Wild West” free-for-all the clearnet was in the 1990s Web 1.0 days. As VormWeb says on their site:
“The darknet is overfilled with spam and scam content and also numerous clones of legitimate services, where it is difficult to check their genuineness.
Because of that, we in the VormWeb project are focusing to index truly genuine news, email, chat, market, forum, community and software services, and put value on quality. This separates us from another darknet search engine, which are indexing plenty of trash from the darknet daily.”
I think I’ve made a good educated guess as to which darknet search engine they’re referring to. More on that later.
VormWeb has some original features. First of all, they try their best to rank search results according to how secure they are. There are three security levels that they indicate:
• Results with the green Verified badge have been verified through PGP signatures. PGP is an open cryptographic standard that can encrypt data for privacy. PGP signatures can also be used to verify an entity is who they say they are. Their identity may be otherwise totally anonymous on the darknet. PGP signatures are often posted publicly. But the decryption keys remain private, and only the entity behind the PGP signature can decrypt messages that you send through it.
• Results with the yellow Warning badge have been checked without PGP verification. These sites may be fine, but VormWeb doesn’t recommend that you conduct financial transactions through them (which I presume would be cryptocurrency).
• Results with the red Risk badge are likely spam, phishing, or other fraud. VormWeb recommends staying away from these sites.
They have two other interesting features.
Darklexika imitates the way Wikipedia is sometimes embedded in the search results pages in Google and DuckDuckGo. I know searching “Kim Crawley” on Google or DuckDuckGo embeds the Wikipedia page on me on those search result pages. Do I appear in Darklexika too? Nein! (No!) I’m not even in the search results at all:
“0 Suchergebnisse für “kim crawley” gefunden!”
Let me try a name that should be familiar on the darknet, Dread forums founder “HugBunter”.
Interestingly enough, there are no search results. But there is something in the embedded Darklexika instance:
“Hugbunter
Founder of Dread and Recon
HugBunter ist der Erfinder des Dread Forums und hat, gemeinsam mit seinem Team, die Suchmaschine Recon und die Webapplikation EndGame entwickelt. Genauere Informationen über ihn sind unbekannt.”
Let’s use Google Translate to get that in English:
“Hugbunter
Founder of Dread and Recon
HugBunter is the inventor of the Dread Forum and, together with his team, developed the search engine Recon and the web application EndGame. More detailed information about him is unknown.”
Darklexika appears to be in German, but VormWeb itself is perfectly usable in English. In fact, they recommend using English language search queries because it is the dominant language of the darknet.
VormWeb also features “Darkglossary”, a guide to darknet jargon for you n00bs. Visit VormWeb through the Tor Browser here: http://volkancfgpi4c7ghph6id2t7vcntenuly66qjt6oedwtjmyj4tkk5oqd.onion
Ahmia
Ahmia is the other darknet search on the darknet (as opposed to duckduckgogg…onion’s clearnet search on the darknet) that I’m well familiar with. And I’m confident that’s the darknet search engine that VormWeb was gently insulting.
Juha Nurmi started development on Ahmia in 2010. Google Summer of Code 2014 was Nurmi’s big opportunity to get Ahmia working for the public for the first time, and he was supported by the Tor Project.
Nurmi wrote in an announcement in 2014:
“Web search engines are needed to navigate and search the web. There were no search engines for searching hidden service web content, so I decided to build a search engine specially for Tor. I registered ahmia.fi and started development on it as a side project in 2010.
This development involved programming and testing web crawlers, thinking of ways to find hidden service addresses (since the protocol does not allow enumeration), learning about the Tor community, and implementing a filtering policy. Moreover, I implemented an API that empowers other Tor services that publish content to integrate with Ahmia.
As a result, Ahmia is a working search engine that indexes, searches and catalogues content published on Tor Hidden Services. Furthermore, it is an environment to share meaningful statistics, insights and news about the Tor network itself.”
Ahmia.fi is the clearnet address for Ahmia. Going to Ahmia.fi, especially in a web browser that’s not the Tor Browser, is pragmatically the total opposite of using duckduckgogg…onion in the Tor Browser to search for clearnet sites. Because .onion sites only open in the Tor Browser, if you used Ahmia.fi in a different web browser, you’d have to copy and paste the search result links into the Tor Browser.
So just use Ahmia’s Tor address from the get go: http://juhanurmihxlp77nkq76byazcldy2hlmovfu2epvl5ankdibsot4csyd.onion/
Ahmia is great for privacy. But the quality of their search results is hit-or-miss for me. And as of this writing, their servers are even slower than web servers on Tor typically are.
Private email with ProtonMail and Cock.li
Email is to the internet what Mario is to video games. There may be computer networking protocol services that are approximately as old, but none have endured in popularity over the decades as email has. How many people do you know who have used USENET in the past twenty years?
Email predates the modern internet itself! To make a long story short, its origins date back to the first electronic message sent between two DEC PDP-10 minicomputers through ARPANet in 1971. The sender was Ray Tomlinson. Minicomputers were the size of refrigerators, so they weren’t “mini” in a 21st century sense. And the computers were at the same facility. But packet switching computer networking technology was brand new, and the message sent was a technological feat. The protocols we use for email now — IMAP, POP, SMTP, didn’t exist yet. The protocols were invented and proposed in 1988, 1984, and 1980 respectively.
Email today is really important to our everyday lives. It’s also a technology that can be filled with both annoyances and danger. Spam and malware embedded in email attachments have been threats for at least thirty years. Email is also one of the most popular vectors for phishing. Phishing emails can contain a link to a website that’s malware, or they can trick people into sending money to cryptocurrency addresses or to reveal sensitive information.
Email is also a vector for espionage. I’m guilty of having had a Hotmail account in the 2000-naughts, and a Gmail account since 2006. Microsoft bought Hotmail in 1997, and they gradually rebranded it to Outlook.com over the course of the 2010s. Gmail is one of the most popular services Google has ever launched. I still frequently use the Gmail account I acquired in 2006 to this very day, as my editors can attest to. It’s also my identifier for the various Google services I’m dependent on.
I know that Microsoft and Google don’t offer their webmail services to consumers free-of-charge out of the kindness of their hearts. It’s a major advantage for them to have ownership over so much of our everyday communications. There’s likely data mining going on.
Some hackers only trust email servers that they operate themselves. There are also opensource webmail interfaces now, so they can enjoy much of the convenience of Gmail (while still having to administrate their backend).
But “operate your own email servers” isn’t a practical option for most people, even those of us who are technologically inclined. So I’ll recommend some email services that augment their respect for your privacy with the power of the Tor Network!
Proton Mail is probably the most popular private webmail service, with approximately 100 million users worldwide. As is typical with webmail services, they also have native apps for iOS and Android, in addition to Windows, Mac, and Linux.
They use various end-to-end encryption protocols for transmitting data over web and email. Which is great for preventing man-in-the-middle attacks from external threat actors. But as with WhatsApp, the best encryption available is pointless when entities you don’t trust are given the keys.
Thankfully, Proton Mail has shown that they truly value privacy and will uphold it under pressure. Their official blog goes into detail about how their technology works, how the law applies to them from the vantage of being based in Switzerland, and how they deal with powerful entities that don’t respect privacy. Here’s an example from March 2023:
“The United States is notoriously weak on privacy laws. With its secret surveillance courts and all-powerful spy agencies, the US has many tools to collect data on people within its jurisdiction and beyond.
Recently, that power has been used to prosecute women. Even before the US Supreme Court overturned the federal right to abortion in 2022, many states had passed laws restricting abortion rights.
To prosecute those cases, investigators have used chat logs, location data, and web searches stored on the servers of American companies like Google and Meta, as TechCrunch recently reported. Sometimes these data requests affect people that haven’t broken any laws…
When a law enforcement agency in the US requests user data from a Swiss company, it is illegal for that company to provide the data. At Proton, we reject all data requests from foreign agencies…
t’s easy to see why law enforcement agencies file millions of data requests to companies like Google and Meta — their entire business models are based on surveillance.
By contrast, Proton’s business model is to provide user-friendly and privacy-focused services to our community. To uphold our commitment to privacy, we have purposely built our products to collect as little user data as possible.”
Now, how is this all relevant to Tor? Well in 2017, they announced that they would offer a Tor website interface for Proton Mail. I’ve personally tested it, and it works great. Their Tor site is here: https://protonmailrmez3lotccipshtkleegetolb73fuirgj7r4o4vfu7ozyd.onion/
Cock.li also provides private webmail over Tor. A cock is another word for rooster, so I feel okay with typing that here. Some of the other domain names they offer for email users are a bit more awkward for me to include here. Oh, here are some that aren’t that risque:
• memeware.net
• 420blaze.it
• firemail.cc
I’m definitely not going to type out some of the others. If you’re a mature adult who finds South Park to be tame, take a look at their site through Tor here: http://rurcblzhmdk22kttfkel2zduhyu3r6to7knyc7wiorzrx5gw4c3lftad.onion/
They’re also pretty blunt on their homepage:
“How can I trust you?”
“You can’t. Cock.li doesn’t parse your email to provide you with targeted ads, nor does cock.li read email contents unless it’s for a legal court order. However, it is 100% possible for me to read email, and IMAP/SMTP doesn’t provide user-side/client-side encryption, so you’re just going to have to take my word for it.”
There you have it, folks.
I have some experience with Proton Mail and no experience using Cock.li. I’d say go for Cock.li if you’re a 4channer. Proton Mail over Tor is a reliable option for email privacy.
Filesharing and chat with OnionShare
OnionShare is, in my opinion, the most practical way to transmit files over Tor.
They offer lots of different interfaces for your convenience. They have a Linux client that’s preinstalled in Whonix and Tails (more on that later), but it can be installed in many Linux distributions through .flatpak or .snap packages that are compatible with Ubuntu and Fedora. (A lot of popular Linux distributions are based on Ubuntu and Fedora.)
There are also native Windows and MacOS clients, in addition to Android and iOS. Tor Browser is far from the only application that uses Tor.
OnionShare is great for sending all kinds of files from one user to another. The interface is intuitive to anyone who’s ever used Dropbox or Google Drive.
What’s a really interesting feature that I haven’t personally tested is their web hosting. You can just upload your own HTML files and they’ll host them for you over Tor. From their docs:
“To host a static HTML website with OnionShare, open a website tab, drag the files and folders that make up the static content there, and click ‘Start sharing’ when you are ready.
_images/website.png
If you add an index.html file, it will render when someone loads your website. You should also include any other HTML files, CSS files, JavaScript files, and images that make up the website.”
They note that their service is only compatible with static web content, which means webpages that only change when you upload a new version of it. OnionShare doesn’t support websites that dynamically generate webpages through SQL and PHP. So that excludes CMSes (content management systems) like WordPress, Joomla, and so on.
Still, that’s pretty cool!
OnionShare also features anonymous Tor chat. You can set up your own chat server, use anonymizing user names, and the interface looks very similar to what you’d see in an IRC client.
Here’s OnionShare’s Tor site: http://lldan5gahapx5k7iafb3s4ikijc4ni7gx5iywdflkba5y2ezyg6sjgyd.onion/
Private communications with TITAN-XMPP
Many of us older folks remember the good ol’ days of instant messaging services like AIM and ICQ.
Jabber launched in 1999 with their XMPP protocol — Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol. XMPP is an opensource protocol, and it can be used to operate instant messaging services that have a similar user experience to AIM and ICQ.
Other than being an open standard, one major difference with XMPP is that it’s decentralized. There’s no central XMPP server, anyone with the right application can deploy their own XMPP server. It’s possible to have one-to-one peer-to-peer sessions that are like old fashioned instant messaging. And it’s also possible to have multi-user sessions, where the experience is very much like IRC and other chat rooms. So if you wanted a private Tor encrypted chat room, the Tor XMPP service I’m going to introduce to you is just as viable of an option as chat in OnionShare.
TITAN-XMPP is a service that deploys XMPP exclusively through Tor and I2P, and never through the clearnet.
End-to-end encryption with OMEMO, PGP, and OTR is automatically enforced for all chat sessions. There doesn’t appear to be a TITAN-XMPP-specific application. Rather you can use TITAN-XMPP through the Gajim, psi, and Dino applications.
Learn more here: http://titanxsu7bfd7vlyyffilprauwngr4acbnz27ulfhyxrqutu7atyptad.onion/
Whonix and Tails
It’s great to use the Tor Browser and a variety of Tor-native web applications to protect your privacy online. But why don’t we go one step further?
Whonix is a whole entire operating system that routes all of your internet traffic through Tor by default.
Like the majority of operating systems that aren’t made by Microsoft or Apple, Whonix is a Linux distribution. That means that the kernel of the operating system is Linux, that’s the part that’s closest to the hardware. Many other operating systems also use the Linux kernel. The best known Linux distros are Android (yes it is, although it has so much Google proprietary code), Red Hat Enterprise Linux (a dominant platform for servers in… the enterprise), Ubuntu, and Linux Mint. All of those operating systems are free as in “free lunch,” and the latter two are also free as in “freedom.” Freedom as in most of the source code of Ubuntu and Linux Mint is opensource. They’re also both forks of Debian.
If you go to DistroWatch.com, you will see frequently updated entries on hundreds of Linux distros. Because Linux isn’t proprietary to a single corporation, anyone with the ability and resources can develop their own operating system with a Linux kernel without having to pay any entity for the privilege.
So Whonix is one of many Linux distros, and it focuses on user privacy and default routing through Tor. That’s not just when you use the Tor Browser for the web. Even if you install a different email client, IRC client, or clients for other internet services outside of the web, all of that traffic will be routed through Tor automatically. There is no option to send your network data through the internet without going through Tor.
Here are some of the applications that are pre-installed in Whonix:
• Tor Browser (duh)
• VLC for media playing and streaming
• Thunderbird for email
• Gajim instant messenger
• An SSH client (encrypted server administration channel)
• Audacity for audio editing
• Ristretto PDF reader
• Flowblade video editor
• OnionShare
• KeePassXC password manager
• GnuPG OpenPGP client
• And a bunch of cryptocurrency wallet apps that I’m totally unenthusiastic about, because I’m not a cryptobro
Tails is another privacy-minded Linux distro that routes all internet traffic through Tor.
Tails stands for “the amnesiac incognito live system.” These are some of the applications that are pre-installed in Tails:
• Tor Browser (duh)
• Thunderbird for email
• Pidgin instant messaging
• Aircrack-ng WiFi cracking tool (cool!)
• OnionShare
• LibreOffice suite (an opensource equivalent to the Microsoft Office suite, with applications for word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, and so on)
• Gimp image editing
• KeePassXC password manager
• A Bitcoin wallet app that I’m totally unenthusiastic about, because I’m not a cryptobro
So there are subtle differences between the pre-installed applications in Whonix and Tails. Are there any other differences between the two privacy-minded Linux distros that route everything through Tor? Absolutely!
Here are the advantages that set Whonix apart. Whonix runs as a disc image in a virtual machine. You can install Whonix in a hypervisor (virtualization) client yourself, such as in Oracle VirtualBox. You can also run Whonix by installing Kicksecure directly onto your internal disk and use it to run the Whonix ISO off of a USB stick (live USB).
If you’re the kind of person who doesn’t care about the installation method as long as it works, you might not see what the advantage of Whonix being a virtual machine is. Well, a virtual machine virtualizes hardware, it’s never installed directly onto your computer the way MacOS is usually directly installed on your MacBook. That one trick means that even malware that breaches Whonix cannot acquire your actual IP address. That’s a major boon for people who highly prioritize privacy.
Tails is primarily designed to be booted as a “live USB.” That means it’s not installed on your internal disk drive, the operating system stays on your USB stick. Which shouldn’t be removed while you have the operating system mounted and running. It may be possible for a threat actor who breaches your Tails operating system to acquire your actual IP address, especially if they acquire root (administrative access).
Score one point for Whonix.
Tails is the only operating system that’s endorsed by Edward Snowden. The journalists and security researchers who were in contact with Snowden for his 2013 NSA revelations — Laura Poitras, Glenn Greenwald, Bruce Schneier, and Barton Gellman, also used Tails. Schneier in particular is a very well respected person in the cybersecurity world. A leaked NSA presentation from 2012 identified Tails as a major threat to them.
Score one point for Tails.
There is one other major difference that’s purely cosmetic to some people but very important to others. The desktop environment in Whonix is Xfce, and the desktop environment in Tails is GNOME. The desktop environment is the general UI (user interface) of an operating system. It’s the way the taskbar and windows look and behave, the default graphics in applications, and so on. I used Xubuntu (Ubuntu with Xfce) and vanilla Ubuntu (GNOME by default) for many years, and I personally don’t have a preference. I might even prefer KDE.
Because both operating systems are free, and both can be used without modifying any of the data on the internal disk drive of your desktop or laptop PC, it absolutely wouldn’t hurt to give both operating systems a try and figure out which one you prefer.
Whonix: https://www.whonix.org/
Tails: https://tails.net/
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