I took great delight in picking his brain recently and our conversation went as follows:
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>>> what made you want to gather these onions?
Basically, curiosity. I had known for a while about the existence of hidden services on Tor, and given them little thought. Back when I started the spider, a lot of HSs had disappeared along with the (original) Silk Road which was shut down just before I started.
So there was a situation where nobody seemed to know what was up and down, and there was a lot of stuff down. This wasn't helped, by the way that Tor HS doesn't give a meaningful error message - you don't know if a site is just temporarily broken, or permanently gone.
I just wanted a list of what was up, which was informative, but mostly accurate and complete. I have little idea of how complete my list now is, but I think it's at least as good as anyone else's list.
>>> what do you expect for the future of tor? is it a sustainable, reliable system?
Difficult to know. I was gonna check my crystal but it's in the repair shop (damn thing always clouds over).
I worry about governments wanting to be able to censor / block Tor and other VPNs etc. Countries like the USA, Germany, Canada, UK which are known for free speech are beginning to show signs of wanting rid of the likes of Tor - not that it's at all practical for them to do so. Iran, China etc, already try to block Tor and potentially have criminalised its use, at least for their own citizens. Russian and other countries, seem to be taking a hard line but haven't totally banned Tor yet.
I also worry slightly about the implications of legislation in otherwise free countries for security researchers or other interested parties - the idea that the simple ownership of information (not sharing, spreading or promoting) is illegal, is somewhat scary.
>>> what misconceptions about tor irk you the most / would you like to clarify?
People who think the "deep web", "hidden web" etc is either bigger or more interesting than the clearnet www (it really, really isn't)
Hidden service owners who seem to think that their service can remain hidden indefinitely.
The Tor HS directory isn't secret (although it's fairly difficult to scan it; only Tor node admins get access and they're not supposed to crawl it).
Hidden service owners who don't have a clue about OPSEC (operational security)
>>> anything you'd like to add or talk about beyond these general questions i'd be sure to mention in my article.
Yeah I'm really pissed off about how many paedos there are. Sure, some paedos are to be expected - but the idea of 99% of HS traffic being paedos - I don't know if this is true - pisses me off.
Scammers piss me off too - but I suppose, they're just trying.
Cloners who clone non-commercial sites made in good faith - are just scum, it's not clear why they do it - but they're doing nobody a favour.
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Harry71 then suprised me with the final few lines of our correspondence, not because of what he said, but because I found myself agreeing with him. I come from a community of extreme content addicts; spending much time on chans, shock sites, and scouring tor for those plain white on black html pages with promises of spooky encounters. Often times there are debates (and arguments) over the morality of certain behaviors or communications had on the internet. Even more so when we consider the possibilites of cypher space. Thankfully though, the guy you get your onions from has a fair and reasonable perspective about how we should use the internet that we find ourselves fighting so often to keep out of the hands of those who would take it from us.
"If we had a magic wand (mine's broken, just like the crystal ball) and magically remove all the paedos, scammers and cloners from Tor Hidden services, would there be anything left? Yes. Would it be interesting - yes. I think so."
Who knows where the internet is headed? No one can say for sure. It is the final frontier for many of us, keyboard warriors diving deep to find that next layer of information. Our hunger only grows as we find more files, more media, more means of communication. We can be grateful, however that users such as Harry71 are working to help us forge a better internet model that allows for anonymity, but doesnt keep us in the dark.
http://skunksworkedp2cg.onion/sites_title.html