Jan 03, 2026

After watching Mr. Robot I got curious about IPFS in general and Anna’s Archive in particular. I found this gem in Anna’s Archive Git repo:

Here is an extreme case for most, but very real for Anna’s Archive, Libgen or Z-Library operators.

• If you are under heavy police pressure from a surveillance government like the US, you are better off using a Live USB and a VPN with killswitch enabled when connecting to your server(s), avoid DNS leaks to Google or your ISP, and so on.

• Consider using a disposable device for it. Canvas fingerprinting is a real thing.

• Consider using a disposable disk for it and be prepared to dump it away. Disk forensics is also a thing.

• Proton suite is unsafe and a honeypot, please do not use it. Tuta is a much better option.

• Tor is slow, overhyped, flagged by tons of web firewalls, and not useful for pirating. Your traffic will stand out like a bright red light. I would strongly discourage using it for clearnet browsing. Hosting and browsing onion services is fine.

• You will need to connect with people on platforms like Signal or Telegram, where you need to use a phone number to register. Services like https://hstock.org and https://sms-activate.org do help a lot. If you use yours and police request your data, you are fucked.

• Do not expect services to encrypt your data, do it yourself. E2EE is a fairytale unless you actually set it up.

Get cryptocurrency in an anonymous way, and start using it!

I feel something romantic about this level of paranoia. Luckily, neiter I nor anyone I’ve ever met had to apply any of these technics.