Cyborg

Worlds collide, a new being takes shape. Child of flesh, blood and wires.

As long as I can remember I have liked messing around with technology. When I was still a little kid I wasn't really allowed to engage with the digital world all that much. As I grew older, the restrictions on what I was allowed to do grew fewer. Slowly but surely I merged with the digital world like most people nowadays have done at a much earlier age. Looking back, I think this gave me a sort of "curious outsider" perspective, allowing me to actively merge with it when ready. This gave me the ability to dig much deeper then most would ever do. Similar to how non native speakers of languages tend to have a better grasp on the grammatical rules of a given language.

Through digging to depths no normal person would ever get to, this world seems to be getting it's hooks in me on a very different level the it does with most. Most seem content with it digging it's hooks into them. The way I interact with this it, I find myself digging my hooks into it as much as _it's_ are digging into me. It feels like mutual exchange. The digital world gets me interested in the things that can be found there, while at the same time I shape parts of said world to my liking. Now sure, I am not one to be able to take a text editor, compiler and a few libraries, and really make something that is _truly_ mine. Or at least not yet. I view this world more like Lego in that regard.

Since moving over from Windows to Linux, I have really been getting digging into cyberspace a lot more. Something else that is emblematic of how I feel that this whole convergence is mutual, is my much more direct way of interacting with this cyberspace. I can actually control things now. Change things I don't like. Sort of choosing the furniture that goes in the living room.

Looking back to how Windows... works, I am quite baffled that I ever even put up with the lack of customizability.

Ghost

Due to the way I am generally incapable of interacting with people for some odd reason -- not going to speculate on what it is here -- I find myself mostly reading other people's stories without the authors ever knowing I have read their words. I am fine with this, I don't need to always be seen. When I do want to be seen I can jump out at any moment. The amount I read tends to give me a somewhat nuanced perspective most people don't really seem to see. Well, the amount of reading combined with my incredibly analytical mind that never, fucking ever, stops observing everything it can.

This protocol is one of the few things on which I am closer to an actual person. Not hiding behind layers upon layers of pseudonyms for the few interactions I do have with a given platform or the others on it.

It feels good to be able to step out of the ghost role every now and then. Let's hope I won't regret doing so any time soon.

Hidden

Part of the reason I have decided to write this blob of text is my exploration of parts the Tor network. I spend quite a lot of time on an extremely restrictive college network. Restrictive to the point where it goes beyond the normal PornHub, PirateBay, Rule34 and 4Chan list. The list includes the TorProject, i2p, common VPNs and probably other dark nets as well. When it comes to Tor, the common relays and bridges are blocked, so I have to request a set of bridges in the browser bundle. SSH on the other hand, isn't blocked for whatever reason. Since this connection is generally extremely slow -- to the point of _it_ being the bottleneck when using a tor connection -- I decided to set up a workaround of sorts. At first I set up something with w3m as an SSH forced command on a server I have access to.

The thing with w3m is that I don't like it's presentation all that much. So I decided to check out Lynx as I have met a few people who swear by it as their terminal browser. The first thing I bumped into was the lack of vi bindings. Scouring around a bit showed there to be a -vikeys parameter. Next problem I bumped into was torsocks not working particularly well with Lynx. Most posts I could find regarding the topic still recommended using torsocks. At some point I decided to look at Lynx' manpage, and what do you know, a few things got highlighted when searching for "socks". So, with everything put together I found a way to browse the Tor network using a text based interface over an SSH connection at a reasonable pace.

Everything put together:

I found myself enjoying scrolling through various blogs a lot more using Lynx then using the official Tor browser. It feels incredibly direct. There is something incredibly neat about the whole experience.

One thing that makes it feel cyberpunk, is by using Cool Retro Term as terminal emulator in combination with Lynx. Its not practical at all though and requires an actual GPU, something not all of my devices have.

And by cyberpunk I mean that it's cool but impractical.

Cool Retro Term GitHub page

Note, if you're going to attempt something similar, you should be aware that the -socks5_proxy parameter is relatively new.

The package in the default Arch repository is too old.

Still, you shouldn't run a rolling release distro on a server (or at all for that matter... Yes I know... I'm still running Artix on my ThinkPad...).

Oddly enough, this is a scenario where the package in the Debian Stable repos is newer then the one in Arch repo at time of writing.

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