Writing a Security Article
Posted on September 14th, 2022 by Blas
Failing to write an article
This is my journey down the rabbit hole that typically consumes me when I try to get started writing an article. I have a list of ideas I want to tackle and hundreds of bookmarks on topics that I find interesting and just want to save later. I was revamping my site and only had two posts prewritten to publish. This is fine but I figured I would get a third one out there and fluff up the numbers a little.
I looked through my bookmarks for inspiration and found a link to a medium post about scraping the deep web for serious hacking forums, none of those urban myth ones that are just an echo chamber for super l33t 14-year-olds.
The article itself had some surface level explanation on how to use a basic scraper, and just explained the steps one would take and how they would go about it. I whip up a Jupyter notebook to do this so it’s easier to just follow along with the article in the first place, and after some setup I came to a major blocker.
The Firefox binary that I would start with gecko driver was not connecting to the tor network. My internet was fine and I was just running an instance of Tor not too long before. Additionally, all the software should have been compatible since the tutorial was fairly recent and these projects are all stable and there was no mention of dependency issues with each other on any issues in the repos for the projects.
This is where the journey down the rabbit hole begins. I went on the Tor website to see if they had some sort of Discord so I can ask what may be causing this issue. This tutorial was followed hastily on a Tuesday night and the goal was to write something brief about a cool new forum I found so time was of the essence. When looking through the Tor website, I saw they had an online IRC chat you could connect to. I went ahead and tried connecting to it through Tor and wouldn’t you know it, the Tor online chat is not supported on…Tor.
I became discouraged. Sure I just had to click back on my chrome tab and go to the same link to ask the question, and there are also valid reasons for why this would intentionally be done, but this is usually the point where it hits that it may have been better to really sit down and better understand what was actually going on to write out a nice technical article. Afterall, it’s likely that this issue was nothing major and if doing graduate-level academic research has taught me anything then this would have required a little more of a look into what the error logs were actually saying and I would probably have found the solution then. But despite all of this, I just started remembering the days where I would wander aimlessly around the internet through IRC. The web IRC chat touched on memories that have long been gone and with this I remembered what chatting through a terminal was even like in the first place and reminisced on BBSes. I wanted to go to one and as such I abandoned this project and pivoted to The Cave BBS.
It’s been a while since I connected to one and it was fun seeing a bit of computing history come to life on my end. Thanks Red Wolf! This BBS was pretty neat and it even had it’s own little chatting system where someone actually replied to a message of me complimenting the BBS within a couple of minutes. Looking through the messages there were a lot of logs that were just related to maintenance so that part was not much interesting, however the games were fun and seeing this tiny ecosystem exist off one random node hosted in Raleigh, NC was a neat experience.
This experience can often happen when trying to write an article on cybersecurity. The hacker manifesto put it best saying that curiosity is what defines a hacker. This world is too interesting to simply pin down one niche and strictly stick to it. As such here is my third article. Some random compilation of what I did on a Tuesday night. A fun one at it.
