Update on Black Hat Chat
So here's a quick follow-up since my last post.
Things have mellowed out a bit lately, largely thanks to better moderation. A shoutout must go to people like @Mafdet, @rex, and @FeelCallins whose presence has made a noticeable difference, and the chat has been far more usable than it was during the worst of it.
But many of you probably noticed... there were some serious stability issues over Christmas. Starting on Christmas Eve, BHC began getting hit with what looks like a DDoS. The site was in and out and the Tor Browser often wouldn’t load it at all, though it was still accessible via bhcli during parts of the outage.
It got worse on Christmas Day where it went offline for a solid while (although already spotty before that). The last valid ping I saw was at 14:06:41 UTC, and it stayed completely down until 18:22:08. This wasn’t just timeouts, but the onion service itself was unreachable (“onionsite not found”), so the site was genuinely offline for a good chunk of the day. Since then, things have been smooth again.
For what it’s worth, Darkforest has also been down for a while now. I first noticed it around December 22nd, and as of writing this, it’s still offline. Not sure if the issues are related, but the timing is interesting.
As for who’s behind the disruptions, people are speculating it could be Sora and her group, possibly Cola as well. Nothing confirmed yet though and all guesses are just community suspicion at this point.
I’ll update again if I find out anything concrete.
Still hoping both communities stabilize instead of disappearing entirely.
Best,
Dasho