Darknet-Metrics: Publishing

May 29, 2026

I recently worked a bit on the way I am going to publish the entire system. The final deploy (since it's only temporary) will be done using a small Raspberry Pi Zero I had laying around (so I don't risk locking my main server in the case that something goes wrong with the service; or even worse, I get hacked...)

Since I had something else installed on it before, I was able to simply log in via ssh and install and set up tor. I let it generate a random Onion Address and pointed it to a local port. Then, I spun up my Python Flask app to start automatically on boot and accept requests from Localhost on port 5000. And that was basically it, since TOR does not require any domain name to be registered or anything like that. I might need to additionally secure the Raspberry Pi since it does include some other projects I had running a while ago and it is allowed to access the local network, e.g. other devices in the network (which I really do NOT like). But probably, it would be unnecessarily complex. Now, the next phase may begin:

Gaining Attention on the Darknet

Since the link itself is such an obscure string of random alpha-numeric characters, no one will be able to find the website by mistake, of course. So, I'm going to have to do some advertisement. To, first, see the impact of a single simple link posted without context in a forum on the Darknet, I am going to create a new Dread account and post the link there. I might need to do some searching to see in which subpart of the forum I am actually allowed to post the link, though.

I will not post the link here so that I, by no chance, change the results of the experiment (though I know I do not have any readers up until this point, so it would not make a difference...)

Again, I am unable to complete this part of the project at the current moment, therefore, I am going to post this entry and make another write-up when I was able to post it.

Update: I guess I won't find the time / motivation to simply do this last distribution of the link, so let's just say the project was a learning opportunity for web development without JavaScript and how to do APIs.