onion service Archives - Michael Altfield's Tech Blog

Techlore Interview (BusKill, Interdiction, and OpSec)

By Michael Altfield, on December 9th, 2025

I’m super happy that Techlore invited me on their YouTube channel to talk security and privacy 😀

Henry was mostly interested in my work with BusKill (an open-source dead man switch), but our conversation ran a gamut of issues regarding security and privacy — including

How to mitigate State-sponsored interdiction attacks, minimizing attack surfaces of mobile phones with broadband processors, the threats of AI “identity verification” systems on privacy, and much more

You can watch the full video below

Can’t see video above? Watch it on PeerTube at tehlore.tv or on YouTube at youtu.be/cptk6aBbJpU

Consulting

Want to improve your privacy? I can help you secure your online presence to defend against hackers and surveillance.

Operations Security Training Encrypted Email Secure Messaging Whistleblower Best-Practices Secure Cloud Storage Secure Video Conferencing 1-on-1 Threat Modeling Contact me to schedule a call.

If you’d like to purchase a BusKill cable, click here.

If you’d like to contact me, click here Michael Altfield

Hi, I’m Michael Altfield. I write articles about opsec, privacy, and devops ➡

About Michael

tech.michaelaltfield.net/

Check if Tor Onion Service is alive (python stem get_hidden_service_descriptor)

By Michael Altfield, on November 5th, 2025

This article will show how to check if a given Onion Service (ie some .onion address) is alive or dead.

Why?

Lots of Onion Services are “here today, gone tomorrow”. If you encountered a large list of Onion Services and want to quickly check to see which are still alive, the best way to do that is by querying the Tor network’s Hidden Service Directory (HSDir).

Michael Altfield

Hi, I’m Michael Altfield. I write articles about opsec, privacy, and devops ➡

About Michael