Cryptostorm network - news

[cryptostorm_support]

Df, founder and principal Cryptostorm administrator will not be available until at least August 25th.
We can assure you that his absence isn't related to Cryptostorm and that we are in close contact with df. We will not make any further disclosures on the reason of his absence.
We will do everything within our possibilities to keep this network up and running. Efforts will be made to rebuild cryptostorm.nu in order to have a functional token database again.
Please monitor our warrant canary and ... take care out there.

[parityboy]

@OP

Many thanks for the update.

[NoClue]

Thx 4 the update. Might not inspire much confidence. One man bands, arent many of those around. Df returns at the end of the next canary period. interesting....

c0mrade

[DudeOfLondon]

Am I correct that the canary text hasn't been changed (it still mentions that the next update is on 31st March) because the founder of Cyptostorm isn't available until 28th of May?

[AnonAsPossible]

Am I correct that the canary text hasn't been changed (it still mentions that the next update is on 31st March) because the founder of Cyptostorm isn't available until 28th of May?

Looks like it's been updated today(1 hr ago), did you re-check?

[DudeOfLondon]

Ah ok now it got changed

[sysfu]

Does anyone beside df have access to the cryptostorm keybase account? https://keybase.io/cryptostorm

[Fermi]

Does anyone beside df have access to the cryptostorm keybase account? https://keybase.io/cryptostorm

Yes, I have ... .

[AnonAsPossible]

So, has df returned yet? I'd guess any updates would be appreciated by ALL members.

[blurb]

So, has df returned yet? I'd guess any updates would be appreciated by ALL members.

Yeah, what Anon wrote.

I should probably keep in touch with the news - just found out. heh.

[blurb]

So is the non functional token data base the reason why I still have acccess, even though I am pretty sure I bought a 3 month token?

That lockdown period has fucked my ability to judge timescales, and I smoke a bit too much pot - but still, it feels a long time since it locked me out (how i get reminded to buy another one!)

[crypto<poo><poo>]

Cryptostorm used to be a good service. now every server I connect to is laggy and this fills my logs:

Code: Select all

PID_ERR replay-window backtrack occurred [1] [SSL-0] [0_00000000000000000000000000000000000000044444444444444444444444] 0:535 0:534 t=1599217655[0] r=[0,64,15,1,1] sl=[41,64,64,528]
PID_ERR replay-window backtrack occurred [1] [SSL-0] [0_00000000000000000000000000000000000000044444444444444444444444] 0:535 0:534 t=1599217655[0] r=[0,64,15,1,1] sl=[41,64,64,528]PID_ERR replay-window backtrack occurred [1] [SSL-0] [0_00000000000000000000000000000000000000044444444444444444444444] 0:535 0:534 t=1599217655[0] r=[0,64,15,1,1] sl=[41,64,64,528]PID_ERR replay-window backtrack occurred [1] [SSL-0] [0_00000000000000000000000000000000000000044444444444444444444444] 0:535 0:534 t=1599217655[0] r=[0,64,15,1,1] sl=[41,64,64,528]PID_ERR replay-window backtrack occurred [1] [SSL-0] [0_00000000000000000000000000000000000000044444444444444444444444] 0:535 0:534 t=1599217655[0] r=[0,64,15,1,1] sl=[41,64,64,528]

I know its not my connection and only happens when connecting to cryptostorm. I dont even know why Im posting on this forum -no one even here


Admin been gone for awhile, suppose to be back aug 25th and do a warrant canary on sept 30th, but who does one every few months -should be every month. Not that Im worried about LE but if you are gonna go as far as to do a warrant canary, at least do it right. 3 months is a lot of time. Think of how many journalists can get their heads chopped off in that span of time. oh well time to look for a new vpn.

!	Message from: parityboy
	Added code tags for clarity.

[n8]

Hey CS team

Any news on the network status?

- cryptostorm.nu is still bust
- Wireguard for CS is down
- OpenVPN is warning that it will soon discontinue 'compress' in your configs
- Is Df back? Last mention of him being available was end of August...

So an update would be higly appreciated. Thanks and take care.

n8

[AnonAsPossible]

Hey CS team

Any news on the network status?

- cryptostorm.nu is still bust
- Wireguard for CS is down
- OpenVPN is warning that it will soon discontinue 'compress' in your configs
- Is Df back? Last mention of him being available was end of August...

So an update would be higly appreciated. Thanks and take care.

n8

With cryptostorm.nu & Wireguard still down, it's a safe bet Df still ain't back. I hope he's OK, he is 'Cryptostorm', without him what do we have!?

[Main Sequence]

Hey CS team

Any news on the network status?

- cryptostorm.nu is still bust
- Wireguard for CS is down
- OpenVPN is warning that it will soon discontinue 'compress' in your configs
- Is Df back? Last mention of him being available was end of August...

So an update would be higly appreciated. Thanks and take care.

n8

With cryptostorm.nu & Wireguard still down, it's a safe bet Df still ain't back. I hope he's OK, he is 'Cryptostorm', without him what do we have!?

Look at this way... September has come and gone.. we're now into October. No updates, no new news, no fixes. The Forum admin Parityboy hasn't logged-in for almost a month, with the result that the forum is overrun with spam postings. I can only conclude that the forum is essentially unmoderated, otherwise these spam posts would be long-gone. Everything seems to be running on autopilot.

Over time, I can only anticipate that more and more services will break, and not be fixed. By all appearances, Cryptostorm is in terminal decline.

[AnonAsPossible]

Within the past few days, CA certificates are being updated, the 'token' database will be back online network wide soon,,, so does this mean Df is actually back?!

If he can just pop-in and let us know he's back, that would put a lot of minds at ease here!!!

[Main Sequence]

Within the past few days, CA certificates are being updated, the 'token' database will be back online network wide soon,,, so does this mean Df is actually back?!

I was unaware of these updates. I hope this signals a return to 'normal' soon.

If he can just pop-in and let us know he's back, that would put a lot of minds at ease here!!!

Agreed.

[Main Sequence]

Would have been nice if we had been given some reasonable notice -- at least a couple of days, anyway -- that that tokens were going to be checked again.

I got booted off overnight, and when I tried to login again, I got an authorization error. What are you supposed to do when you can't check the token validity?

Luckily, I had another token, but for people who don't that means essentially they were cut off without warning.

[AnonAsPossible]

It seems like the best way to get the latest news regarding CS, is through their Twitter account;

https://twitter.com/cryptostorm_is

[okaruto]

It's really great to see the token verification is working again. I updated my store to use the new url and it works like a charm

[parityboy]

Hey CS team

Any news on the network status?

- cryptostorm.nu is still bust
- Wireguard for CS is down
- OpenVPN is warning that it will soon discontinue 'compress' in your configs
- Is Df back? Last mention of him being available was end of August...

So an update would be higly appreciated. Thanks and take care.

n8

With cryptostorm.nu & Wireguard still down, it's a safe bet Df still ain't back. I hope he's OK, he is 'Cryptostorm', without him what do we have!?

Look at this way... September has come and gone.. we're now into October. No updates, no new news, no fixes. The Forum admin Parityboy hasn't logged-in for almost a month, with the result that the forum is overrun with spam postings. I can only conclude that the forum is essentially unmoderated, otherwise these spam posts would be long-gone. Everything seems to be running on autopilot.

Over time, I can only anticipate that more and more services will break, and not be fixed. By all appearances, Cryptostorm is in terminal decline.

I'm back. Been really busy with work, but I'll try to clean up the forums this week.

[Main Sequence]

Hey CS team

Any news on the network status?

- cryptostorm.nu is still bust
- Wireguard for CS is down
- OpenVPN is warning that it will soon discontinue 'compress' in your configs
- Is Df back? Last mention of him being available was end of August...

So an update would be higly appreciated. Thanks and take care.

n8

With cryptostorm.nu & Wireguard still down, it's a safe bet Df still ain't back. I hope he's OK, he is 'Cryptostorm', without him what do we have!?

Look at this way... September has come and gone.. we're now into October. No updates, no new news, no fixes. The Forum admin Parityboy hasn't logged-in for almost a month, with the result that the forum is overrun with spam postings. I can only conclude that the forum is essentially unmoderated, otherwise these spam posts would be long-gone. Everything seems to be running on autopilot.

Over time, I can only anticipate that more and more services will break, and not be fixed. By all appearances, Cryptostorm is in terminal decline.

I'm back. Been really busy with work, but I'll try to clean up the forums this week.

Glad to see you back. Hope things are well with you.

One thing that has been brought to my attention recently (that I was previously unaware of) is that Python 2.x was end-of-lifed in January 2020.

Bitmessage is written in Python2, and as far as I am aware, there are no plans to port it to Python3. Given that the base platform is now effectively abandoned / totally unsupported, this does not augur well for Bitmessage's long-term future. The Cryptostorm staff/admins might well have to revisit the matter of using Bitmessage for communications / support.

https://dev.to/scriptautomate/python-2- ... means-30p2

https://www.infoworld.com/article/33652 ... hon-2.html

[parityboy]

Glad to see you back. Hope things are well with you.

All's good here, how's things with you?

I've cleaned the forums as best I can, but some of the entries in the forums seem to be "ghost" entries, which will require a sysadmin to clean out of the forum database.

[df]

I'm back :E
Been back a few days now, took a minute to get situated.
Busy replacing the dead servers, and redoing cs.nu, fixing/upgrading wireguard, updating ossl/vpn/ssh everywhere, killing the spam here, etc. etc.
I'll do a proper announcement after I finish some of those more urgent tasks.

[Bluemoon]

Welcome back DF !!!

Happy and Safe New Year to you and your Team !!!

[AnonAsPossible]

Awesome to know you're back df , you are the only one who can properly steer the CS ship!! Over the past year things had started to deteriorate, I did notice little improvements last week like quicker connections etc. and decided to check here to see if indeed you're back.

[df]

Alrighty, I think that's it.
Added a bunch of new servers. A couple are upgrades for existing servers that were still running crap hardware (like Portugal and it's Intel Athlon, now Intel Xeon).
Main website's been updated. Same layout/colors/etc., just updated the text to more accurately reflect the current network setup. Also added a server map in the area just before https://cryptostorm.is/#section5 , so people don't have to go digging around to find cryptostorm.is/uptime to get the server locations, and I put a direct link to the faq on the main page too (at the top, to the left of the ip checker thing).
OpenVPN configs have been updated @ https://cryptostorm.is/configs/ and https://github.com/cryptostorm/conf/ . I decided to bring back those comments filled with techie details (now updated), but this time I moved any of the stuff people might wanna change (auth-user-pass, dns, cipher, remote) to the top of the file so you don't have to sift through all the comments to find those lines.
wireguard keys on https://cryptostorm.is/wireguard have been updated for the new servers too.
most of the wireguard backend auth API's code has been rewritten so that it works more efficiently (before, when wireguard was working, it sometimes didn't add/del keys to all the servers, now it will).
widget updated to v3.45, should be pushed to all the servers now so next time you connect it'll prompt to upgrade (or just grab it from https://cryptostorm.is/cryptostorm_setup.exe ). It includes the latest dnscrypt-proxy, openvpn, openssl, a buncha bug fixes. I also ditched Cava Packager for something more recent, which brought the initial load time from something like 15-30 seconds down to a couple of seconds. Also added an option under Security that lets you switch between AES-256-GCM or POLY1305-CHACHA20 for the data channel cipher (the one that encrypts your traffic). POLY1305-CHACHA20 should be faster on most systems.
Since CentOS 6.10 went EOL, I decided to switch over to Arch Linux, at least for new servers. So all the new ones are running Arch, not CentOS.
That should make things easier to update since I won't have to compile most things from source anymore. On those Arch systems, I'm also not doing grsecurity, since it's not free anymore and I can't just keep using the last free version. Instead, https://github.com/anthraxx/linux-hardened and https://github.com/GrapheneOS/hardened_malloc is used on those systems to provide similar security features.
The dnscrypt files on https://github.com/cryptostorm/cstorm_deepDNS/ are updated now too, but there's an issue going on with some of the relays, something to do with UDP fragmentation that's occuring, or being reported as occuring by dnscrypt-proxy. I left a message about it for jedisct1 (the guy that wrote dnscrypt-proxy), maybe he'll know what's going on there. So if you're trying to use our Anonymous DNS relays (relays.md) and you get a "[another DNS server] couldn't be reached anonymously" error, then just add to your dnscrypt-proxy.toml the line "force_tcp = true" and it'll stop using UDP, which gets past that error.
I also moved this forum onto a dedicated server. Before it was on a VM that had way too many overly paranoid settings to keep script kiddies from pwning the forum, but it ended up just making it easier to DoS the site, which is why it used to be so laggy. Instead of trying to secure it like that, it made more sense to just buy a cheap dedicated server and dedicate it to the forum, so if some phpbb zero day does come along, it won't affect anything else.
The webchat thing is back up too, that was one of the first things I worked on getting back up. https://cryptostorm.nu/chat/ , I'm usually there, I just might not have that window in the foreground, so if you PM me there it might take a while for a response.

I think that's about it... I'll do a a more detailed (and less-messy) annoucement on https://cryptostorm.is/blog/ in a day or so, for the people who don't check the forum.

[lajola]

The dnscrypt files on https://github.com/cryptostorm/cstorm_deepDNS/ are updated now too, but there's an issue going on with some of the relays, something to do with UDP fragmentation that's occuring, or being reported as occuring by dnscrypt-proxy. I left a message about it for jedisct1 (the guy that wrote dnscrypt-proxy), maybe he'll know what's going on there. So if you're trying to use our Anonymous DNS relays (relays.md) and you get a "[another DNS server] couldn't be reached anonymously" error, then just add to your dnscrypt-proxy.toml the line "force_tcp = true" and it'll stop using UDP, which gets past that error.

Hi, this problem has been solved? Do you have contacted jedisct1?

I am on OSX, how can check if i have this error: [another DNS server] couldn't be reached anonymously" error


Thank you

[df]

@lajola
Haven't heard back from jedisct1 yet. You'll see that error if you're running dnscrypt-proxy at the console/terminal. I haven't tested any GUI frontends for dnscrypt-proxy, so not sure what it would look like in those. If you get that error, then add to your config "force_tcp = true". If you don't see it anywhere in your terminal or the log files, then don't worry about it.

[lajola]

@lajola
Haven't heard back from jedisct1 yet. You'll see that error if you're running dnscrypt-proxy at the console/terminal. I haven't tested any GUI frontends for dnscrypt-proxy, so not sure what it would look like in those. If you get that error, then add to your config "force_tcp = true". If you don't see it anywhere in your terminal or the log files, then don't worry about it.

Ok thanks

[df]

A WireGuard issue was just fixed too, see viewtopic.php?f=32&t=29355&p=45401#p45401
So if you weren't able to get any traffic through your WireGuard tunnel, try again, it should be working now