Open-Access Usenet Server
news.tcpreset.net operates as a truly open-access system with no registration requirements or posting restrictions. We champion unrestricted communication while maintaining platform integrity through sophisticated automated defenses.
Our infrastructure employs Cleanfeed and SpamAssassin to neutralize spam and malicious content, ensuring a secure environment for legitimate discourse without compromising accessibility.
Privacy-Preserving Pseudonymous Infrastructure
We defend unrestricted expression, metadata privacy, and resistance to censorship through infrastructure designed to decouple network identity from content authorship. The two are deliberately separated: the network never learns who you are, yet you keep the ability to claim and prove authorship of what you write.
The m2usenet posting gateway is now integrated directly into the onion web-based newsreader. Reading is free and requires no identity; a single Tor hidden service serves both the reader and the composer. When you post, the message crosses four Tor hidden services before it ever touches a spool: the HTTP composer (this onion), the SMTP relay onion, the mail2news gateway onion, and finally the Tor NNTP server (peannyjkqwqfynd24p6dszvtchkq7hfkwymi5by5y332wmosy5dwfaqd.onion). Each onion connection is not a single 3-hop circuit but a rendezvous of two 3-hop circuits — three relays chosen by the initiator and three by the responder, meeting at a rendezvous point: six relays per hidden service. Across the four hidden services of the chain that is on the order of 24 Tor relays between you and the news spool, and no originating IP address is logged at any stage.
Pseudonymity with Provable Authorship
You post under a pseudonym, not under accountability-free anonymity. An identity is built entirely client-side from three values you choose:
- Username — any handle you like.
- E-mail — any address (
any@any); it is a free-form label, never verified and never resolved. - Ed25519 public key — generated in your browser, the cryptographic anchor of the pseudonym.
These three fields form your identity string username | email | ed25519-pubkey. Network-layer anonymity is preserved by Tor; at the same time the persistent keypair lets you sign successive posts under the same pseudonym, so readers can verify that a series of messages comes from one and the same author. Same key, same pseudonym, same visual fingerprint — authorship is asserted without ever exposing a real-world identity.
Visual Identity: the Face header
The identity string is rendered into a deterministic identicon via Ch1ffr3punk's VFACE algorithm. The resulting PNG is attached to every post as a base64 Face: header (RFC 4021), so newsreaders that support it display a stable visual badge beside the author. The same keypair always yields the same identicon: a one-glance proof of continuity that a forged duplicate cannot reproduce.
Each post therefore carries a coherent authorship bundle, anonymity preserved but authorship claimed:
From:— pseudonym and chosen e-mail label.Face:— base64 identicon derived from the identity string (Ch1ffr3punk VFACE).X-Ed25519-Pub:— the public key of the pseudonym.X-Ed25519-Sig:— Ed25519 signature over the message body.
Keypair Generation & Signing
- Generation: a fresh Ed25519 keypair is created locally in the browser (NaCl / CSPRNG). The secret key never leaves your machine; it can be exported as a portable JSON identity file and re-loaded later to keep posting under the same pseudonym.
- Signing: the full message body is signed with your private key, producing a 64-byte signature carried in
X-Ed25519-Sig:next to the public key. - Verification: anyone can validate the signature against the published public key and the body — only authentic, untampered messages are accepted as authored by that pseudonym.
Hashcash Proof-of-Work Anti-Abuse
Identity generation is free, so it cannot by itself stop spam. To impose a real per-message cost we keep Hashcash computational puzzles:
- Challenge: the client assembles a header (timestamp, destination, 64-bit nonce) canonicalised with the message content.
- Hash grinding: the nonce is incremented, computing SHA-1 hashes until 24 leading zero bits are found (~16M operations, 5-15 seconds).
- Economic asymmetry: negligible for a legitimate author; prohibitive in bulk (1000 messages ≈ 5 CPU-hours).
- Validation: the server verifies the SHA-1 instantly, checks timestamp freshness (±2h), and blocks replay via a spent-token database.
Together, Hashcash (cost-to-post) and the Ed25519 / Face identity (pseudonymous authorship) form a dual-layer model: anonymous at the network layer, accountable at the authorship layer, with no registration.
Access the Posting Interface
The composer lives on the same onion as the newsreader. Open it with Tor Browser or a SOCKS5-configured browser:
http://qgaswy4ebtrhaargqvoboutky7xoyyx5rq5nhydixemkniresdze5dyd.onion:8043/
Read freely; when you decide to post, generate or load your Ed25519 identity, solve the Hashcash token, sign, and submit.
