I read somewhere that these sites were intentionally positioned near population centers so that an attack on these nuclear facilities would also create a greater disaster.

Can you extinguish a protocol nobody owns?

Tape will work. But if you are opening up a laptop anyway, you might as well just do a physical disconnect and plan on relying on a webcam when needed.

Slashdot has a comparison of a few alternatives. My preference is Briar as my user name would indicate!

I distrust the microphone more than I do the camera. They can gather a LOT more information using the microphone. When I got my computer, I opened it up and physically disconnected both the camera and microphone. Now, when I need to be on a video conference, I use a webcam to plug in to my USB. Otherwise, all that is off by physical impossibility.

Now I’m wondering how much of the price we pay is due to the cost of manufacturing and how much is just a bunch of middle-men driving up prices. Maybe this is just a case of a bunch of shell companies organized for military purposes but I’m going to guess that the practice is relatively normal enough that it didn’t raise any red-flags among the other firms involved.

There are sites like Ahmia that you can submit your site to and which attempts to do indexing. People who run .onion sites should also do webrings like what were popular in the mid-1990’s. I remember seeing those all the time on the original Geocities. Starting a .onion site is easy to do with software like OnionShare.

I think the key is getting a core group of users in your friend/family community using it. I got all my family using Briar and now some of their friends are on it too, just because they knew people using it. IMO, Briar is the best message platform out there and I’d love to see more people using it.