Yesterday, adult site Pornhub announced a new, streamlined method for people to report revenge porn on its site, with the hope that it could help steadily strip out explicit videos filmed or shared without consent.
But while mainstream sites are taking a tougher stance on revenge porn, its presence is steadily creeping onto the web’s dark counterpart, where site administrators can largely get away with spreading the content by hiding their identities and the location of their websites.
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Pink Meth, possibly the most notorious dark web revenge porn site, was taken down in October 2014. The takedown came at the same time as Operation Onymous, a multi-agency law enforcement effort that targeted around two dozen dark web sites, including the second iteration of the Silk Road drug marketplace. Now, a new mirror of the original Pink Meth is attempting to offer a definitive reemergence of the infamous site.
In June, Motherboard reported that one dark web site was simplistically archiving some of the images that were previously part of Pink Meth, but the new mirror is more ambitious in its effort to reestablish the removed revenge porn images and other features of the site.
“I’m launching this mirror because I see it as a public service”
“First of all I’m not the real owner of pinkmeth I just host it as mirror/archive atm,” someone who went by the name “Justin Sane” and provided a link to the mirror told Motherboard in an encrypted email. “The goal is to make the site fully functional again with all backend stuff and so on.”
Although Motherboard cannot confirm whether the site contains images hosted on the original Pink Meth, it includes over 50 pages that list women with links to explicit photos of them.
Sane said that he sourced the images from a backup of Pink Meth hosted on Pirate Bay, and launched the mirror about a month ago. He pointed to a hidden .txt file on the archive containing his online handle “black sheep,” in order to prove he controlled the site.
The original Pink Meth would sometimes include the social media profiles and contact information of victims. This latest mirror also appears to include many of those details.
Pink Meth also encouraged victims who discovered their photos on the site to write an account of how their images were likely obtained, further humiliating themselves. Although that part of the site isn’t functioning on this new mirror, Sane says the intention is to get it and other features up and running again.
“We also have plans to make it accessible on the clear web as well in the future,” Sane continued. As for how that might be done without compromising the security of the site, Sane said that he was considering hosting a proxy on a “bulletproof” server, as well as frequently switching domains for the site.
As for Sane’s motivation, he said, “I’m launching this mirror because I see it as a public service and also even as mark against Operation Onymous takedown and with all that it implies. This is just a challenge that they can’t win!”
