What I’ve Been Forging: Darknets, IPTV Scanners, and Overlay Networks
If you’ve been wondering why I’ve been quiet here lately, it’s because I’ve been deep in the code mines.
I’ve been spending a lot of time over at Sarah’s Forge .Dev, which has become my dedicated workbench for open-source software, coding experiments, and generally trying just screwing around.
Since I know the SignalsEverywhere crowd loves exploring invisible networks, decentralized tech, and signal hunting, I wanted to do a roundup of the projects I’ve dropped recently. From building darknet mesh networks on Android to scanning UDP multicast streams, here is what I’ve been building.
🧅 The Tor Ecosystem on Mobile
I’ve been obsessed with the idea that mobile devices shouldn’t just be clients—they should be servers.
1. Hosting Hidden Services with Flutter
Native Android developers have had the ability to host Tor Hidden services for years, but Flutter devs were left behind. I finally fixed that gap with tor_hidden_service. It wraps the official binaries and lets you map a local port on your phone to a public .onion address. No servers, no static IPs—just your phone serving content to the darknet.
2. Unstoppable Chatter
Hosting is one thing, but communicating is another. I released tor_gossip, a library that implements an epidemic gossip protocol over Tor. It builds a chat network with no central server. Messages “infect” the network peer-to-peer using cryptographic envelopes. I even built a demo app where you add friends by physically scanning QR codes of their onion addresses to build a “Web of Trust.”
📡 RoseLink: My Own Overlay Network
I have a confession: I hate that we have to pay rent to cloud providers just to host a simple website.
I’ve been working on RoseLink, a community-owned overlay network. It creates a reverse tunnel from your local machine to a public relay mesh.
- The Goal: Run one command on your laptop and get a
myblog.rosedomain accessible to the world. - The Tech: It uses a custom SOCKS5 proxy to trick the browser into resolving
.rosedomains and routes traffic through a gossip-enabled mesh network. - The Identity: You own your domain via an Ed25519 private key. No registrars, no fees.
It’s currently functional, offline but open source.
📺 CableCompany: Hunting IPTV Streams
This one is for the signal hunters. I fell down a rabbit hole investigating how hotels and ISPs deliver TV. It turns out, it’s often raw, unencrypted UDP Multicast.
The problem is finding the streams in a range of 268 million addresses. So, I built CableCompany. It’s a modern GUI app (Python + LibVLC) that uses a “Smart Scan” heuristic. It detects beacon packets on common subnets, sniffs the raw MPEG-TS packets, parses the binary Service Description Tables, and plays the video.
It feels a lot like scanning radio frequencies, but for video packets on a local network.
🛠️ The Daily Drivers (Rust & Go)
Finally, I built a few tools just to keep my own sanity while working on Linux:
- FlutterCleaner (Go): I realized I was losing 30GB of disk space to old build artifacts. I wrote a recursive cleaner in Go that reclaimed that space in about 15 seconds.
- Tiny Rust Tools: I wired up my i3wm setup with
roseprocess(a keyboard-first process killer) andRoseNotes(an instant scratchpad). They are single-binary Rust apps designed to be lightning fast.
Come Forge With Me
I’m going to keep documenting these deep dives into networking and privacy tech. If you want to grab the source code for any of these, or just see how I’m breaking things this week, head over to the new site.
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