v0.2.0: Focus Refactor — Three-Pillar Architecture

What changed

KillNode v0.2.0 is a significant architectural refactor. The guiding principle: do three things excellently rather than five things adequately.

Removed

• WebTorrent — BitTorrent transport is conceptually interesting but architecturally dangerous. Peer-wire connections bypassed Tor entirely, meaning your real IP was visible to every peer. Removed entirely.
• Onion synth — The simulated .onion address generator was cosmetic, not functional. A real hidden service requires a running Tor HS configuration, not a random string.
• Shadowsocks / V2Ray sidecars — Replaced with proper lyrebird/obfs4 integration built directly into the Tor torrc. One less binary to manage, one less attack surface.

Added / fixed

Real Tor control-port integration. KillNode now speaks the Tor control protocol directly. Cookie authentication over TCP to port 9051. SIGNAL NEWNYM rotates your circuit set on demand. GETINFO status/bootstrap-phase drives a live 0–100% progress bar. GETINFO circuit-status shows your active BUILT circuit count, updating every 5 seconds.

Pluggable Transports via lyrebird. Paste obfs4 bridge lines from bridges.torproject.org into the bridge textarea. KillNode writes UseBridges 1, ClientTransportPlugin obfs4 exec lyrebird, and the bridge directives into the torrc automatically. The lyrebird binary ships inside the Tor Expert Bundle — no extra download needed.

Hardened SOCKS5 gateway. The local SOCKS5 ingress on port 9741 now buffers reads properly across split packets, handles IPv6 (atyp 0x04) addresses, and returns correct SOCKS5 error reply codes on failure instead of silently dropping the connection.

Dead-man killswitch timer. An optional timer (30 s / 60 s / 120 s / 5 min) that watches for unexpected Tor exits. If Tor disconnects and does not recover within the window, the full killswitch fires automatically — no operator action required.

Three-card UI. The renderer is now three focused cards: Tor Orchestrator, Proxy Mesh, Neural Killswitch. Each does exactly what it says.

Upgrade path

Existing installs carry no user data that conflicts with the new schema. The TorrentJob SQLite table has been removed; your Setting rows carry over unchanged. Launch the new build and configure bridges or the dead-man timer if you want them.