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I thought I was designing for SpaceX, it may have been for the Silk Road

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Re: I thought I was designing for SpaceX, it may have been for the Silk Road

#71

Post by stephenhuey »

bduerst wrote: post #51
gthtjtkt wrote: post #41

Edit: Turns out the headline is completely made up. This was in the comment section: > So was “Sciview” actually some sort of analytics app for Silk Road, with the “sensors” representing some other Silk Road metrics? Or was BB truly freelancing for SpaceX while administering Silk Road? > AUTHOR: Excellent question, I don’t know. So he has no idea if he was just a subcontractor or if he was doing work for Silk Road. I…

Not sure, but Silk Road obviously couldn't rely on traditional third party web analytics, even though they still needed to identify and fight spammers/fraud. There's also a lot of open-source solutions for things like this (PiWik, AWStats) so, as you said, the author probably was involved in the outsourcing a different project for someone in L.A. But then why would they try to disguise the sample as rocket sensor dat…

He had worked for SpaceX in the past. The blog post author omitted many details, probably because 2 years ago this story was so heavily documented by every major publication you can think of (BBC, NY Times, IB Times, Wired, Ars Technica) that he felt his audience would know the details.

Re: I thought I was designing for SpaceX, it may have been for the Silk Road

#72

Post by ufmace »

griffinmb wrote: post #15
ufmace wrote: post #13

I'm not doubting the story, but it doesn't seem to fit together much the way that it's told here. Exactly who was he really working for, and what was his "friend"s relationship to them? All I can really say is maybe you should be extra skeptical when somebody talks about working for a "big name" company, like SpaceX, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, etc. If you're never reading or writing emails from a company.com email ad…

He was working for "Defcon" or Blake Benthall (his roommate in the story). Defcon was running Silk Road 2.0 after the second "Dread Pirate Roberts" left. Blake had been working for SpaceX, and left to work on Silk Road. This is his HN account: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=blakeeb

Thanks, that's interesting. Sounds like Blake's story could be much better than this one. We can only wonder how many thousands of HN readers have read these DarkNet stories and thought they could make one secure enough to withstand an FBI investigation.

Re: I thought I was designing for SpaceX, it may have been for the Silk Road

#73

Post by emodendroket »

dmix wrote: post #45
emodendroket wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7277371 Prophetic.

Defcon was always much more hateable than DPR. There's probably a reason no-one came to his defense the way they did with Ross. And buying a Tesla with Bitcoin? He was begging to get caught. And he complains about greed. He should have watched Breaking Bad and learned the basic lesson of not buying a flashy car when you're trying to keep a low profile.

I admit I haven't kept up with the whole Silk Road 2.0 story, but I don't see DPR as sympathetic considering the only reason he didn't have a hitman kill people was that he was too bumbling to hire a real one.

Re: I thought I was designing for SpaceX, it may have been for the Silk Road

#74

Post by toyg »

nebulous1 wrote: post #52
stiva wrote: post #34

This really is an interesting story, but I wish he'd taken it to a journalist instead of writing it himself. The narrative is choppy and has a lot of holes in it. I would have loved to see this done as a feature from someone with a lot of experience writing about technology. That might also have given some extra credibility and context to things.

Ha. I was going to write a very similar comment. It's a really interesting situation, but the story as told is incomplete and lacking in really obvious parts, such throwing out "30 FBI agents kicking down the door" but not giving anything concrete. Was he there at the time? Was he even still living there? If so, it seems to go directly against his lawyer's "[you will] never hear from the FBI".

He might fear that too many details could result in renewed interest from the FBI. Sure, they have it all already... or do they?

Re: I thought I was designing for SpaceX, it may have been for the Silk Road

#75

Post by daniel-levin »

stiva wrote: post #34

This really is an interesting story, but I wish he'd taken it to a journalist instead of writing it himself. The narrative is choppy and has a lot of holes in it. I would have loved to see this done as a feature from someone with a lot of experience writing about technology. That might also have given some extra credibility and context to things.

I agree. This would be awesome if it was written up like the Paul le Roux story on The Atavist [0]. That was gripping. I'd be so excited to read the next piece each week. I want to hear the rest of this story.

[0] https://magazine.atavist.com/the-mastermind

Re: I thought I was designing for SpaceX, it may have been for the Silk Road

#76

Post by josephjrobison »

nebulous1 wrote: post #52
stiva wrote: post #34

This really is an interesting story, but I wish he'd taken it to a journalist instead of writing it himself. The narrative is choppy and has a lot of holes in it. I would have loved to see this done as a feature from someone with a lot of experience writing about technology. That might also have given some extra credibility and context to things.

Ha. I was going to write a very similar comment. It's a really interesting situation, but the story as told is incomplete and lacking in really obvious parts, such throwing out "30 FBI agents kicking down the door" but not giving anything concrete. Was he there at the time? Was he even still living there? If so, it seems to go directly against his lawyer's "[you will] never hear from the FBI".

Now it's out there, though. This can be the V1.0 of the story and although it won't be breaking news if written professionally, it can be a great investigative piece still!

Re: I thought I was designing for SpaceX, it may have been for the Silk Road

#77

Post by minus7 »

If you take a look at the code on Github you quickly realize it's complete bullshit, a bit of hardcoded data [1] and one file of backend code that looks like it was copied from somewhere [2].

[1] https://github.com/tdrach/Sciview/blob/master/public/javascr...

[2] https://github.com/tdrach/Sciview/blob/master/routes/api/v1/...

Re: I thought I was designing for SpaceX, it may have been for the Silk Road

#78

Post by rahrahrah »

vkou wrote: post #68
rahrahrah wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's riseup?

A group that tries to provide secure means of communication for protests and activists. Take the fact that the FBI have seized and replaced their co-located servers as you will.

Right, got it.

Re: I thought I was designing for SpaceX, it may have been for the Silk Road

#79

Post by notahacker »

stephenhuey wrote: post #65
gthtjtkt wrote: post #41

Edit: Turns out the headline is completely made up. This was in the comment section: > So was “Sciview” actually some sort of analytics app for Silk Road, with the “sensors” representing some other Silk Road metrics? Or was BB truly freelancing for SpaceX while administering Silk Road? > AUTHOR: Excellent question, I don’t know. So he has no idea if he was just a subcontractor or if he was doing work for Silk Road. I…

Don't recall if I ever met the author of this blog post personally, but his boss/roommate mentioned this particular application to me several times over several months. I was thousands of miles away from SF but it came up repeatedly in casual conversations and after leaving SpaceX he seemed to genuinely believe he had a shot of selling this product to SpaceX as an internal tool. He always juggled lots of projects and…

Lots of plausibly lucrative subprojects also make a good cover story and/or attempt at money laundering for someone running a drug trading platform.

Seems more likely that this was his intention (or, as you say, he genuinely thought he might be able to flog it to his ex-employer) rather than getting design work for part of the back end for the Silk Road. If he wanted an analytics package for his trading platform, surely he'd have just told the blog post author he was subcontracting an analytics package for a very boring company under NDA's trading platform rather than trying to disguise his design brief as curiosity-inducing stuff like metrics for rocket launches?

Re: I thought I was designing for SpaceX, it may have been for the Silk Road

#80

Post by wheelerwj »

untog wrote: post #46
wheelerwj wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what gave you that impression? I sent the following email (below) shortly before receiving the previous one (above).

I assume you mean about the credibility? We don't know those e-mails are real. A journalist handling the story would contact the relevant parties to confirm the account given.

I was just making a joke about it being choppy and hard to read.
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