Underground Hansa Market taken over and shut down • Hacker News Board

Re: Underground Hansa Market taken over and shut down

#291

Post by contingencies » Fri, Jul 21, 2017, 1:30 AM UTC

tylersmith wrote: post #287

matt_wulfeck wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting. What do you do with your market research?

I'm a developer on the OpenBazaar project which is a p2p Bitcoin market. Because DNMs are the most popular Bitcoin marketplaces I keep up with them and their features and trends. They're great sources for discovering security concerns.

Can you give an example of some of the security concerns you have discovered? Do you keep a formal list of threat vectors? I would have thought they are pretty much the same as regular web apps.

PS. OpenBazaar seems to have received $3M funding. Interesting about change for a project started by Amir Taaki given his very anarchist professions.

PPS. Desktop client seems a bad thing to develop first (in the true tradition of Bitcoin!). Perhaps you guys could have stuck with network client daemon + API for starters. Anyway, good luck.

Re: Underground Hansa Market taken over and shut down

#292

Post by mindslight » Fri, Jul 21, 2017, 1:55 AM UTC

ch8230 wrote: post #24

loeg wrote: post #6

I like how they try and color the site by associating it with sites that sell weapons and child porn. > It is Hansa Market, currently the most popular dark market in the ‘anonymous’ part of the internet, the so-called darknet. > ... > The darknet markets enable large-scale trading in chiefly illegal goods, such as drugs, weapons, child pornography, and ransom software. ... No weapons or child pornography were sold on…

Seems fair to lump in with the rest since it was in fact an illegal market place.

Home Depot is an illegal market place.

Re: Underground Hansa Market taken over and shut down

#293

Post by danek » Fri, Jul 21, 2017, 2:04 AM UTC

captainmuon wrote: post #65

I would love to know how they got caught. There is probably something to learn about opsec from this. The paranoid side of me says Tor is unsafe (due to whatever - the authorities having backdoors on most hosting services, on your PC, due to the encryption being cracked by some unknown breakthrough or due to 90% of entry nodes being controlled by NSA). And NSA and FBI and co just have hundreds of people working on "p…

Does "parallel construction" mean "finding plausible but fake explanations for how we got the evidence so we don't burn our successful and secret investigation techniques"? Just guessing from context...

Re: Underground Hansa Market taken over and shut down

#294

Post by trobertson » Fri, Jul 21, 2017, 2:06 AM UTC

danek wrote: post #293

captainmuon wrote: post #65

I would love to know how they got caught. There is probably something to learn about opsec from this. The paranoid side of me says Tor is unsafe (due to whatever - the authorities having backdoors on most hosting services, on your PC, due to the encryption being cracked by some unknown breakthrough or due to 90% of entry nodes being controlled by NSA). And NSA and FBI and co just have hundreds of people working on "p…

Does "parallel construction" mean "finding plausible but fake explanations for how we got the evidence so we don't burn our successful and secret investigation techniques"? Just guessing from context...

Yes.

Re: Underground Hansa Market taken over and shut down

#295

Post by sondr3 » Fri, Jul 21, 2017, 2:07 AM UTC

5_minutes wrote: post #10

The clever thing is that they took it over and for one month monitored it without the users knowing. Everyone on obfuscating their persona with Tor and bitcoins, still had to enter their postal addresses on the website, to receive the goodies. That database must be a wet dream for law enforcement.

I have a friend who quite frequently used to buy from online markets (I have since lost touch with him). From what he told me what he and his friends used to do was to buy a new post box and set it up somewhere away from where they lived under a fictitious address and name. So they'd be John Doe living at Copper Street 45 (when it only actually goes to 44 or whatever).

Then he'd track how long the package took, whether or not it was delivered normally by the postal service and even then wait a week or so and get it in the middle of the night. Nowadays they apparently just use drones instead to deliver stuff.

Re: Underground Hansa Market taken over and shut down

#296

Post by averagewall » Fri, Jul 21, 2017, 2:08 AM UTC

atemerev wrote: post #34

ch8230 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems fair to lump in with the rest since it was in fact an illegal market place.

Not everything that is illegal is wrong. E.g. being gay is illegal in many places.

There's a big discussion about what's bad about drugs. But I wonder if we can rationally work out what's bad about child porn.

My understanding is that possessing it means you obtained it from someone, who probably wanted some kind of payment, who abused children to produce the material so he could get that payment.

There are quite a few gaps there. What if it was published for free? What if children weren't physically abused but were secretly and anonymously photographed? Shouldn't there be exceptions for victimless child porn?

Of course the dominant factor is people are horrified by deviant sexualities. We're barely managing to accept homosexuality which is probably more common than peadophilia.

Re: Underground Hansa Market taken over and shut down

#297

Post by sondr3 » Fri, Jul 21, 2017, 2:10 AM UTC

amyjess wrote: post #138

abrkn wrote: post #85

It's just a matter of time until the store fronts are developed open source on Github and hosted decentralized on a network like MaidSafe. People love to get high and are willing to pay. Innovation will follow to meet demand.

> It's just a matter of time until the store fronts are developed open source on Github Given that Richard Bates faced prosecution for working on the code of the original Silk Road, this could result in very, very bad repercussions. GitHub would very likely be raided, and anyone who committed to or forked the repo could be prosecuted. I don't think anyone wants that to happen. Actually, I wouldn't be surprised if Git…

I would imagine it wouldn't be advertised as a product developed solely for Darknet related markets but rather a marketplace for people who value their privacy and such. A few of the torrent sites I use have their tracker source code available on GitHub.

Re: Underground Hansa Market taken over and shut down

#298

Post by nnfy » Fri, Jul 21, 2017, 2:24 AM UTC

averagewall wrote: post #296

atemerev wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not everything that is illegal is wrong. E.g. being gay is illegal in many places.

There's a big discussion about what's bad about drugs. But I wonder if we can rationally work out what's bad about child porn. My understanding is that possessing it means you obtained it from someone, who probably wanted some kind of payment, who abused children to produce the material so he could get that payment. There are quite a few gaps there. What if it was published for free? What if children weren't physical…

While I believe that western sexual norms are a bit puritanical, the premise behind protecting children with zealous laws is that it is extremely difficult to judge whether child pornography is truely victimless, even if you believe that harm from childhood sexuality is overstated in modern society. Because of the power imbalance between adults and children, and the permanent effects that abuse can have on children, it is reasonable to err on the side of caution and keep all child/adult sexual interactions illegal, and reduce demand for such interactions by keeping pornography illegal.

As an aside, I am curious as to the reason you are being down voted, besides your audacity of expressing an unpopular opinion.

Re: Underground Hansa Market taken over and shut down

#299

Post by nnfy » Fri, Jul 21, 2017, 2:26 AM UTC

trhway wrote: post #259

SomeStupidPoint wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if it was -- not all illegal (or wrong) things are equally wrong. I'm much more okay with, eg, petty theft than murder, and would find it weird if people tried to make people stealing candybars from Walmart out to be equal to murderers.

>would find it weird if people tried to make people stealing candybars from Walmart out to be equal to murderers. it is pretty equal for the 3rd strike

Except it is completely unequal because you've been given 3 chances to follow the laws of the society in which you live. And because sentencing will still be much less severe than that of murder.

Re: Underground Hansa Market taken over and shut down

#300

Post by hallman76 » Fri, Jul 21, 2017, 2:40 AM UTC

nnfy wrote: post #298

averagewall wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a big discussion about what's bad about drugs. But I wonder if we can rationally work out what's bad about child porn. My understanding is that possessing it means you obtained it from someone, who probably wanted some kind of payment, who abused children to produce the material so he could get that payment. There are quite a few gaps there. What if it was published for free? What if children weren't physical…

While I believe that western sexual norms are a bit puritanical, the premise behind protecting children with zealous laws is that it is extremely difficult to judge whether child pornography is truely victimless, even if you believe that harm from childhood sexuality is overstated in modern society. Because of the power imbalance between adults and children, and the permanent effects that abuse can have on children,…

That's not expressing an "unpopular opinion". They're being ignorant about the harm being done to the victims of child pornography and (it seems) trying legitimize that harm by drawing a dotted line to homosexuality.

It has no place on HN. I would downvote if I could.