Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Underground Hansa Market taken over and shut down

politie.nl

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

301–310 of 381 posts

Re: Underground Hansa Market taken over and shut down

#301

Post by ryanlol »

mullen wrote: post #284
ryanlol wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pointless, hosts don't do KYC so you can just lie to them and be whoever you please.

I was thinking you would need to ship them custom servers and have a specific network setup on the system. Standard out of the box rental servers are not going to work. I honestly don't know how that would work with getting servers to an ISP for them to rack and follow the networking instructions.

Even if you did colo and shipped out your own boxes you wouldn't need to set up real LLCs. Fake information would still work fine, many places do colo for bitcoin.

Re: Underground Hansa Market taken over and shut down

#302

Post by mulmen »

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.

In what way does that seem fair?

This is a dangerous way to present facts that changes the perception of the reader in ways that may not be noticed while not technically telling a lie.

You are claiming that all crimes are of equal severity and should have equal consequences. That is absurd.

Re: Underground Hansa Market taken over and shut down

#303

Post by mulmen »

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,…

Short of presenting data I think you're making a bit of a leap to say that pornography encourages some undesired behavior. It could easily be argued either way.

Re: Underground Hansa Market taken over and shut down

#304

Post by mulmen »

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…

> 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.

You're right that this is a very difficult topic to discuss rationally but I'm going to try anyway.

> 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?

1) Compensation does not have to be financial to be an incentive. 2) Anonymous photography of individuals without their knowledge can absolutely cause harm. 3) Being a victim of a crime does not require knowledge of the crime taking place nor does it require physical contact.

> 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.

You're equating homosexuality to child abuse which puts you on the wrong side of history.

Re: Underground Hansa Market taken over and shut down

#305

Post by mulmen »

nnfy wrote: post #299
trhway wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

Why three? Why not two or five? What's so special about three that it fits such a wide range of offenses?

Re: Underground Hansa Market taken over and shut down

#306

Post by patrickyeon »

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...

That's definitely a cynical way (that I would tend to lean towards agreeing with) to describe it.

The other spin would be "we discovered illegal activity through evidence that would be inadmissible in court, so we went ahead and focussed on gathering admissible evidence". Probably by looking in places they wouldn't have looked otherwise, but not by making anything up or breaking any laws.

Re: Underground Hansa Market taken over and shut down

#307

Post by mythrwy »

blattimwind wrote: post #105
mindcrime wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It leads one to wonder... what is the "best" place to host servers if you're going to run a darkweb market? Seems like you'd want a place where the government/police/spooks aren't as tech savvy and sophisticated, and perhaps somewhere where the government isn't on the best terms with traditional Western powers. Venezuela? But do they even have electricity for running servers? Maybe some smaller African nations? Botsw…

> Venezuela? But do they even have electricity for running servers? Venezuela isn't a third world country. Yes, they have electricity (and it is very cheap, hence a lot of BTC mining there).

For sure electricity and maybe not "primitive" (if that's the appropriate word), but Venezuela is certainly a third world country.

Re: Underground Hansa Market taken over and shut down

#308

Post by wybiral »

jimmyk wrote: post #286
7952 wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps. But within the context of gay rights it is the government that behaved improperly. Society bundled behaviour and innate characteristics into a single thing. That was wrong, and it is important to highlight that. Of course in a post homophobic world the distinction is rather irrelevant. It makes no difference to anyone if homosexuality is innate, or just a set of chosen behaviours. Why would it matter either…

I'm confused by your comment. >Society bundled behaviour and innate characteristics into a single thing. It seems like that's what you're doing here: >...you don't have any choice about being gay, or about having gay relationships. Being gay does not mean you have to have gay relationships. Having gay relationships is a choice.

Yes we've rehashed the difference between internal thinking and action. I don't think anyone believes that a government is directly oppressing internal monologue.

The original quote was "being gay is illegal in many places". By saying "being gay is illegal" it seems to imply a behavior though. Being a murderer, or being a pilot, or being a carnivore...

But, you're right. We can all agree that it's totally legal to be a murderer or thief as long as you don't behave that way.

Re: Underground Hansa Market taken over and shut down

#309

Post by jetru »

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…

hansa was serving plain http. I wonder how much this matters since they use gpg for making orders.

Re: Underground Hansa Market taken over and shut down

#310

Post by Retra »

valuearb wrote: post #210
BearGoesChirp wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Buying drugs does fund those actions. Drugs being illegal are a major reason why, and why I support legalization. But that doesn't excuse anyone currently making a purchase today. Think of it this way, illegal images could be produced by advanced CGI, but aren't because that tends to be just as illegal. That doesn't excuse anyone who consume images not produced by advanced CGI.

People have the right to control what goes in their bodies. I don't have the ability to see if my weed is "violence free", because drug prohibition took that away. You can't hold me responsible for violence among marijuana cartels if you don't give me a clean source for my marijuana. It's like saying encryption is used by terrorists, so if I buy encryption I'm indirectly supporting terrorism.

You can be held responsible. You don't have a right to obtain a substance just because you want it. It doesn't matter if it "goes in your body" or not. That's not how rights work. You have to justify the value to society.
Post reply on HN