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A dark web tycoon pleads guilty, but how was he caught?

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Re: A dark web tycoon pleads guilty, but how was he caught?

#111

Post by RandomBacon »

MaupitiBlue wrote: post #71
DINKDINK wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>if these techniques and vulnerabilities were made public[...] Should the government prove that it followed the law when investigating a criminal? Did they obtain the proper warrants that people recognize preserve stable law and order? It's unreasonable to assume that the vulnerability, that brought this case to justice, is the last one that could ever be used. More so, if you assume that most people are good and a h…

> Should the government prove that it followed the law when investigating a criminal? They do, but only if the defendant requires them to do so. What’s happening here is that the prosecutors told the defendant “look, we all know you did it, so plead guilty and we’ll recommend a light sentence. You have a right to make us reveal our tor backdoor, but if you do the plea offer is off and we will have the trial, and win,…

IIRC a year or two ago, weren't some criminals let off the hook because they didn't take a deal, and the law enforcement angency didn't want to reveal how the criminals were caught?

Re: A dark web tycoon pleads guilty, but how was he caught?

#112

Post by appleshore »

heartbeats wrote: post #94
ChrisCinelli wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a side note: Promise (YC startup) was also saying that 70% of people in jails are waiting for judgement or are in for a technical violation (ex: did not show up to a hearing). And being in jails they end up losing their job, eventually they lose their house etc. This is a space with a lot of low hanging fruits. And minor fixes may end up doing a lot of good.

It's not so simple. Why do we have education? Firstly, because there's needed some way to filter people. If you get 100 applicants, you can't make a detailed consideration. But if only 30 have degrees, it's much easier. So there is a signalling effect. But secondly, and more importantly, because you need somewhere to have these kids. If there's ten million jobs and ten million two hundred thousand jobs, you'll get pr…

In major cities like LA, bail for misdemeanors can be $80,000 if someone misses a court date. And the jails are horrific, they force you to be racist especially if you’re Hispanic or black.

There’s so many LAPD/LASD scandals that it’s hard to conceptualize. The FBI spent millions installing videocameras throughout the jails to stop the rampart torture and abuse of inmates by LA County Sheriff Deputies. The longtime Sheriff went to federal prison over it. And this was after a 10-year supervisory role of the DoJ and hundred million+ spent to stop police report. After it!

Good luck surviving that system without a serious bias towards authority.

Re: A dark web tycoon pleads guilty, but how was he caught?

#113

Post by sorenjan »

ohmygodel wrote: post #46

Running a hosting server for onion services, as was done in this case, is a terrible idea. It greatly increases the risk of deanonymization. The question is less how this hosting service was discovered and more how it ever stayed up long enough to become so notorious. Here's why: 1. Each hidden service chooses a "guard" relay to serve as the first hop for all connections. 2. A server running multiple hidden services…

> 5. The adversary's guard can observe the hidden service's IP directly.

So does the guard know that it is a guard and that the traffic comes from a hidden service? I thought Tor worked by jumping from node to node, and that each node didn't know whether the traffic came from the original client/service or from another node in the chain. So each time you make a connection over Tor you're essentially telling a guard node "here's my real IP, send this traffic to this hidden service and return the response please" and you have to trust that they keep it a secret? I feel like I'm missing something here.

Re: A dark web tycoon pleads guilty, but how was he caught?

#114

Post by ohmygodel »

sorenjan wrote: post #113
ohmygodel wrote: post #46

Running a hosting server for onion services, as was done in this case, is a terrible idea. It greatly increases the risk of deanonymization. The question is less how this hosting service was discovered and more how it ever stayed up long enough to become so notorious. Here's why: 1. Each hidden service chooses a "guard" relay to serve as the first hop for all connections. 2. A server running multiple hidden services…

> 5. The adversary's guard can observe the hidden service's IP directly. So does the guard know that it is a guard and that the traffic comes from a hidden service? I thought Tor worked by jumping from node to node, and that each node didn't know whether the traffic came from the original client/service or from another node in the chain. So each time you make a connection over Tor you're essentially telling a guard n…

The Tor protocol doesn't explicitly signal the guard relay that it is in the guard position. However, the guard relay (call it R) can use several indicators to conclude that the preceding hop (call it S) is indeed the source (e.g. the onion service):

1. S is at an IP address that is not a public Tor relay as listed in the Tor consensus. It's not impossible that S is a bridge (i.e. private Tor relay), but statistically unlikely because using a bridge isn't all that common.

2. During circuit construction, S extends the circuit beyond R two times. I don't see why Tor couldn't easily create dummy circuit extensions to fool R, but it doesn't (probably because there are so many other indicators that this change alone wouldn't solve the problem).

3. R observes what appear to be HTTP-level request-response pairs between it and S at about the same round-trip time (RTT) as the RTT R observes between it and S at the TCP layer, which should only happen if there were no more hops beyond S.

If I recall correctly, Kwon et al. [0] describe several more statistical indicators of being a guard for an onion service.

Also, you are right that a client doesn't tell the guard node the destination (e.g. the onion service) of its traffic. The guard node is not trusted with that because it already directly observes the client, and so giving it the other side would deanonymize the connection.

[0] https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity15/technical...

Re: A dark web tycoon pleads guilty, but how was he caught?

#115

Post by cronix »

dsl wrote: post #73
cronix wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Tor was created to help dissidents of other nations communicate [1] Why would the US Navy develop something to help dissidents in other nations? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tor_(anonymity_network)#Histor... > The core principle of Tor, "onion routing", was developed in the mid-1990s by United States Naval Research Laboratory employees, mathematician Paul Syverson, and computer scientists Michael G. Reed and D…

> Why would the US Navy develop something to help dissidents in other nations? From their website: "The [Naval Research Laboratory] works closely with the National Security Agency (NSA), Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command (SPAWAR), Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), and Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA)."

Those are US gov't agencies, not "dissidents in other nations."

Re: A dark web tycoon pleads guilty, but how was he caught?

#116

Post by coliveira »

heartbeats wrote: post #94
ChrisCinelli wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a side note: Promise (YC startup) was also saying that 70% of people in jails are waiting for judgement or are in for a technical violation (ex: did not show up to a hearing). And being in jails they end up losing their job, eventually they lose their house etc. This is a space with a lot of low hanging fruits. And minor fixes may end up doing a lot of good.

It's not so simple. Why do we have education? Firstly, because there's needed some way to filter people. If you get 100 applicants, you can't make a detailed consideration. But if only 30 have degrees, it's much easier. So there is a signalling effect. But secondly, and more importantly, because you need somewhere to have these kids. If there's ten million jobs and ten million two hundred thousand jobs, you'll get pr…

There is a much simpler way to solve the problem: reduce the weekly working hours. Instead of working 40 hours, require people to work 35 or less. Instead, what governments around the world are doing is using the excuse of technology to increase the working hours, therefore causing hourly pay to go down and increasing poverty. It is a completely destructive social policy, and we're all paying the price in some way.

Re: A dark web tycoon pleads guilty, but how was he caught?

#117

Post by saber6 »

homonculus1 wrote: post #65
ChrisCinelli wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is a bad idea to do illegal stuff.

Depends on your value system. Another perspective is that some laws ought to be broken, in spite of the potential consequences.

Pretty sure slanging heroin and diddling kids is a net negative....

Re: A dark web tycoon pleads guilty, but how was he caught?

#118

Post by saber6 »

edm0nd wrote: post #69
HideousKojima wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ross was dumb enough to get fake passports/ids shipped directly to his home address

While Ross did do some bad things, I do not think it is enough to warrant a double life sentence plus forty years without the possibility of parole. El Chapo, an actual drug cartel member who is directly responsible for thousands of deaths, only got a single life sentence. Ross got screwed on his sentencing and it is totally unjustified. Free Ross!

You're insane. His site facilitated numerous drug deals for profit. He also paid bitcoin in what he thought was a hit-job (he was duped). This dumbass can rot in prison. Screw him.

Re: A dark web tycoon pleads guilty, but how was he caught?

#120

Post by taneq »

coliveira wrote: post #116
heartbeats wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not so simple. Why do we have education? Firstly, because there's needed some way to filter people. If you get 100 applicants, you can't make a detailed consideration. But if only 30 have degrees, it's much easier. So there is a signalling effect. But secondly, and more importantly, because you need somewhere to have these kids. If there's ten million jobs and ten million two hundred thousand jobs, you'll get pr…

There is a much simpler way to solve the problem: reduce the weekly working hours. Instead of working 40 hours, require people to work 35 or less. Instead, what governments around the world are doing is using the excuse of technology to increase the working hours, therefore causing hourly pay to go down and increasing poverty. It is a completely destructive social policy, and we're all paying the price in some way.

The problem here, as always, is that all of the routine jobs that require minimal employee knowledge are being automated. The remaining jobs, even in 'blue collar' areas, now involve job-specific knowledge which takes time and money to impart and which goes stale if not used regularly. It's far less effective to have two part-time engineers design a widget than it is to have one full-time engineer design it. It's even worse having two part-time electricians wiring up a machine, because the handover is going to be messier.
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