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Police crack down on Silk Road following first drug dealer conviction

arstechnica.com

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Re: Police crack down on Silk Road following first drug dealer conviction

#21

Post by wmf »

jerguismi wrote: post #6

Apparently SR forums gained almost 5000 new users last month. http://imgur.com/a/asNew The numbers from the store are unknown, and also I'm pretty sure it is very difficult to get a realistic volume from the sales.

"We perform a comprehensive measurement analysis of Silk Road... We gather and analyze data over eight months between the end of 2011 and 2012... We evaluate the total revenue made by all sellers, from public listings, to slightly over USD 1.2 million per month..." http://arxiv.org/abs/1207.7139

Re: Police crack down on Silk Road following first drug dealer conviction

#22

Post by sliverstorm »

betterunix wrote: post #17
DanBC wrote: post #10

I never know from stories like this if law enforcement are hopelessly clueless or if they do know what they're doing but just not releasing details. While the tech is probably secure it's easy for people to make mistakes that leak information; and while NSA or GCHQ probably find it easy to get that information they have no interest in doing so. So, do police agencies have people who know enough about the mistakes peo…

"So, do police agencies have people who know enough about the mistakes people make with Tor and Bitcoin?" I met a researcher who did some work on attacking Tor, the results of which were given to law enforcement agencies. He was a bit light on details, but the basic idea of his approach was this: 1. You narrow down the geographic location of your target. Not hard in the case of the Silk Road, since there is a physica…

Clever. Good to know they aren't totally clueless.

Re: Police crack down on Silk Road following first drug dealer conviction

#23

Post by sliverstorm »

pippy wrote: post #15
sliverstorm wrote: post #12

Talk about bad press for Bitcoin. Silk Road is probably the number one reason regular Joe's would ever hear them mentioned.

To be realistic though, bitcoin is mostly used for gambling and drugs. Depending on your philosophy, the freedom it enables is far more important than what it's used for.

You pose an interesting philosophical quandary. If the freedom it enables is simply the freedom to gamble illegally and trade illicit goods, is that important...?

Do people make the argument that freedom is simply intrinsically good? Or do they argue, like with bittorrent, that the possible occasional positive uses outweigh the more common, primarily negative uses ?

Re: Police crack down on Silk Road following first drug dealer conviction

#24

Post by michaelbuckbee »

betterunix wrote: post #7
squidsoup wrote: post #5

Pause for a moment and consider that one can purchase narcotics from an anonymised network using virtual money. There's no need to read speculative science fiction these days, you can just read the news.

Those drugs still have to be shipped via a real postal system. Speculative scifi suggests that I will have a machine in my house that will produce drugs on the fly, with chemical reactions that are controlled by software.

No need to wait for 3D printing, last night I was reading a short story [1] in which the players in an ARG earned experience points via the hand delivery of items from one player to another in the real world forming an alternative delivery system from the postal carriers.

Similarly, in Daniel Suarez's Daemon [2] he describes how a series of net connected people pass around individual parts that they have no idea the purpose of until they all get delivered to one guy who assembles them into a gun.

1 - http://www.amazon.com/Metatropolis-John-Scalzi/dp/B0058M5ZJ6 - "The Red in the Sky is Our Blood"

2 - http://www.amazon.com/Daemon-ebook/dp/B003QP4NPE/

Re: Police crack down on Silk Road following first drug dealer conviction

#25

Post by bvdbijl »

anonymous wrote: post #14

I'd like some clarification on Tor, please. Namely, how can the silkroad's site operate without the owners being detected? AFAIK Tor has its own DNS with .onion, but don't those resolve to regular IPs? And if police have a normal everyday IP, can't they just imprison the site's owners directly?

No, they do not resolve the regular IP adresses

Re: Police crack down on Silk Road following first drug dealer conviction

#27

Post by AnIrishDuck »

anonymous wrote: post #14

I'd like some clarification on Tor, please. Namely, how can the silkroad's site operate without the owners being detected? AFAIK Tor has its own DNS with .onion, but don't those resolve to regular IPs? And if police have a normal everyday IP, can't they just imprison the site's owners directly?

My understanding is .onion addresses "resolve" to the entry point of a Tor tunnel that takes you to the hidden site. The node sitting at the entry has no knowledge of where the traffic goes, just the next hop node.

Re: Police crack down on Silk Road following first drug dealer conviction

#28

Post by polarix »

sliverstorm wrote: post #23
pippy wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be realistic though, bitcoin is mostly used for gambling and drugs. Depending on your philosophy, the freedom it enables is far more important than what it's used for.

You pose an interesting philosophical quandary. If the freedom it enables is simply the freedom to gamble illegally and trade illicit goods, is that important...? Do people make the argument that freedom is simply intrinsically good? Or do they argue, like with bittorrent, that the possible occasional positive uses outweigh the more common, primarily negative uses ?

I think the idea is that prohibitions against any value exchange are purely evil or misguided, so they should be routed around.

Re: Police crack down on Silk Road following first drug dealer conviction

#29

Post by Cushman »

betterunix wrote: post #17
DanBC wrote: post #10

I never know from stories like this if law enforcement are hopelessly clueless or if they do know what they're doing but just not releasing details. While the tech is probably secure it's easy for people to make mistakes that leak information; and while NSA or GCHQ probably find it easy to get that information they have no interest in doing so. So, do police agencies have people who know enough about the mistakes peo…

"So, do police agencies have people who know enough about the mistakes people make with Tor and Bitcoin?" I met a researcher who did some work on attacking Tor, the results of which were given to law enforcement agencies. He was a bit light on details, but the basic idea of his approach was this: 1. You narrow down the geographic location of your target. Not hard in the case of the Silk Road, since there is a physica…

Does this really work in the case of the Silk Road? Communication is completely asynchronous, the people sending and receiving packages never make a direct connection. You would need to find a geographic area for the server itself, which is presumably a closely guarded secret.

Re: Police crack down on Silk Road following first drug dealer conviction

#30

Post by Cushman »

sliverstorm wrote: post #12

Talk about bad press for Bitcoin. Silk Road is probably the number one reason regular Joe's would ever hear them mentioned.

Somebody help me out here: Isn't Silk Road also the number one reason Regular Joe would use bitcoin?
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