31–40 of 73 posts
This definitely is not the first silk rd conviction plenty of ppl have been nabbed by customs around the world if you read the forums just they were smart enough not to say anything without a lawyer
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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…
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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.
I know I'm being a little extreme, but again- what!?!
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
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.
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"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.
In the case of the Silk road, the police would probably need to direct the target to another website, and somehow convince the target to leave that website open. Harder, yes, although probably not impossible -- one might, for example, claim to be directing the target to a website where a PGP key is being distributed, and then use Javascript to open a window in the background (one of the many reasons why one should disable Javascript whenever they use Tor). It is generally considered to be good advice not to follow off-site links for something like Silk Road, but the reality is that most people who go there are not experts on computer security and do not understand how Tor might be attacked (consider, for example, this case: http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2007/11/encrypted-e-mai/ ). The police may not be world-class cryptanalysts, but they are pretty good at tricking people.
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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'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?
https://www.torproject.org/docs/hidden-services.html.en tl;dr hidden services are anonymous
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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.
The researcher's original work was meant to crack down on child pornography distribution, where the covert channel would be embedded in the download of a video or large file of some sort. In the case of the Silk road, the police would probably need to direct the target to another website, and somehow convince the target to leave that website open. Harder, yes, although probably not impossible -- one might, for exampl…
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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.
But doesn't some node eventually have to know the final destination of the hidden server?