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

1.5 TB of Dark Net Market scrapes

gwern.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 78 posts

Re: 1.5 TB of Dark Net Market scrapes

#61

Post by hfsktr »

WalterGR wrote: post #52
jmduke wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unrelated to the darknet, but this Twitter account evoked a very similar feeling in me (random snippets from userboards in the 80's and early 90's): https://twitter.com/wwwtxt

"I heard about the Apple Watch recently and was going to check it out—but not now. It can't even transmit or input data. ☯93JAN" Prescient.

Some of them a bit less clairvoyant about the future:

"The actual date for the end of the world is July 5, 1998. ☯92NOV"

It is interesting how many were accurate or onto something. I just didn't expect it.

edit: Found this gem after wasting more time that I cared to.

"I think the future of personal communications holds great things in store for us, but privacy won't be one those things. ☯94AUG"

Re: 1.5 TB of Dark Net Market scrapes

#62

Post by gwern »

userbinator wrote: post #47
gwern wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are generally not text only. I feel that images are useful to allow browsing the markets as they were and may be highly valuable in their own right as research material, so I tried to collects images where applicable. (The forums usually did not support any kind of image upload other than avatars, so this is more relevant to the markets than forum scrapes.) As far as CP goes, there should be essentially zero CP…

DNM users almost universally loathe CP, and no market has ever dared to permit sales. These users are willing to do so many other illegal things, but the thought of being known as a pedophile or supporting pedophilia in any way, is completely abhorrent to them? Interesting datapoint.

It is interesting, isn't it? You might expect there to be a 'general factor of criminality/antisociality/violence' akin to how we find a general factor of intelligence in psychological things, but as far as I can tell, drug use or sales seems to be largely orthogonal to other kinds of crimes - most of the DNM users will never buy credit card dumps and rip off retailers (carding is disliked by a lot of DNM users, although not enough to totally ostracize it like CP), most DNM users will never download CP, most DNM users will never beat or rape someone, etc. I have no issue buying and using illegal drugs, so I'm a criminal, but I'm not the same kind of criminal as, say, the Vallejo kidnappers (which BTW if you haven't read the complaint, it's an amazing read if you're into true-crime stories: http://www1.icsi.berkeley.edu/~nweaver/vallejo.pdf ).

This probably has a lot to do with why the War on Drugs has been such a failure and why legalizing does not seem to unleash crime waves.

Re: 1.5 TB of Dark Net Market scrapes

#63

Post by tedks »

mikeash wrote: post #33
tomcam wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Um.. It says Black Market right on the tin.

Indeed, a warning that it may contain illegal content would be about as sensible as the standard "Warning: may contain nuts" label on a tin of nuts.

What is illegal in a download of an online drug marketplace? Are pictures of drugs banned where you live?

Re: 1.5 TB of Dark Net Market scrapes

#64

Post by mikeash »

tedks wrote: post #63
mikeash wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed, a warning that it may contain illegal content would be about as sensible as the standard "Warning: may contain nuts" label on a tin of nuts.

What is illegal in a download of an online drug marketplace? Are pictures of drugs banned where you live?

It's a general black market, not just drugs. For example, one of the sites described on that page is PEDOFUNDING, "A crowdfunding site for child pornography." Now the dump isn't supposed to contain any images, but it's hard to be 100% sure. In any case, whatever risk there might be seems to be clearly implied in the name and description there.

Re: 1.5 TB of Dark Net Market scrapes

#66

Post by tripzilch »

hfsktr wrote: post #61
WalterGR wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I heard about the Apple Watch recently and was going to check it out—but not now. It can't even transmit or input data. ☯93JAN" Prescient.

Some of them a bit less clairvoyant about the future: "The actual date for the end of the world is July 5, 1998. ☯92NOV" It is interesting how many were accurate or onto something. I just didn't expect it. edit: Found this gem after wasting more time that I cared to. "I think the future of personal communications holds great things in store for us, but privacy won't be one those things. ☯94AUG"

July 5, 1998 is "X-Day", from the Church of Subgenius. It actually happened.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-Day_%28Church_of_the_SubGeni...

Re: 1.5 TB of Dark Net Market scrapes

#67

Post by chm »

WalterGR wrote: post #51
chm wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't do MDMA personally but I have some friends who like going to raves with some chemical supplies. On the streets, some make it a point of honor to sell/buy only "MDMA" because "ecstasy" is "crap". The only precise name is MDMA. In my opinion the name users give to what they're ingesting is inconsequential. Most users have no idea what MDMA means anyway, nor would they know how to chemically identify if what the…

The only precise name is MDMA. There's also "Molly," which is the street name for pure MDMA. (Though: most terms are tied to a specific geography.) ...nor would they know how to chemically identify if what they bought might contain MDMA. True, but that's not unique to MDMA users. cf. the heroin in the Netherlands that was being sold as cocaine, and which lead to several deaths. Organizations such as Dance Safe have e…

Ah yes, Molly. Heard that one too. The heroin is apparently still being sold as cocaine in Amsterdam. I was posters about this on stores a couple of months ago :/

Re: 1.5 TB of Dark Net Market scrapes

#68

Post by runnr_az »

tripzilch wrote: post #66
hfsktr wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some of them a bit less clairvoyant about the future: "The actual date for the end of the world is July 5, 1998. ☯92NOV" It is interesting how many were accurate or onto something. I just didn't expect it. edit: Found this gem after wasting more time that I cared to. "I think the future of personal communications holds great things in store for us, but privacy won't be one those things. ☯94AUG"

July 5, 1998 is "X-Day", from the Church of Subgenius. It actually happened. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-Day_%28Church_of_the_SubGeni...

This is true.

Love the "See also:" Heaven's Gate, a real-life cult with a similar concept of "X-Day"

Re: 1.5 TB of Dark Net Market scrapes

#69

Post by hfsktr »

tripzilch wrote: post #66
hfsktr wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some of them a bit less clairvoyant about the future: "The actual date for the end of the world is July 5, 1998. ☯92NOV" It is interesting how many were accurate or onto something. I just didn't expect it. edit: Found this gem after wasting more time that I cared to. "I think the future of personal communications holds great things in store for us, but privacy won't be one those things. ☯94AUG"

July 5, 1998 is "X-Day", from the Church of Subgenius. It actually happened. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-Day_%28Church_of_the_SubGeni...

Some of the quotes are from before I was even born so that is just one of the references I don't know and just assumed it was a date thrown out for no reason.

Re: 1.5 TB of Dark Net Market scrapes

#70

Post by joshmn »

gwern wrote: post #37
fractalcat wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mean like this? https://archive.org/download/dnmarchives

I don't think that works. It's not remotely browsable or searchable. It would be quite challenging to put these scrapes up, anyway. They're regular wget crawls with a regular directory/file structure, the problem is that there's so much material and so many files that it can be almost impossible to find what you are looking for... (Plus you need to rewrite links into relative links to make everything render properly.…

Hmm. Now I'm thinking that I might end up using your idea (scraping the dark web) and using something like httrack[0] to do exactly that: structure.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTrack

Post reply on HN