111–120 of 243 posts
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SR was just a glorified rails app, and my understanding was that it was initially pretty buggy. It's within reason that someone could pick up the knowledge they need within a few months to build such a thing, at least enough to get it rolling.
I thought it used PHP? At least the question on StackOverflow that allegedly led to his demise asked about PHP issues.
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Do you ever buy anything at grocery store, drug store, restaurant that you put in your body? There is risk in everything. Generally people aren't sociopaths and aren't out to harm others. Risk is minimal but exists. Sellers on Silkroad do have reputation? Anonymous does not mean "unknown".
> Do you ever buy anything at grocery store, drug store, restaurant that you put in your body? Not really a fair comparison. If a grocery store assaults or defrauds you, you have legal recourse. There is nothing you can do if an illicit transaction fails. The rest of what you say is true, of course.
This is more recourse than you have in practice against a grocery store if they refuse to give you a refund - what are you going to do, sue them?
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> considering that the sellers might be cops Why wouldn't law enforcement pose as buyers, as well? This is a common tactic in narcotics enforcement. Entrapment often isn't an issue, as the seller took the first step of advertising the drugs for sale. Are you getting at the fact that the buyer must have a receiving address, while the seller can ship anonymously? I would be skeptical of that. If I were attempting to tr…
> Why wouldn't law enforcement pose as buyers, as well? Because as a buyer you don't know who the seller is. You just receive your package. But as a seller, you know your buyer's mailing address. It becomes trivial to catch the buyer.
I'd never buy heroin from a website, but I see the Silk Road as cyber-civil-disobedience, and I hope the persona of DPR and the site itself are as unsinkable as they claim. The drug war is a ghastly thing, and the number of people we lock up in the US is more shameful than our foreign policy. You can begrudge the first DPR his lame security, shady murder contracts, and ill-gotten fortune, but he's the product of our…
I don't see the Silk Roads of the world making much difference with regard to the drug war. Right now Silk Road is the eBay of drugs, where convenience is it's competitive advantage. I can get some drug without visiting a shady person in some shady place, but the drugs (in general) are still coming to the US the bloody, violent way via paramilitaries, druglords, etc. A huge part of the US war on drugs takes place amo…
It has symbolic value I think. While I don't feel particularly anarchistic, I think a solid dose of a rebellious streak in society is good. Just to keep the government on its toes. A counterforce to governments tendency to do NSA scandal type stuff if you will.
A serious question: while I have nothing against Silk Road (the drug war is a waste of money anyways), aren't people afraid of putting stuff in their body that they had an anonymous person send to them? I mean, unless the seller has a reputation, isn't there is a substantial risk of using that drug? Are my fears unfound? On one hand, the idea of buying drugs online is probably more safe than doing it on the streets,…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
SR was just a glorified rails app, and my understanding was that it was initially pretty buggy. It's within reason that someone could pick up the knowledge they need within a few months to build such a thing, at least enough to get it rolling.
I thought it used PHP? At least the question on StackOverflow that allegedly led to his demise asked about PHP issues.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is what made Kaczynski (the Unabomber) so difficult to track. IIRC, he would travel for a few hours (by bus) to a town and deposit his packages in a mailbox there [citation needed]. This made it difficult to track him, since the origin of the package didn't leak any information about the sender. For sellers, proper OPSec requires that they do not leave fingerprints in/on the package, that mailing locations are r…
Isn't that also a result in the quantity of packages sent? If you want to run a business, you'd need a much larger set of "random" mailboxes then if you are sending out a handful of bombs over years.
If you're smart enough to devise these opsec procedures, you're probably smart enough to make a decent living doing something legal. So being a drug dealer is only worth it if you can do it at scale and make serious money. But these opsec procedures would significantly erode your hourly rate, making Silk Road an unattractive proposition. Unless, of course, you're willing to throw caution to the wind and optimize for efficiency rather than security.
I'd never buy heroin from a website, but I see the Silk Road as cyber-civil-disobedience, and I hope the persona of DPR and the site itself are as unsinkable as they claim. The drug war is a ghastly thing, and the number of people we lock up in the US is more shameful than our foreign policy. You can begrudge the first DPR his lame security, shady murder contracts, and ill-gotten fortune, but he's the product of our…
The current DPR is allegedly the third one, and the one in jail is the second, as he said in an interview with Forbes.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> considering that the sellers might be cops Why wouldn't law enforcement pose as buyers, as well? This is a common tactic in narcotics enforcement. Entrapment often isn't an issue, as the seller took the first step of advertising the drugs for sale. Are you getting at the fact that the buyer must have a receiving address, while the seller can ship anonymously? I would be skeptical of that. If I were attempting to tr…
This is what made Kaczynski (the Unabomber) so difficult to track. IIRC, he would travel for a few hours (by bus) to a town and deposit his packages in a mailbox there [citation needed]. This made it difficult to track him, since the origin of the package didn't leak any information about the sender. For sellers, proper OPSec requires that they do not leave fingerprints in/on the package, that mailing locations are r…
For example, conceivably when you package the drugs in your warehouse, local pollens and molds could find their way into the insides of the packaging. If the distribution of pollens and molds is unique to a reasonably small area, that would be an information leak.
A bit sci-fi? Sort of. You'd need a database of mold and pollen distributions for the whole country, plus tools to analyze the distribution in a given package. That's daunting, and maybe it's more trouble than it's worth for drug enforcement. But it's not outright impossible. And I have no idea what's the maximum effort DEA is willing to spend to track down Silk Road sellers.
This is just one example of a possible information leak, off the top of my head. I'm sure we could come up with others, if we thought hard enough about it. All of this is to say that it's not the information leak you're worried about, it's the one you haven't thought of that will ruin you.