Live data from Hacker News

Feds Demand Reddit Identify Users of a Dark-Web Drug Forum

wired.com

21–30 of 221 posts

Re: Feds Demand Reddit Identify Users of a Dark-Web Drug Forum

#21

Warning: this opinion probably won't fit into the HN zeitgeist. If you commit a crime online don't be surprised when they seek to gain evidence against you. This isn't a liberty issue. This is a you're probably a criminal issue and law enforcement is coming after you. I don't protect drug dealers in my neighborhood because of their right to free speech and personal liberty so why would I protect these guys? It just a…

"violence and drugs" One of these things is not like the other.

Re: Feds Demand Reddit Identify Users of a Dark-Web Drug Forum

#22
post #10

We (speaking as a netizen) need Usenet 2.0; eg: something that can fulfill the role of reddit that is decentralized/distributed. Perhaps reddit can even transition into being a reader (a la google reader) for people that don't want to set up their own node. I'm not saying that drug discussion is the quintessential act that deserves to be protected, but I am worried that the government has such an easy avenue to get t…

i agree. recently i desired to create an online community for a small game that probably wouldn't have many users or posts. subreddits are fantastic for that type of thing, and i like the ease of use and PRAW, however, handing over all of the community's data to conde nast isn't something i'm interested in. what i'd like is a tool with which to create online communities, which would consist of a message board with up…

> * what i'd like is a tool with which to create online communities*

vBulletin has support for all of this, as does WordPress, and probably a hundred other pieces of software.

The downside, as always, is that you become a sysadmin and moderator and hacker and on-call technician.

Re: Feds Demand Reddit Identify Users of a Dark-Web Drug Forum

#23
post #17
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i agree. recently i desired to create an online community for a small game that probably wouldn't have many users or posts. subreddits are fantastic for that type of thing, and i like the ease of use and PRAW, however, handing over all of the community's data to conde nast isn't something i'm interested in. what i'd like is a tool with which to create online communities, which would consist of a message board with up…

See https://www.wilderssecurity.com/threads/list-of-the-best-enc...

interesting, hadn't heard of virtually all of these, thanks ;-)

Re: Feds Demand Reddit Identify Users of a Dark-Web Drug Forum

#24

Warning: this opinion probably won't fit into the HN zeitgeist. If you commit a crime online don't be surprised when they seek to gain evidence against you. This isn't a liberty issue. This is a you're probably a criminal issue and law enforcement is coming after you. I don't protect drug dealers in my neighborhood because of their right to free speech and personal liberty so why would I protect these guys? It just a…

The reason I know you're lying is that anybody that I have met that has done any time says they wouldn't wish it on their worse enemy.

Re: Feds Demand Reddit Identify Users of a Dark-Web Drug Forum

#25

Warning: this opinion probably won't fit into the HN zeitgeist. If you commit a crime online don't be surprised when they seek to gain evidence against you. This isn't a liberty issue. This is a you're probably a criminal issue and law enforcement is coming after you. I don't protect drug dealers in my neighborhood because of their right to free speech and personal liberty so why would I protect these guys? It just a…

Because buying and selling drugs is a mild crime which carry too harsh sentences. Especially considering the awful prison system which makes no attempt to help inmates become productive members of society.

Re: Feds Demand Reddit Identify Users of a Dark-Web Drug Forum

#26

Warning: this opinion probably won't fit into the HN zeitgeist. If you commit a crime online don't be surprised when they seek to gain evidence against you. This isn't a liberty issue. This is a you're probably a criminal issue and law enforcement is coming after you. I don't protect drug dealers in my neighborhood because of their right to free speech and personal liberty so why would I protect these guys? It just a…

I'm not sure why you think the majority of Hacker News would be against you.

There are uncomfortable uses of state power in the drug war, like FISA warrants and civil asset forfeiture. This is not one of them.

Edit after reading replies to your comment: Well, I guess I predicted wrongly.

Re: Feds Demand Reddit Identify Users of a Dark-Web Drug Forum

#27
post #11

One would assume that the users of deep web-related subreddits would take just as many precautions to protect their privacy when using Reddit as they do when on the deep web. Just because you don't actually conduct illegal activity via Reddit doesn't mean that it's impossible for someone to connect the dots to your deep web forum account(s) with enough effort. If people turned out to truly be that foolish then I will…

>One would assume One would be quite foolish to assume strong OpSec from drug seekers and their enablers. We've seen case after case resulting from these busts with absolutely trivial investigations necessary to locate the defendants.

Not a /r/DarkNetMarket customer, but I read it to keep the pulse on that section of the Bitcoin economy. You're very right. Every few months someone posts a "tails is overkill, here's my (misconfigured insecure) mobile TOR setup that is just as good". I'd wager many darknetmarkets customers aren't keeping tor properly up to date either.

Re: Feds Demand Reddit Identify Users of a Dark-Web Drug Forum

#28
post #17
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i agree. recently i desired to create an online community for a small game that probably wouldn't have many users or posts. subreddits are fantastic for that type of thing, and i like the ease of use and PRAW, however, handing over all of the community's data to conde nast isn't something i'm interested in. what i'd like is a tool with which to create online communities, which would consist of a message board with up…

See https://www.wilderssecurity.com/threads/list-of-the-best-enc...

I'm amused that this pops up two scary security warnings in Chrome, presumably due to the fact that it's a self-signed cert and is using what Chrome says is outdated crypto.

Re: Feds Demand Reddit Identify Users of a Dark-Web Drug Forum

#29

Warning: this opinion probably won't fit into the HN zeitgeist. If you commit a crime online don't be surprised when they seek to gain evidence against you. This isn't a liberty issue. This is a you're probably a criminal issue and law enforcement is coming after you. I don't protect drug dealers in my neighborhood because of their right to free speech and personal liberty so why would I protect these guys? It just a…

>they are criminals

They likely disagree that their "crimes" ought to be illegal, and do not accept the legitimacy of any punishment for such behavior.

Why should they have to "make a choice" and make "better decisions" when they don't believe what they've done is wrong?

Re: Feds Demand Reddit Identify Users of a Dark-Web Drug Forum

#30

Warning: this opinion probably won't fit into the HN zeitgeist. If you commit a crime online don't be surprised when they seek to gain evidence against you. This isn't a liberty issue. This is a you're probably a criminal issue and law enforcement is coming after you. I don't protect drug dealers in my neighborhood because of their right to free speech and personal liberty so why would I protect these guys? It just a…

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jury_nullification

Law does not equal to the "rules of society", at best they asymptote the "rules of society", if there is even something like that.

In programming term, law is the formalized code (ie a program) of a society's moral stance. And as any computer program, it has bug, unintended behaviours, and changing one part of it will affect other parts due to unknown complexity. Imagine how hard it is to do random stupid CRUD app at scale, our moral code itself is complex and ambiguous, applying to a few hundred millions users and it's a big fat mess that's barely coherent.

I don't have an opinion on the whole "war on drugs" one way or another. But it's straight up dangerous to believe that the law is the be-all end-all in a society, especially when more basic ideals are put down to be less important.

> they broke the rules of society and now society wants to punish them

Contrary to popular belief, every single one of us here on HN are still human, not robots. And we are decidedly part of society.

Post reply on HN