Dream Vendor "Canna_Bars" Sentenced to Prison • Hacker News Board

Re: Dream Vendor "Canna_Bars" Sentenced to Prison

#331

Post by junon » Mon, Sep 21, 2020, 12:48 PM UTC

jasoneckert wrote: post #78

What I find the most interesting about this article is that someone was able to be identified using a picture of their fingerprints. Thus, any photos posted online could be scoured for identification information. And with computer vision technologies becoming more mature, it means that regular video footage of people could identify them the same way in seconds or less using a wide variety of different visual traits.…

I pulled in the image from the article and tried it myself. A few minutes of fiddling around with the various filters, I got this result:

https://imgur.com/82yHUoM

I reckon that'd be enough to run through a database.

Re: Dream Vendor "Canna_Bars" Sentenced to Prison

#332

Post by stallmanite » Mon, Sep 21, 2020, 2:04 PM UTC

justanotheranon wrote: post #282

djinnandtonic wrote: post #281

I don't like to sound like I'm wearing tinfoil, but I'm not sure I believe this. We keep getting eyebrow-raising explanations for how computer criminals are caught; I always ask why bother? The American intelligence apparatus has compromised nearly all network traffic, from hardware backdoors on up. I assume the real way this person was detected and caught would be too embarrassing to admit, hence the fingerprints-fr…

Parallel Construction. it would be a national security catastrophe if it leaked that NSA was bulk decrypting all TLS/SSL traffic Internet-wide, by using a giant rainbow table of prime pair products for instant decryption without factoring, which was first proposed by Rabin back in 1997 at a NIST working group for establishing crypto standards. then NSA would lose the biggest SIGINT advantage since ENIGMA back in WW2.…

If having this information advantage is so important to national security why let the DEA be involved at all? Either the national security angle is bs or they care more about enforcing drug laws than protecting our country.

Re: Dream Vendor "Canna_Bars" Sentenced to Prison

#333

Post by peter_d_sherman » Mon, Sep 21, 2020, 3:12 PM UTC

>"Vendors sent the money launderer a certain amount of Bitcoin and the money launderer mailed cash back to the vendor."

My question:

If Party A sends Party B Bitcoin, and Party B sends Party A money, and that transaction is considered "money laundering" -- then let's suppose Party A sends Party B gold (coins, bars, bullion, etc.), and Party B sends Party A money -- does that transaction also count as "money laundering"?

?

Re: Dream Vendor "Canna_Bars" Sentenced to Prison

#334

Post by johnnyfaehell » Mon, Sep 21, 2020, 4:05 PM UTC

grumple wrote: post #276

johnnyfaehell wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The word "lots" is what's called a weasel word [1]. 1000 is "lots". Is it a lot if there are a million drug dealers? How does it compare to other crime correlations? Or general rates in the population? Let's be serious, you and I both know, I meant a high percentile. This is just a bad faith argument made after using an anedote of knowing 12 drug dealers to say a statement about a high percentile of drug dealers wo…

Most drug dealers in this country are small time weed dealers. Usually college kids or recently graduated. These are the drug dealers who are small time and basically never get caught because they aren’t the demographic that drug laws were created to criminalize. So no, you and I seem to know different things. Selling drugs is cheap, profitable, easy, and relatively low risk if you’re somewhere weed has been decrimin…

> Most drug dealers in this country are small time weed dealers. Usually college kids or recently graduated. These are the drug dealers who are small time and basically never get caught because they aren’t the demographic that drug laws were created to criminalize. So no, you and I seem to know different things.

I'm assuming you're counting people who sold drugs to a friend as a drug dealer?

And trust me, most drug dealers are not college kids. Those are edge case drug dealers. Even the small time ones who sell say 100 pills/an oz of coke a month.

> I’ve got to say it seems like this argument comes from a lack of real world experience and a strict adherence to the reports and theories of law enforcement agencies. Contrary to your belief, non-drug crimes do not suddenly spike in areas where drugs are legalized. See: Europe, American states where weed is legal.

I think the difference is, I had experience with a lot more drug dealers than you. Ranging from school kids selling a hundred bucks of weed a week, to people selling to pay for their weed, to folk selling because they got into drug debts, to people who supplied the entire town with a specific drug. You seem to know only small time folk selling weed.

> Contrary to your belief, non-drug crimes do not suddenly spike in areas where drugs are legalized. See: Europe, American states where weed is legal.

Weed? That's not where the money makers are. Very few people sell weed to make money, there is no money in weed. Heroin, cocaine, crack, meth are what people sell when they want to make money. These drugs not not legal in any country, in Portugal it is treated as a health issue but it is as far as I know, still illegal to sell the drugs.

Re: Dream Vendor "Canna_Bars" Sentenced to Prison

#335

Post by parliament32 » Mon, Sep 21, 2020, 6:08 PM UTC

heelix wrote: post #10

modin wrote: post #3

> The pictures included closeup pictures of Porras’ hand with visible fingerprint ridges. I thought via the title that they fingerprinted the lens used to take the photograph, not that there was literal pictures of fingers.

I strongly suspected that is what they did too. Got to wonder if they used the EXIF data to find him - linking photos of the pot and other social media/etc public shots, then used the fingerprints as parallel construction.

Imgur strips EXIF data on upload, so that's unlikely.

Re: Dream Vendor "Canna_Bars" Sentenced to Prison

#336

Post by wwright » Mon, Sep 21, 2020, 10:47 PM UTC

Jon_Lowtek wrote: post #164

wwright wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The war on terror and war on drugs are closely related enough (through expansion of powers and economic policies such as allowing police to purchase old military equipment) that I wonder if it’s worth even treating them as separate things.

The war on drugs has a lot more raids in the own territory while the war on terror has more bombings in foreign territory, so for now there are some major differences. However once using predator and reaper drones against citizens without any judicial oversight is normalized, that difference will be gone.

I should have made my statement more carefully. I agree with you fundamentally; I see them as two heads of one beast, though.

Re: Dream Vendor "Canna_Bars" Sentenced to Prison

#337

Post by tacocataco » Mon, Sep 21, 2020, 11:57 PM UTC

ohyeshedid wrote: post #269

jijji wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i think the OP is talking about crystal meth, not ritalin or adderall. Ritalin and Adderall is not what "faces of meth" depicts, as it depicts long term use of smoked crystal meth addiction.

This is correct, also part of the nuance that's often missing in these kinds of discussions. Pharmacy grade drugs are a different beast than the street drugs. From packaging to usage, it's two sides of the same coin.

So we should make all of it pharmacy grade?

Re: Dream Vendor "Canna_Bars" Sentenced to Prison

#338

Post by CJefferson » Tue, Sep 22, 2020, 5:02 AM UTC

spenczar5 wrote: post #246

CJefferson wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm going to be honest, the argument that hemp is a generally great material has always seemed weak to me. There are plenty of countries where growing hemp is legal, and it still never seems to get much use.

It historically has had tons of use. It was pretty much the only material used for making rope for centuries in Europe, and was used widely in building construction too. Hemp cultivation was a crucial piece of colonial Virginia’s economy, heavily promoted by the British government, and it was used for clothing, sails, and even fine textiles as far back as the Viking age (eg, https://www.nature.com/articles/srep02686…

Sorry, should be clearer. It did indeed have historical uses. Not sure if it has much current ones.

Re: Dream Vendor "Canna_Bars" Sentenced to Prison

#339

Post by tacocataco » Tue, Sep 22, 2020, 5:47 AM UTC

TheAdamAndChe wrote: post #35

johnwheeler wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He also had a prior felony, sold meth, sold Xanax, and had an Uzi. Not someone you’d want to date your daughter.

The Uzi was a semi-automatic. It wouldn't be any more dangerous than your typical Glock, but would be bigger and heavier. He's still a felon carrying a gun which is bad, but it's not worse than any other gun.

Maybe he wouldn't need a gun if his trade was legal and he could call the cops when people threaten him.

Re: Dream Vendor "Canna_Bars" Sentenced to Prison

#340

Post by mianas » Tue, Sep 22, 2020, 11:16 AM UTC

Scoundreller wrote: post #188

Jabbles wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imgur certainly doesn't display EXIF by default, but are you sure it doesn't retain it such that it could be obtained by a warrant?

If I were them, I wouldn’t save it just to reduce my warrant workload. Kinda like 4chan and DMCAs: there’s no point since it’s usually deleted by the time it’s submitted anyway.

4chan is a bit special when it comes to government orders.

For example, they have a (heavily limited) de-facto warrant canary. Since damn near all of them specify that no data should be deleted for a period of time, posting is disabled on a board, or the entire site so nothing gets deleted.

They also disallow posting of files with embedded data (based on some heuristic) and either strip exif data, or forbid posting images containing it. (the exif stripping thing comes from people accidentally doxing themselves by posting an image from facebook a few years back)