Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hansa has already taken AB's place.
....aaaand it's gone
I wonder if the time was intentional to allow more people to be caught.
AlphaBay, the Largest Online 'Dark Market,' Shut Down
41–50 of 134 posts
Re: AlphaBay, the Largest Online 'Dark Market,' Shut Down
#42This won't stop people who want drugs from buying them. What it'll do is prevent some people from buying them from reputable sellers with positive feedback. Now they might have to find some shady dealer who could be selling them rat poison.
Why is 'selling poison instead of drugs' even a logical scare-tactic? Wouldn't even the shadiest of dealers want to keep their customers/hosts/victims around to, you know, keep bleeding money?
See the recent news about fentanyl.
Re: AlphaBay, the Largest Online 'Dark Market,' Shut Down
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why is 'selling poison instead of drugs' even a logical scare-tactic? Wouldn't even the shadiest of dealers want to keep their customers/hosts/victims around to, you know, keep bleeding money?
There is currently an epidemic in Vancouver (among other cities) of overdose deaths from a drug called Fentanyl that is several orders of magnitude more potent than morphine. People want it because it is so potent, but the problem with extreme potency is that the difference between an imperceptible difference and a lethal dose is orders of magnitude smaller in terms of weight. My guess is 'poison' was a slight hyperb…
Few people actually want fentanyl. Some enjoy the patches, but it doesn't have the same feel as heroin/morphine/etc., though they're close enough to all get you high. It's just super cheap and available, illegally. When the cost of the equivalent dose is a tenth or even a quarter, well that's a huge selling point.
As always with opiates, the real issue is improper manufacturing/labeling. Even IV users would be mostly fine if they had properly labelled IV ampoules.
Re: AlphaBay, the Largest Online 'Dark Market,' Shut Down
#44"'The so-called anonymity of the dark web is illusory,' said Acting Administrator Chuck Rosenberg of the DEA." I wonder if this is true, or simply hyperbole. I'm extremely curios on the technical details of this bust. Edit: It appears that some info can be found here https://www.justice.gov/opa/press-release/file/982821/downlo... . Look at the section "Alexandre Cazes: Alphabay's Founder and Operator" It looks like t…
Maybe. In any case involving TOR, I would not dismiss the possibility of parallel construction.
Tor hidden servers with large traffic aren't too hard to find when you can see the entire internet and can shape traffic.
I think the future is a reputation network/market built on top of something like ethereum.
Re: AlphaBay, the Largest Online 'Dark Market,' Shut Down
#45You have to think eventually the criminals will evolve proper OPSEC - there is simply too much money to be made. Also, you really should be living in a place with no extradition - Thai police picking you up is a bad place to be. Vietnam is close by and has no extradition - a much better choice for aspiring criminals.
Re: AlphaBay, the Largest Online 'Dark Market,' Shut Down
#46This won't stop people who want drugs from buying them. What it'll do is prevent some people from buying them from reputable sellers with positive feedback. Now they might have to find some shady dealer who could be selling them rat poison.
Why is 'selling poison instead of drugs' even a logical scare-tactic? Wouldn't even the shadiest of dealers want to keep their customers/hosts/victims around to, you know, keep bleeding money?
It's not a logical tactic, just, without professional equipment (whose sale is restricted!) working with drugs whose doses are measured in micrograms is a hard task and likely to result in failure.
Why are the drugs in the illicit marketplace the ones with such small active doses? Prohibition strongly incentivises the manufacture/transport/sale of drugs with higher potency (per unit volume) -- as the odds of detection go up with bulkiness: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_law_of_prohibition
Re: AlphaBay, the Largest Online 'Dark Market,' Shut Down
#47Don't these people know that they will never kill this. Just like Napster's death, and oink, and what, and so on. Every time they shut one of these down the next one will be harder to shut down.
Huh? What's the 2017 version of Napster?
Re: AlphaBay, the Largest Online 'Dark Market,' Shut Down
#48Condolences to any users/vendors who lost coin because of the takedown. Anybody have info on how the admin was found? Was the method of DDoSing Tor nodes used to force traffic into honeypot'd Tor nodes?
Yeah man, those poor poor vendors who make money on addicted users...
Re: AlphaBay, the Largest Online 'Dark Market,' Shut Down
#49Don't these people know that they will never kill this. Just like Napster's death, and oink, and what, and so on. Every time they shut one of these down the next one will be harder to shut down.
Huh? What's the 2017 version of Napster?
You can freely play most songs you want now (through youtube, bandcamp, soundcloud, spotify). I don't think there needs to be a 2017 version of Napster, because music isn't locked in physical albums anymore.
Re: AlphaBay, the Largest Online 'Dark Market,' Shut Down
#50You have to think eventually the criminals will evolve proper OPSEC - there is simply too much money to be made. Also, you really should be living in a place with no extradition - Thai police picking you up is a bad place to be. Vietnam is close by and has no extradition - a much better choice for aspiring criminals.
Or it will evolve to being run by Russian mobsters or North Korea--folks that are much harder to stop than random 25-year old geeks from America and Canada.