Silk Road/Darkweb

How many knew about it before the news broke? I had no idea such things existed. Thanks for telling everyone so stupid kids can go out and find this stuff!

I knew about TOR and the darkweb. I didn't know about the Silk Road.

Pretty nutty if you ask me.

I have no idea what it is. Guess I need to go look it up now.

pinchvalve wrote: How many knew about it before the news broke? I had no idea such things existed. Thanks for telling everyone so stupid kids can go out and find this stuff!

Stupid kids have found out about it long ago. It's stupid parents that are only just learning of it.

Was news to me. Not surprising though.

News to me too, but then I'm a parent, and not young any more.

Known about it for awhile. Never cared to actually go look.

I read about it on zerohedge a few months ago, I guess. I figured it would get shut down.

Silkroad gets "Shutdown by the FBI" at the exact same time most of the government websites shutdown, due to the shutdown....

IT'S aTRAP!

I was aware it existed from a few news articles, but never bothered looking for it.

Never had heard of the Darkweb, but I heard about the Silk Road from a friend I met about 8 months ago.

Heard about the Darkweb and TOR a few years ago and IIRC at the time it was sort of like you had to have an invitation to join, so to speak; i.e. an existing member had to recommend someone. It appears to be mostly a way for child porn sellers to operate under the radar.

I have a TOR system build out of a older machine that I built clean. Just to poke around not to do anythings haddy, was interested in the technology.

What is astonishing to me is that it took how many years to catch this guy when he was leaving trails out in the open for anybody to follow.

There are more dangerous places on the darknet run by people with much better skills, in some ways I wish they had just left it open with the external tap in place they would have found much more interesting things.

I knew about it before it was cool.

smugface

Anyone want to give the rundown on what this is before I end up on an NSA list searching for information to find out.

I hope I am not already on it. I have searched Silk Road a few times, but I was searching for a seller of Mitsubishi Delica's in BC Canada.

never heard of either .... ... might be time to fire up the googles machine

Basically Silk Road was like ebay except the most commonly sold items were illegal drugs. People connected to it using TOR ('the onion router', an anonymizing relay service) and paid for them using bitcoins (a cryptographic digital currency that's actually gaining some traction).

It turns out that the guy who started/ran/whatever it was an idiot and made stupid rookie mistakes in covering his tracks, so the feds laughed and shut him down. I've also read that the site had a record of all the transactions that went over it, so it will be interesting to see if the people who used its services are now on the government's list...

If by rookie mistakes, you mean trying to hire hitmen to kill people, then yes.

Had he not done that, he would likely still be just fine........at least for the time being.

z31maniac wrote: If by rookie mistakes, you mean trying to hire hitmen to kill people, then yes. Had he not done that, he would likely still be just fine........at least for the time being.

No rookie mistakes like using his own email address and name to promote the site in the first place.

And if you look at the story of how they caught him, they just mined the internet archive (whichever one, NSA, Wayback, they didn't say) of forum postings about the time his started it looking for promotions. Kinda like skapes-it-over, paid blogging promotion stuff. His email address linked to those forum accounts led right to him. And, he knew he was being watched, so he buys 5 or 6 fake ID's from Canada which "just happened" to be inspected at the border crossing. And, the feds went to some other country and "convinced" them to give the feds full access to some server that just happened to be hosting the site. Guess that TOR thing isn't quite the onion they thought it was, huh? Oh, yeah, and BTW, the feds created the TOR onion thing in the first place to give the Arab Spring anonymous (kinda, if you're not a fed) email and forum stuff. His trying to hire a hit man (which was a fed) was just one of the things they got him on. They would have got him without that anytime they wanted.

Dr. Hess wrote: Oh, yeah, and BTW, the feds created the TOR onion thing in the first place to give the Arab Spring anonymous (kinda, if you're not a fed) email and forum stuff. His trying to hire a hit man (which was a fed) was just one of the things they got him on. They would have got him without that anytime they wanted.

Hess, yes, onion routing was started as a DARPA thing, but it predates the arab spring by several years. I suspect you mean it was created so it would be available in similar situations to the arab spring.

Everything I'm interested in is a DARPA initiative.

GameboyRMH wrote: I knew about it before it was cool. *smugface*

Hipster

Yeah, Joey, I could see that. Probably just rolled out as an expedient for the spring thing. DARPA controls virtually all science research.