Analyzing Silk Road 2.0
An anonymous reader writes: After a recent article about breaking the CAPTCHA on the latest incarnation of Silk Road (the darknet-enabled drug market place), Darryl Lau decided to investigate exactly what narcotics people were buying and selling online. He found roughly 13,000 separate listings. Some sellers identify the country they're in, and the top six are the U.S., Australia, England, Germany, and the Netherlands, and Canada. The site also has a bunch of product reviews. If you assume that each review comes from a sale, and multiply that by the listed prices, reviewed items alone represent $20 million worth of business. Lau also has some interesting charts, graphs, and assorted stats. MDMA is the most listed and reviewed drug, and sellers are offering it in quantities of up to a kilogram at a time. The average price for the top 1000 items is $236. Prescription drugs represent a huge portion of the total listings, though no individual prescription drugs have high volume on their own.
nm, i'm stoo stoned to remember what I was going to post.
Be seeing you...
236 dollars buys you what? A boatload of cocain? One MDMA pill? That's no way to get any relevant information out of research.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
In order for this research to be of any use we need peer reviews as well.
Can they please go into some detail as to the methodology used to connect to Silk Road 2.0, how they purchased things anonymously and how to tell teh real thing from fakes?
Also, if they have any idea of how to hide a kilo of say uhm, feathers from the authorities in terms of shipment, delivery and pickup that would be great for uhm, scientific purposes.
A 'singular oddity' is an event that cannot be explained and only happens when you are alone.
Errr, go look for yourself. Are you a FBI agent trying to encourage someone to break the law?
Some sellers identify the country they're in, and the top six are the U.S., Australia, England, Germany, and the Netherlands, and Canada.
Hey, you need a few more ands in there...
The price is only so high because these drugs are illegal. I can't see the page (slashdotted?), but chances are that these drugs would not even be worthwhile to sell if the price was not driven up by making them illegal.
Nae king! Nae laird! Nae yurrupiean pressedent! We willna be fooled again!
Are the captcha so ineffective?
He uses OpenCV for pre-process and Tesseract for OCR, and has >90% success for captchas...
That's great but how do sites counter bots nowdays?
> They don't pay any taxes - not federal, state, county, or city!
This is my big problem with drugs. Just think of all the lovely healthcare the country could buy with that drugs tax.
> Think of the children!
I don't think Peado bear is allowed on it.
Drugs are an evil scourge upon humanity!
Drugs are destroying the moral fiber of our citizens!
Yeah right.. I've been hooked on opiates for 15 years now. I work 65 hours a week, I pay my taxes, I keep to myself, and my morals are still intact last time I checked. I do it legally by going to my local Methadone clinic. You see, I love pain killers and I don't want or need help and nobody is going to stop me from taking them.
I don't blame you for your opinion. You just like many others are the result of years of drugs are evil propaganda spread by the cartels. They do this because legal drugs are bad for business.
Unless you are actually buying drugs I don't think you are breaking any laws.
If I write here: "Order drugs for $5!" You are not breaking any law by reading it.
These two things don't go together. You may want to re-evaluate. Get real help and free yourself.
Different person here. This is in line with my own personal morality and absolutely correct. My life is mine to do with as I please. I am free to do whatever I want whenever I want, provided that the consequences are SOLELY confined to consenting adults (generally that would be just me).
Anything else is an evil desire to control other people, with the approval you get from your own conscience, by convincing yourself it's for their own good, so you can pat yourself on the back and feel like a good person. The typical lack of reasoning ability, wisdom or long-term thinking in most people today and the general shallow thinking of the popular culture sadly promotes and legitimizes this inability to be satisfied with one's own life while respecting that others will live theirs as they please and realizing that telling people how they should live has never worked in the first place (c.f. Prohibition) so there should not even be a debate about this.
Someone who cannot responsibly use things (usually due to either a lack of personal maturity and self-knowledge, and/or an inability to deal with one's own life that causes them to reach for drugs as a quick-fix "remedy") has a problem. There are many others who use drugs the same way you might come home from work and drink a beer and stay home. Like Bill Hicks pointed out, it sure is strange the way you never hear about responsible drug users on the news or see them portrayed on shows. That would contradict all the fear propaganda and think-of-the-children rhetoric. Pay attention and you'll notice that the major mass media outlets will generally never contradict either: each other, or anything that faciltiates control. Adult people who are expected to make their own decisions about their own lives in a responsible manner, without being told how to live, absolutely does not facilitate control. Qui bono?
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
This is the first slashvertisement I've seen here that hasn't generated a single complaint! Does seem to indicate that the war on drugs is a losing battle.
As long as someone is fairly affluent this is not unusual. It is when people close to the poverty line get hooked that you run into problems since so much of their resources go into supporting the addiction as opposed to just taking a chunk out of their disposable income.
It seems that this is pretty good proof that there is a demand for reputable MDMA. Perhaps the club scene would be safer if there were less mystery powders claiming to be "Molly". If the dosage was known steps could be taken to provide the most fun for the least amount of harm (it sure as hell isn't harmless).
It's also purportedly good for therapy too. I plan to get some for my parents on their 50th anniversary.
Of course it is a Honey Pot people .
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Simplistic answers to complex problems set off the trip (love the play) wires.
You left out a whole set of parameters both known, and suspected, as contributors of drug addiction/use.
As one obvious example: Some people are wired for addictive/obsessive/compulsive behavior.
Sadly, that omission trashed out your whole post.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
If you come over to The Netherlands you can buy 'em right in the city center - leaves and everything on 'm. You can draw thea from the plant and use that. And due to all that nice agricultural expertise we even managed to increase the THC count to the level of a harddrug, so I'm pretty sure you're not going to have to concentrate it - it's going to be pretty dangerous if you do that to plants with 18 to 20% THC in the tips already.
Therefore, by the (faulty) logic you're using, you're just a cow with a keyboard - osu-neko (2604)
It rather depends on what you get hooked on. If you get hooked on heroine or morphine (which is worse, I've understood), you're only going for the fix after a while, so unless you have a trust fund you will run out of cash due to lack of income.
Therefore, by the (faulty) logic you're using, you're just a cow with a keyboard - osu-neko (2604)
You have great site – realy The Web industry has established various award schemes for websites A blog award is an award for the best blog in a given category. Some blog awards are based on a public vote and others are based on a fixed set of criteria applied by a panel of judges. owietlenie led Monitoring Floty plan kont Microsoft Dynamics NAV rachunek kosztów NAVISION roll-out