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Silk Road 2.0 Seized By FBI, Alleged Founder Arrested In San Francisco
blottsie writes The FBI has arrested the online persona "Defcon," identified as Blake Benthall, a 26-year-old in San Francisco, who the agency claims ran the massive online black market Silk Road 2.0. Benthall's FBI arrest comes a year after that of Ross Ulbricht, also from San Francisco, who's the alleged mastermind of the original Silk Road and still awaiting trial. The largest of those reported down is Silk Road 2.0. But a host of smaller markets also seized by law enforcement include Appaca, BlueSky, Cloud9, Hydra, Onionshop, Pandora, and TheHub. Also at Ars Technica.
That was quick.
Really, a second fool resides in the US while running an illegal operation? Go ahead, wave a red cape at the bull, but don't cry when it gores you.
... in 5... 4... 3...
If only there were legal markets that could be taxed and regulated to meet this demand.
This is the reason why we can't have anything nice. Is because their are too many jerks out there who will use a new technology as a way to do illegal activities!
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
So andromeda, asprox, vawtrak, dyreza, all the z-bot variants, multiple ransomwares, zemot, rerdom, dridex/cridex/bugat/feodo, all that shit's already been solved huh? And you cracked this case in your free time?
the biggest crime you can commit is to defy the state, victim-less crime or not.
awesome! captcha explains why : proceeds
Who is still using these sites after all of the Silk Road 1.0 arrests? You have to be pretty dumb to risk your freedom on some stranger's computer security skills.
So, exactly how would a person create an unbreakable Silk Road? Is it be possible to create a searchable, reputation based, decentralized marketplace for "stuff"? Is it possible if the profit aspect of admin is removed?
If money is being transferred electronically, it can be traced back to you. That's the weakness of all illegal online marketplaces.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
They arrested the online persona? Why didn't they arrest the actual person?
Are you guys getting a cut of link traffic, or are you just too lazy to clean up the URLS?
The link to Ars is half tracking crap
In reality, most of that is just crap for the marketing losers
You're either lazy, incompetent, of greedy.
Oh, wait, since Dice bought you, you get to be all three.
This is the second time someone in SF created a silk road. Perhaps we should nuke SF and finally win the WoD.
1. Tor is not as secure as everybody says it is (because _____ insert your favourite conspiracy theory/security failure here).
2. NSA/GCHQ, etc... justification for snooping on everyone (terrorists! drugs! guns!) is just complete and utter bull****. Hard detective work pays every time, and is probably more cost-effective than the massive surveillance and privacy violations we have right now.
Please note that 1 and 2 are not necessarily opposed to each other. We may well have 1 AND 2 at the same time..
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
What I don't understand is how someone could believe that they wouldn't get caught. We all know now that everything we do on a networked computer is logged, and someday the government infrastructure will find the transactions and prosecute them. Are they thinking the amount of money was small enough to avoid notice?
"Who are you?" "No one of consequence." "I must know." "Get used to disappointment."
The Government God forbids mere mortals from being allowed to escape their just punishments of soberly enduring the stupidity and drudgery of Western life - with the exemption of booze and prescription meds like Jesus would want, of course.
Funny thing is, some minutes before the news came out, bitcoin price had a surge, like these aren't bad news for the virtual money.
I dare say that most markets have manipulation to some degree, but the all price of BTC seems to be a huge manipulation... specially when you do the math and see that the top 10 wallets, could bring the price down at once to less that 20$ in every exchange at the same time just by selling their coins.
These free trade sites will keep popping up as fast as they are shutdown. The government's position that unrestricted trade is dangerous is untenable.
Marry young girls
Child marraige of girls is allowed in the Old Testament.
Banned by feminists the world over now.
Criminalizing goods that are in high demand will always create a black market, which in turn will divert significant economic assets to the pockets of criminals. By virtue of being rich, they wind up having significant political influence (until they do something stupid and get themselves arrested).
The whole problem gets wiped off the map if you make the drugs legal (perhaps with a bit of regulation by the FDA). You can even tax them.
VT/VPro is the culprit.
Intel chips have a VNC server built in which scrapes the integrated graphics card's framebuffer.
It can be turned off but can always be reenabled remotely.
It can be communicated through the NIC, Wifi, and 3g if a 3g card is integrated.
RAM can also be accessed.
3.0 incoming!
Unless he was dealing in illegal goods himself ( like what happened with v1 ), what are the legal grounds for arrest? He would be no different than eBay or amazon, or craigslist. He provides a legal service, how its used is not his fault.
Perhaps a new paradigm is needed; hosting within Tor but on servers the US gov has difficulty getting to, and a cold money trail. The "important" people in the network would need anonymity and would also need to not make money as admins or VIPs. Instead, they'd collect their profit as minor users (with different accounts) and keep most of their money within the system (e.g. free drugs). Real profits would go to charities (e.g. the EFF accepts bitcoin donations), ensuring that there is no usable money trail (obviously, the EFF would not back this kind of work).
Atop that, the new system could be better distributed (decentralized) and perhaps even free software (self-hosted via Trac or whatever) to follow the cryptographer philosophy of more eyes (reviewers) ensuring more security.
Of course, this assumes the Silk Road community has selfless idealists willing to coordinate this...
Just do like a lot of shady companies. Register on the NYSE, do an IPO and get your stocks bought by idiots. Then you become untouchable.
Examples: Herbalife, Primerica, Tupperware Brands, Microsoft, etc...
Of course it can. And like all security, it's a question of how expensive and time consuming that process is.
If one used anonymizing technology from start to finish, and mined their bitcoin (mining is often a break even affair, so it can be viewed as a secondary avenue of converting dollars to BTC) it's actually quite difficult to trace. Sure you can follow the transaction trail of the bitcoin but you can't establish at which points it changed hands vs simply moving around those addresses could belong to anyone. And if you mined your own coin the origin address won't be associated with an exchange and identifying information.
And then of course there are mixers. The bitcoin you put in is not the bitcoin that comes out. This makes it much more difficult to determine the origin.
Beating the technology itself is a rather expensive process. It's unlikely the FBI will even try for anyone but those running the site and large merchants.
from the link:
[Emphasis added]
VT/VPro is the culprit.
Intel chips have a VNC server built in which scrapes the integrated graphics card's framebuffer. .Xs
It can be turned off but can always be reenabled remotely.
It can be communicated through the NIC, Wifi, and 3g if a 3g card is integrated.
RAM can also be accessed.
The FBI claims that under Benthall's leadership, Silk Road 2.0, as of September 2014, allowed more than 100,000 people to buy illegal drugs, generating roughly $8 million per month in sales.
I'm not sure what Silk Road's cut of that 8million is, but even 1% is a nice chunk of monthly revenue. More than enough to pay for a few AWS servers and live on.
I highly doubt that these guys get into this type of service for any other reason than to make lots of cash. Legal channels are already clogged with robbers, er.. bankers (cheap shot I know) so how else do you try and make lots of money?
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
The future is being developed and we are already testing a marketplace that cannot be shutdown.
Decentralized marketplace for instantly trading uses blockchain technology, DHT, and mutisigniture arbitration.
https://openbazaar.org/
Beta 3 is about to be released. Join Us and support the future with a decentralized Ebay - https://github.com/OpenBazaar/...
http://tip4commit.com/projects/728
Ammunition has legitimate real issues concerning its transportation, necessitating regulation. (Not that it's hard to do safely, but we really are talking about small amounts of explosives. You can't just wish away the issues; you have to actually use a little common sense or else face risks and consequences. And since people don't use common sense, government is there to make 'em as though they did.)
In contrast, guns and marijuana don't have real issues; they are regulated for whimsical reasons. My point: Whims change. Whether or not this whim will change, remains to be seen, but it least it can happen. The People could decide to not regulate marijuana (and with no negative consequences to anyone (except black-marketers)) in a way that they would never be able to decide to not regulate ammunition.
Pot erased an average of 8 IQ points. And IQ points are becoming a more valuable commodity, as technology eliminates more and more jobs that used to employ unskilled labor.
So the question is, where do you draw the line -- how many IQ points must a substance erase before you're in favor of banning its use -- 30? 80?
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
The way to have less crime, is to criminalize fewer things.
Brilliant! We could have less bank-robbery crime by decriminalizing bank robbery. We could have less illegal wiretapping by decriminalizing illegal wiretapping. Those pesky KKK lynchings? Decriminalize them.
Maybe you meant to say, "I wish things that I personally don't have a problem with would be decriminalized."
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
Marry young girls Child marriage of girls is allowed in the Old Testament. Banned by feminists the world over now.
Um unlike the Q'uran, the Old testiment isn't a legal document. Its an written history of how God wanted humanity, Israel and Judea to live. It also records how they chose to live in defiance of that. Child marriage is never ok. Paul who was a pharisee because becoming Christian would have said so in one of his letters. He didn't. So quit taking a book you don't understand out of context. It make you look more like the troll you are.
...to hear how exactly they got him.
And the next one will probably be a distributed system that can't be shut down.
" FBI has arrested the online persona "Defcon," identified as Blake Benthall".
No. The FBI has arrested Blake Benthall, alleged to be the online persona, "Defcon". It's for the court system to decide whether it agrees with that allegation.