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After Silk Road 2.0 Bust, Eyes Turn To 'Untouchable' Decentralized Market
apexcp sends this article from The Daily Dot:
Following a wave of Dark Net arrests that brought down the famous anonymous drug market Silk Road 2.0, all eyes have turned to a marketplace called OpenBazaar that is designed to be impossible to shut down. Described as the "next generation of uncensored trade" and a "safe untouchable marketplace," OpenBazaar is fundamentally different from all the online black markets that have come before it, because it is completely decentralized. If authorities acted against OpenBazaar users, they could arrest individuals, but the network would survive. "If you're thinking about OpenBazaar as Silk Road 3.0, you're thinking about it much too narrowly," said OpenBazaar operations lead Sam Patterson in an interview last night. "I actually think it's much more powerful as eCommerce 2.0."
Since it's decentralized, they'll have to go after the actual users. Maybe throw some of them in jail. And since the network will survive, they can generate a steady stream of arrests, rather than shutting down the network and having to find out where all the users have buggered off to.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
you haven't read anything about it have you? it'll have the option of running over TOR, plus most of the items sold will be legal items, nothing illegal about selling something to someone, it's just Ebay without the company charging you fees
You're connecting directly to people's IP addresses! For fuck's sake, guys! Are you even trying to make it anonymous anymore?
Sweet pickles. From the fucking article:
This is missing one of Silk Road's major features of "washing" your BitCoins through a central pool. Without the laundering facilities available, it becomes a lot easier to track sellers down.
I suppose a decentralized eBay-ish thing could be handy, but without the money laundering, it's a lot less useful.
This looks great in concept but, having everyone run it on their own machines and host their own store means encouraging lots of people to be vulnerable to every security issue that comes along. Oops one remote exploit and anyone's anonymity can be compromised.
Now, I am not fool, I realize that many of the bigger players will take more steps will protect themselves with dedicated servers rented under false identities etc....but the vast majority are being encouraged to leave themselves exposed to every vulnerablity that comes along because they don't have the sophistication to play the game that they are being encouraged to play.
This is one of the reasons I really liked the concept of freenet....sure everyone is hosting but, there is author anonimty beyond simply "you can't find my IP", there is actual separation between hosted data and how it is published.
Of course, I haven't tried it in years but, the problem always more seemed to be speed than anything since it is funadamentally a storage and retrieval mechanism and not a transport layer.
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
After watching the video with the guy from OpenBazaar, and from things I've read lately about where capitalism is going, I have to wonder, where is the end game in all this?
AirBnB threatens the hotel/motel paradigm, Lift and Uber threaten taxis, now OpenBazaar threatens online commerce, bitcoin, etc;
These new services appear to be starting a crack, albeit a small one, in the current model of how money is made and by who.
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range
No no no, don't you see? This is entirely unlike Craig's List! For one thing, it doesn't have Craig. For another... um, ... LOOK BEHIND YOU, A THREE HEADED MONKEY!
Seriously, if you're running across someone else's network and/or on someone else's hardware, you can't keep this anonymous.
Even if you're running on your OWN hardware, you still have to interconnect. And there just isn't a good, reliable way to remain anonymous.
If someone can get in and see your wares, the feds can as well. At which point, you take up residence in FPMITA prison and they liquidate your life for cash.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Cos, you know, TOR is so anonymous...
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Do you have any evidence, any at all that a TOR user's anonymity has ever been compromised due to a vulnerability specific to TOR?
To my knowledge ever document case of someone being discovered that used TOR was because of something they said or did, some type of malware on there machine, or a user-agent that was leaky about identifying information.
I am not saying TOR has not been compromised, we know of the malware injection done by some exit node operations for example, but assuming you are being smart, using SSL, using a browser that is trustworthy and front ending it with something local like privoxy to anonymize user agents strings, strip cookies, other http headers etc, from everything I have read/discovered/scene TOR is still "secure".
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
People give up their liberties when government cries "ILLEGAL". The problem is, there is no crime between two willing people.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
This is why the Gentle User cannot have nice things.
Tor must be implemented with precision. The steps are involved because the theory is involved. Some of the better, well-informed and technically savvy users have been busted.
I am an IT professional and I am not at all comfortable that I could use Tor and guarantee my own anonymity.
I advise people against using Tor in hopes that they will be able to surf without discovery because it can give a false sense of freedom to do as one wishes.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
TOR does nothing. Anyone can run an exit node. Anyone can track your shit back to the IP you entered TOR with. The government operates many TOR exit nodes.
"We sell legal things too!!1111!!" is about as salient a point as "But what if I use Bittorrent to download Linux ISOs?!?!111" or "But The Pirate Bay doesn't host content!!!". It doesn't stop the people doing illegal things from being busted. It doesn't stop the ISPs, governments, etc. from attacking the service as a whole. It doesn't stop people from being jailed for setting up the service.
The ONLY way to be anonymous is to use someone else's connection and to spoof your MAC when doing so. To maintain anonymity over time you'll choose a random MAC each time you connect to someone else's connection, not use the same connection repeatedly, and not use connections near your residence.
The internet works by routing packets from host to host. Everything that touches a major ISP is recorded by the government. If you are using a connection attached to your name or address, you are fucked. If you are using other connections but using your real MAC address, or a browser that uniquely identifies you, you will be fucked once they start mapping your behavior over time.
If you want to stay anonymous and hidden, you have to anonymize and hide your physical connection to the internet. The only other things worth doing are:
1 - Encryption using pre-shared keys (shared OFFLINE). The key can be anything from a password to a certificate to one time pads. If you use certificates you must not use any of the "trusted" certificate authorities - you must self-sign.
2 - Steganography. Don't trust that the well-known encryption algorithms are secure. Use your own algorithms on top of that to mask and hide shit.
If you really, really want to do shit in secret on the internet you're going to have to do some work.