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After Silk Road 2.0 Shutdown, Rival Dark Net Markets Grow Quickly
apexcp writes: A week ago, Silk Road 2.0 was theatrically shut down by a global cadre of law enforcement. This week, the dark net is realigning. "In the wake of the latest police action against online bazaars, the anonymous black market known as Evolution is now the biggest Dark Net market of all time. Today, Evolution features 20,221 products for sale, a 28.8 percent increase from just one month ago and an enormous 300 percent increase over the past six months."
They should really start naming the black markets after big companies and celebrities. Then, when the news of a shutdown occurs, people will be confused. "What? They shut down the Microsoft drug marketplace?"
All right, maybe they aren't Russian, I don't know. But why not try to find these uber-coders that you always hear about to do some pen testing of the Tor code? It's in their best interest to make sure Tor is as secure as possible.
The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination
- Douglas Adams
This is like trying to stop people from breathing... The illicit markets will NEVER die.
Man wants what he cannot have... This will NEVER change.
Its our Nature. Fighting our own nature... Is costing us more than we care to admit.
The Cyber Warriors across the world re-allign their cyber guns, pointing them at government.
I expect some of those 20221 products to be made of dark matter and powered by dark energy. Brought to you by Dark Helmet on a dark horse.
Also, let's all agree that "Evolution" is an amazingly shitty name for an online black market after "Silk Road", which was pretty inspired.
We should start a campaign to suggest better names for the next instance after Evolution.
I suggest:
The Dark Bazaar
Addiction finds a way.
In other news, police arrest drug dealer on corner. New drug dealer replaces him that same night.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
At some point - probably soon - they'll shut down the last one of these and then there won't be any more. That's how the war on drugs was won!
Do you have ESP?
All right, maybe they aren't Russian, I don't know. But why not try to find these uber-coders that you always hear about to do some pen testing of the Tor code? It's in their best interest to make sure Tor is as secure as possible.
Fairly certain the russian and the international hacker community in general is already doing this.
Of course a true pro would not be using a publicly accessible darknet, they'd run their own.
Admit nothing. Deny Everything. Make Counter-accusations.
Cut off a head, and two shall take its place! Hail Hydra!
There is no God, and Dirac is his prophet.
All right, maybe they aren't Russian, I don't know. But why not try to find these uber-coders that you always hear about to do some pen testing of the Tor code? It's in their best interest to make sure Tor is as secure as possible.
What are you talking about? The only thing Tor does is add layers of indirection between the client and host, the data still needs to eventually be able to find a viable route between A and B. When a large percentage of connections using the TOR protocol end up at the same hand full of places, which is something that you can determine when you have access to a Tier 1 service providers records btw, then it helps narrow down the number of suspects you need to investigate. The only way to remain secure in that world is to remain small.
Seriously how is it "Dark net" if it is known enough to make it to the Slashdot rss feed?
Drugs are an important part of society. Some may not like it, but a place such as the DNM's are a better, safer way for people to score their fix. I really wish that there would be less media attention, and that the united states would back the hell off of the drug trade. I don't know whats worse, the people sitting at home getting high, or the militarized police presence that is terrorizing their own people.
I really enjoy the fact that the 'news' tells us where to go to buy our drugs now that Silk Road is down again. And reading the comments told me which top competitors to look for as well. Thanks 'the news'. And thanks Slashdot. Thanks to you I no longer have to face the world sober.
The huge "black market" for these kinds of drugs is thriving because people must invest big monies for drugs that are basically trash that is sold for 300x the real value.
Legalize the drugs. Let any local pharmacy/drug store sell these drugs to anyone who really wants to consume them, and the price will drop quickly, killing the black market.
Wrong. Tor helps to reduce the risks of both simple and sophisticated traffic analysis by distributing your transactions over several places on the Internet, so no single point can link you to your destination. https://www.torproject.org/about/overview
As far as I'm concerned, the only really legitimate reason for govt. to have gone after the original Silk Road operator was the allegation that the guy placed a hit on someone else. The act of hiring someone to murder another person for you is pretty clearly illegal and the law should pursue that.
The act of running an anonymous marketplace website seems to me like it should fall under "common carrier" status. Of course, the govt. hasn't been interested in looking at things that way ever since the BBS era in the 1980's.
The fact remains though.... the U.S. post office surely helped facilitate the actual delivery of many of those illegal orders placed on Silk Road, yet we never talk about arresting the mailmen who delivered the packages. We never talk about raids on the post offices to search through boxes held there either.
When criminals conduct illegal business via phone calls, nobody ever blames the telco for selling them the circuit that allowed it to happen either.
If you want to argue that Silk Road type websites are illustrating collusion with the criminals by offering categories such as "illegal drugs" to post ads in? You might have a valid point there ... But it seems to me that's little more than a detail that such site operators could get around by simply making broad, more general categories that are clearly usable for LEGAL transactions as well as anything illegal in some countries.
So far, I haven't really heard any evidence that Silk Road 2's operator was directly INVOLVED in any criminal activity. (No requests to murder someone else, no selling or buying of illegal substances himself, etc.)
so no single point can link you to your destination
In this case there are (potentially) many points. No one node can connect the source and destination of a given connection, but if the attacker monitors or controls enough of the internal routing nodes then it's not that difficult to analyse the timing and build up a statistical model linking the endpoints over time. For that matter, a busy .onion site would tend to stand out no matter how obfuscated the routing, simply because of the increased traffic.
"The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat
I can't determine if your post is sarcasm or not, but I'm pretty sure it's sarcasm. This post is really for the next guy assuming sarcasm was correct.
How many times do people have to read history to determine that prohibition does not work? The "War on Drugs" is a failure, alcohol prohibition was a failure, and Opium prohibition was another failure. How can anyone in good faith know history and claim that the answer is punishing consumers and/or bystanders? Simple, it can't be done in good faith because they are basing their claim on a lie.
Making a site like Silk Road illegal does nothing to address the problem. People may as well try to make back alleys illegal, whispering illegal, and sound proof board rooms illegal.
Bad guys exist because there is a segment of society who's only opportunity for advancement is through illegal activities, and another segment who's only method of survival is illegal activities.
Smart cops use alleys to determine what's going on, they don't fight to fill them with concrete or arrest anyone driving through the alley. When the not so smart cops find an alley and start arresting everyone inside, the bad guys just move.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
...take the Silk Road?
There was a recent post asking how authorities might have breached the Tor network.
A related question to ask might be "what can we do to increase our network privacy/security"?
I've often wondered if a "government authority" blacklist would be worthwhile. For example, the City Police near where you live probably surf from a fixed IP address at that location. We could maintain a list of such addresses and allow websites to subscribe to the list.
If an address geolocates to within 50 miles of Washington DC (or Langley, VA; or Bluffdale, UT) it's probably not someone you want looking at your site.
Anyone with the slightest idea of how the internet works will realize that this scheme will be trivial to get around using any number of techniques, but the purpose isn't to make access *impossible*, it's to make access *harder*. It starts an arms race between government agencies and an army of determined hackers.
Suppose you're a government agent. You can't send a link over E-mail to your boss at the office because when he opens it the site will show different results. You have to do screenshots or make web page copies - it's much more work (and a more complicated evidence chain).
Suppose you're a government IT guy. You have to implement VPN connections to remote computers so that your agents can surf the net properly, and this is a ton more work for you to do, and it's insecure and might open up your internal network to hackers.
It starts a competition for resources. In addition to law enforcement, the government entities also have to spend time, effort, and money to get around the additional hurdle. If it costs us little to implement, and costs them a lot to get around, then it's effort well spent. And there's a multiplication factor: each and every government agency has to implement a solution to our one system.
In the manner of spam blacklists, we could allow people to nominate specific IP addresses as being "city hall in Tallahassee" with some confirmation protocols to ensure accuracy and that the list doesn't get spammed.
You could have your website either block the listed IP addresses, or show different content.
We could make it *much* harder for authorities to gather website evidence.
That is not how hidden services work. They do not "exit" the TOR net at all and are hence indistinguishable from relays.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
We should start a campaign to suggest better names for the next instance after Evolution.
Intelligent Design?
What if I told you that they did and Silk Road was the honey pot?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The link is to dailydot.com. Every link at dailydot is to another dailydot page. Yes, this often happens at slashdot, but it is a sign of, um, what should I call it? When you only link to your own site, you may not be serving the public as well as you could.
I'd like to see links to insightful pages outside the original site. That is increasingly harder to find. This 'Evolution' site is said to be the 'biggest Dark Net market of all time' and yet there is no link to it or to any site that has something useful to say about it. This /. story seems to be a useless tease.
...omphaloskepsis often...
Agora made the Silk Road look like a joke. The only reason the governments went after SR is because it was so vulnerable and they could make an example of SR in the media. Well I haven't seen any security, stability, or privacy issues with Agora. Currently by invite link only though due to recent events. Current invite link only accessible via Tor browser.
http://agorahooawayyfoe.onion/register/KgLio7jsR8
Umm... no. I think I understand the law pretty well. And just like I said, the mistake these guys made really just lies in the details. They could run the exact SAME software, the exact SAME way (requiring a Tor session to establish a connection to it), and get around the accusations of engaging in a conspiracy to sell narcotics by simply eliminating the names of categories of sales that are deemed illegal.
You can't prove that the site operator opted to run an anonymous site purely or primarily to hide the fact that it was for illegal activities. That's nothing more than a theory or a guess. I'd say that many people interested in projects like Tor just believe in the idea that you have the right to conduct a financial transaction without being traced. (A pure cash transaction in the physical world is pretty much just that.) Without these options, we've reached a point where it's nearly IMPOSSIBLE to buy anything over the Internet without the transaction getting logged (or even analyzed for some sort of marketing or statistical purposes). About the closest thing to it is using a site like Craigslist to meet someone in person and pay cash to do the transaction -- but then we're back to using traditional methods vs. online payment and some sort of mail delivery of the product.
Hi dude I'm soz but I'm highly milatant i do not giv 1 fuk who or what knows where i have been. Yes I do drugs, yes I have bought class a drugs online. My name and addresses are easyly.findable wit my ip address but do i give a fuck? NO. Its my body,my life, my choice fuck u and every LIE u have ever told.