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Drug Case In Ireland Has Fingerprints of Carnegie Mellon's Attack On Tor

blottsie writes: Newly released evidence shows that Irish detectives who worked the case of two convicted drug dealers may have also used data obtained through CMU's Software Engineering Institute's methods. Mannion and O'Connor were arrested on Nov. 5, 2014, according to a database of Dark Net arrests created by independent researcher Gwern Branwen. That's the same day that the owner of Silk Road 2.0, the replacement for the infamous drug marketplace Silk Road, was arrested. The IP addresses of Silk Road 2.0 were provided to the FBI by a "source of information," according to a search warrant in another case impacted by the attack on Tor, which court documents later confirmed was a university-based research institute.

8 of 72 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Silk Road? by cfalcon · · Score: 4, Insightful

    You seem off topic.

    First, I agree with you about Ulbright, DPR.
    Second, this seems to be about silk road 2.
    Third, this isn't even about jackasses acting with jackassery- this is about attacks on TOR.

  2. Re:Good for CMU. by HairyNevus · · Score: 2

    Right, so because everyone who buys or sells drugs is an enemy, and every citizen has the potential to buy/sell drugs, then we should spy on all citizens. It's basic logic, citizen, the NSA, FBI, DEA, and ATF are all spying on you, because that's what a responsible government does to protect itself from its enemies. You do like having a government, don't you, citizen? Citizen...?

    --
    You were critically hit for no damage. The bruise will look nice, and maybe the scars will make good party talk.
  3. Re:Good for CMU. by Pentium100 · · Score: 2

    Remember kids - your so-called "friends" may be your enemy! They may be secretly communists/capitalists/muslims/jews/infidels (underline where necessary), therefore you need to secretly check their phones etc and report any unauthorized content to local authorities.

  4. Re:Good for CMU. by AmiMoJo · · Score: 2

    The problem is that nowadays the tools needed to spy on other countries end up being used against us, either by those other countries or by our own traitors.

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    const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
    SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
  5. Re:Good for CMU. by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Unfortunately, what they were doing before was arguably much more useful: CERT/CC, a program heavily intertwined with CMU's software engineering side, has a relatively noble history of doing security research with the intent to make software more secure; rather than weaponize exploits for somebody's petty temporary advantage at the expense of every other user.

    There is absolutely no way that catching a few druggies could possibly be worth tainting the reputation of a respected security research institution with the suspicion of being just another malware vendor for the feds. Are there scary bad people who use software? Sure. Do all the rest of us use mostly the same software, almost all of it terrifyingly full of holes and in dire need of any and all assistance available? Also yes.

  6. Re:Good for CMU. by Zero__Kelvin · · Score: 2

    "... spying on each other is normal ..."

    "... "Spying on the enemy *is* normal ..."

    What isn't normal is the little twist you are trying top slip in under the radar. It isn't normal to consider each other to be the enemy. That is something encouraged by the government, but shunned by intelligent and educated people, as well as plenty who don't have those opportunities.

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    Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
  7. Re: Good for CMU. by PopeRatzo · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Libertarianism doesn't require faith in that.

    Libertarianism always starts with "if only". As in, "If only people were different, people would be different."

    and is quite demonstrable

    The part that's demonstrable is that those that act only for their own good will inevitably take advantage of those who work in the good of the commons, and eventually will poison the well. There is a reason greed has been considered a human failing, at least until the relatively recent development of libertarianism. Let's be honest: libertarianism only exists to provide a moral/social/political framework to give cover to sociopaths. Not that all libertarians are sociopaths. I don't believe that at all. But all libertarians are useful to the sociopaths.

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    You are welcome on my lawn.
  8. So, where to now? by RuffMasterD · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Looks like this genie is out of the bottle, and the temptation will simply be too great for law enforcement to let it back in. Tor is compromised. What can we do now? Can Tor be improved to mitigate such attacks, or to warn users in real time that an attack is happening? Are there alternative systems that are not known to have been compromised yet?

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    Human Rights, Article 12: Freedom from Interference with Privacy, Family, Home and Correspondence