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How a Tax Inspector Used Google Search To Locate the Founder of SilkRoad (bbc.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: You could buy any drug imaginable, wherever you were in the world, on the Silk Road website. Hidden on the dark web, it made millions of dollars every week. The US government had been trying to shut it down for more than two years when tax agent Gary Alford was brought in to try to trace the money which passed through the site.
In his spare time, Gary started searching Google to try to find the mysterious mastermind behind the site: Dread Pirate Roberts. And he was successful. Gary spent hours trawling the internet for the first ever mention of Silk Road. He says he came across a posting on Bitcoin forum. In the post, Roberts had shared his Gmail account. That escalated the investigation. Gary spoke with BBC describing the rest.
No one is going to watch a stupid video for this.
yeah that's the official story
they just dont want to admit they used the same techniques to break in machines as what they are supposed to protect us from , the silkroad bust is as criminal as what was going on on the silkroad
On my reading list is "American Kingpin: The Epic Hunt for the Criminal Mastermind Behind the Silk Road" by Nick Bilton. The author previously wrote "Hatching Twitter: A True Story of Money, Power, Friendship, and Betrayal", a great read about the accidental founding of Twitter, the shenanigans of the four cofounders who wanted to CEO, and everyone else who wanted to buy a revenue-less Twitter.
life is prison......
When you first want to unveil something like this, think ahead more. Don't get caught up in the excitement of your creation.
Use a new computer (hint, they're cheap these days, even a Raspberry Pi). Use a browser in the most anonymous mode, within a VM. Connect to the internet using an anonymous WiFi. Create a new account on the forum simply for the unveiling event. Wipe the VM and maybe even the entire computer when you're done. If the computer was a Pi, simply dispose of the SD card. Use a USB WiFi dongle, not the computer's built in WiFI -- and then dispose of the WiFI dongle when done. Use a pre-composed message for your announcement. Make sure it is not in your typical writing style and vocabulary. Don't compose the message on another computer. Maybe on a yellow paper tablet that is easily disposed of.
Maybe that sounds too paranoid. After all, they're not out to get you.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
And you all believed in this fairytale. Yeah... searching Google. Eyes... to see and Ears... to hear! Gullible generation.
The guy built a website. Hell I myself had a Geocities page, putting up a storefront is hardly mastermind criminal stuff.
This wasn't any storefront. It was the Amazon of the international black market. Sex, drugs and nuclear weapons were just a few offerings available.
RPi and any modern cpu/mobo have serial numbers recorded in either the firmware or burned into the chips themselves. Make sure *NO* application you might have running polls that information nor transmits it. Windows 10 you can basically assume does. Some Linux distributions MIGHT. Browsers, videogames and other 'free' apps almost definitely will. Crash debug logs that can be remotely transmitted (Microsoft products, Firefox, etc.) should be assumed to.
If you ARE going to do this, make sure the item is purchased in-cash. Used is best, especially if you can sit on the hardware a few years and pay in cash. New is riskier, even paying cash, because almost every electronic retailer scans the device serial barcodes from the back of the Rpi/CPU/Motherboard/GPU boxes, which, combined with the 'Loss Prevention' Cameras placed along the checkout area (in some cases PER REGISTER!) could already be transmitting data to the feds (or your domestic equivalent) for facial recognition lookups. If the latter is not simply paranoid delusion, then you need to proxy buy new items, ideally using strangers who can't be traced back to you and either are unwilling or unable to remember you should law enforcement identify and interrogate them.
While it doesn't look like the future we once envisioned many aspects of the dystopian cyberpunk futures are now. Just not all the cool almost-ubiquitous cybernetic augmentation, flying cars, or pollution sufficient to block out the sky (well, unless you're in beijing or somewhere.) The surveillance apparatus necessary for some of the darkest of those stories is well into play however, and while it still has lots of dark spots, they are shining more light into our private lives by the day. Remember this, even if you're a nobody now and have nothing to hide. On the day that you aren't and you do, you will need those aspects of your life they don't know about if you want to survive. If they know them all, they will have no trouble cutting off access to every friend, family member, or favor you might have left that could help you escape their clutches. And unlike the stories of kind strangers saving some, like many of the persecuted classes in Nazi Germany, or big budget movies with parelleling storylines, all that saving you will do is get you both captured and imprisoned or made dead.
Librarian: I texted my son, "...a bunch of FBI agents just came in and busted a guy." My son knew exactly what Silk Road was! (nervous laugh) I don't know why he knew that.
Comedy gold.
Protect your browser with the Force Safe Search add-on
DON'T FORGET TO PAY YOUR $699 TV LICENSE FEE YOU COCKSMOKING TEABAGGERS!
Or you can't watch.
And take no action against the 100 others who are just as guilty. People will continue to get drugs and automatic weapons. People will die. But you'll feel all smug.
Your justice is mythical. It's a set of lies that keeps you compliant with a monstrously corrupt system.
It's a millenials thing. Even tough they spend hours and hours everyday texting, they somehow don't seem to know how to read.
On almost every technical forum, whenever someone mentions a very simple procedure to do something, there's always that guy that asks "Could you do a video tutorial ?".
Are you fucking serious ? A video ? For something that can be explained in half a dozen lines of text and maybe one or two screenshots ?
"searching Google to try to find the mysterious mastermind behind the site: Dread Pirate Roberts."
Inconceivable!
I'm still waiting to hear the downside.
Lol, well, get back to us when you launch your own darknet enterprise with fucking geocities.
I don't think it means what you think it means.
You could buy any drug imaginable, wherever you were in the world, on the Silk Road website.
Yeah. Or so they claim.
and yet, the war on drugs has caused immeasurably more damage than the silk-road ever could have.
AI is meant to cross-compare the cumulative mistakes. There's nothing else you'd use AI for. Think about how LinkedIn now belongs to Microsoft, and how everyone is starting to treat it like Facebook. Be very afraid.
Thus begin the stories about how "righteous" Google is. The fucking video was filmed in winter. I guess trotted out now after the lefties (feminists) from Google and the Media got together and had a convo about how to regain lost ground. So fucking transparent.
Shhhhh Trumpie........get back down in your mom's basement...
Man Slashdot needs a "ID10T" mod for comments like this.
You could not sell Sex or nuclear weapons on Silk Road.
At first I thought it TOR's front page, and can vouch for the abundance of drugs; mostly kids selling their Adderall.
From a technical standpoint, Amazon isn't particularly exceptional as a website, or at least it wasn't until it had enough volume that major innovations were needed to handle the load.
Being a large presence on the internet often consists of creating the first "good enough" site for a particular niche.
This is my signature. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
The U.S. Federal government was not granted the power per the U.S. Constitution to regulate health care, so under the 10th Amendment, that is reserved to the States and to the People.
It's yet another example of government overreach.
And the tax departments job is to collect taxes, PERIOD. Per congress, the Internet is not subject to taxes, so they have no say in that. At best they can tax sales and that is it.
As you can see, with all the arrogance and foolish pride within law enforcement agencies, if someone comes up with something, it will most likely be impugned and ignored. The twin towers would still be standing and 3000+ people would still be alive if the big shots at the FBI hadn't ignored two of their own agents, who mentioned their concern about Arabs seeking flight lessons minus training in take off and landing training.
AS someone said, get a few bucks and stop and the culture within law enforcement will cause them to be stymied. Political correctness will also greatly hinder LEA.
I'm not falling for it. I don't read the articles. Did you think having the articles read themselves to me would work any better?
OMG facts!
Mr. Alford has an impressive story - intelligent Googling to crack a major case - but long term, this "victory" will not solve the "problem" that
government has defined. Silk Road opened for business as a vendor for a market demand. He / we / etc. might not like the Silk Road business model, but customers want those products / services and will pay money for them. This leads to trade. New vendors will enter the market, they will learn from Mr. Ulbricht's failure, and their management will evolve to prevent those failures themselves. Wash, rinse, repeat until the vendors become invulnerable.
America simply can't learn from Prohibition. If anything, Silk Road directly benefited Mr. Alford himself. He starred in a vid, he has (more) job security based on his success, he might get a promotion, a pay raise, etc. and in this economy, all of that matters. Silk Road and its descendants prove the existence of a government-mandated market failure. The success of the Silk Road descendants proves that sooner or later, government will have to declare victory in the Drug War so that we can all go home. When the Drug War finally ends, the "Drug Problem" will also end, because the Drug War caused the "Drug Problem." The "Drug Problem" never caused the Drug War. Obviously.
go join a convent and take a vow of silence you fucking idiot
Sad.
Even if it were true (it's not), what's wrong with selling sex between consenting adults anyway? Every newspaper worth its weight has an ad section for erotic services (unless you live in fundamentalist countries like Afghanistan or Sweden).
Read about it in Wired months ago.
Lol, well, get back to us when you launch your own darknet enterprise with fucking geocities.
This is more likely to happen than not... I mean... it's geocities... if you can navigate that madness, you are far better than any fed.