The safety of the transactions is not the issue... What is at issue during the sentencing phase is the willful, repeated violation of the law thousands of times and that the prosecution could prove it. Repeat offenders get harsher sentences.
The whole point of Silk Road was to AVOID law enforcement.
I thought the point was to provide anonymity. Can't we in the same extent say that people who are running TOR nodes are also trying to avoid law enforcement?
Actually DPR's purpose was to MAKE MONEY by avoiding law enforcement entanglements.... He knew what was being sold and where the money he was making came from.
Running TOR nodes falls eerily close to this, and I would imagine that doing this would put you at risk of criminal charges. Personally, I'd not risk it.
There are MANY avenues for appeal in this case... But that doesn't change the fact that he's going to jail, likely for a long time. After all, he made a boatload of cash from the illegal trade he made possible. Remember it was his INTENT to allow people to engage in illegal activities, it was the sole purpose of the website he ran, he knew what was going on and even made money from the illegal activities and encouraged such activities. Henry Ford built cars which may have had the potential for being used for illegal purposes, but cars are mostly used for legal purposes and are purchased for legal reasons. I'd further bet that if you told Ford that you intended to use your car to commit a crime, they would be inclined to at least report you.
No the Henry Ford analogy just doesn't work here...
According to the news reports I've read, and assume are accurate...
He was 14, not 18, the issue was reported (albeit not to the right authority) and the young man was sent to "treatment" for his issues by his parents and as far as we know it didn't happen again. I haven't heard any of the victims complaining that something else needs to be done, or that his behavior didn't stop. It was also 13+ years ago and the statute of limitations happened to be 3 years. It's old news and there is nothing of value we can accomplish by discussing it now, unless of course you WANT him to loose his job and be publicly disgraced for what he freely admits where vile and evil actions that he highly regrets having done.
But feel free to invent any new facts you want, because as you point out, there are no records... But there never where any in the version of events I've been reading.
However, E-Bay goes to some effort to detect and report illegal activity and I'm sure they are willingly and routinely working with law enforcement. The whole point of Silk Road was to AVOID law enforcement.
I really fail to see what makes Ross Ulbricht any different from a regular drug dealer on the street (few of whom get life sentences) other than the massive amount of media attention that Silk Road got and that he was dealing drugs over the internet.
I don't know too many drug dealers who pocket $142 million. I feel that might have something to do with the decision.
Well That and given the number of transactions they can prove he was involved in... I'm sure it is thousands...
The problem with that little tidbit is that he's not been convicted of doing it... Until he is convicted of the crime (or admits to it as factual), it cannot affect the sentence handed down. So you cannot use that as justification for the sentence.
What Snowden is doing with his time in prison, I mean Russia.. Working at a "technology" firm, making blog posts to keep Putin in power... Poor guy. It's just another way to make little rocks out of big ones...
GPS Jamming doesn't work as you seem to think. Your receiver would still see quite a few signals, they'd just be lying about the position. Or, if you go with the cheaper model jammer, the receiver wouldn't see anything because the noise floor would be too high.
Switching to alternate navigation modes is indeed possible, but as I've stated in other posts, I'm suggesting that there be physical obstacles added using largely invisible structures to force the drone to fly a complex route to get where it wants, then concentrating the detection capacity along the forced route. In other words, force the bad guys to do specific things that make them more easily detected.
No system is perfect...You do what you can within the resource constraints you have and consign yourself to living with the risks that are left.
Silly me, here I thought we where discussing the lawn of the White House where this would be a fixed installation. In known locations, it's not hard to set up fixed systems and limit the affect you have on the neighbors.
Now you want to expand this into ad-hoc locations that are always moving? Fine, but in those cases you just use jamming and forget the consequences to the surrounding area. You only protect these areas on a temporary basis anyway so any problems with the local's garage doors and WiFi networks will be short lived. By the time the neighbors figure out that it is really your jamming that is keeping things from working, you will be long gone and their stuff will be working again. Most won't care at that point.
Also remember this is the government... They can do what they want, jam whomever they choose, and if they have a good security reason, there isn't much you can do about it.....
But you DO know that the available parts which can be used in building this kind of thing easily are going to force one into pretty predictable spectrum. Yea, the bad people might be smart enough and well enough funded to do the modifications necessary to move out of the commercially available spectrum, but the reality is that it's EASY to build a receiver compared to building a transmitter.
With today's SDR (Software Defined Radio) offerings, especially in the high performance receiver area, monitoring large swaths of RF spectrum quickly is pretty easy. You don't have some guy spinning the dial anymore or have to wait for that channelized scanner to cycle though it's frequency list , but you can monitor a whole range of frequencies all at one time. Once you find something of interest, you can quickly go back into the digital buffers and do the direction finding.
My point is that you START by looking at the WiFi spectrum (and other well known frequencies) and move out from there. Would it be possible for someone to figure out a frequency you don't monitor well and build a device to use that? Sure. But you monitor what you can and make that option VERY expensive for the bad guys. You also don't advertise what these frequencies might be so the bad guys have to guess. It's not like you can externally detect if somebody is listening and what frequencies they are listening into....
Iron dome is not really about short range mortars, but ballistic rockets and other long range ballistic munitions. Where the principle is similar, I don't think Iron Dome would be very effective on short range mortars, especially ones fired at very low angles.
However, as another poster pointed out, there ARE systems used to protect areas from mortar shells which are field ready. I was unaware of them. After looking at pictures of the equipment, I couldn't help but notice that there are similar looking things on top of the White House which I had wondered about in the past. So, at this point, I don't believe a mortar attack would be all that successful.
Two things come to mind... 1. If the drone just has a camera and is not emitting, the point of the flight is likely to be reconnaissance and the pilot will want to get the thing back to look at the pictures, OR, the mission is really just one way and they pilot is trying to deliver something or observe the responses to the drone. AND 2. The point here is to disrupt the drone's flight so it doesn't reach the intended destination FIRST and then try to locate the pilot who is very likely within line of sight of the drone. Recognizing that detecting a small airborne platform close to the ground is incredibly difficult you do things to make it harder for the drone to reach sensitive locations undetected. You use RF jamming to disrupt things the drone is likely to need (WiFi, RC Frequencies, GPS etc) and force the drone into more expensive and difficult methods being controlled. You also make the drone navigate in ways that makes it more observable, having to fly over and around obstacles and then concentrate your detection and threat elimination efforts to the probable ways a drone would likely have to approach. You also make it more risky for the pilots and though some may successfully get away, make sure some won't. FINALLY, you routinely evaluate the success of your equipment and procedures and make improvements as the state of the art advances and as you identify weaknesses. You won't eliminate every risk, but you can make it pretty difficult for the bad guys...
Again, you folks act like RF energy cannot be controlled, it just goes off in all directions no matter what you do and that there is no way to isolate the jamming energy to small areas. This is not true. Would there be some residual affect outside the intended area? Perhaps, but if you do this right it would not be wide spread, nor would it need to extend more than a few hundred feet beyond the desired areas....
Tell me it's not possible to limit where you put the RF and control the signal strength outside the desired area to acceptable levels... I think you can do that, if you are careful and think about where you put the jammers, what antennas you use and what direction you point them.
Also, GPS jammers are neither expensive nor rare. They are off the shelf and have been for decades and well with the budget of the Secret Service (In fact I'd bet they ALREADY have a few). Directional antennas are also inexpensive and off the shelf, even at the frequencies of GPS. None of this is rocket science... Just a bit of engineering.
1. Sound is ineffective (ibid.). Video is probably not much better. You didn't mention synthetic aperture radar, which would be my first choice.
2. Do your barriers extend all the way over the top of the object you intend to protect? How about walls and roofs, would they work?
No, they extend as high as you can manage w/o making them obvious. The purpose is to entangle, snare or disrupt the drone in flight by providing obstacles that the distant pilot cannot observe and don't expect. Of course you *could* just build a structure over the whole thing.... But my working assumption is they don't want to change the ascetics of the thing.
3. GPS jamming is illegal. WiFi jamming is illegal if it exceeds a maximum ISM band transmission power.
Yes, it is illegal for you and I, but the government *can* legally do it anytime and any place it wants.
4. Probably a good idea to find the person responsible.
5. Can you? Would you like to share any of them? Even one?
My primary idea is to use nets similar to the way birds are sometimes captured for scientific study. Tie a couple of bean bags to a net, fire it out of a cannon making sure it's rotating. Rotation spreads out the net, snares the drone and the weight of the bean bags disrupts it's flight. There are a couple of variations on this you could try, even a shot gun might be effective but pretty safe to bystanders if the drone is low enough and close enough to the shooter.
OK.... I'm a bit behind the times in regards to mortars. I knew they had the ability to return fire based on RADAR tracking back to the source, but I didn't know about this... Which explains some of the interesting bumps and equipment sitting on top of the White House I've seen lately...
I disagree. Both the pilot and the aircraft will be emitting in most cases, but even if it's just the pilot, that signal will be a "new" one, which pops up in an area that is of interest, as it will have a line of sight access to the areas being protected. It's not hard to detect that a signal is new, plus it is not hard to locate where a signal source is if you have multiple receivers and just a little bit of technology behind them. A new signal in a predetermined area, especially one with enough strength to be used to pilot a drone into undesired areas should be enough to get you looked at closely in a short time. You won't be lost in a sea of similar RF signals as some here seem to think.
Yea, but a cell phone signal flying over the south lawn is a pretty clear indicator that you have an issue, and if you have data connection with any kind of usable latency, that drone is going to be practically glowing with RF energy, which is 1960's technology detectable.... Everybody seems to think we somehow have a problem coming up with a location of a signal source, when it's EASY to set up multiple receivers and generate a really good idea where that source is in a very short time. And if you limit the coverage of your receivers by using directional antennas, you can easily winnow out all the sources outside the area you are interested in so you don't ever listen to them.
Did you miss the part where I said we'd jam GPS in the general area of the lawn? Really, you just provide false signals and you can pretty much deflect the drone on GPS autopilot away from it's intended target. Easy to do, off the shelf hardware exists.
Slashdot Mirror
The safety of the transactions is not the issue... What is at issue during the sentencing phase is the willful, repeated violation of the law thousands of times and that the prosecution could prove it. Repeat offenders get harsher sentences.
The whole point of Silk Road was to AVOID law enforcement.
I thought the point was to provide anonymity. Can't we in the same extent say that people who are running TOR nodes are also trying to avoid law enforcement?
Actually DPR's purpose was to MAKE MONEY by avoiding law enforcement entanglements.... He knew what was being sold and where the money he was making came from.
Running TOR nodes falls eerily close to this, and I would imagine that doing this would put you at risk of criminal charges. Personally, I'd not risk it.
There are MANY avenues for appeal in this case... But that doesn't change the fact that he's going to jail, likely for a long time. After all, he made a boatload of cash from the illegal trade he made possible. Remember it was his INTENT to allow people to engage in illegal activities, it was the sole purpose of the website he ran, he knew what was going on and even made money from the illegal activities and encouraged such activities. Henry Ford built cars which may have had the potential for being used for illegal purposes, but cars are mostly used for legal purposes and are purchased for legal reasons. I'd further bet that if you told Ford that you intended to use your car to commit a crime, they would be inclined to at least report you.
No the Henry Ford analogy just doesn't work here...
According to the news reports I've read, and assume are accurate...
He was 14, not 18, the issue was reported (albeit not to the right authority) and the young man was sent to "treatment" for his issues by his parents and as far as we know it didn't happen again. I haven't heard any of the victims complaining that something else needs to be done, or that his behavior didn't stop. It was also 13+ years ago and the statute of limitations happened to be 3 years. It's old news and there is nothing of value we can accomplish by discussing it now, unless of course you WANT him to loose his job and be publicly disgraced for what he freely admits where vile and evil actions that he highly regrets having done.
But feel free to invent any new facts you want, because as you point out, there are no records... But there never where any in the version of events I've been reading.
However, E-Bay goes to some effort to detect and report illegal activity and I'm sure they are willingly and routinely working with law enforcement. The whole point of Silk Road was to AVOID law enforcement.
I really fail to see what makes Ross Ulbricht any different from a regular drug dealer on the street (few of whom get life sentences) other than the massive amount of media attention that Silk Road got and that he was dealing drugs over the internet.
I don't know too many drug dealers who pocket $142 million. I feel that might have something to do with the decision.
Well That and given the number of transactions they can prove he was involved in... I'm sure it is thousands...
The problem with that little tidbit is that he's not been convicted of doing it... Until he is convicted of the crime (or admits to it as factual), it cannot affect the sentence handed down. So you cannot use that as justification for the sentence.
So building berms and calling them "land art" is news worthy?
No, but it's Slashdot worthy apparently... News and News for Nerds are not congruent sets.
are called shills.
But not all shills are professionals.. Some just do it for giggles...
What Snowden is doing with his time in prison, I mean Russia.. Working at a "technology" firm, making blog posts to keep Putin in power... Poor guy. It's just another way to make little rocks out of big ones...
They want their Sidekick and Lotus 123 back!
No, no, no.. Word Perfect and Borland C.... Unless Windows 3.1 is more your style..
GPS Jamming doesn't work as you seem to think. Your receiver would still see quite a few signals, they'd just be lying about the position. Or, if you go with the cheaper model jammer, the receiver wouldn't see anything because the noise floor would be too high.
Switching to alternate navigation modes is indeed possible, but as I've stated in other posts, I'm suggesting that there be physical obstacles added using largely invisible structures to force the drone to fly a complex route to get where it wants, then concentrating the detection capacity along the forced route. In other words, force the bad guys to do specific things that make them more easily detected.
No system is perfect...You do what you can within the resource constraints you have and consign yourself to living with the risks that are left.
It's called "logrotate" and shame on you if you stared the logger and didn't configure it first.
. . . have you tried turning it off and on again? :-)
Ok. but I can't reach the power switch....
It's a Pi? Then I'm pretty sure it will spontaneously reboot for them in pretty short order...
Silly me, here I thought we where discussing the lawn of the White House where this would be a fixed installation. In known locations, it's not hard to set up fixed systems and limit the affect you have on the neighbors.
Now you want to expand this into ad-hoc locations that are always moving? Fine, but in those cases you just use jamming and forget the consequences to the surrounding area. You only protect these areas on a temporary basis anyway so any problems with the local's garage doors and WiFi networks will be short lived. By the time the neighbors figure out that it is really your jamming that is keeping things from working, you will be long gone and their stuff will be working again. Most won't care at that point.
Also remember this is the government... They can do what they want, jam whomever they choose, and if they have a good security reason, there isn't much you can do about it.....
LOL
But you DO know that the available parts which can be used in building this kind of thing easily are going to force one into pretty predictable spectrum. Yea, the bad people might be smart enough and well enough funded to do the modifications necessary to move out of the commercially available spectrum, but the reality is that it's EASY to build a receiver compared to building a transmitter.
With today's SDR (Software Defined Radio) offerings, especially in the high performance receiver area, monitoring large swaths of RF spectrum quickly is pretty easy. You don't have some guy spinning the dial anymore or have to wait for that channelized scanner to cycle though it's frequency list , but you can monitor a whole range of frequencies all at one time. Once you find something of interest, you can quickly go back into the digital buffers and do the direction finding.
My point is that you START by looking at the WiFi spectrum (and other well known frequencies) and move out from there. Would it be possible for someone to figure out a frequency you don't monitor well and build a device to use that? Sure. But you monitor what you can and make that option VERY expensive for the bad guys. You also don't advertise what these frequencies might be so the bad guys have to guess. It's not like you can externally detect if somebody is listening and what frequencies they are listening into....
Iron dome is not really about short range mortars, but ballistic rockets and other long range ballistic munitions. Where the principle is similar, I don't think Iron Dome would be very effective on short range mortars, especially ones fired at very low angles.
However, as another poster pointed out, there ARE systems used to protect areas from mortar shells which are field ready. I was unaware of them. After looking at pictures of the equipment, I couldn't help but notice that there are similar looking things on top of the White House which I had wondered about in the past. So, at this point, I don't believe a mortar attack would be all that successful.
Two things come to mind... 1. If the drone just has a camera and is not emitting, the point of the flight is likely to be reconnaissance and the pilot will want to get the thing back to look at the pictures, OR, the mission is really just one way and they pilot is trying to deliver something or observe the responses to the drone. AND 2. The point here is to disrupt the drone's flight so it doesn't reach the intended destination FIRST and then try to locate the pilot who is very likely within line of sight of the drone. Recognizing that detecting a small airborne platform close to the ground is incredibly difficult you do things to make it harder for the drone to reach sensitive locations undetected. You use RF jamming to disrupt things the drone is likely to need (WiFi, RC Frequencies, GPS etc) and force the drone into more expensive and difficult methods being controlled. You also make the drone navigate in ways that makes it more observable, having to fly over and around obstacles and then concentrate your detection and threat elimination efforts to the probable ways a drone would likely have to approach. You also make it more risky for the pilots and though some may successfully get away, make sure some won't. FINALLY, you routinely evaluate the success of your equipment and procedures and make improvements as the state of the art advances and as you identify weaknesses. You won't eliminate every risk, but you can make it pretty difficult for the bad guys...
Again, you folks act like RF energy cannot be controlled, it just goes off in all directions no matter what you do and that there is no way to isolate the jamming energy to small areas. This is not true. Would there be some residual affect outside the intended area? Perhaps, but if you do this right it would not be wide spread, nor would it need to extend more than a few hundred feet beyond the desired areas....
Tell me it's not possible to limit where you put the RF and control the signal strength outside the desired area to acceptable levels... I think you can do that, if you are careful and think about where you put the jammers, what antennas you use and what direction you point them.
Also, GPS jammers are neither expensive nor rare. They are off the shelf and have been for decades and well with the budget of the Secret Service (In fact I'd bet they ALREADY have a few). Directional antennas are also inexpensive and off the shelf, even at the frequencies of GPS. None of this is rocket science... Just a bit of engineering.
1. Sound is ineffective (ibid.). Video is probably not much better. You didn't mention synthetic aperture radar, which would be my first choice. 2. Do your barriers extend all the way over the top of the object you intend to protect? How about walls and roofs, would they work?
No, they extend as high as you can manage w/o making them obvious. The purpose is to entangle, snare or disrupt the drone in flight by providing obstacles that the distant pilot cannot observe and don't expect. Of course you *could* just build a structure over the whole thing.... But my working assumption is they don't want to change the ascetics of the thing.
3. GPS jamming is illegal. WiFi jamming is illegal if it exceeds a maximum ISM band transmission power.
Yes, it is illegal for you and I, but the government *can* legally do it anytime and any place it wants.
4. Probably a good idea to find the person responsible. 5. Can you? Would you like to share any of them? Even one?
My primary idea is to use nets similar to the way birds are sometimes captured for scientific study. Tie a couple of bean bags to a net, fire it out of a cannon making sure it's rotating. Rotation spreads out the net, snares the drone and the weight of the bean bags disrupts it's flight. There are a couple of variations on this you could try, even a shot gun might be effective but pretty safe to bystanders if the drone is low enough and close enough to the shooter.
OK.... I'm a bit behind the times in regards to mortars. I knew they had the ability to return fire based on RADAR tracking back to the source, but I didn't know about this... Which explains some of the interesting bumps and equipment sitting on top of the White House I've seen lately...
I disagree. Both the pilot and the aircraft will be emitting in most cases, but even if it's just the pilot, that signal will be a "new" one, which pops up in an area that is of interest, as it will have a line of sight access to the areas being protected. It's not hard to detect that a signal is new, plus it is not hard to locate where a signal source is if you have multiple receivers and just a little bit of technology behind them. A new signal in a predetermined area, especially one with enough strength to be used to pilot a drone into undesired areas should be enough to get you looked at closely in a short time. You won't be lost in a sea of similar RF signals as some here seem to think.
Yea, but a cell phone signal flying over the south lawn is a pretty clear indicator that you have an issue, and if you have data connection with any kind of usable latency, that drone is going to be practically glowing with RF energy, which is 1960's technology detectable.... Everybody seems to think we somehow have a problem coming up with a location of a signal source, when it's EASY to set up multiple receivers and generate a really good idea where that source is in a very short time. And if you limit the coverage of your receivers by using directional antennas, you can easily winnow out all the sources outside the area you are interested in so you don't ever listen to them.
Did you miss the part where I said we'd jam GPS in the general area of the lawn? Really, you just provide false signals and you can pretty much deflect the drone on GPS autopilot away from it's intended target. Easy to do, off the shelf hardware exists.