Silk Road forums

It's weird though. You'd think that if the FBI got the "largest facilitator of child porn on the planet", they'd publish a press release. LE is all about PR. Like that methylone bust, Farmers Market, and thousands of others.

Maybe they are waiting until his extradition is guaranteed.

An FBI agent made some statements during Eric Marques's hearing on September 12 which the media spun into the FBI "admitting" to taking down FH.

This whole fiasco shows how the media plays telephone with news stories. The only reliable source of info is the Irish Independent reporter who was in the courtroom. Everything else is a retelling on top of an interpretation on top of a retelling.

Presumably anything inside direct quotes has not been botched, and so far nobody has attributed "Freedom Hosting" to direct quotes coming from an FBI agent's mouth, so they haven't quite admitted it yet. Although it's probably true.

gpg: Signature made Sat 04 May 2013 09:19:18 AM GMT using RSA key ID 67B7FA25
gpg: BAD signature from "Silk Road <staff@silkroadmarket.org>"

The sig was copied from a post made on May 4.

It's funny how scammers go out of their way to include proof of their scam, knowing that 99% of their targets won't check the signature.

You should use a disposable VM to view untrusted files. Simply disconnecting your computer from the internet prevents a malicious file from phoning home and revealing your IP address to an adversary, but that file could be malware that infects your computer and phones home later. It could also get your MAC address (like the FH exploit did) or hardware serial numbers. A disposable VM with no networking protects against all these things, because it uses virtual hardware with fake MAC addresses and serial numbers. Install a Linux distro, which on its own will protect against 99% of malware, and if you think the file is malicious or has infected the guest OS, destroy the VM and the malware is gone.

There is still a threat from malware that can break out of VMs, but you're increasing the difficulty a lot compared to the common malware that we see. A Linux VM running over Tor would have provided multiple layers of protection against the FH exploit, for example.

Which exit node injected a different cert? That should be reported.

If you think someone is going to perform a forensic analysis of your hard drive, you should DBAN it. Tor can leave all kinds of subtle traces that you may not be aware of: http://dkn255hz262ypmii.onion/index.php?topic=148291.msg1152452#msg1152452

They will still know that you wiped your hard drive.

How does the Tor version affect a TAILS user? I can't even find what version I'm running. Will it automatically be updated in the next version of TAILS?

You can find the version by opening a terminal and running "apt-cache policy tor". I get 0.2.3.25. That will slow down your Tor use. Whonix suffers from the same problem. It hasn't bee updated in 6 months though.

They should upgrade to 0.2.4 in the next version of Tails.