Silk Road forums

Anyway, you're right, someone could use a real gmail account that belongs to someone else - though I don't really see why they would - it's easy enough to just make up a fake one for the PGP key info, it's not like anyone needs to use it.  Besides...  seems as if using someone elses email address would only be asking for trouble?

There's an old saying in behavioral psychology that under carefully controlled conditions, the animal will do as it damn well pleases.

When people use a PGP app for the first time, they see that "Email Address" field and interpret it in different ways. Some are informed enough to register an email address (usually a Tormail address) specifically for SR, and put that in their key. Others put completely fake info that doesn't look like an email address. Others, perhaps thinking they are being clever, put a fake address that looks like a clearnet address. If you pick a random address for Gmail or Hotmail, chances are pretty high someone has already registered it. I figure that's what happens quite often.

Thanks for your informed input...  I enjoy reading your posts astor.  You have so much to contrubute!

Little things like this keep me going. I'm glad a lot of people find my posts useful. Thanks man.

You should read StExo's last security audit, which was stickied in this subforum for a while.

I imported 1020 vendor keys a while back and analyzed them for stuff like valid clearnet email address. I think there were about 50 valid addresses that I found. However, just because it's valid (which you can check without sending an email, btw), doesn't mean it belongs to them. They may have accidentally or intentionally used an address that belongs to someone else. They have plausible deniability in that sense, unless LE wants to go on fishing expeditions.

It is a bad practice anyway. You should register an email address for SR purposes only and put it in your PGP key so customers can contact you when the SR server goes offline, as it has for extended periods on several occasions. Then that info is actually useful.

You can set up a clearnet email account over Tor with some providers. There's at least one thread about that on the forum already. Or you can create a Tormail account, which may be the best option, but Tormail has experienced unreliable uptime in the past

The feedback score is really a qualitative categorization of:  legit vs scammer.

That's how it's used by most people and how it is expected to be used. There is essentially no quantitative score of how good a vendor's product and service is.

If you get low quality product or crappy packaging, you are expected to message the vendor or mention it in your review, but still leave a 5.

You're supposed to leave a 1 only if the product never arrived and the vendor is acting shady, or you got an empty package or something that indicates you got scammed.

It's the same configuration file for GPG4USB. It's located at  \wherever\you\extracted\gpg4usb\keydb\gpg.conf

Yeah, it can take a year for open source wifi drivers to be added to the Linux kernel. While it is possible to use Windows drivers with ndiswrapper, I've found that to be buggy a lot of the time. It's better to use native Linux drivers.

You have 2 options here.

1. Return that laptop and buy a used one off Craigslist or Ebay. If it's a few years old, it will be much more likely that the Linux kernel (version 3.2) included with Tails supports the wireless card. You should ask about the hardware details and figure out if it is supported, for example on these sites

http://wireless.kernel.org/en/users/Drivers
http://linux-wless.passys.nl


2. Buy a $10 usb wifi dongle that is supported on Linux. You can search the reviews on sites like Newegg for the key word "Linux" and see what people say about it. You would then plug in the dongle and run Tails.

hitit, did you rename the file to gpg.conf?

It doesn't matter where you put it in the file, as long as it doesn't a # at the beginning.

It is worth noting that if you are rooted even if you are using WiFi there is a good chance you will be fucked

This is the main reason why getting people off Windows is the most effective security step they can take, and Tails is one of the easiest ways to do that (along with providing a lot of security and anonymity features out of the box), so overall I consider it an improvement in security, despite that lack of persistent entry points (which can be handled manually for now). Linux is far less vulnerable than Windows, although that may change if it becomes more popular, especially among "criminals".