Silk Road forums

They wrote a blog post about it the last time it went down:

https://blog.torproject.org/blog/tor-check-outage-03-and-04-july-2013

"Over the past 24 hours https://check.torproject.org has been unavailable due to excessive DNS queries to the exitlist service. It seems there are a number of individuals and companies with commercial products relying upon this volunteer service. We finally hit the point where we couldn't keep up with the queries and simply disabled the service.

This is a volunteer service offered as a proof of concept. We strongly encourage people to run their own. The code is available at https://svn.torproject.org/svn/check/trunk/.

The new Tor Browser 3.0 alpha series includes a new way to detect "tor or not" locally, without relying on a single point of failure service. This is the first step towards finally retiring check.torproject.org for good.

As of 09:00 on 04 July 2013, the service is re-enabled. We reserve the right to take it down as needed without notice."


As always, if you're on a hidden service, Tor is working for you.

So say you are using Windows, and you have your good files on a TrueCrypt partition, and your secret files inside a hidden partition inside that. Now let's say Windows stupid 'recently used documents' list just happens to show all the files you opened recently from your hidden partition. Wouldn't that be a giveaway to LE if your computer is analyzed?

Yes, it would. I've mentioned this problem repeatedly and it's the reason I recommend against using Truecrypt files. You should use full disk encryption or Tails, which has a persistent volume but there is no unencrypted area to leak data onto, since the root partition is mounted in RAM and it doesn't touch your hard drive.

Maybe they see some of the files from the normal TrueCrypt partition having been opened in your recent file list. Which is fine, you can give them the password for the normal truecrypt partition. But then when they see other files on some other drive letter that they don't see in the TrueCrypt partition you gave them the password to, it just seems like it will be obvious to them that either (a) you have another USB drive or external storage you did not tell them about, or (b) you have a hidden partition that you are denying you have.

It probably goes without saying that Windows isn't the best choice for this application anyway.

Truecrypt can fully encrypt a running Windows system. Do that or switch to Tails.

If you talk to the right person at the post office, you can convince them to give you a stack of those stickers that they are so tight about handing out. I talked to a vendor who told the lady he runs an eBay based business and doesn't have time to get the tracking stickers on an individual basis. She gave him a bunch.

I thought onion.to is useful when you don't have an access to an computer with tor or don't want/cant install it to another computer(someone else s). Or is there better options?

If you don't have Tor on your computer, don't access hidden services. Don't take short cuts with your security. Don't let onion.to sniff your passwords.

Yar, she's down matey.

While this is definitely true, I don't see how it's a downside for SR or DPR. Stupidity has been running rampant and accelerating at an accelerating rate. If people do stupid shit and get themselves caught, then that could very well be a long-term benefit for all of us.

Are you seriously suggesting that the admins should promote unsafe behavior in order to get their own users busted, to weed out the dumb people?

People following you with accounts they create over clearnet.