Silk Road forums

donatto,

In Pidgin, open Help -> Debug Window. When I connect to the silcroad server, I see these lines (with some omitted):

account: Connecting to account astor@silcroadg3c3mtu6.onion.

dnsquery: Performing DNS lookup for 127.0.0.1
dnsquery: IP resolved for 127.0.0.1

proxy: Attempting connection to 127.0.0.1
proxy: Connecting to silcroadg3c3mtu6.onion:6667 via 127.0.0.1:9150 using SOCKS5

socks5 proxy: Connection in progress
socks5 proxy: Connected.
socks5 proxy: Able to read.

proxy: Connected to silcroadg3c3mtu6.onion:6667


You should see a similar sequence of events. At which step does it fail?

A lot of FUD in here.

Differentiating a proxy from the real site is difficult. The real site and the phishing site have the same time stamp, exactly 12 seconds ahead of real time, but a good proxy simply forwards the main site and MITMs the connection. Access times to hidden services can be variable, but taking averages over many access attempts might yield some fruitful results. I've discovered that TTLs are useless. They are reset along the circuit, so you always get 64.

This is of course great for plausible deniability, if they are behind it.

The thing is, Jack, it's not a single data point, but the aggregate of facts. Atlantis has been on an aggressive marketing campaign for some time now, and it's clear they want to steal SR users. They tried creating forum accounts and advertising here, but those accounts and posts were deleted. They tried drawing vendors to their market by waiving the vendor fee and 3 months of commission. They tried luring more vendors with these "buyer" shills with gift codes. They created an AMA on on the Silk Road subreddit, for Christ's sake. Is it really hard to believe they would engage in underhanded tactics to steal SR users?

Do you believe those were real buyers with gift codes? I can't prove they weren't, but the aggregate of facts convinces me they were Atlantis shills.

If you MUST use a service like Safe-Mail, then you must ensure to use Tor to keep them from harvesting your IP addresses, and you also must ensure that all your email is PGP-encrypted BEFORE it ever hits the Safe-Mail servers.

That's a given for any clearnet email provider. You'd be an idiot to do anything criminal with a clearnet email account and not use Tor + PGP.

They can still get metadata, like the email addresses you were communicating with and the dates / times of the emails, but the NSA probably already has that data.

The issue is, some services won't communicate with you when you have a Tormail address, or it might look suspicious if they know what it is. There are use cases for clearnet email providers, and Safe Mail is one of the few that allows you to register over Tor.

Thanks DPR for clarifying things.

The All Time column is gone now, when did you last see it, SS?

I still wouldn't buy anything on Atlantis, given their blatant disregard for their users' security.

Interesting Frank. Thanks for the info. Maybe they have been keeping monthly totals all along.

Although, in order to calculate the 1 year stats, they will have to keep records of number of purchases, amount spent, auto-finalize rate, and refund rate on a monthly basis, which is presumably more info than they kept before.