Silk Road forums

by looking at the cities of the return addresses..? can you explain what they did ? How did this leave a trace?

Not sure exactly. Here's the Wikipedia article about her, which mentions the Mail Isolation Control and Tracking thing:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shannon_Richardson

There were articles about it too. Apparently that wasn't all they used to find her, and she called LE herself.

shit when i first got on SR i remember thinking 13 bucks was fucking high as shit..

but dont ever bet on btc.. if you were here for the rise and fall i think you've learned your lesson..

this shit is not an investment unless u got money to loose.. i know people that lost EVERYTHING!!

bought when the shit was 170 200 bucks.. now have nothing.. so..

do as u do but shit i know one thing if investing invest what u dont need at ALL!!

I was watching the live stream of Gox trades during the crash. Right as it started, I saw a trade for 315 BTC at $239. Whoever sold was a genius in retrospect. Whoever bought that BTC, if it was one person, has lost $50,000 of $75,000. So if anyone reading this is depressed about losing 10% in the last week, think of that guy.

My motto: shit could be worse.

I guess the one good thing about photographing 160 billion pieces of mail is that they have 160 billion photographs. Like the NSA, they are swimming in an ocean of data that they can't look at. No human eyes will look at the photos of your packages unless you come up in an investigation, like that woman in Texas who sent ricin in the mail. Even though she used a fake return address, they found her by looking at the cities of the return addresses of other pieces of mail that went through the system immediately before and after her letters, which turned out to be useful in that case.

I guess they used a fake name AND THEY DID LEAVE A NOTICE/CARD/SLIP but the customer used a fake name so he is now not willing to go retrieve the package from the post office I guess so he just expects me to reship him another order for free.

Check out this tracking.  Here is an censored screenshot - http://torimagesbp2vt3u.onion/i/eqsr.jpg

Looks to me like they attempted to deliver the package three times, as expected, but the business was closed the first time, and then the fake name became an issue. That's his problem, Jack. He can go pick it up or take the loss.

just upgraded my USB to the latest version of TAILS and it's fucked my pidgin up -  just getting 'disconnected', and hitting reconnect just loops through the same thing. worked fine on TAILS 0.18. any ideas?

Many people have experienced this in the upgrade to 0.19. Change the settings in Accounts -> Manage Accounts -> <Whatever the chat service is called> -> Modify -> Proxy tab to use the default Gnome settings (ie, not Tor/Privacy).

Me personally I use dee.su Liberty Linux because it's small and less complex. Tails has ballooned to it's own mega operating system filled with DVD players and other nonsense you'll never use. You also have to re-download tails all the time because of how shitty linux security is and their massive DVD is getting to a be a burden to keep doing this.

I consider that a feature that they continually update the image with bug fixes and new anonymity-enhancing features like obfsproxy bridge support and stream isolation, along with updates to TorBrowser, which itself is heavily fortified against privacy leaks. Liberte hasn't been updated in almost a year. Do you think it was released bug free? Do you think the Gnome browser it uses protects your anonymity as well as TorBrowser? Anonymity is more than just pointing an app at a tunnel, especially when it is something as complex as a browser.

So i visit one legal newsgroup that is members only and created the Google account just using a regular email, not gmail.  Just need to put a name (which can be fake) and an email and you can access the newsgroups.  Asks for things like phone number or back up emails but you don't have to give these. Easy to use normally but haven't used one with tor yet.  There is one members only one i visit but would prefer to be anonymous when using it from now on.  So if I create a new tormail only for that group (which i have visited on clearnet before and logged into with another email), and used that tormail for the Google account, would that be safe?  My main concern is that I've used the website and logged in with a different email through clearnet, and don't want to accidentally unmask myself by using this site on tor.

So i was more wondering if that would be safe, if there was anything inherently in Google or those newsgroups which would make using tor a bad idea with it (like how it is not the best idea to use Facebook with tor).

Thanks for any help, am still learning so sorry if the question is stupid :/

You could be linked to your clearnet identity through information that you provide about yourself, or through your writing style. It is surprisingly easy to link some people, if they have unique patterns or quirks in their writing style. One person on this forum was linked because he wrote "a lot" as "allot". That's a very unique way to misspell it, and I presume his spellchecker didn't catch it because "allot" is a real word. Generally, the more correct, normal and mundane you write, the harder it is to find signatures or "fingerprints" in your writing style, at least for amateur readers. Professional stylometrists might be able to perform statistical attacks on your writing, looking at things like word frequency, to match your anonymous and clearnet identities, but it's unlikely you have to worry about someone like that.

No offense, but you do have a non-standard and non-correct writing style, so I would advise against it.

I may have just answered my own question now, as when I tried to go to the main Google newsgroup site, it tells me that I need to have JavaScript enabled to use the site which I am pretty sure is not okay to enable?  I was under the impression it was never safe to turn JavaScript on with tor, so it still wouldn't be safe if you turned java on for the newsgroup and off for silk road?

JavaScript increases the attack surface against you, but I don't think Google is in the business of deanonymizing its users. The main reason being that a lot of people in censored countries use Tor and other proxies to access Google. Google wants them to access its sites. If it bugged its Flash video player on YouTube to connect over clearnet, the Iranian government could potentially see that connection. If someone was uploading a video of Iranian officials committing crimes, that could get them killed. Google can't take that chance, so I don't think they are in that game. Plus the general attitude that I've seen from people like Mike Hearn, a Google employee who has posted on the Tor mailing lists, is that they have no problem with anonymous users. The barrier to creating an account is mostly to stop spammers.

The important thing to remember is that the drugs cost the same whether a bitcoin is worth a dollar or 100 dollars!

Not if you buy a bitcoin at $100 and spend it at $1, or $88 for that matter.

Unfortunately, the recent trend looks a lot like it did after the 2011 crash, when the BTC price decreased slowly but steadily over several months. That's what it looks like it has been doing for the last 5-6 weeks after some initial bouncing up and down after the big crash.

Here's what I'm talking about (outlined with my shitty annotation): http://xqz3u5drneuzhaeo.onion/users/qicpic/files/sk.png

It started around May 20.

Here's how it compares to the 2011 crash: http://xqz3u5drneuzhaeo.onion/users/qicpic/files/sq.png

Obviously the magnitude is bigger this time, but it looks roughly similar.

Past performance is not indicative of future results, but I don't have much confidence at this point that the situation will improve, given the other indicators that I cited above. Interest in bitcoin has seems to have cooled..