Silk Road forums

@Vegeta

-----BEGIN PGP MESSAGE-----
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=8err
-----END PGP MESSAGE-----

atlantis announced its opening on bitcointalk.com about a month or so ago. thats how i heard of it anyway....

I thought you were joking, so I checked. It's true: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=154138.0

Not sure what to think of that.

Another Mac user who can't import keys or see the keys they have imported.

Last one was 2 days ago: http://dkn255hz262ypmii.onion/index.php?topic=150106.0


This thread might help you: http://dkn255hz262ypmii.onion/index.php?topic=144403.0

You did nothing wrong. That's a common occurrence. I puked or felt sick the first few times I did opiates.

In fact, I felt that way the last time I did an opiate, after not having done any for over a year.

Let me give you another example. A few weeks ago, I was talking to someone online who was using the ExcludeNodes feature to exclude all relays in his country and several other countries that host some of the biggest relays. He was having trouble connecting to sites, especially hidden services. Well, what do you expect when you tell your Tor client to ignore half the network?

I understood the logic behind what he was doing, but also why he was wrong. He believed that it was easier for LE in his country to watch domestic relays and potentially identify him. He also believed that LE in those other countries were more likely to be watching their relays.

I pointed out to him why excluding huge swaths of nodes was a bad idea. Imagine one of your entry guards is malicious, and the operator is watching all the IP addresses that connect to it, and the relays that they connect to on the other side. If he sees a Tor client in country X that never connects to relays in country X, that's very suspicious. By changing the default Tor behavior, you make yourself stick out. You want to look like everyone else.

He thought about that for a minute and replied, "Like a school of finish."

Exactly. Walk up to a pond and pick a fish. Come back an hour later and see if you can find the same fish. Unless it has marks that make it stick out, you won't be able to do it.

The safest behavior is the default behavior, 1. because the Tor Project people know more about anonymity than we do and pick those defaults for a reason, and 2. because most people stick with the defaults. Once you start doing uncommon, exotic, and complicated things, you make yourself more identifiable, but more importantly, you draw attention to yourself.

Am I correct in thinking in this case a VPN would be useful as a further barrier between me and any malicious bridges?
Now this is drifting off topic a little would it be of any use to move to running tor in a VM or with a live version of tails would that be entirely redundant?

People have different opinions about this. I also think most people don't understand how to be anonymous, but maybe I'm wrong and they are right. Here's my opinion, anyway.

Unless you are a high value target -- unless your adversary is actively looking for you, and they know you use Tor, so that can be used as circumstantial evidence against you -- you're better off using Tor like everyone else, and looking like everyone else. You're better off mixing into the crowd. As such, there are 500K daily Tor users (connecting to regular relays) and only 30K daily bridge users. Even fewer of those bridge users are going through VPNs or doing other complicated things to hide their Tor use. If you are not an existing target, but you don't want to be picked out of a fishing expedition, then you should act like everyone else. Use regular relays. Sure, somebody could see that you are using Tor, but so what? So are millions of other people. It's the ones who are taking extra precautions to hide that will stick out to our adversaries.

And no, I don't think a VPN will protect you, because legal businesses rarely fight LE demands for data. And all this stuff about VPNs that don't log? Yeah, that's a promise that can be revoked (thanks to an LE demand) at any time without your knowledge. The whole point of the Tor design is that you don't trust any entity that can see your whole circuit. That's privacy by design, rather than privacy by policy.

Oh that reminds me, I was looking through some old posts on the topics of bridges (they look to have been before obfsproxy) and it was recommended to set up your own private bridge to avoid that scenario of having your IP harvested by a compromised bridge. This seems eminently sensible to me but would using another computer of mine accessing the net through the same access point do the job. I think it would if my understanding of the bridges is correct but every time I think I have a grip on the infrastructure of tor I read something and it slips from my fingers.

No that's bad, because then your "bridge" or entry point is effectively the middle hop in your circuit.

You should stick with as few bridges as possible. Assuming that some are run by our adversaries, the more bridges you "sample", the more likely you are to get on someone's list.

Bridges are supposed to be for censored users in places like China and Iran. No western countries block access to Tor, so you gotta figure that local bridge users will be interesting to LE in these countries. Trying to hide their Tor use, they must be up to no good.

So it's entirely possible that they are running some bridges and enumerating the IP addresses that connect to them. To mitigate that attack, connect to as few as possible.