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Messages - astor

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1561
Security / Re: Where and how is the safest most reliable place to keep your bitcoin?
« on: April 16, 2013, 11:52 pm »
Depends on your level of competence. If you run a safe operating system with a low chance of getting malware (ie, not Windows), and you make frequent encrypted backups, then the Bitcoin-QT client over Tor is the safest way to store your coins.

The second safest place -- and I know this sounds crazy -- but the second safest place is probably MtGox. Say what you will about how shitty their service is, but they got hacked 2 years ago and have significantly increased their security with things like 2 factor authentication. They are the biggest target in the bitcoin community and haven't been hacked since, so I think that's a plus. I would trust my coins there more than anywhere else. The drawback is that you can't access your account over Tor.

Next is blockchain.info. They also offer 2 factor authentication, and you can make automated backups of your wallet. My concern is that their interface has a history of being buggy and I've seen a few threads where people complain about transactions that haven't gone through.

After that, it's really a crap shoot with the various ewallets. Some disappear over night, some get hacked, some have accidentally deleted their wallets.  ::)

1562
Off topic / Re: I Need Friends
« on: April 16, 2013, 11:24 pm »
+1 Rapper and Repus, a little karma across the time zones. :)

1563
Off topic / Re: Operation Corn
« on: April 16, 2013, 11:12 pm »
Quote from: smokecrack on April 16, 2013, 04:53 pm
im looking for high fructose corn syrup

Easy with that stuff, man. It ruins lives.

1564
Silk Road discussion / Re: SR down for maintenance: Though Patience is Virtue let the Arguments Commence
« on: April 16, 2013, 07:39 pm »
It's up for me.

1565
Philosophy, Economics and Justice / Re: Economic Terrorism by US Bankers caused the market crash. It will soon rise.
« on: April 16, 2013, 05:25 pm »
Quote from: cantharidin on April 14, 2013, 03:31 pm
Always look for the simplest and most straightforward explanation for events, and you will rarely be led astray. 

Exactly, it's called Occam's Razor. Not a law by any means, but a general principle that tends to work.

Is it more likely that some of the facts you heard are wrong and inconsistent, or that there's a massive cover up?

Quote from: BlazedForDays on April 15, 2013, 07:47 pm
What I believe happened was what was coined (haha) Operation Foolcoin. I think it's still on reddit if you want to go see for yourself. Anyway, in OP. Foolcoin a group of "hackers" dumped their BTCs in the 250s and 260s range. After this dump they launched a MASSIVE botnet attack against MTGox, BTC-E, Bitfloor, BitStamp, and even the BTC forums Bitcointalk. The combiation of their DDOSing, Gox's beautiful trade engine (over an hour of lag time at some points, really?), and people panicing caused our massive downspiral. I bet you these same people bought right back in at 50 or 60.

I also believe there was some market manipulation, I just don't see any evidence that it was by central banks or governments. TBH, even at a $2 billion market cap, bitcoin was small potatoes to those guys.

As I said earlier, people have a hard time accepting that sometimes insignificant people can do significant things.


1566
Silk Road discussion / Re: Bitcoins Suck! Done!
« on: April 16, 2013, 05:17 pm »
I think to a lot of people didn't like that they spent $200 and got 1 bitcoin, especially when they were used to getting a lot more. Of course, they could buy 2 grams of coke or 3 grams of MDMA with that bitcoin, but that part didn't translate.

1567
Silk Road discussion / Re: astor and AllDayLong are in forbes!!
« on: April 16, 2013, 04:52 pm »
LOL, they quote me like I'm an economics expert, even though I was totally wrong about what would happen after the crash.

Then again, bitcoins are rallying...

1568
Off topic / Re: Operation Corn
« on: April 16, 2013, 05:39 am »
Has anybody tried this vendor? How is the stealth?

Did you get one big cob or was it all in kernels?

Anybody tried plugging? Did you get that ringing in your ears?

1569
Silk Road discussion / Re: Bitcoins Suck! Done!
« on: April 16, 2013, 04:57 am »
You, me and everyone else. :)

When the crash started, I saw a trade of 351 BTC @ $239. That person spent $83,000 and now has $21,000.

I guess things could be worse.

1570
Silk Road discussion / Re: PANIC!
« on: April 16, 2013, 03:09 am »
Yep, I bailed.

1571
Security / Re: Forensic analysis of Tor use
« on: April 15, 2013, 09:46 pm »
The first item she listed isn't an issue for most people, since they'll start Tor from their desktop / file manager, not the command line.

The second item is the most troubling, since I think very few of us are/were aware of it.

The third item may only be an error when starting Tor from the command line. I grepped my own .xsession-errors and got nothing.

The fourth item is only an issue when attaching external media, which is not the most common method of getting the browser bundle. Most people will simply download it.

There may be other traces left behind when starting TBB from the file manager, which this analysis would have missed. An example is recently-used.xbel. Launching from a menu or panel item doesn't leave a trace that I know of.

Will be interesting to see how many traces are left on Win7.

Also, none of this even touches true forensic analysis of free and swap space.

To me, the take away message is, use FDE or Tails, or forget about trying to cover up your Tor use.

1572
Security / Forensic analysis of Tor use
« on: April 15, 2013, 06:56 pm »
Once in a while we get questions here in the Security forum about how to erase all evidence of Tor on a computer. Is it enough to simply delete the browser bundle folder? I'm a paranoid person and usually recommend a full disk wipe, even though LE is not going to forensically analyze the free disk space of the average SR user. Mainly my recommendation comes from not knowing what the TBB is leaving behind.

Finally we have answers! Runa Sandvik of the Tor Project is forensically analyzing the traces left behind by the TBB on Linux, Windows and OS X. Her first analysis, published a few days ago, covers Linux (specifically Debian).

======

As part of a deliverable for two of our sponsors (Sponsor J, Sponsor L), I have been working on a forensic analysis of the Tor Browser Bundle. In this three part series, I will summarize the most interesting or significant traces left behind after using the bundle. This post will cover Debian Linux (#8166), part two will cover Windows 7, and part three will cover OS X 10.8.

Process

I set up a virtual machine with a fresh install of Debian 6.0 Squeeze, logged in once and shut it down cleanly. I then connected the virtual drive to another virtual machine and used dd to create an image of the drive. I also used hashdeep to compute hashes for every file on the drive, and rsync to copy all the files over to an external drive.

After having secured a copy of the clean virtual machine, I rebooted the system, connected an external drive, and copied the Tor Browser Bundle (version 2.3.25-6, 64-bit) from the external drive to my Debian home directory. I extracted the package archive and started the Tor Browser Bundle by running ./start-tor-browser inside the Tor Browser directory.

Once the Tor Browser was up and running, I browsed to a few pages, read a few paragraphs here and there, clicked on a few links, and then shut it down by closing the Tor Browser and clicking on the Exit-button in Vidalia. The Tor Browser did not crash and I did not see any error messages. I deleted the Tor Browser directory and the tarball using rm -rf.

I repeated the steps with dd, hashdeep, and rsync to create a copy of the tainted virtual machine.

Results

Using hashdeep, I compared the hashes from the tainted virtual machine against the hashes from the clean virtual machine: 68 files had a hash that did not match any of the hashes in the clean set. The most interesting files are:

~/.local/share/gvfs-metadata/home: contains the filename of the Tor Browser Bundle tarball: tor-browser-gnu-linux-x86_64-2.3.25-5-dev-en-US.tar.gz. GVFS is the virtual filesystem for the GNOME desktop, so this result will probably vary depending on the window manager used. I have created #8695 for this issue.

~/.xsession-errors: contains the following string: “Window manager warning: Buggy client sent a _NET_ACTIVE_WINDOW message with a timestamp of 0 for 0x3800089 (Tor Browse)”. It is worth noting that a file named .xsession-errors.old could also exist. I have created #8696 for this issue.

~/.bash_history: contains a record of commands typed into the terminal. I started the Tor Browser Bundle from the command line, so this file contains lines such as ./start-tor-browser. I have created #8697 for this issue.

/var/log/daemon.log, /var/log/syslog, /var/log/kern.log, /var/log/messages: contains information about attached devices. I had an external drive attached to the virtual machine, so these files contain lines such as “Mounted /dev/sdb1 (Read-Write, label “THA”, NTFS 3.1)” and “Initializing USB Mass Storage driver…”.

======

She doesn't discuss the results, but I find them interesting. The bash commands in the history file are obvious (and won't exist when starting TBB from the file manager or a menu item), but I didn't expect the TBB archive filename to show up in something called gvfs-metadata. I wonder if there is some way to prevent that? And if there isn't at least you now know to shred the files in that folder!

Mitigation strategies are mentioned in the bug reports below.

In her next blog post, she will cover Windows. I bet there will be a lot more traces.


References

https://blog.torproject.org/blog/forensic-analysis-tor-linux
https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/8166
https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/8695
https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/8696
https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/8697

1573
Drug safety / Re: Ask a Drug Expert Physician about Drugs & Health
« on: April 15, 2013, 06:38 pm »
Quote from: DoctorX on April 15, 2013, 07:56 am
Studies in human pharmacology and studies of psychoterapeutic use of MDMA in the 1970s show that 120-150 mg is the highest rank. A re-dose of the half (60-75 mg) 2-3 hours later extends the experience with not too many adverse effects.

This has been my formula for a long time, except I do 180 followed by 120. :)

1574
Silk Road discussion / Re: Low bitcoin prices
« on: April 15, 2013, 06:04 pm »
If you lost money overall in the last 2 months, it's because you got greedy and stopped cashing out and now it's too late.

At least eddie was honest about it and admitted it.

1575
Silk Road discussion / Re: Low bitcoin prices
« on: April 15, 2013, 06:02 pm »
Quote from: medicalcannibas420 on April 15, 2013, 02:19 pm
The low bitcoin prices have me very concerned......if the bitcoin is going to continue moving forward....it has to become way more stable.....losing 50% of its buying power in 1 day is not a currency
that anyone should be interested in.

It's actually been pretty stable the last 4 days, hovering between $90 and $110. But yeah, it's still too volatile.


Quote from: medicalcannibas420 on April 15, 2013, 02:19 pm
During the run up in prices i was hedged the whole way......so when I sold product i was still tied to the USD....now that those transactions are complete and the bitcoins equivalent of those transactions are in my account  they are now worth 1/2 of what they were at the finalization.

That should only affect 4 days of sales. What about the 2 months before that when bitcoins were increasing 50-200% per week and went up 1000% in value overall?

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