Silk Road forums

This thread will probably be deleted, but before it is, I'd like to tell you that you have bigger hurdles to overcome than the technical aspects of running a hidden service. SR competitors are unlikely to succeed for the same reason that Facebook competitors are unlikely to succeed. Facebook benefits from the network effect: everyone wants to be where everyone is. Buyers want to shop at the marketplace that has the most vendors (and product selection), while vendors want to sell in the marketplace with the most buyers. It works so well that SR can charge $500 for a vendor account and still get more new vendors than BMR or Snuj.

BTW, take a look at the Snuj market. Started a couple of months ago, it appears to have gone nowhere, even though the site design and all that decent.

Delete what you want to remove and use the Guttman wipe of 36 times in and after the use of ccleaner.

I still see people quoting the Gutmann 35 method. It was never intended to use all 35 wipes on a single hard drive. Gutmann designed the 35 wipes to use multiple methods in cases where you don't know what type of drive it is, but for any known drive, only a subset were supposed to be used.

That being said, it's pretty well established at this point that a single random write is sufficient to make all data unrecoverable.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology says, "[F]or ATA disk drives manufactured after 2001 (over 15 GB) clearing by overwriting the media once is adequate to protect the media from both keyboard and laboratory attack."

The Center for Magnetic Recording Research says, "The U.S. National Security Agency published an Information Assurance Approval of single pass overwrite, after technical testing at CMRR showed that multiple on-track overwrite passes gave no additional erasure."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_erasure#Number_of_overwrites_needed

Write et al. performed their own tests and found that a single overwrite was sufficient.

Wright, Craig; Kleiman, Dave; Sundhar R.S., Shyaam. Overwriting Hard Drive Data: The Great Wiping Controversy. In R. Sekar, R.; Pujari, Arun K.. "Information Systems Security". Information Systems Security: 4th International Conference, ICISS 2008. http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F978-3-540-89862-7_21

More here: http://dkn255hz262ypmii.onion/index.php?topic=99520.msg699299#msg699299


The most important feature of a random overwrite is to do the whole disk, not individual files. Files can be written to multiple locations of a disk, and overwriting an individual file only writes over its last location.

You also need to use a tool that is not running on the host OS. The host OS usually reserves blocks which won't be overwritten by any tools running on the host OS.

You need a bootable program like DBAN. Run the "nuke" option with 3 writes (2 random, 1 with zeroes) and the data will be unrecoverable. Then reinstall the OS and use full disk encryption so this isn't an issue in the future.

People have suggested showing some buyer/reviewer stats. They could still be anonymous, but you could see how long they've had an account, and maybe how many purchases they've made (perhaps binned, like <10, 10-50, and 50+). That way you could make a better judgement about whether to trust the review.

Sorry, I wasn't clear. Those were examples of when he was critical of Pidgin, like 6 months ago. If you follow the link in that tweet to the bug report:

https://developer.pidgin.im/ticket/11110

That one was fixed too. I think overall Pidgin is much safer than it was even a year ago, mostly thanks to his good work.

Edit: Actually that particular bug was fixed almost 2 years ago.

You wrote:

Hi, astor,
does it work??

Thanks


Yes, it works.

Do you want to post a public key so I can send you a message?

Maybe he does the same thing as me, use a "real" name that isnt his, and his response was a sarcastic one when you asked him if that was his real name.

The vendor supposedly admitted it was his real name:

so i msg the guy and said bro is your name blank ...IRL...HE SAID YEAH how do u know??

if you posted relevant information and created discussion on topics of interest, your post count would still go quickly while your actually learning something instead of the hundreds of posts made in that thread which are nothing but pointless dribble

Exactly. The "posting just to get posts" thing is born of the same laziness that causes people to repost the same questions over and over again when a forum search would bring up dozens of threads on the same topic (even despite the fact that the search function sucks). At least now they could be reposting the same questions in the Newbie board, but they're not even doing that. They are posting to get posts and THEN coming on the main forum to repost the same questions.

Instead of grasping this opportunity to ease into the water at their own pace with the help of the Mod's to guide them through and answer any genuine questions, it's more like a food fight at a kid's 10th birthday party,

That's the biggest problem. 3 mods can't cater to that maddening crowd and answer all their questions, 24 hours a day. Senior members should be allowed to post there. We could answer questions and direct the conversations in more fruitful ways,  so instead of posting just to get posts, they could be asking questions and getting useful answers.