Silk Road forums

Quote from: kmfkewm on March 15, 2013, 03:20 am

Quote from: ByronLegosi on March 14, 2013, 06:29 pm

The only way a private key is useful to someone is if they intercept a message enc with its public key and
if that has happened chances are you're already in the shit as it is.

By that logic there is no need to use cryptography at all.

My statement was almost identical to saying "There's no use in knowing someone's password if you didn't know what site it was for". Would you have disagreed with that? My logic is sound I think you may have misread it somewhere.

@onetwothree :
It's a tough problem no doubt, and like always a large part does rely on some level of trust, without it we'd all have unplugged our network cards (or I would lol). However, the solution as I say is to make sure you aren't trusting any one agent with all your data. Splitting the data client-side encrypting (obviously) and sending separate pieces to separate parties is pretty much the only solution you can trust, and even then you'd have to trust all the agents were not in collusion. This is why I said the problem is academic because as yet there is no solution, if there were it could make you very rich.

It's not a quick job though so give me some time and I'll show you my solution. It would be audit-able and all network traffic from any client would be too. So I think you would be able to thoroughly check what was happening and come to ones own conclusion as to it's security.

I'll second your signature in this case but let me actually make my statement first ;-)

I think you might have mis said it somewhere. The entire point of using encryption is to keep you safe in the event of an interception of communications. To say that once the interception has taken place it doesn't matter if the attacker has your private key or not because you are fucked anyway, is essentially the same as saying you might as well not encrypt your communications.

From a user friendliness and feature rich point of view, VMware is the winner. I am pretty sure VMware has a seamless mode that is actually seamless, versus Virtualboxes shit seamless mode that essentially just makes the desktop transparent / removes it (but still has its own application bar etc instead of integrating with the hosts).

From a security point of view Virtualbox is superior, primarily because it is open source and VMware is not.

Quote from: kmfkewm on February 20, 2013, 02:36 pm

I like genetically engineered food, it reduces hunger. All food is genetically engineered anyway, it is just before humans directly influenced natural selection to engineer our food, and now we are more advanced and we use advanced genetic modification techniques to engineer our food.

And here I thought you were propaganda proof kmf. You know that GMO yields have been steadily declining over the past 10 years while organic farming has maintained consistent yields since the introduction of machinery capable of handling the tough weed problems that caused the need for GMO crops in the first place.

I am all for genetics to bring new traits to boost yields, but the GMO industry is not interested in that, they are interested in selling their patented gene crops and their wildly expensive chemicals to maintain similar yields but locking the producers into a perpetual cycle of needing to buy the newest chemicals and genes because nothing else will grow once they have started.

I will say that I am by no means an expert in regards to genetically engineered food versus 'natural organic' food. But I find your claim to be highly suspect. The best example of GMO I know of follows this pattern: invent a highly effective pesticide, oh noez it kills the plant as well, genetically modify the plant to resist the pesticide, now you can use highly effective pesticide without killing the crop. This means that the genetically modified crop is able to be used concurrently with a highly effective pesticide, the organic crop that hasn't been genetically modified cannot be used with that pesticide because it will kill it, and due to using less effective pesticides the natural organic crop is going to get eaten by pests. This means that by using the genetically engineered crop, you can produce more food. Now when everybody starts using this genetically modified crop, there is going to be a significant increase in the amount of food available, and starvation is going to go down and food prices are going to go down due to supply and demand economics.

Now I do know that the genetic engineering corporations do lock farmers into needing to purchase seeds from them for every cycle, and that is more a debate regarding property rights than it is a debate about the benefits of genetically modified foods.

Also, genetic engineering does mimic human controlled selection, in my view it is like an increased speed natural selection. Instead of the farmers using the pesticide on the 'organic' crops and having them all die save for a few, and then breeding the few survivors, for many cycles until they coerce the crops to be naturally resistant to the pesticide, they cut to the chase with genetic engineering.

Also it is not just creating plants that are immune to certain effective pesticides, they also engineer them to produce more. And again it is just enhanced natural selection, rather than getting the end result of higher yields by the farmers interfering with natural selection in an attempt to coerce certain desirable properties over many generations, they directly interfere with the genetics of the plant or of the salmon or whatever to get the desired result immediately and precisely.

You, sir, are a fucking idiot.  Ignorance like this and widespread corruption is the reason companies like Monsanto continue to taint all of our seedbanks and ruin all of our food.  Natural selection is NOT genetic engineering.

Human controlled selection is indeed genetic engineering, it just isn't the most efficient route. If I have a population of organisms and I select which ones are allowed to breed based on characteristics I find desirable, I am in effect changing the genetic make up of future generations of the organism to be more similar to what I desire. This is a time consuming process though, and it is more efficient and precise if I directly genetically modify the organisms to be how I desire, rather than try to indirectly change their genetic makeup via controlling the mating / reproduction.

Porn should be banned.

Sadly, this will not happen in the foreseeable.

Everything should be banned

Keeping a site running 24/7 is a real challenge, especially when it is being run by a single person, and even more so when they need to access the server via Tor (typing in SSH commands five ahead of what you see on the screen is never any fun) and are running an illegal site that isn't their full time job. Keep that in mind before bitching about down time .

Quote from: kmfkewm on March 07, 2013, 02:40 pm

Cold boot attack works against RAM no matter what device the RAM is in.

But kmf, I've heard a lot of people say that CBA doesn't work against DDR3. What's your opinion?

I actually asked a forensics expert about this. He said that CBA doesn't work against DDR3 unless the memory is frozen. Unlike DDR2 etc DDR3 has its state decay very rapidly, so you cannot quickly restart the machine and boot up into a forensics live OS, or remove the RAM and put it into a forensics laptop. But the rate of its state decay is still slowed by freezing it, so provided you freeze it the attack is still feasible. CBA doesn't always inherently involve freezing the RAM, but in cases where the RAM is frozen it is still applicable to DDR3.

imo mephedrone is absolute toxic shit. That said...

Claim:

Secondly, recently published work by Freeman et al. [30] is suggestive of lasting cognitive impairment (as measured by a prose recall task) in human MMC users.

Abstract of citation:

Design  A mixed within- and between-subjects design compared 20 mephedrone users, first while intoxicated (T1) and secondly drug free (T2); and 20 controls twice when drug free (T1 and T2).

Settings  Participants' own homes.

Participants  Healthy adults recruited from the community.

Measurements  Subjective effects, episodic and working memory, phonological and semantic fluency, psychomotor speed and executive control at were assessed at T1 and T2. Trait schizotypy, depression, changes in mephedrone use since the ban and attitudes influencing use of a hypothetical new legal high were indexed at T2 only.

Findings  Compared with controls, mephedrone users had generally impaired prose recall (P = 0.037) and higher scores in schizotypy (P < 0.001) and depression (P = 0.01). Mephedrone acutely primed a marked ‘wanting’ for the drug (P < 0.001), induced stimulant-like effects, impaired working memory (P < 0.001) and enhanced psychomotor speed (P = 0.024). Impulsivity in mephedrone users correlated with the number of hours in an average (nearly 8 hour) mephedrone session (r = 0.6). Users would be drawn to use a new legal high if it were pure, had no long/short term harms, and was positively rated by friends or on the internet.

Conclusions  Mephedrone impairs working memory acutely, induces stimulant-like effects in users and is associated with binge use. Factors that influence users' attitudes to new drugs might help to predict future trends in use of the many new psychoactive substances emerging on the internet.

They apparently tested the mephedrone users while high and then some unknown amount of time later while they were no longer intoxicated. The only conclusion they came to was that it caused an acute impairment in working memory.

In summary

Secondly, recently published work by Freeman et al. [30] is suggestive of lasting cognitive impairment (as measured by a prose recall task) in human MMC users.

versus

Conclusions  Mephedrone impairs working memory acutely, induces stimulant-like effects in users and is associated with binge use. Factors that influence users' attitudes to new drugs might help to predict future trends in use of the many new psychoactive substances emerging on the internet.

Unless the cited study goes into more detail than the conclusion of the abstract, the claim of lasting rather than acute cognitive impairment is not an accurate summary of the citation provided. At least if you take the word 'lasting' to be different from 'acute', which I certainly do.