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With all due respect, that is just crazy. This could flag countless numbers of people who just happen to walk by a mailbox on their way to work, for example.

People who walk by a mailbox on their way to work will do so in a non-random fashion. Every time they go to work they will likely take the same route and pass by the same boxes. Vendors tend to ship from random boxes that are not in a predictable path. If vendors ship from the same set of boxes, or boxes in a certain restricted geographical area, they will be making themselves much weaker to focused surveillance operations. If they use random locations to ship from, then they will make themselves much weaker to the crowd intersection attack I mentioned above, because people who are going to work do not display so much randomness in their path over time.

Another thing to keep in mind is that people who are going to work are going to show up as going to work. People who drop off packages and then go home are going to show up as dropping off packages and then going home. Remember that they can position your cellphone. So it is actually very easy to filter away the noise.

Anyone who carries a cellphone with them while engaging in illegal activity is just begging for trouble.

From there inquiries could be made to determine if the owner of the cell phone uses tor from their internet connection (use of tor is detectable via data packet pattern analysis), further raising suspicion.

Or they could just get records of who all in an area a vendor is known to work out of uses Tor, and use that as their initial crowd of suspects. This is why it is a good idea to use bridges.

This is most unlikely. Carrying out in-person surveillance is EXPENSIVE, and is resorted to only when there is no other way to gather evidence.

When manned surveillance is carried out generally is determined by a balance of two things: importance of target identification and target crowd size. If they have reason to believe that one out of a hundred people they have identified is involved in selling small amounts of marijuana, there is no chance they will put each of the suspects under manned surveillance in an attempt to identify the actual culprit. If they have reason to believe that one out of a hundred people they have identified plans to detonate an atomic bomb in a major city, you better believe that they will all be under intense surveillance.

Suggest leaving your cell phones at home when visiting the post office boxes.

It is a very good suggestion. Of course people should not carry cellphones with them while engaging in illegal activity! They are tracking beacons for fucks sake.

The basic premise of your argument appears to be that the authorities have unlimited budgets and/or manpower to conduct investigations. That is most certainly NOT the case. Like every other organization, they have to watch the budgets, and get the most bang for their bucks. Engaging in wild-goose chases such as these, will get anyone fired/demoted very rapidly.

NC

Law enforcement already have covert cellphone positioning networks and don't even bother asking providers for geopositioning records anymore:

http://www.technewsdaily.com/4537-embargoed-law-enforcement-tracks-real-phones-phony-cell-towers.html

analyzing that data and carrying out intersection attacks based on known positioning data that anonymous vendors have been in (ie: near boxes) is a serious threat to vendor security and not at all a wild goose chase. It is a serious attack with a lot of potential to fuck those who do not defend themselves against it.

2c-h is inactive but it is the primary precursor for most of the 2c- family of drugs.

The only possible explanation I've ever really come to is that there *aren't* infinitely small spans of distance.

There are not infinitely small spans of distance, the smallest possible distance is called a planck length. I believe that there is a sort of teleportation that takes place as objects move over this distance, but I am no expert on such things.

If your neurons lose their connections... then you lose them as a part of your consciousness.  Perhaps you're not understanding just how "hand-wavey" the one possibility I'm putting forth is: the sum of our neural connections may, for reasons totally unknown to me (well, basically totally unknown anyway), at some critical point cease to be a sum of the connections and begin to become more than their sum.  Complexity theory sort of stuff on a massive scale -- along those lines.

If your neurons aren't touching (twins of course don't share neuronal connections)... then according to what I'm suggesting, of course you don't share a consciousness.  Twins wouldn't any more so than you and I.  It's literally an identical situation in my opinion -- the similarity of their neural configuration is perhaps noteworthy because it makes them so very similar in our understanding as fellow humans, but actually it doesn't have any effect whatsoever on their independent consciousnesses (the plural sounds awfully silly, lol).  They're two different beings just like you and I, just as my position would predict.

Do you see what I'm getting at?  I'm not sure where else I might be explaining myself poorly, but I'll try and get the idea across further if you'd like -- they're all fun little concepts to me, so long as I'm not stuck sober at the time

Let me try again to explain because I also think we are still not on the same page. It seems to me that you believe that this thing we are calling the self is entirely dependent upon and indeed impossible to differentiate from a particular neural network, ie: the brain associated with the self. More concisely, you believe that you are in your entirety the systems maintained by your living brain. When your living brain dies, your self goes with it.

Now in general I strongly agree with you actually. I think when my brain dies my sense of self will entirely disintegrate, all of the memories and opinions I have will be lost, obviously all of my sensory abilities will go as well. However where I hold a different view than you is that I do not think my self in its entirety will necessarily die with my brain. I believe that if it is true that my self is perfectly synonymous with my brain, that a perfect copy of my brain would be just as much my self as my original brain is. However, as we both agree, it is obvious that this perfect copy of my brain/body will not be me. If my original body dies, I will still lose my sensory perception, I will still lose my ego, I will still experience the things that are associated with human death. My exact copy will not experience these things, it will continue to see through eyes, think thoughts, feel things, have my memories and indeed even my ego. But it will not really be me seeing those things, me feeling those things, etc. The conclusion I come to from this is that there is some small part of me that is independent of my brain, for if my self and my brain were the same thing by different names, a perfect copy of my brain would still have my 'stream of consciousness' going through it and it would not in fact be a separate entity.

Or perhaps it is the case that I am the same entity as my perfect copy, and am just completely incapable of having awareness of this. In some cases lesions of the brain can cut off communications between certain neural networks, leading to strange effects, such as the ability to see data but the inability to understand language in the perceived data due to severed communication pathways between the visual and verbal processing neural networks of the brain. Even though the language and visual data are understood separately , the lack of ability to pipe from visual to verbal can result in the inability to read what you have written, whilst maintaining the ability to write from muscle memory and to spell from verbal memory.  I can somewhat imagine myself and my perfect copy sharing the same stream of consciousness and simply being incapable of recognizing it due to the lack of connection between our brains, however I am more inclined to believe that we would be two separate entities.

Quote from: kmfkewm on December 28, 2012, 11:06 am

Quote from: SelfSovereignty on December 28, 2012, 10:18 am

I'm amazed that anyone who's experienced how powerfully a simple chemical can influence their own awareness could think for a second that we continue when our brains have ceased to function. 

This view boils down to 'I am the neural network that is my brain'. I wonder how do you explain that identical twins are not the same being? They share the same genetics, their brains will be essentially identical until nurture molds them differently. There are minor differences between twins, for example they have different fingerprints due to their unique movements inside of the womb I believe, but in any case they are essentially the same thing from a physical perspective. Over time they will develop into different people as nature and nurture both share a role in determining who we are, but the original neural networks of both twins will be nearly identical. To me this indicates that our self, at its very core, is more than our brain. Certainly our ego is tied entirely to our brain. Our memories, opinions, etc...they rely entirely on the brain. But if your brain is identical to your twins brain, and you are your brain, it seems as if you are your twin. And we know that twins are separate beings, so I have trouble to believe that this is truly the case.

An even better example would be more in the realm of science fiction, but imagine that a perfect copy of you is created. Down to the smallest detail, at the point in time when this copy of you is created, it is entirely identical to you. Do you think that you and this copy of you are the same person? There are two beings that will interact with the world, two beings that will see through their own eyes, think their own thoughts. Certainly you will be extremely similar, at first you will be exactly similar and then over time you will likely drift apart due to environmental differences in your experiences....but it is apparent that you will be two different people and have two different selves despite sharing the same structure of brain, the same set of memories, etc.

Your thinking appears -- and please, pardon me if I'm wrong -- to be predicated on an assumption that you provide no explanation of: that there's some kind of long-distance connection between the twins' brains.  Of course they aren't the same person, because their cells aren't connected to each other.

Think about something: your brain doesn't function perfectly at all times.  Yet you continue to think you're "you," as do I.  Infact I don't even notice, other than pondering my current thoughts and deciding that I'm more or less "coherent," or "intelligent," than usual.  I assume this is due entirely to having done it thousands or millions of times and having the memories to compare to.  But that doesn't mean that the loss of a single cell, or temporarily poorly functioning collections of them, makes me a different person.  I don't even notice.  Now how can I not notice?  Because I'm the sum of all the interconnected parts of my brain, and if I lose one, I lose some piece of my consciousness but can hardly tell the difference except by comparison.

Honestly, I'm not sure why you'd think that twins with identical brains would share a consciousness when they aren't physically connected?

I think you completely misunderstood what I said. Your original claim is that your self is entirely synonymous with your brain, and my argument was that if your self is really synonymous with your brain then you and a duplicate of you will be a single conscious being. As we can easily determine that you and your identical twin are different conscious entities, and that if a perfect copy of you is made at any given instant that it will be its own conscious entity, I think it casts some doubt on the claim that your self is entirely dependent on your brain. Sure your ego is, your memories, etc...but I think there is something else that is independent of the brain. Simply because I do not think that a perfect copy of me will really be me. If I die after the perfect copy of myself is created, I will not be seeing through the eyes of my copy. I will not be tasting through the tongue of my copy. But the brain will be the same brain, so I must at some level exist independently of my brain.

The question is whether each expansion produces the same universe. We are each infinitesimally unlikely, transient combinations of atoms. The universe appears deterministic at the meso and macro scales, but we know it isn't at the quantum scale. If the evolution of the universe is dependent on tiny variations in the density of quantum particles at birth, then it is infinitesimally unlikely that the universe would evolve the same way twice. Thus in all preceding and proceeding expansions, this galaxy, much less his solar system, planet, or us, wouldn't exist.

Even if each expansion does not produce the same universe, I believe it is extremely likely that something we could describe as our selves would come out of some number of the expansions. First of all, the series of events that led up to the exact thing I call me already once came out of an expansion. This is proof that I can come out of an expansion of the universe. If the universe really did contract and expand infinitely, that would mean that there would be an infinite number of times that I could come out of the expansion of the universe. As there will be no I to be aware of all of the time that passes over expansions I do not come out of, from my perception I would never not exist as I would immediately go from nonexistence to existence again, whenever it happens that I come out of the universes expansion again. Also, if I cut off my finger I am still the same person. if my brain is rewired, I am still me up to some point. And even if there is a completely new body and mind, complete with ego and memories and opinions, I will still consider it to be 'me' so long as the I that exists separately from these things continues to perceive through the new sensory organs. I mean, a perfect clone of myself is a discrete being, so to me it quite obvious that 'I' consists of more than my memories, ego, brain wiring, body , etc. 'I' comes from the ability of a single thing to process information and interact with the world, and even a complete living copy of me will not be the same 'I' as me but rather will be its own new self. 

it is infinitesimally unlikely that the universe would evolve the same way twice

Over an infinite sequence of contractions and expansions anything but the impossible could happen. It is already well established that it is possible for me to come out of the universes expansion from a singularity.

Unfortunately it seems that the majority of physicists think that we live in a universe that will expand out into heat death and that the universe and time will one day die. However I do not think anyone has proven this and I do not think anyone knows for certain, so it is unlikely but it could happen.

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Actually, the evidence, judged by the world's experts on the matter, makes that the *most likely* outcome. The fact that it isn't proven certainly doesn't make it unlikely. I think that's wishful thinking.

You misunderstood me, aided by the fact that I was not as clear as I should have been (my 'it' pointed to something further away than it should have). I meant that our being in a cyclic universe is unlikely, but it is not outside of the realm of possibility. Currently the worlds experts think the most likely outcome is that the universe will experience a heat death. Certainly I am inclined to believe that what they say is true, they are after all the experts. However, nobody has proven with certainty that the universe will experience heat death, or that the universe is not cyclic, and thus although with the best understanding of today it is highly unlikely, it is not totally proven as impossible. There are still unknown variables. But the knowledge we have today certainly points to heat death as the most likely outcome, and a cyclic universe as unlikely.

Nick Bostrom has the best writings on this. Definitely look him up.

Will do.

It depends a bit on the specific goal and configuration. Exiting out of a non Tor proxy allows you to protect yourself entirely from active attackers who target only the Tor network: at best they will be able to determine that you have accessed a non-Tor related proxy. The same benefit comes from entering with a VPN. On the other hand if you exit with a fixed proxy you will hurt your anonymity a lot probably, but you are pseudonymous anyway and as long as you are always pseudonymous with Tor and the same pseudonym is used, it shouldn't matter imo. Entering with a VPN also protects you from active attackers who only target Tor and it can give you a nice static entry node which comes with quite a lot of advantage really. On the other hand if your VPN node is compromised then you will always use a compromised entry guard. The more technically advanced people who are part of the Tor community tend to talk about it as if it is a magic shield and using anything else with it is either going to hurt your anonymity or have no effect on it. This is a very commonly held opinion in Tor circles, even amongst some of the people who know Tor best. However you also need to keep in mind that they tend to look at things a bit differently than you may. They like the fact that Tor changes entry guards and selects several, because let's say you have three entry guards and one of them is bad, assuming you use them all equally this means that the attacker has the ability to view only 33% of your entry traffic. If you use one entry node and it is bad the attacker has the ability to view 100% of your entry traffic. On the other hand if you use three entry nodes that means that there are three chances for you to pick a bad node, if you use one entry node and it is good that means that you are perfectly protected from purely active attackers. And it is much easier to pick one good entry guard than to pick three. But if you pick one and it is bad you are in a much worse situation than if you picked three. The Tor community tries to balance these things but there is some significant room for interpretation imo. They are also quite firm about researching everything extremely thoroughly, imo to the point that sometimes they delay making obvious good choices simply because there is not a paper out backing them yet. One example of this is how long it has taken them to go about switching to using two entry guards rather than three. it is not a surprise to me that this is superior, anymore than it is a surprise to me that using layered guards can greatly increase the anonymity of hidden services, but as obvious as these things appear to be only recently have research papers been released regarding them.

Another example is the end point linkability issue I pointed out: Tor really does aim to be an anonymity network but the way we use it we are not anonymous anyway due to our pseudonyms. Tor people may want circuits to rotate pretty quickly to maintain unlinkability and thus increase anonymity in one sense, but conversely fast circuit rotation increases the speed in which an attacker will be able to monitor both ends of your connection (although having guard nodes ameliorates this by a lot). The fact that using a proxy to exit through will make you less anonymous is the main reason people who think in terms of Tor will strongly suggest against it, but I think they may not see that for people who don't care about true anonymity that protecting from Tor focused active attackers may be more of a plus than sacrificing their already non-existent anonymity is a minus (pseudonymity != anonymity).

Working quantum computers have already been constructed. In fact the quantum algorithm for prime factorization has already been run on one, although it was only to factor 15 into 3 and 5.

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/09/quantum_compute.html

It is quite likely that a good deal of progress has been made since the first time they did this. Even doing it at all was a big step though as it took Shors algorithm from theoretical to implemented on a quantum computer. Now I am not educated enough to be truly up to date on the latest happenings with quantum computing, but I listen to smart cryptographers and physicists when they talk. And I have seen over the past few years the attitude shift from one of dismissing quantum computers as a viable strategy for attacking vulnerable sorts of asymmetric cryptography, to being one of acceptance that all of the widely used asymmetric algorithms are in serious danger and probably are not going to be secure for much longer. Even with really really big keys. In cryptography literature you can see a new interest in quantum resistant multivariate quadratic polynomial algorithms, and there is a good chance that this sort of asymmetric crypto will replace quantum vulnerable elliptic curve (ECDH) and prime factorization (RSA) sorts of asymmetric cryptography. Nobody knows when they will be able to break the keys we are currently using, but many people predict that there is going to be a rapid and exponential increase in the size of the composite numbers they can factor with their quantum computers.