Silk Road forums
Discussion => Security => Topic started by: jonsnow on July 25, 2011, 09:18 pm
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I have spent hours upon hours trying to get PGP to work properly on my mac and I can't get it to work. I am tired of trying to get it to work and don't have the time to keep trying to get it to work.
I finally got some bitcoins on to SilkRoad today and want to place my first order this week. I know everyone says to use PGP when sending your mailing address to the seller for obvious security reasons but I can't get it to work. My question is, does sending my mailing address to the seller on TorPM add any more security than just using the message system on Silk Road? What added security benefit does using TorPM give me over the Silk Road message system?
Thanks for any help!
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There best answer is hell no. The logical answer is TorPM is more secure then sending through SR PM since it's known unless SMF changed but this can be googled, that admins of SMF can read PMs.
TorPM *claims* to use encryption and I'd never trust them but it isn't a known fact that they do not.
Without knowing anyhing else, if you had to choose between the 2 TorPM would be the most reasonable choice.
But at least with PGP you have less to guess about. Do I think it's secure? I dunno, but I think it's perceived to be secure enough where it would take something huge for them to come out with them knowing, probably slickly by having a paper released by a college student then the next day announcing they caught some raghead or something using pgp that was recently broken.
I would spend some time and learn to use pgp. If you have ubuntu it's easy. If not check out tails, it's a live cd that uses tor and it takes 4-5 steps to get going, would be willing to spoon feed ya.
The main fucking mistery that pissed me off as far as sending is where do you encrypt or decrypt? Some say mail programs but the good thing about GPA is it has a clipboard that lets you do all this.
Don't do TorPM for securety, do it for convienance with pgp used by you at all times.
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I have successfully set up GPGTools on my Mac -- I can help you set it up if you need some guidance. Once you get it set up it's pretty easy to encrypt messages. I think PGP/GPG is the best way to protect your privacy (at least compared to other methods), so it's worth spending a little extra time up-front to get it working on your Mac.
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I have spent hours upon hours trying to get PGP to work properly on my mac and I can't get it to work. I am tired of trying to get it to work and don't have the time to keep trying to get it to work.
I finally got some bitcoins on to SilkRoad today and want to place my first order this week. I know everyone says to use PGP when sending your mailing address to the seller for obvious security reasons but I can't get it to work. My question is, does sending my mailing address to the seller on TorPM add any more security than just using the message system on Silk Road? What added security benefit does using TorPM give me over the Silk Road message system?
Thanks for any help!
Hey Jon-everyone has an opinion about this but a practical way to look at it would be: if you are only going to buy one time then putting in the additional hours to install PGP is not worth it. HOWEVER-if you are planning on buying regularly then you definitely want to install PGP so you can talk to the sellers and send your address encrypted. I put up a step by step installation "for dummies" type post so just search under my name. It also has a link that has screen shots so you can go thru it in minute detail as you do it.
Don't feel bad, I spent about 20 hours one weekend getting it installed and working and I had already used PGP several years ago. I'd just done it on a PC and now I needed to do it on a Mac. Then there's people here who will trade sample messages with you so you can make sure it's working properly.
Good luck! :)
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Sending the shipping address through other channels decentralizes the whole thing because LE would have to get access to both channels to know that you ordered something illegal and to get your shipping address.
I am not familiar with TorPM but you should consider that for cryptographic applications only open source software can be assumed as secure because of the high risk of backdoors in closed source applications (a famous example is hushmail which was wrongly considered as safe by many people back in the days).
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PGP is really the way to go. GNU Privacy assistant (GPA) is really very easy to use, have you tried that?
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I greatly appreciate all the feedback. I still have never been able to got PGP working on my mac. I think upgrading to OS x Lion has caused a few problems.
I decided to run vmware so I could try it on windows and by following this guide http://dkn255hz262ypmii.onion/index.php?topic=1283.00 I was able to get it to work. I made my first purchase yesterday and was able to send it with PGP encryption and feel much better about the security of the transaction.