Quote from: FarmerBob on March 17, 2012, 08:38 amI like your enthusiasm Pine, However I don't know that I see the business case behind anyone setting up a test lab. Seems very pricey and very risky to me. I certainly wouldn't want to be the guy people send samples to for purity analysis. (at least not in the USA) For drug analysis I suppose there might be a case to be made if you live in a tolerant country where possessions of small analytical samples won't get you in much trouble, but I'd think such services are already available outside of SR and TOR.Well, it doesn't have to be 1 guy. You could setup an intel exchange (a real one...). Information and analysis could be auctioned ebay style. The community decides what's useful and a multitude of offers appear from different parties with access to information/expensive machinery etc. There's always going to be complications, but you'll let the market sort them out for itself.Quote from: FarmerBob on March 17, 2012, 08:38 amShipping and Security is pretty straightforward. Be able to pass both X-ray and Dog-sniff test. No need for a research lab there. The info you need to do both of those is already readily available. I have to disagree. There's nothing straight forward about Shipping, it takes a whole lot of thought to work out an optimal solution that doesn't make problems for you down the road. The vast majority of vendors, I believe, are using sub-optimal methods through a lack of knowledge on certain issues. Also, it is not really the intention of the drug smugglers to pass the X-ray and Dog-sniff. The real objective is much simpler, which is to ensure the packages are not flagged for those methods to be used in the first place. X-rays and dogs are hugely effective, but impossible to use on anything but a tiny fraction of all mail. This is why, despite the wide diversity of effective and ineffective methods used, 97.51% of drugs smuggled from the Silk Road get through. That number includes fraudulent buyers, lost mail and other caveats, so actually the number of packages intercepted is tiny. 1 in a 100 at best. And again, a fair proportion of vendors have lousy methods of transport, the numbers for the elite will be an order of magnitude better.Quote from: FarmerBob on March 17, 2012, 08:38 amAs for the IT & computer security side that's less lab and more PC. I'd think there are plenty of coders out there already looking into that (good guys and bad guys and LE)I'm using 'lab' in a broad sense, the way it's used in social science. In any case, one of the biggest troubles is that although a considerable number of people on this forum and vendors on SR have great expertise in computers, that cannot remain the case for very much longer. Soon, more and more newbies will get tripped up by elementary gaps in their computer security procedures. Thus; there is a huge demand for straight forward guides, FAQs, How-Tos, whatever you want to call it. tldr; Education.Basically, the key issue is getting the pros to help the newbs adopt more sophisticated procedures. Most people who hang around this forum already get this, so I'm preaching to the converted there. But the vast majority of buyers definitely are not obtaining information from this forum. I'd hazard a guess from my experience of internet related consumer psychology and say that less than 1% of the buyers on the Silk Road actually post here, and perhaps only 1 out of 10 actually read the forums at any point.Quote from: FarmerBob on March 17, 2012, 08:38 amInterception & tracking systems seem pretty easy to make using PIC micro-controllers or arduino shields that are readily available. You could even just modify a cheap pay as you go phone to call a number when the box is opened. But if its enough product to be worthy of a tracker and it gets to the point where the box is opened by LE the buyer is probably already in deep shit. So again, no need for a lab there, and it's probably best that there be no "standard" technique that LE would start scanning for. Ah! But it's all so much more than that! The latest RFID tags are very sophisticated. They are very tiny, and can be printed onto a piece of paper. Some can extract energy from their surroundings, there's lots of cool tricks with RFID. I don't think it would be possible to pickup the electronic signature of a tag, since whether it is 'alive', can be controlled with different clever means (in short, they are cool are we want them :)).Quote from: FarmerBob on March 17, 2012, 08:38 amAlso a question, and forgive my ignorance, but I've never bought on here before: Are sellers here really just shipping drugs in plastic bagging or food grade vacuum bags? If so there is no way those packages would make it through a drug sniffing dog presentation.Best RegardsBob[/quote]Yes. But like I said, it's not for the Dog. It's mostly to avoid/deter:- suspicion by postman/post handlers (weed being rather pungent to the human nose).- electronic sniffing devices.If the package got to the Dog or Xray in the first place, then you've already made some mistake, that is how most of us see it.The second point is becoming increasingly important I feel. Key thing is: although they can detect down to a nanogram of drug residue, there is so much drug residue already inside the postal network, that they are forced to lower the sensitivity of the devices. For one thing, there is cocaine on 90% of the cash dollars in circulation, and cash gets posted in the postal system all the time. Too many false positives would bankrupt them.