Quote from: vlad1m1r on May 10, 2012, 02:02 pmForgive me Pine but my technical knowledge isn't as profound as yours but isn't the essence of a Tor hidden service that it is already decentralised and cannot be taken down? Also isn't the contact information of buyers/sellers already duplicated in essence by people having separate accounts here on the Forum?Tor hidden services are not decentralized, they have the same client/server architecture as the normal web and they can be taken down like any other server. Having just said that:-> They don't depend on the DNS system, at least the regular one people use. Tor has it's own DNS system.   So, even if everybody doesn't have web access because DNS lookup doesn't work, we'll be fine.-> The full name for them is: location hidden services. All traffic to/from service is encrypted since it flows over the Tor network.-> Unlike a regular web server, we cannot obtain (without great difficulty) the ip address of the location hidden service. We obtain the .onion url to be sure, but it doesn't translate to an ip address and that is what makes shutting down a hidden service so difficult. Ask kmf for a more lucid technical explanation of why this works, but work it does. It probably works by public key cryptography of course, but the details escape me. As for your 2nd question, it depends on a whole bunch of stuff. If you took down SR, Tormail and the forums, then what would you do? I mean a typical takedown operation on the clearweb takes down hundreds or thousands of websites. And many of the contact details are completely fake anyway. That's why I'm not happy with the 'Plan B' you guys go going there. It's better than no plan at all, but it's not great.Quote from: vlad1m1r on May 10, 2012, 02:02 pmI imagine if SR was taken down for any reason, a new site would be set up and the address for it would be posted across every major message board so that people could get back in touch - I also imagine the site's creators keep regular back ups in case this happens to restore people's account details - do we really need to do anything above and beyond this? I'm not picking holes in what you've said, I'm genuinely curious.V.The problem is that you're placing a whole lot of faith and trust in one group of people. Yes, we do need to go above and beyond. You think SR has backups? Maybe. But you can bet your life that LE also would have "backups" to give to us in a bait and switch operation.Quote from: 4l| on May 10, 2012, 02:42 pmTor hidden services are clearly capable of going down, otherwise there wouldn't be dead links on the hidden wiki page. This forum was offline for over a week at one point.I don't see the harm in aggregating contact information that has been made publicly available by vendors. It would be trivial for LEO to crawl this site and extract tormail addresses, for example. Exactly. My concern with the 2nd part, is that people aren't using real contact information for fear of being traced e.g. if tormail was compromised.I appreciate their concern, while at the same time I have to point out that we need a better method that allows us to all anonymously contact each other, even if it were dreadfully slow and annoying to use.If anybody has some genius plan now would be a good time to mention it.