Quote from: metta on August 13, 2012, 11:45 pmHi Guru,Thank you for your detailed response to my query. This is all new to me so I am easily confused ... ;-)It is ok, you are a sunshine enjoying small friendly lizard visiting the black market Internet after all. :)Quote from: metta on August 13, 2012, 11:45 pmWhat I was originally referring to was this quote from the SR wiki:"Receiving addressFrom the moment you submit your order, to the moment it is displayed to your vendor, the information is fully encrypted and totally unreadable. Then, as soon as your vendor marks your package with the address and confirms shipment, the address is deleted forever and is not retrievable. For the extra cautious, you can encrypt your information yourself with your vendor's public key so that even we at Silk Road would be unable to view it, even if we wanted to. See below for more ways to be safe."As I read this, SR encrypts one's address sent with an order to the vendor, so I thought perhaps this was protection enough. No it isn't, because (A) this could all be lies (we hope not, but it is possible) and (B) even if it was true LE could hack SR's website and conduct a long term man in the middle attack, basically intercepting as many addresses as possible. Using PGP prevents even SR Staff from knowing what messages say, which is infinitely better than trusting anybody. Trust is in short supply around here, we rely on cryptographic strength as opposed to trust here. Sort of similar to how Bitcoin works by cryptography instead of being backed by a government (trust).I mean, you want to be in the situation where SR could get completely compromised, but LE has no information on you whatsoever apart from a useless nym which is not associated with your offline identity. Anybody who doesn't avail of such PGP protection is ultimately going to have a greater chance of getting busted.Quote from: metta on August 13, 2012, 11:45 pmI've downloaded GPGtools for Mac, but it hasn't been updated for Mountain Lion and some things such as email are not working. There appears to be some other glitches as well . . . either that or I'm just not understanding how it works. I've taken up pine's offer to join the PGP Club and I've exchanges a couple of messages, but not correctly each time.I'm usually pretty tech savvy, but this PGP thing is confusing for some reason. With pine's patience, though, I expect to finally get it sorted out.By the way, is there some method to turning on formatting options in this forum?mettaNoooooooo! No formatting. Formatting bad! O_oThis would require the use of Javascript, which would hypothetically compromise your anonymity using various hacker tricks. You should have Javascript turned off on SR and SRF.--Anyway, I forget the exact details of what messages I sent, but get back to me if you've any problems and we'll sort them out.