Silk Road forums
Discussion => Off topic => Topic started by: aceeca on April 27, 2012, 05:45 am
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So, I know a lot of sellers post things like their emails and other ways to contact them just in case SR ever ends up being shut down. Due to recent fascist political endeavors, I thought it would be very cool if someone listed all the sellers that have different ways of contacting them, and what they sell. Yep.
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Sounds like this would compromise a lot of people. Bad, bad idea.
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Er, I don't think you understand how things work around here. How would creating an itemized contact list of vendors for the public be a heroic act?
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I'm just gunna be well blunt about this. Does anyone else smell a bit of Gammon?
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So, I know a lot of sellers post things like their emails and other ways to contact them just in case SR ever ends up being shut down. Due to recent fascist political endeavors, I thought it would be very cool if someone listed all the sellers that have different ways of contacting them, and what they sell. Yep.
So having gone to all this trouble to protect our identities, you think we're just going to hand over our cellphone numbers?
Most SR sellers have a Tormail e-mail address on their profile in any case but how could Silk Road ever be shut down by LEO? There's no centralised server, no ISP - there's not even a reliable way of blocking Onion Routing, so surely we needn't worry about it?
V.
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What's the color of a 1cent piece?
Copper Copper
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So, I know a lot of sellers post things like their emails and other ways to contact them just in case SR ever ends up being shut down. Due to recent fascist political endeavors, I thought it would be very cool if someone listed all the sellers that have different ways of contacting them, and what they sell. Yep.
So having gone to all this trouble to protect our identities, you think we're just going to hand over our cellphone numbers?
Most SR sellers have a Tormail e-mail address on their profile in any case but how could Silk Road ever be shut down by LEO? There's no centralised server, no ISP - there's not even a reliable way of blocking Onion Routing, so surely we needn't worry about it?
V.
To add to this, if you look at the interviews done with computer science experts (as in the ones that teach it at Oxbridge, the equivalents at other universities, people who design it) they all say the same thing. Isn't crackable any time soon and there is no legal basis to make the people who run TOR to be compelled to give up the keys. I was a bit skeptical of this but I asked the guy who manages my phone encryption and he confirmed it. There isn't anything that can crack TOR at this time.
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there really does seem to be alot of cops, or dumbfucks, or moonbears on here today, and not a mod in sight. unless they have their online status hidden. Sunday must be their day of rest... and with that, I'm off to start my night of rest!
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Does anyone feel like being *AN hero?
I think that's what he meant.
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Does anyone feel like being *AN hero?
I think that's what he meant.
Slow clap.
ssslllooooowwwww claaaapppp
You are funny.
you made me smile and forget for a moment how I'm going insane trying to configure everything to make a deal.
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Sometimes when I'm on a bus, I imagine it crashing and saving all of the people.
Then saving "the girl" and getting married.
It's pretty fun... :\
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I CAN BE YOUR HERO BABY........
I CAN KISS AWAY THE PAIN......
IF ANYONE GIVES THE SKETCHY OP MY EMAIL ADDRESS......
I WILL NEVER, SELL TO THAT MOTHER FUCKER AGAIN.......
Ahhh....I love singing...
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You guys must have short memories if you don't remember what happened with OVDB. SR is a relatively centralized institution. You won't be so lazare faire if all the hidden services you currently use evaporate overnight. SR gets turned off for an hour, and this board gets flooded with panicking buyers every time. This is a global business not a cottage industry, you can't just pop out for a coffee break and a smoke, the service has to flow 24 hours a day, 365.25 days a year.
Remember how it feels when the electricity goes in a black-out? All previous assumptions are rendered invalid. You have to visit a shop just to buy water because your pump doesn't work. And you feel stupid for not having candles or matches etc, until the lights come back on and you promptly forget the inconvenience. You didn't get smarter because the lights came on. You just got more confident.
The point is that if there was a highly decentralized method of the entire network anonymously communicating with itself without using SR as a intermediary, then that would be a good thing. It gives flexibility, redundancy. It would make bouncing back from an attack instantaneous. Sure it'd happen anyway, but why have a disruption in service?
The key thing is to make it so that even if LE 'intercepted' messages or was a member of that network, that it would be completely irrelevant.
Making a list of clearweb contact details is stupid, yes. But the problem is real even if the solution purposed was crap. Why do you think Speak Easy is being built?
Instead of pointing fingers, try to come up with some interim ideas to fix the problem. Something that isn't obviously dependent on a single set of DOSable servers somewhere.
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You guys must have short memories if you don't remember what happened with OVDB. SR is a relatively centralized institution. You won't be so lazare faire if all the hidden services you currently use evaporate overnight. SR gets turned off for an hour, and this board gets flooded with panicking buyers every time. This is a global business not a cottage industry, you can't just pop out for a coffee break and a smoke, the service has to flow 24 hours a day, 365.25 days a year.
Remember how it feels when the electricity goes in a black-out? All previous assumptions are rendered invalid. You have to visit a shop just to buy water because your pump doesn't work. And you feel stupid for not having candles or matches etc, until the lights come back on and you promptly forget the inconvenience. You didn't get smarter because the lights came on. You just got more confident.
The point is that if there was a highly decentralized method of the entire network anonymously communicating with itself without using SR as a intermediary, then that would be a good thing. It gives flexibility, redundancy. It would make bouncing back from an attack instantaneous. Sure it'd happen anyway, but why have a disruption in service?
The key thing is to make it so that even if LE 'intercepted' messages or was a member of that network, that it would be completely irrelevant.
Making a list of clearweb contact details is stupid, yes. But the problem is real even if the solution purposed was crap. Why do you think Speak Easy is being built?
Instead of pointing fingers, try to come up with some interim ideas to fix the problem. Something that isn't obviously dependent on a single set of DOSable servers somewhere.
Forgive 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?
I 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.
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You guys must have short memories if you don't remember what happened with OVDB. SR is a relatively centralized institution. You won't be so lazare faire if all the hidden services you currently use evaporate overnight. SR gets turned off for an hour, and this board gets flooded with panicking buyers every time. This is a global business not a cottage industry, you can't just pop out for a coffee break and a smoke, the service has to flow 24 hours a day, 365.25 days a year.
Remember how it feels when the electricity goes in a black-out? All previous assumptions are rendered invalid. You have to visit a shop just to buy water because your pump doesn't work. And you feel stupid for not having candles or matches etc, until the lights come back on and you promptly forget the inconvenience. You didn't get smarter because the lights came on. You just got more confident.
The point is that if there was a highly decentralized method of the entire network anonymously communicating with itself without using SR as a intermediary, then that would be a good thing. It gives flexibility, redundancy. It would make bouncing back from an attack instantaneous. Sure it'd happen anyway, but why have a disruption in service?
The key thing is to make it so that even if LE 'intercepted' messages or was a member of that network, that it would be completely irrelevant.
Making a list of clearweb contact details is stupid, yes. But the problem is real even if the solution purposed was crap. Why do you think Speak Easy is being built?
Instead of pointing fingers, try to come up with some interim ideas to fix the problem. Something that isn't obviously dependent on a single set of DOSable servers somewhere.
Forgive 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?
I 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.
Tor 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.
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Forgive 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.
I 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.
Tor 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.
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pine, you are the real-est realist I've ever met.
can't we just keep in touch via clearnet wikipedia's silk road entry? ::) ;D