Silk Road forums
Discussion => Shipping => Topic started by: FiberOptic on March 26, 2013, 09:29 pm
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Anyone happen to know if USPS keeps any rerecords of what blue box a piece of mail was picked up from? Given the amount of orders I ship a week, if they were keeping this info it would give them a lot of data to work with. I use as many different boxes as possible and avoided boxes with security cams but with enough data you're bound to slip up at some point. Granted this would require quite a big investigation, resources, and man hours but knowledge is power.
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yeah I picture all of these too. They dont have time for that shit, they barely have enough time in the day to deliver all the mail.
They do what Franklin told them to do. Deliver The Mail. Scents and shitty packaging bring a nosy dick or two around but for the most part it's private.
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Anyone happen to know if USPS keeps any rerecords of what blue box a piece of mail was picked up from? Given the amount of orders I ship a week, if they were keeping this info it would give them a lot of data to work with. I use as many different boxes as possible and avoided boxes with security cams but with enough data you're bound to slip up at some point. Granted this would require quite a big investigation, resources, and man hours but knowledge is power.
Regardless of the computer records kept, what most vendors seem to forget here is that the postal workers are sentient beings. They read the addresses on all the mail they handle, and they learn what's normal for their routes. The same guy will likely pick up the mail from the same blue box over and over for years; a Postal Inspector can literally just ask the guy for his recollection of the return addresses being deposited in that box over time. The guy will likely have a good recollection of the visual layout and maybe even the specific businesses used as return addresses for your orders, if he's been picking them up for a while. He might even notice that you switch up return addresses constantly but use the same font and label type or whatever, and report that to a Postal Inspector on his own.
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They do not keep track and postal workers hardly qualify as sentient beings imo.
You can check this by mailing a number of letters to yourself.
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They do not keep track and postal workers hardly qualify as sentient beings imo.
You're obviously a retard.
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They do not keep track and postal workers hardly qualify as sentient beings imo.
You're obviously a retard.
Care to add some further insight other than just bashing him?
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Fiberoptic, I suggest a little project to introduce entropy. In the case of some newfangled tracking technology we are as yet unaware of, it may come in very useful. Basically you want a way to avoid developing patterns or a habit that catches you out later. The primary advantage is that a nosy postman might intercept a suspect package 1 week, but if you only revisit that blue box several months later, it's unlikely to turn into a problem for you.
There's a list of the post boxes that exist in each zipcode on the USPS website or some 3rd party websites. Scrape that location data down and turn them into records with 1x blue box per line. Then go to a random line sorter (there are programs online for this) that will shuffle the records around so that they are out of any ordering. Say there are ~200 boxes around you and so ~200 records. Find another random number generator service online that allows you to constrict the returned values to a range of between 1 and ~200. If it's 132, it's the 132th randomly sorted record. That is the address for today's box drop(s).
In addition, I am pretty sure that there's a considerable number of boxes and other mail pickup delivery points that don't have security cams and aren't on USPS's official list, and as such are perfectly off the radar. Some apartment blocks and businesses have internal collection points for outgoing mail, just as some do with laundry and trash, but it is situation dependent and usually not publicly accessible unless you have access. Could be worth it though since security cameras are usually on the outside, not the inside.
Finally, if you have a considerable quantity of packages going out, I suggest you use the next zip code over. In the summer wear dark glasses and a cap, in the winter wear a fluffy hat and gloves. You should always wear protection for your hands, whether it's liquid Band-Aid in summer or gloves in winter, because if they get identical fingerprints, even on the outside of two different packages over a period of time, then the local police department may feel the urge to investigate, especially in a small town. Some dexterous vendors put smaller packages into 1 larger envelope package, then put the large one into the blue box and shake the smaller packages out. No gloves and it works just as well (don't lose the envelope!). Another advantage to this approach is that a nosy person looking at your back seat doesn't see dozens of small packages. Curtain twitching grannies have been known to conduct rudimentary traffic analysis and report suspicious activity! :D
The random thing is easy to program, I might do something later this week if I get the time, in fact there's a whole suite of useful programs that SR vendors and buyers could avail of, we should have an entire thread on the subject sometime.
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Care to add some further insight other than just bashing him?
USPS employs hundreds of thousands of college educated American citizens. They're unionized with great benefits and little responsibility besides being fast. It's a very cushy job, so there's obviously a LOT of competition. They downsized recently and lost a lot of their stupidest employees in the process.
The average USPS employee is more intelligent and observant than the average Silk Road buyer! This community seems to think that they're subhumans or something, but this community is what's unobservant compared to postal workers.
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Care to add some further insight other than just bashing him?
USPS employs hundreds of thousands of college educated American citizens. They're unionized with great benefits and little responsibility besides being fast. It's a very cushy job, so there's obviously a LOT of competition. They downsized recently and lost a lot of their stupidest employees in the process.
The average USPS employee is more intelligent and observant than the average Silk Road buyer! This community seems to think that they're subhumans or something, but this community is what's unobservant compared to postal workers.
I'd agree with that. I've always been impressed by the postal workers I've dealt with. Not so much the counter workers but the ones that deliver the mail tend to be on the ball in my experience.
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Fiberoptic, I suggest a little project to introduce entropy. In the case of some newfangled tracking technology we are as yet unaware of, it may come in very useful. Basically you want a way to avoid developing patterns or a habit that catches you out later. The primary advantage is that a nosy postman might intercept a suspect package 1 week, but if you only revisit that blue box several months later, it's unlikely to turn into a problem for you.
There's a list of the post boxes that exist in each zipcode on the USPS website or some 3rd party websites. Scrape that location data down and turn them into records with 1x blue box per line. Then go to a random line sorter (there are programs online for this) that will shuffle the records around so that they are out of any ordering. Say there are ~200 boxes around you and so ~200 records. Find another random number generator service online that allows you to constrict the returned values to a range of between 1 and ~200. If it's 132, it's the 132th randomly sorted record. That is the address for today's box drop(s).
In addition, I am pretty sure that there's a considerable number of boxes and other mail pickup delivery points that don't have security cams and aren't on USPS's official list, and as such are perfectly off the radar. Some apartment blocks and businesses have internal collection points for outgoing mail, just as some do with laundry and trash, but it is situation dependent and usually not publicly accessible unless you have access. Could be worth it though since security cameras are usually on the outside, not the inside.
Finally, if you have a considerable quantity of packages going out, I suggest you use the next zip code over. In the summer wear dark glasses and a cap, in the winter wear a fluffy hat and gloves. You should always wear protection for your hands, whether it's liquid Band-Aid in summer or gloves in winter, because if they get identical fingerprints, even on the outside of two different packages over a period of time, then the local police department may feel the urge to investigate, especially in a small town. Some dexterous vendors put smaller packages into 1 larger envelope package, then put the large one into the blue box and shake the smaller packages out. No gloves and it works just as well (don't lose the envelope!). Another advantage to this approach is that a nosy person looking at your back seat doesn't see dozens of small packages. Curtain twitching grannies have been known to conduct rudimentary traffic analysis and report suspicious activity! :D
The random thing is easy to program, I might do something later this week if I get the time, in fact there's a whole suite of useful programs that SR vendors and buyers could avail of, we should have an entire thread on the subject sometime.
Thanks for the tips!
Around here there are TONS of those apt/ neighborhood mail boxes with out going mail. There are never cameras around them and there are probably 10x as many of those as blue boxes. My concern is that the mail from those boxes are much more likely to be from that specific neighborhood so I think a return address from a different area could draw unwanted attention and I imagine the volume of outgoing mail in them is much lower than a blue box. I'd also assume the mail in them would be more likely to be plain envelopes than priority mailers and such.
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I seriously doubt they keep track of what bluebox something is picked up from. They keep records of all kind but that would take more time and resources than they have to throw at it.
The only think I can think of is if the mail piece has a tracking # on it, the mail collector might scan it right there and it might get IDd as being picked up from a certain bluebox, but I highly doubt letters and untracked pieces are kept track of like that.
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Fiberoptic, I suggest a little project to introduce entropy. In the case of some newfangled tracking technology we are as yet unaware of, it may come in very useful. Basically you want a way to avoid developing patterns or a habit that catches you out later. The primary advantage is that a nosy postman might intercept a suspect package 1 week, but if you only revisit that blue box several months later, it's unlikely to turn into a problem for you.
There's a list of the post boxes that exist in each zipcode on the USPS website or some 3rd party websites. Scrape that location data down and turn them into records with 1x blue box per line. Then go to a random line sorter (there are programs online for this) that will shuffle the records around so that they are out of any ordering. Say there are ~200 boxes around you and so ~200 records. Find another random number generator service online that allows you to constrict the returned values to a range of between 1 and ~200. If it's 132, it's the 132th randomly sorted record. That is the address for today's box drop(s).
In addition, I am pretty sure that there's a considerable number of boxes and other mail pickup delivery points that don't have security cams and aren't on USPS's official list, and as such are perfectly off the radar. Some apartment blocks and businesses have internal collection points for outgoing mail, just as some do with laundry and trash, but it is situation dependent and usually not publicly accessible unless you have access. Could be worth it though since security cameras are usually on the outside, not the inside.
Finally, if you have a considerable quantity of packages going out, I suggest you use the next zip code over. In the summer wear dark glasses and a cap, in the winter wear a fluffy hat and gloves. You should always wear protection for your hands, whether it's liquid Band-Aid in summer or gloves in winter, because if they get identical fingerprints, even on the outside of two different packages over a period of time, then the local police department may feel the urge to investigate, especially in a small town. Some dexterous vendors put smaller packages into 1 larger envelope package, then put the large one into the blue box and shake the smaller packages out. No gloves and it works just as well (don't lose the envelope!). Another advantage to this approach is that a nosy person looking at your back seat doesn't see dozens of small packages. Curtain twitching grannies have been known to conduct rudimentary traffic analysis and report suspicious activity! :D
The random thing is easy to program, I might do something later this week if I get the time, in fact there's a whole suite of useful programs that SR vendors and buyers could avail of, we should have an entire thread on the subject sometime.
Pine you are awesome.
Thanks for your effort to type this down.