At 01:43 AM 6/12/2011, Jeffrey Paul wrote:

This guy doesn't know that The Silk Road is a hidden service that can _only_ be accessed via Tor - and he further doesn't know the difference between "elicit" and "illicit".

Surprisingly, there are lots of techies who can't spell (you'd think a field that requires deep attention to grammars and syntaxes in artificial languages would primarily attract people who can do the same in natural languages, but it's been obvious for decades that that's not close to universal), and there are techies whose native language isn't English, and there are spell checkers that will fix misspelled words inaccurately because they're not looking at grammar.) And even if you can only access the service using Tor, that doesn't mean you can't set up Tor wrong, which was one of his points. And while he mentioned that that kilo of coke you're being shipped may be coming from somebody the Feds are watching, people dealing in that kind of volume are more likely to be careful. But people buying personal-use retail quantities of drugs, like the guy buying that 10-strip of acid? They're more likely to be buying it from somebody who's not careful, or for that matter the dealer may be a Fed or an informant.

or for that matter the dealer may be a Fed or an informant.

The dual-use feature of information is a given. Information system designers and operators play a dual role in every field from religion to education to government to FOI to security and to law, the latter two in particular. Open source has always been dual-use, and the usage of the term is a sure sign of duplicity, indeed in most cases asymmetrically so. The DNI is one of the few who has admitted that is how spy agencies use the term, but looking at other uses it seems clear that it is a cloak for deception to a greater or lesser degree, primarily to get information swapping going in a particular direction to favor the initiator. Early adopters commonly promise high ROI then gradually shift to less return and more profits as confidence in the product grows and the opportunity for exploiting that confidence attracts shrewder investors. Vulture capitalists, as if there are any other kind, are especially adept at this. Informants, insiders, administrators, judges, arbiters, trusted grammarians, language police, third parties, confessors, lovers, teenagers luring Breibarts to smear congresscritters, bitcoiners, digital moneymakers, security do-gooders and evildoers, and skeptics of all these, is there any question of their pervasive dual-usage to tip the rewards toward themselves? Put them on a pinhead to see them bleat. This is not about the major religions and governments only, but any initiative to induce confidence in one belief and suspicion about others. Without that duality there would no pro- and anti-thinkers and tinkerers always working in cahoots as if an irrefutable scientific proof of the absence of god. They too two-dance pinheadedly. Informing is ordinary behavior, and its takes little inducement to open source the spigot. Mild disagreement will usually work. Even better is dinging the tip jar.

On Tue, 2011-06-14 at 10:44 -0400, Ulex Europae wrote:

At 04:43 12 06 11, Jeffrey Paul wrote:

...

On 12 Jun, 2011, at 10:31 , Eugen Leitl forwarded:

...

That said, there's numerous ways your privacy could be compromised if your buying drugs or performing elicit activities. Some points of possible attack include:

This guy doesn't know that The Silk Road is a hidden service that can _only_ be accessed via Tor - and he further doesn't know the difference between "elicit" and "illicit".

Also, didn't someone say that bitcoins were fairly stable in the $10 range before that Silk Road article, that they jumped up to $20 and $30 after the article?

Check out the chart over the last month: <http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/mtgoxUSD#rg30ztgSzm1g10zm2g25> Personally I credit the honorable Senators for causing the $30 jump. Bitcoins in the FEDERAL GOVERNMENT!? Couldn't have _paid_ for better publicity. [demime 1.01d removed an attachment of type application/pgp-signature which had a name of signature.asc]