To the surprise of absolutely nobody. I have to wonder about the human resources needed to secure a community like this. After a while, it must get just too large, and where an above-ground org can hire from a massive technical labor pool, a community like this would (for obvious reasons) only have access to a much smaller pool of labor. Possibly relying on volunteers or employees that are picked more for their ability to navigate and work securely than for their skillset. The end result could be failures to choose/implement best practices/technologies/solutions/code at any of a million critical points that can give an adversary a way in. Like, I wonder if it's even theoretically possible to secure a network that illegal and that big in light of what we now about our security organs? I don't see how. I could see individuals staying private maybe, but not entire communities of them. A chain is only as strong as its weakest link.
When says you have to secure a single node? In silk road's wake, there are dummy sites popping up all over. But at the end of the day, it's just a communication problem, putting sellers with buyers over a secure channel. You don't need one millionaire and one website to do that. Just a distributed and secure communication network in which it's not worth the effort to track down each and every person involved.
If there is one takeaway for me from the latest round of revelations, it's just how much effort they are willing to expend. You're right about it being a communications problem. The possible solution of the child-sites popping up all needing to link buyers and sellers securely just sounds to me like you'd have the same issues with competency as one node, multiplied a few times. Encryption isn't easy for most users, and any sort of managed interface or network to make it easier is a huge point of failure potentially. Maybe encryption knowledge at a base level just isn't where it needs (for the population in general) to be for a distributed marketplace like that to work anytime soon.a distributed and secure communication network in which it's not worth the effort to track down each and every person involved.
Damn. 20 years old, living in San Fran, with a billion dollars and one of the biggest drug markets in his pocket. That is insane. I wonder which Hollywood exec just bought the rights to this masterpiece story. edit: 14 days later: http://www.theverge.com/2013/10/16/4845812/silk-road-hitman-...20th Century Fox and Chernin Entertainment have hired Dennis Lehane, the novelist behind Shutter Island, to adapt a Wired article by Joshua Davis about the story for the big screen. The twist is that the Wired article hasn't actually been published yet.
I find it kind of sad. 29 years old and he'll probably be in jail for the rest of his life.
I heard it on NPR the day the story broke. A cursory Google search yields these:
www.slate.com/blogs/crime/2013/10/02/ross_william_ulbricht_maryland_indictment_the_alleged_silk_road_mastermind.html www.businessinsider.com/ross-ulbricht-charged-in-2nd-silk-road-for-hire-plot-2013-10
Next stop is, of course, finding the dead bodies of all the teenagers who will no longer have access to safe 2Cl or heroin.“This is supposed to be some invisible black market bazaar. We made it visible,” says an FBI spokesperson, who asked not to be named. “When you interviewed [Ulbricht], he said he would never be arrested. But no one is beyond the reach of the FBI. We will find you.”
"don't worry guys, i know someone who has real pure molly"
It was only a matter of time. They seized him in San Francisco, along with taking millions of bitcoins. Does anyone think that they have access to people info who used the Silk Road to purchase drugs/anything else.
Wow. As morally "grey" as it is that something like this could exist, it was pretty incredible that the power of the internet made something as wild as the Silk Road possible. That being said, I'm sure that before long something will take its place. It took this long to shut down one Tor site. It'll take just as long to take down the next one.
I'm sure there already is something like Silk Road out there. What it is, I have no idea, but I don't doubt that it will be seeing an increase in traffic following this development.
There's one called Atlantis that went as far as making an advertising campaign.
Actually, Atlantis shut down last week for "security reasons." http://gawker.com/popular-dark-net-illegal-drug-market-shuts...
So all the canaries in the coal mine are dead. Like Freedom Hosting, it sounds like they didn't find him by an attack on Tor. Of course, that might not be true.
Call me jaded, but I can't help but wonder whether this bust has been timed to coincide with (and hence draw attention from) Snowden's upcoming leak about the US assassination program.