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Re:FBI raids alleged online drug market Silk Road, arrests o... by VMG on Wednesday October 02, 2013 @06:20PM (#6485822)
this has nothing to do with 1984 -- DPR was very sloppy, this is an indication that TOR works.

I'm betting a dozen entrepreneurs are looking at this right now thinking "I can do this better" and are designing their systems as this is happening.

Re:FBI raids alleged online drug market Silk Road, arrests o... by mindcrime on Wednesday October 02, 2013 @07:58PM (#6486273)
That's what they want you to think, so they can snare you in their FBI ran honeypot...

All joking aside, I hope you're right, and that the next few SR alternative sites figure out how to get it right, and that Tor itself isn't fundamentally broken by the FBI.

Re:FBI raids alleged online drug market Silk Road, arrests o... by bigiain on Wednesday October 02, 2013 @09:03PM (#6486471)
Agreed - I'd like to think both this, and the Lavabit being coerced to hand over private SSL keys news elsewhere today - indicates that TOR and SSL are still "as secure as needed" against even targeted FBI attacks.

Unfortunately that all now needs to be viewed with the suspicion of "parallel reconstruction" - I'm somewhat less convinced that if the NSA targeted someone specific that SSL and TOR would resist their efforts (and that for something like Silk Road, that the NSA wouldn't happily break and read everything DPR did over his SSL secured TOR connections, and "share" just the right tidbits with the FBI for them to go and create a plausible explanation involving google searches and old forum posts).

Welcome to the post Snowden era - where we know that our governments not only don't have our best interests in mind, but have sophisticated programs in place to lie to us about how they arrive at the evidence they present (in those annoying occasions where they have to use courts who aren't just rubber-stamping everything they're told too).

(Edit: on reflection, it's kinda sad that this might well have been good detective work by diligent, talented, and persistent FBI investigators doing exactly what he taxpayer employs them to do - but that effort is now permanently under the dark cloud of suspicion of unconstitutional dragnet surveillance and morally corrupt processes like "parallel reconstruction".)

Re:FBI raids alleged online drug market Silk Road, arrests o... by VMG on Thursday October 03, 2013 @04:23AM (#6487746)
The question is - what was the service provided by Silk Road at the end of the day, and what can be decentralized?

The trust and review system, the search engine and the communication platform can all run independently and don't need to happen on the same platform.

The web interface can be provided by an open-source turn-key package, so the next DPRs only need to figure out the hosting.

Re:FBI raids alleged online drug market Silk Road, arrests o... by ledge on Thursday October 03, 2013 @05:47AM (#6487936)
The escrow system was probably the most critical service that SR provided. Unfortunately that seems to require a centralized model.
Re:FBI raids alleged online drug market Silk Road, arrests o... by butler14 on Wednesday October 02, 2013 @06:41PM (#6485925)
exactly what i was thinking, the amount of work involved despite some pretty horrendous slip-ups, implies TOR + basic common sense can be a pretty powerful thing
Re:FBI raids alleged online drug market Silk Road, arrests o... by debaserab2 on Thursday October 03, 2013 @01:28AM (#6487357)
In principle I agree with what you're saying, but I think it's harder than you realize to maintain basic common sense all the time. People do irrational things, all the time. Even the normal ones.
Re:FBI raids alleged online drug market Silk Road, arrests o... by XorNot on Thursday October 03, 2013 @03:14AM (#6487568)
Also anyone talking about it here on HackerNews is already failing at it.
Re:FBI raids alleged online drug market Silk Road, arrests o... by makomk on Thursday October 03, 2013 @04:11PM (#6491646)
Meh. The FBI and DEA can investigate my Silk Road seller account all they want and they won't find anything interesting.
Re:FBI raids alleged online drug market Silk Road, arrests o... by deathhand on Friday October 04, 2013 @04:07PM (#6497607)