Feds found Silk Road 2 servers after a six-month attack on Tor?

Re:Feds found Silk Road 2 servers after a six-month attack o... by lucastx on Wednesday January 21, 2015 @04:08PM (#8925787)

The title of this Wired article is somewhat over the top. It is about a (then) upcoming Gareth Owen's presentation on 31C3.

I just watched it [1] yesterday, and Gareth Owen himself says that this number is the count of a certain kind of hidden service request that should not be confused with "visits" or "visitors", for a number of reasons. The main ones I remember are:

- The specific kind of request measured is the first step towards connecting to the service, but may not always represent a complete connection that can be mapped to a individual

- Various anti-childporn organizations crawl the dark web constantly searching and indexing child pornography hidden services

[1] http://media.ccc.de/browse/congress/2014/31c3_-_6112_-_en_-_...

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Re:Feds found Silk Road 2 servers after a six-month attack o... by csandreasen on Thursday January 22, 2015 @06:01AM (#8928530)

A more accurate analogy would compare it to DNS requests instead of visits. I don't know that there's any scientific research out there correlating percentages of DNS requests to visiting a website. That said, it's not an unreasonable assumption that the overwhelming majority of requests for any given domain hosting a web server are for actual users to fetch the content hosted there.

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