Silk Road forums
Discussion => Silk Road discussion => Topic started by: Anonymou5 on November 21, 2012, 09:15 pm
-
http://www.theverge.com/2012/11/21/3675278/silk-road-operator-says-fail-whale-not-feds-brought-down-notorious
-
The anonymous online black market known as the Silk Road, which offers everything from drugs to pirated Red Bull, is back up after an outage that lasted about two weeks.
When Silk Road became inaccessible earlier this month, the rumors started flying. Its psuedonymous operator Dread Pirate Roberts was temporarily incommunicado, prompting theories that he’d been picked up by the FBI or had run off with the site’s deposits. There were also claims that the site had been hacked, or flooded with fake traffic and brought down by a malicious attacker.
Silk Road started coming back online late last week and is now running, albeit slowly and with some errors. Dread Pirate Roberts reassured users that there was no scam, no FBI, and no hacking. The illicit bazaar was growing so fast that the influx of new users brought the site down, he announced.
"WE WERE GETTING AN INFLUX OF NEW MEMBERS THAT WAS OVERLOADING OUR CURRENT INFRASTRUCTURE."
"A couple of weeks ago, we started seeing the accessibility and speed of Silk Road start to drop, especially around peak hours," Dread Pirate Roberts announced to Silk Road users in a forum message. "Monitoring the number of incoming connections, pageviews and registrations showed record breaking numbers, so the obvious conclusion was that we were getting an influx of new members that was overloading our current infrastructure."
Dread Pirate Roberts and Silk Road’s team, which includes technical as well as customer support, "did a full redeploy of the entire system including the new security and performance measures which turned out to be quite challenging in the end," Dread Pirate Roberts said.
Although the explanation was short on details, most users gladly accepted it and seemed to have resumed their normal illegal activities. "Just like that. Faith was returned to the road. Thanks DPR," wrote user luckysquid.
Silk Road is only accessible via Tor, a decentralized network of servers that encrypt and relay signals in order to mask users’ online activity. The vast majority of listings are for drugs: prescription opiates like Oxycontin and anti-depressants, steroids like Somatropin, and street drugs including marijuana, ecstasy, heroin, cocaine, and even the notorious date rape drug GHB.
Users rely on Bitcoins, the semi-anonymous ecurrency, in order to buy and sell the thousands of items on offer; it’s been estimated that the marketplace accounts for a majority of all commercial transactions done in Bitcoin.
Nicolas Christin, associate director of the Information Networking Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, spent six months tracking activity on Silk Road and released a report in August estimating the marketplace’s activity at around $22 million from January to July of 2012.
The study made quite a splash, although the $22 million figure turned out to be a bit high. Dr. Christin will be publishing a revised version later this month that lowers the estimate to around $15 million.
SILK ROAD HAD AT LEAST $15 MILLION IN BUSINESS FROM JANUARY TO JULY
The true figure is still elusive. Dr. Christin’s estimates do not include stealth listings, which are not linked from the rest of Silk Road and are only viewable to buyers who have been given the URL. He also stopped tracking sales in July, after which the site has reportedly grown significantly.
Dr. Christin is inclined to believe the official explanation for Silk Road’s temporary disappearance. "Server overload, basically, due to the continuous, rapid increase of members, which led to the site being unusable. They had to redesign their infrastructure to accommodate the load; not an easy thing to do given their security constraints," he said in an email. Although he acknowledged that the reasons could be more nefarious, "the explanation given by the operator is consistent with what could be observed."
Tor has stymied the FBI’s efforts in the past, putting a stop to at least one investigation into child pornography. However, users have reason to be paranoid. US senators Chuck Schumer and Joe Manchin publicly called on the Drug Enforcement Agency to investigate Silk Road last year.
In April, the feds busted the Tor-protected drug marketplace known as The Famer’s Market, arresting 15 people. In August the Australian Federal Police arrested a man for importing drugs using Silk Road, issuing a warning to Silk Road users that "their identity will not always remain anonymous and when caught, they will be prosecuted."
THE DEA SAYS IT IS INVESTIGATING SILK ROAD
The DEA says it has been investigating Silk Road for more than a year. When The Verge called to ask about Silk Road, DEA spokesperson Rusty Payne recognized the name immediately. "Typically we’re not really giving out investigative updates about what we’re doing, but it’s it's safe to say we are heavily involved in looking into that."
It’s been pointed out that Silk Road is tiny compared to the worldwide drug trade, suggesting that authorities should concentrate their resources elsewhere. Still, the site’s fast growth, and the terror that the "world weed web" strikes in the hearts of first-world parents, make it an increasingly attractive target.
But for now, at least according to the site’s operators, robust IT support remains the biggest challenge.
-
I laugh at these articles.
LE are fucking idiots, "Aww let's shut down a marketplace where people can get reliable, and safe drugs - so they are forced to go elsewhere (less safe) for the substances."
Street drugs and the drug trade, come with violence - Silk Road, comes with a loving forum of people who get along.
I think it's about time some notorious rebel gang hatch a plan to spike the white house water with high doses of MDMA, so that the president realizes drugs are the shizz and makes them legal.
-
I read sydney has a rash of shootings this year, 120 so far, a record. The vast majority are drug dealer hits. "Known to the police", "black AMG was seen", "bikie connections", "operates tattoo parlors".
It is fucking stupid that while the cops are struggling to cope with bi-weekly gunfire in residential areas they'd choose to devote their limited resources to making it harder to buy 3 grams of weed safely and anonymously through the mail. FUCK. Where are the journalists they should ask this question at the next police press conference.
-
Seriously, I like the authors ability to realize the situation, and report it. The fact is, SR was down for an extended time, vendors were out of business as a result, and the site had become slow and generally unreliable in the time leading up to the outage. On the forum, people were worried that the stie was down for reasons other than technical. People were also reassuring (including DPR), that the outage was a result of high volume traffic. In the end, Occam's Razor--DPRs justification for the outage is plausable and consistent with what we saw, we know DPR didn't run off, since here we are, and it's far less likely that the FBI infiltrated SR, and no one has heard a peep. The author didn't try to make SR like the devilish monster as it has previously been protrayed.
What I don't like is the added publicity that this article will undoubtedly bring to SR, thus feeding the influx of members that caused this outage, in addition to expanding the marketplace, making it a higher priority to LE agencies.
If you use SR, then don't talk about it outside of Tor. If you don't use SR, then don't report on it outside of Tor. It will be our downfall.
-
Seriously, I like the authors ability to realize the situation, and report it. The fact is, SR was down for an extended time, vendors were out of business as a result, and the site had become slow and generally unreliable in the time leading up to the outage. On the forum, people were worried that the stie was down for reasons other than technical. People were also reassuring (including DPR), that the outage was a result of high volume traffic. In the end, Occam's Razor--DPRs justification for the outage is plausable and consistent with what we saw, we know DPR didn't run off, since here we are, and it's far less likely that the FBI infiltrated SR, and no one has heard a peep. The author didn't try to make SR like the devilish monster as it has previously been protrayed.
What I don't like is the added publicity that this article will undoubtedly bring to SR, thus feeding the influx of members that caused this outage, in addition to expanding the marketplace, making it a higher priority to LE agencies.
If you use SR, then don't talk about it outside of Tor. If you don't use SR, then don't report on it outside of Tor. It will be our downfall.
As much as I would love for these articles to stop, we know its not gonna happen. The journalistic attention you can get from talking about the scary internet black market is way too attractive for reporters.
-
I haven't been on SR in a while. I read this article today and made me want to come back online and see if everything is working ok. browse the forums and see what users had to say. good to see that the site seems to be a bit faster now.
-
I don't see why spreading the word that drugs can be obtained in a safe and anonymous way can be bad...
It is SR staff's job to keep the website working. More people means more work, but that's a revolution we want isn't it?
-
Whenever somebody writes something like, "and even the notorious date rape drug GHB.", I know they're idiots!
goblin
-
The only thing I got from the article was, don't sell to "Adrianne". :p