Silk Road forums

Discussion => Newbie discussion => Topic started by: 32zitsyfly on May 04, 2013, 03:16 pm

Title: Trouble on the Road
Post by: 32zitsyfly on May 04, 2013, 03:16 pm
Did everyone read the post on the main board by DPR?
If you haven't I suggest you do, not only is it disturbing, but you'll need to read it if the asshole who's doing this succeeds and you want to still stay connected to the road.

Check out his 2nd stickied post
Title: Re: Trouble on the Road
Post by: narcocapitalist9 on May 04, 2013, 03:46 pm
I have read it, and in my opinion based on what I know about tor, I used to be involved in the mailing list discussions years ago, this is a problem that was gonna come sooner or later. My opinion is the root of the problem has to do with two things: there is no incentive for anyone to increase tor's capacity except activism and charity, the majority of traffic on tor is script kiddies too lazy to learn how to configure a VPN like a real hacker, and that's likely the kind of slime that is prosecuting this attack.

I have made some suggestions in this post: http://dkn255hz262ypmii.onion/index.php?topic=155597.0 and I am of the opinion that shuffling around hidden service addresses is the way to go, as writing a browser extension to do this is the shortest route to a stop-gap solution while something more permanent is implemented (such as changes in the tor code). Another solution that I would like to promote that will also help is to encourage as many SR users as possible to run a non-exit tor relay. There is no reason to run an exit relay if your aim is to expand the network capacity for hidden services, as you never leave the network to do this. If half of the silk road user population were to run a tor relay with between 256 and 100000kbit connections, that would actually increase tor's total relay capacity by about 18%!  (I'm basing that on an estimate of 500 SR users doing this).

I have done this, and I have 15000kbits to provide to the tor network, and I hope this idea catches on because part of why this loser is doing so well at keeping the site down is because tor is such a tiny network system compared to what can flood into it from outside due to it's total lack of protection against abusive behaviour by tor users.

I personally think that the ultimate solution is to take tor, strip out exit capability and add a system of enforcing reciprocation between relays, and make an automatically bandwidth-regulating system in it so it opens up as much as 75% of one's upstream connection for this purpose. It may not have to take quite so much of SR users' bandwidth for a long time to widen the channel to make a flood attack uneconomic for this attacker, but I personally will keep running my relay until there is an alternative onion routing type network to get onto SR with.

I am in the process of developing a system that would actually make it possible to distribute SR completely, but I am not a very competent programmer and if it's just down to me it could be 18 months to 3 years before I have something usable. I would be most happy to find new collaborators who have better coding skills, I am just a problem solver, really. I don't have adequate attention to dedicate to actual programming, though with the assistance of a couple of drugs, one of them being illegal (or preferably some synthetic variant such as asymmetric alkyl methamphetamine or bromantan, an obscure russian stimulant/nootropic) I would be able to do a lot more. But I would be most happy to find others with programming skills and software development experience to at least have a look over my idea and see if they can see a way to implement it. The ideal would be that the onion routing/rendezvous system that I have conceived of a method of enforcing reciprocal routing (using scriptable contracts), forms a basic component of the system I have dreamed up, and with just that part of it implemented, SR could have access via this system and not have any avenues of being attacked through poisoned nodes or flood attacks through a system that has no protection against abusive traffic especially flood attacks.