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Don't forget SR1 was shut down due to a forum post that was linked to an anonymous PHP question on Stack Overflow. [1] There's nothing illegal in this repo, su
by gkoberger 13y ago
Don't forget SR1 was shut down due to a forum post that was linked to an anonymous PHP question on Stack Overflow. [1]
There's nothing illegal in this repo, sure -- but definitely don't even think of implementing it yourself. Or even use it.
[1] http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/10/how-the-feds-took-down-the-dread-pirate-roberts/ http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/10/how-the-feds-took...
- breadtk 13y agoOPSEC, it's hard.
- goshakkk 13y ago1. it's just an idea of how to make a decentralized SR. 2. I doubt I'll be able to implement it entirely myself regardless. 3. even if I or someone else does, what is bad about it, exactly? It'll be just software. A set of Ruby/JS files. Everyone would be able to run a node so clearly punishing a mere guy who turned idea into reality, but who doesn't run the operations himself, won't be a feasible option.
- SamuelKillin 13y agoThat's very naive of you.
- Jgrubb 13y ago"punishing a mere guy who turned idea into reality, but who doesn't run the operations himself, won't be a feasible option" This is dangerously naive. This is exactly what "they" do, if only to brutally discourage anyone else from trying it.
- doorty 13y agoLive free. Don't let "them" scare you into acting out of fear.
- Jgrubb 13y agoI agree with you 100%. I just also think that to claim "oh, I just wrote this software, I can't get in trouble for anything" doesn't take into account either the technological illiteracy of most of the justice system, nor the current environment of what can qualify on the evening news as being a win for the War on Terror.
- JulianMorrison 13y agoName one example, please. Said example must include: * open source implementation released to the public * author did not directly do anything obviously illegal, or profit by anyone else doing it * overwhelming force under colour of law
- ephemeralgomi 13y agoYou weren't around for DeCSS, I guess?
- ChrisClark 13y agoThere was this guy: http://www.techweekeurope.co.uk/news/programmer-sentenced-to-death-in-iran-for-upload-software-55430 http://www.techweekeurope.co.uk/news/programmer-sentenced-to... * He built some software to upload images to a web site. * A porn site then used it without his knowledge. * He was sentenced to death.
- JulianMorrison 13y ago* in Iran. Miss a detail, change the story.
- toomuchtodo 13y agoProtip: Don't live in Iran. /s
- pavel_lishin 13y agoIs your point that all of us live in the United States?
- 67726e 13y agoI think his point is that most of us do not live in a religious autocracy.
- 13y ago
- VMG 13y agoForce them to declare war against crypto then.
- mahyarm 13y agoSo the Tor, Bitcoin, libOTR, pidgin/adium, encfs, luks, openssl, openssh, openvpn, truecrypt & recent PGP devs (not counting the crypto-as-muntions early days) fear this too? The ones that have been harassed in my memory is the Cryptocat dev and Winny. Don't mark your software as having a political purpose and more of a general tool and I think you'll have less harassment in your future.
- boi_v2 13y agoThere is nothing wrong with this, I guess government propaganda is really scaring some people. If it were like this arms manufacturing should be a crime and the billionaires behind those factories should be in jail, you still live under democracy so government should fear you and not the other way round.
- saraid216 13y ago> you still live under democracy so government should fear you and not the other way round. Believe it or not, V for Vendetta is not actually a handbook on how to run a democracy.
- thenomad 13y agoOne could, however, argue that Thomas Jefferson had some valid points on democracies and the running therof. And it's him that V for Vendetta was riffing off: “A government afraid of its citizens is a Democracy. Citizens afraid of government is tyranny!”
- goblin89 13y agoOn the other hand, a point could be made that it's totalitarian regimes where governments are afraid of their citizens (those in fear of losing their powers, especially illegitimately obtained, start suppressing freedoms and surveilling everyone).
- baddox 13y agoDemocracy is "rule by the people." You are not "the people," so you should fear democracy.
- saraid216 13y agoWhy is it that most HN politicos have nothing useful to say besides, "Be afraid"?
- 13y ago
- anon928338 13y agoI would discourage even titling the submission "Silk Road 2.0". I can't speak to the criminal side of things, but civil court judges have come up with theories that if another piece of software has been deemed 'illegal' and you try to attract users of that software to your software, then your software could be considered illegal. Again, it's apples to oranges, but you can see how the court's line of reasoning could go the same direction. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arista_Records_LLC_v._Lime_Group_LLC#Inducement http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arista_Records_LLC_v._Lime_Grou...
- beedogs 13y agoYou seem to be assuming in point 3) that the government is rational about this kind of crap. History proves they're out of their minds when it comes to drugs and prosecution of any and everything related to them. They'd throw you in prison for as long as they possibly could just to "make a point".
- carleverett 13y agoThis is exactly the kind of comment that needs to have sources.
- beedogs 13y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marc_Emery#2005_arrest_and_extradition_proceedings https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marc_Emery#2005_arrest_and_ext...
- ballard 13y agoThis has problems and isn't going anywhere for long: - it makes GitHub a target - it makes contributors into targets First, Git (although DVCS) needs to be located in a non-extradition country where a SEAL team cannot just break in and steal dev servers. This sounds like it would require tor also. Second, all contributors need perfect anonymity hygiene. Anyone that commits publicly is a liability. Use a new pseudonym just for this project, keep issues and discussion to information and technical matters strictly.
- rmc 13y agoFirst, Git (although DVCS) needs to be located in a non-extradition country non-extradition country to where? Non-extradiction country to the USA? That's very America-centric. Any place you can host it, will have local courts, local police and local judges. You can't find a country that, effectively, has no laws you have to obey.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- ballard 13y agoWhine about hating America somewhere else, you have nothing original to add. http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- pessimizer 13y agoA claim that extradition to America isn't the only way that various crimes in the world are punished is not "hating America," unless you're dumb.
- ballard 13y agoAre you really so poorly mannered as to chime in and start throwing nasty names around? That genius you replied to takes one point to make a political statement, not contribute anything to the conversation and then slips into to the gutter. If it's not popular to stand up for yourself being assaulted, then I don't really care. If you aren't, you're still completely wrong. Russia, America or any nationstate that is made aware of something can seize whatever it wants whenever it wants and wherever it wants. That's why any controversial app must be distributed, fault resilient for both development AND production. Centralized will never work, even with perfect security hygiene. It's a good thing that Git has a full copy, because a single dev server seizure would be annoying but not fatal. Do you have any other flaws to point out that pertain to my original comment?
- mrcactu5 13y agoomg i'm still digesting it The story then went full-on Breaking Bad nuts, with Redandwhite demanding $150,000 for a "non-clean" kill and $300,000 for a "clean" version. Roberts said that he knew the value of such things; he claimed to have paid $80,000 for a previous "clean" hit, and he wanted a discount. Did I say earlier that the story had already gone off the rails into Crazytown? Reader—I was wrong. Because a federal indictment unsealed separately today in a Maryland court says that Roberts had in fact arranged such an $80,000 hit just a few weeks earlier. Not crazy enough? Turns out that the "hitman" in this first attempt was actually a federal agent. Roberts was upset that one of his employees—records show these employees were paid between $1,000 and $2,000 a week —had stolen from Roberts and eventually managed to get himself arrested by dealing with an undercover agent. Roberts wanted the employee tortured so that he would return the missing Bitcoins. Not knowing much about hitmen, Roberts ended up talking to the very undercover agent who had helped bust his employee.
- pvnick 13y agoConsidering DPR presumably made $80 million in bitcoins before he was caught, >definitely don't even think of implementing it yourself is not very convincing...
- gkoberger 13y agoHard to spend $80 million when the feds have it and you're in jail. Plus, this new system would involve no central entity taking a cut.
- dubcanada 13y agoIt's a lot easier to evade the Fed's if you live in Africa or middle east. Just saying but you could easily setup those operation outside of US in a much "harder" to get caught. And if you bounce around every now and then to different countries you're pretty much guaranteed not to get caught at least for a good number of years.
- JackFr 13y agoI imagine that prisons are largely filled with people who felt they we're "pretty much guaranteed not to get caught at least for a good number of years." (Even if they remember to destroy their inscribed copies of 'Leaves of Grass')
- SoftwareMaven 13y agoRight up until the Feds drop a tip to said African or Middle Eastern country, after all, those countries are known for their drug tolerance and their human rights.
- frank_boyd 13y ago> SR1 was shut down due to a forum post that was linked to an anonymous PHP question on Stack Overflow. That's their public version of the story. Thanks to Snowden, we know today that they use "parallel construction", so we may have no clue at all to what lengths they went and how many illegal tactics they used: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/08/dea-and-nsa-team-intelligence-laundering https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/08/dea-and-nsa-team-intel...
- CamperBob2 13y agoThis should be modded much higher than it is. What are the odds that someone thought to check Stack Overflow independently of any particular reason to do so?
- tlrobinson 13y agoIs implementing a distributed marketplace any more illegal than, say, implementing a distributed digital currency (Bitcoin) or anonymity network (Tor)?
- frank_boyd 13y agoOf course not. The only thing that potentially could get the user in trouble would be the specific and illegal usage of it, i.e. the selling of illegal substances.
- javert 13y ago"Of course not" is probably technically the correct answer right now. But, speaking as an American, we increasingly cannot assume the legal system to be logical. There is no "of course," there is only "ask a lawyer to find out what current practice probably is." As a side note, of course, this is the very definition of the breakdown of law. But that is what the people want: a nation, not of laws, but of men.
- tlrobinson 13y agoWhat if the creator somehow profits from the system? One could imagine a Bitcoin-esque system where the creator includes rules in the client that require every transaction to send a small cut to a Bitcoin address he owns. [1] If that system then "happens" to be used for illegal purposes like drug trafficking, is the developer of the system committing a crime? It's distributed so he can't shut it down and he's no longer actively participating. What if he destroys the private key of the Bitcoin address? It's an interesting thought experiment... [1] Of course you'd need a critical mass of users and the right incentives to prevent people from starting their own "alt-markets" much like Bitcoin has spawned dozens of "alt-coins".
- nowarninglabel 13y agoThere's a real world example here, Liberty Reserve. Granted, it was centralized, but same law concepts apply. The problem with Liberty Reserve was not that they had a system used by criminals, but that they knew this fact and actively encouraged this activity to continue, including sending around lots of incriminating internal e-mails.
- tomphoolery 13y agoUnless we all clone it. :)