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How a drug dealer’s IP was found out by package tracking
- clsec 11y agoThis is just plain old bad opsec.
- paulhauggis 11y agoIf you are going to buy or sell drugs online, at least figure out how to cover your tracks.
- rwmj 11y agoLegalize them already. Buying and selling drugs on the "dark net" has improved the safety and quality of drugs, and reduced the violence of (street) dealing[1]. We should be encouraging more of this. [1] Source: http://www.economist.com/news/international/21629417-business-thriving-anonymous-internet-despite-efforts-law-enforcers http://www.economist.com/news/international/21629417-busines...
- amelius 11y agoIndeed. And I'd rather see a war on refined sugar than a war on drugs.
- krispyfi 11y agoI think the only ethically justifiable war would be on antibiotics, because someone using them incorrectly could cause an outbreak of drug-resistant microbes that would also affect responsible people. People giving themselves diabetes is sad, but it's ultimately a personal choice. (That said, I do support education, restrictions on advertising, etc., to help people make the right choices.)
- itistoday2 11y agoCan we not have wars on things? Like, if someone or something else starts a war on us, we can self-defense them, but otherwise let's try to get this word out of our collective vocabulary by ceasing all the unnecessary and harmful wars we're fighting.
- biomcgary 11y agoWar is not the answer. It is the ONLY answer. See: War on (choose one: cancer, poverty, AIDS, terrorism, bullying, guns, etc). More seriously, war rhetoric reduces the idea of real war to a banality.
- creativestar 11y ago<a href="http://naturesmedicine.eu/product.php?id_product=48">Gymnema http://naturesmedicine.eu/product.php?id_product=48">Gymnema Sylvestre (Meshashringi)</a> is helpful in the treatment of diabetes. Specific herb to increase insulin production in pancreas. Helps to regulate blood glucose levels and enhances glucose tolerance. The leaf extracts contain gymnemic acid, which is known to inhibit hyperglycemia (increased sugar level in the blood). The principle constituent of Meshashringi is gymnemic acid, which has anti-diabetic properties. It reduces excessive blood sugar. It has also been shown to have a regenerative effect on pancreatic beta cells and is insulinotropic, which means it stimulates or affects the production and activity of insulin. Meshashringi helps decrease the craving for sugar. It temporarily abolishes the taste of sugar and helps neutralize excessive sugar present in the body in diabetes mellitus. Eating the fresh leaves numbs the taste buds to the sense of sweet or bitter Hence the name means 'sweet destroyer'. It also reduces appetite. It can be found at : http://naturesmedicine.eu/product.php?id_product=48 http://naturesmedicine.eu/product.php?id_product=48
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- gragas 11y agoPerhaps the "dark net" has improved the safety of drugs by removing the violence of street dealing, but exchanging drugs without government regulation is still dangerous; most people rarely, if ever, test the drugs they receive from China and elsewhere. When drugs are trading under names like "acid", "molly", and "ecstasy", it's almost impossible for typical users to pinpoint exactly which chemical they are about to ingest. All of the 2C's, NBOMe's, and of course LSD are typically sold under the name "acid". And when people are dosing what they assume is LSD, they might accidentally ingest 10–100 times the regular dose of another psychedelic, sold to them as "acid". While it doesn't lead to many deaths each year, safe drugs still kill people because they are unregulated and illegal. "On May 7, 2011, in the United States, two young adults died after overdosing on Bromo-DragonFLY, which they thought was 2C-E, and several others were hospitalized during the same incident. Because they took a dosage appropriate for 2C-E, those who took the drug received, in some cases, 100x the normal dose. Both deaths followed seizures, vomiting blood, and terrifying hallucinations. Several surviving victims are reportedly still suffering from its physical effects." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bromo-DragonFLY http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bromo-DragonFLY I believe that government regulation and legalization could solve this enormous public health issue.
- ryan_j_naughton 11y agoSee this article and resulting HN discussion: Inside the Deep Web Drug Lab.[1][2] "Welcome to DoctorX’s Barcelona lab, where the drugs you bought online are tested for safety and purity. No questions asked." [1] https://medium.com/backchannel/inside-the-deep-web-drug-lab-9718cd0fe504 https://medium.com/backchannel/inside-the-deep-web-drug-lab-... [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9275987 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9275987
- mikejurma 11y agoThis is why people use test kits and go with reputable buyers. If you use a marquis or mecke re-agent test and a good scale, you can avoid a lot of that. And there are hundreds of thousands of people buying drugs online. There's going to be a few edge cases like that. People who take darknet LSD know to look out for nbome and other imitations.
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- kmfrk 11y agoDeliveries is pretty good ... http://junecloud.com/ http://junecloud.com/
- tlrobinson 11y agoDeliveries still contacts the USPS's website...
- foz 11y ago> Bates was arrested and taken to the Rockland Police Department, where he was interviewed. He waived his Miranda Rights ... > ... He also consented to a search of his laptop and iPhone and gave officers the passwords to his e-mail and Skype accounts. Poor guy. I think he should have talked to a lawyer first before doing all of that.
- andrewchambers 11y agoNever give any info to the police you don't need to if you are under any sort of investigation. They will always use it against you, it is their job.
- krapp 11y agoEspecially if you're actually guilty.
- LLWM 11y agoIf you're actually guilty, please do talk to the police. It will save everyone a lot of time.
- indians_pro 11y agoWhere everyone excludes you, because you will not just save time, you will _gain_ time - jail time. So, if you're guilty, only talk if you _want_ to turn yourself in/face charges.
- LLWM 11y agoIf you don't want to face charges, don't commit the crime in the first place. But more seriously, you will face charges anyway. And if you haven't said anything, that will only prolong the inevitable. Or is it your personal goal to get away with committing crimes?
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- eli 11y ago> methylone (also known as "molly") I don't think that is generally true.
- rythmshifter 11y agoits not. MDMA is molly. methylone is MDMC
- ChuckMcM 11y agoMakes for an interesting metadata privacy case. Presumably you keep click'n ship data forever, you find a 'bad' package, and back track the IP that was checking on it, and then every other package that IP tracked. It looks like they covered their bases with the possibility of a dynamic IP issue. The weird thing is the temporal 'big data' thing. like keeping face id fingerprints over time at various places, and when a person's face is identified as one of interest then going back in time to see where their face appeared. Or their license plate, or their cell phone IMEI, or any number of random bread crumbs which are now dirt cheap to store for ever and ever.
- mhuffman 11y agoHow the hell are these people using the Dark Net to buy drugs, then not using Tor or a vpn when checking websites to track their drugs?
- rbobby 11y agoI would expect a tracking check from a TOR exit node to be a "clue". Might even be grounds for reasonable suspicion (would need a judge/case law to know for sure). Which is enough to isolate a package for a drug sniff. Though for international shipments I don't think the postal service/border folks need to meet a reasonable suspicion standard for a sniff. I guess the take away is... never check your parcel's tracking details.
- tedks 11y agoIs there any indication that a hidden service marketplace was used to buy this?
- miander 11y agoIt struck me from this article how thoroughly the USPS and investigators practiced due diligence and did their homework during the course of the investigation. They went through the proper procedures for opening the package and made sure their Comcast records checked out. If you must use techniques like data mining to look for suspicious activity this is how it should be done.
- fsk 11y agoYou still don't know that's the reason he got caught. The real reason could be something else, and this is just "parallel reconstruction". "Parallel reconstruction" means that you catch someone using an "illegal" information source. You then monitor him, wait for him to make a mistake, and then that's the "official" excuse for how you caught him. The police who testify in the case aren't even lying, because they only have the "parallel reconstucted" evidence and not the illegal evidence that was the original lead.
- braythwayt 11y agoSorry to see you were downvoted. Parallel reconstruction has completely undermined my faith in what the police say was their procedure for gathering evidence.
- fsk 11y agoIt is abuse for someone to use "downvote" to mean "I disagree".
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- classicsnoot 11y agoInappropriate? yes. Rude? yes. Indicative of churlish immaturity? yes. Abuse? Nope.
- fragmede 11y agoYou also have to examine the evidence used. It's possible the police got lucky with Silk Road's 1 Ross Ulbricht's deleted traceable email address, but that I don't believe, and strongly believe parallel reconstruction. The USPS logging IP addresses on a webservice they run? Absolutely believable.
- LLWM 11y agoWhy does it matter if this is really why he was caught? The facts are that he was caught, and there was a legal way for him to have been caught. That's why parallel reconstruction is acceptable in the first place.
- NKCSS 11y ago> Once they located Bates’ IP address, they may have checked to see if it had been used to search for other packages. But in the affidavit, United States Postal inspector Stephen Dowd seems to imply that this link happened in a more automated fashion. As he wrote, "The USPS database reflected that an individual using a computer or other device with IP address 75.67.6.214 accessed the USPS Track 'n Confirm website to track the progress of both the Florida Parcel and Bates Parcel #1." Is it just me, or does this just sound like a simple query in a relational database? Don't see anything special here...