Re: [tor-talk] Tor as ecommerce platform

[antispam06@xxxxxxx]

Sorry for the rant.

On Wed, Aug 8, 2012, at 23:47, Maxim Kammerer wrote:
> Anyone who installs Tor (or I2P, for that matter) and explores the
> hidden services, immediately sees the overwhelmingly illegal (mostly,
> since it depends on jurisdiction) content. Anyone who runs an exit
> node immediately sees that a sizable portion of the traffic is of
> questionable nature. [1]

What you call exploration is more like advertisment. And a powerful one
as it implies a sense of danger and a sense of ilegality. The same way
people will click on a spam message link that promises Sarah Palin's
nipples even a heterosexual woman or a gay man, push an inocent link on
some message board with high trafic and you get trafic. It's how society
works. Say you advertise for your half baked demonstration of the Theory
of Relativity. A few phisics majors would check you out. Maybe some will
point out the mistakes. One or two might quote you as an ignorant on his
blog. Now, change that and announce your brand new site that disproves
the Theory of Relativity and shows the huuuge government conspiracy.
You'll get every nut case checking out that board. But you'll also get
the skeptics, the ones who go against the Conspiracy Theory. And you
stand a good chance to have at least some of the phisics majors.

In short you are bound to have spikes in trafic. The key is to have a
long run. The longer the better. In order to catch a glimpse.

Also, have to say I love the US media newspeak. What's questionable?
Questionable, via the dictionary[1], doubious (esp. in the area of
morality) or of disputable value. Is it a Harry Potter site promoting
âthe best book in the worldâ? Is it some nut proving once more that the
people never went outside the atmosphere because there's where the
angels thread? In many (most?) parts of the World a gay dating site
could be even worse than the child porn site, and people do get killed
for getting into consenting adult parties. Well, in the past weeks
Britain has proven more than a few times people do get arested and
slaped by the so called authority just for passing by a hot area.



On Thu, Aug 9, 2012, at 01:25, Maxim Kammerer wrote:
> Also, the âimmediate deletionâ part is often not achievable, even if
> server admins actively try to remove such content â CP videos (for
> whatever definition of CP) in various social networks are a known
> problem, especially when they are restricted to closed groups. A
> âknown problemâ not in the sense of an argument that politicians use
> to promote themselves over the think-of-the-children case du jour, but
> you would actually see imageboard threads with (irony alert) links to
> abuse report queues on said social networks, full of such content.

I find it very interesting to see the subject debated. On one hand we
have the concept of honey pots used in computer security. The idea is
not new for sure. But people do concentrate on censorship like mad in
the past decade. And, sorry, but some pictures are dust thrown in the
eyes of the public. Out there there are whole countries specialised in
the real deal. There is child slavery. And children not forced to
prostitute themselves are worked 16 hours a day by Adidas, GAP and the
other cool brands. With no future and no health this looks more like a
countryâwide concentration camp for the minors. Catch a copy of the
Hammer of Witches, written some centuries ago, and see how any oposition
is bound to be evil. Either are with me or against me.

It's interesting this type of 1984 like perpetual war. A couple of years
ago I was reading âBrotherhood of Corruption: A Cop Breaks the Silence
on Police Abuse, Brutality, and Racial Profilingâ and the author
mentions he heard about Operation âIron Wedgeâ (I hope I'm not mixing
stuff) which has proven very effective as cops would masquerade as drug
dealers and catch everybody asking for a dose. The result was bad from a
few angles. First, the trafic was reduced, thus affecting the perpetual
war. Second, there were caught a lot of people who shouldn't. So they
moved to the next stage, the one used in popular movies too, to catch
the poor and avoid VIPs alltogether. This way every year the number of
arrests is high justifying budget increases.
 
> If I were to guess, I would say that for any definition of illegal
> content / activity, most such content is located on clearnet, since
> Tor is simply too small. If anything, Tor provides an immense
> opportunity for law enforcement to discover such activities in a
> centralized manner, by setting a few exit nodes (and maybe relays for
> finding out popular .onion addresses). E.g., instead of crawling the
> whole web for terrorism forums, just analyze those sites that are
> accessed via exit nodes (where you also have the opportunity to MITM).

True.

> Terrorists are dumb, but some are bound to have the know-how to
> install Tor.

That reminds me of something told by Jake Applebaum. About an FBI guy
who thought all the criminals are stupid.

Anyway, beware of the power of the terms. Piracy is high seas robbery.
Where you have nowhere to run or hide. Yet it is used liberally and
indiscriminate to mark unauthorised digital copies. But it is so much
shorter, isn't it? Same goes for the terrorists. In the 15th century
they were called witches. The 20th century was a mess and half the World
called them communists and the other half called them capitalists. In
the 21th century the media has settled for the term terrorist. Only that
Noam Chomsky pointed out that terrorism is relative and not absolute.

On Thu, Aug 9, 2012, at 08:49, Eugen Leitl wrote:
> No more legal Tor, you mean. There are huge botnets in operation.
> It would be very easy to get infected by a trojan installing
> Tor. I doubt there will be millions of raids against innocent
> people who just failed to secure their computers, no more than
> there are raids against people who spew hostile traffic into
> the wider Internet.

Under scrutiny they have proven it takes time, it takes qualified
personnel and for all that you need an investment fund[2]. Sure, I've
seen movies with the lone IRA guy specialised in both explosives and
close quarters combat who can launch an attack on some populated city by
sitting in the lotus position with his faithful laptop, located in a
field of poppies and with his trusted hidden sattelite uplink. Probably
it's just some Johnny Mnemonic type of guy, he just replaces the chip
with the knife combat theory and voila! he can do a script in python
that can run on a visual basic interpreter.

Last week I was reading about some military nut expressing some fantasy
estimates about how much money businesses are losing because of cyber
attacks just as a way to pay himself a raise. Nowhere in that article
was any mention: if the tax is so high, why not hire a good sys admin
and pay him well? Or more if the network is too large. Nowhere in that
article was any mention: if the cracker tax is so high why not go back
to the old ways with pen and paper?

People nowadays have been living in a dream where they can get scared,
but nothing should harm them. And this dream is quite recent. And I
really don't know how it happened. A century ago I would have gone to my
grandma with wine and cake and could meet the big bad wolf. I could meet
some robbers and rapists. I could meet a hungry bear. Today I overspeed
on the icy road through the remains of the same forest and the car skids
and stops into a tree. Today I bitch because the road was not cleaned
fast enough and that local administration taxes too much for a large
villa with a pool. A century ago I would have been content the taxman
has left the cow, the only source of protein for the whole family. Am I
crazy? A century ago the whole family could have died in pain because of
eating the flesh of a sick pig. Today there are pressure groups raving
about how some preservative that helps people avoid rotten meat might
give one cancer in the next 50 years or so. A century ago most people
would not live for 50 years, but today that is a serious concern.


[1]
http://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/questionable?showCookiePolicy=true
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuxnet
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