[Dark Web] Ever Wonder if Anonymizers are Really Safe? (TOR, JAP, ETC)

a reply to: Navarro

I think it is foolish in the extreme to believe ANYTHING you do online, send from your smartphone and so on is secure..regardless of how many walls you build around you.

Everything you say, every site you visit, your likes, dislikes, political opinions, shopping habits, sexual habits and orientations / perversions, just about everything is probably known already.

The thing is...'they' are probably not interested in you, or what you do online in the slightest. 'They' have eyes on the entire connected world, they're certainly not going to be in any way interested in what little people get up to or are interested in, unless that takes place in context of terrorism or some plot to cause great mischief / harm.

Relax...i doubt they'll be kicking your door in because you looked at a couple of pot websites or pervy porno practices.

a reply to: CoBaZ

Your link references a ternary computer. For what it's worth, the Russians made a working one back in the 70's, unlike popular belief though it's not yes/no/maybe but rather 1, 0, and -1 which allowed for quicker bitwise operations in certain calculations. Oddly enough however, many operations that we use computers for today are faster with binary than ternary. The same would be true of the Quinary system you mentioned, base 2 has a lot of mathematical advantages.

Also, it's not just wood that you can build computers out of, you can build them out of basically anything, it's all just a matter of computational speed and electric switches compute very quickly.

Edit, here's some reading on it if you would like.
en.wikipedia.org...

a reply to: Aazadan

Just think if the base 3 and base 5 systems were built with today's tech, how efficient could they be...

a reply to: CoBaZ

They would be just as efficient. Base 3 has some speed advantages because it doesn't need to use positive/negative signs to determine the sign of the number. There are some base 2 techniques that achieve a very similar result though such as two's compliment, and the hardware to make a base 2 system is much cheaper than base 3.

Also, bit shifting is generally more useful on powers of 2 than on powers of 3 or 5.

For the record, Ross Ulbricht (Dread Pirate Roberts) got caught because he was careless & complacent.

His team of SR admins had been infiltrated by FBI agents. He also had several fake IDs with his real picture but fake names mailed directly to his residence in San Fran. They intercepted that package of IDs and did what's called a controlled delivery. The story goes that when he was questioned about the suspicious package he even told the undercover officers that were standing in front of his doorstep that anyone could buy fake IDs from a place called Silk Road... (careless!).

Then the team of FBI agents that had infiltrated the SR administration orchestrated a murder-for-hire scenario that had a butt load of red flags. I found it rather suspicious that they used the murder-for-hire charge to bring him down but they never put him on trial for that.

Last but not least, Ross ultimately effed up by breaking one of his own rules. He was sitting on his lap top in San Fran's library with his back to the room and not to a wall, and when the swat team came in they snuck up on him from behind, snatched his laptop, and took him down. When they looked at the laptop they saw that he was accessing the SR Admin page. They stuck a hacked thumb drive into his USB and copied everything from his laptop onto the stick.

Also... A lot of people think the beginning of his demise was when he posted in a programming forum asking for help from anybody that was familiar with writing scripts for TOR. He posted that under the username Frosty, the same name for his laptop that was confiscated. And a lot of people also think that the FBI/NSA either bribed or extorted the person in Iceland that was hosting SR on their server.

I was a member on the first SR, and the FBI seized about 2 grand I had in bitcoins.

Just because TOR was developed by the US Navy does not mean that the system is compromised. Just be careful when using TOR, make sure your .onion URLs are accurate and up to date. The most common way to track the identity of someone using TOR is to use a phishing attempt.

My two cents.

a reply to: ColdWisdom
This man knows what's up.
Tor is not broken for the average careful user. The more people that use it, the safer it becomes. SO USE IT.
Install Tails on a cheap laptop and use Tor through a "burner" phone and your privacy will be secure unless you're about to do something rad or terror related.
Learn PGP and USE IT.
Privacy is no joke.
Ross was an idealist and he blew it. I'm an idealist.... And I've blown it heaps of times.
My cognitive liberty is my own and Silk Road took all that # off the street and cleaned it up, made it safe, and started something that won't be easily stopped or even understood by the powers that be.
Ross is now teaching yoga to inmates in prison... Bless his cotton sox. Theres a book by an Aussie Author who goes by the name of Eleen Ormsby (I think) about Silk Road... I haven't read it yet but I understand it gives a good account of what was going on back then.
Tally Ho then chaps.... I'm off to do some online shopping.