Hacker News Reader

Comment by dmix | Hacker News Reader

The Silk Road was written in PHP wasn’t it? Did Ross write it himself or did he hire someone or use some 3rd party e-commerce platform and customized it?

The story mentions him writing an Amazon web scraping script then managing the bookstores e-commerce website but not much else prior.

He just doesn’t sound like a full blown programmer by 2011. Not to mention running a Tor hidden service, managing the servers, managing his anonymity, Bitcoin tumbling, security, etc. He must have had to learn a ton on the fly, yet he figured it all out pretty fast it seems.

I haven’t read the whole story yet though, so maybe he was more technically inclined initially than it appears.

View on HN

One of the major bits of evidence that the FBI used to establish a link between DPR and Ross was that very early on he used an account on stackoverflow that still had links to his true identity to ask a question about configuring servers for a TOR hidden service.

Not only that, but he used the same or a very similar username to spread the news about the Silk Road market on a different website. (Of course he did this in a plausibly deniable way, but if it turns out that the same guy has been asking for help with making that kind of site on SO, it doesn't take much to put two and two together...) Not to mention the other mistakes he most likely made while running the site, which (when brought to light after the investigation) proved to everyone just how far that dark market was from the "libertarian utopia" DPR liked to talk about. Of course there's a pretty big selection effect here; we would expect the people involved in something like SR to be quite overconfident and perhaps overly motivated by greed, and thus to be more likely to do some of these things.

Well, the "violence" that took place was perhaps provoked by and certainly facilitated through law enforcement. I use quotes because it appears he primarily got extorted. Those same federal agents also sought to enrich themselves at various points throughout the case. Mr. Ulbricht did illegal things and paid a price for it, but the whole case reeks and the agents that played in the dirt should be made an example of just the same as he was.

Agent Carl Force went to jail...

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/10/corrupt-silk-roa...

It was written in PHP with CodeIgniter I believe. Some of his journal entries detailed how hopeless he was at developing it and how he had to hire people who were better programmers.

https://codeigniter.com/

He had help from Variety Jones and Richard Bates.

I don't know anything about VJ, but Richard was a software engineer (I knew him personally: we went to college together, he was a CS major, and he had a job developing software professionally while he was still in college).

The person who ran Open Vendor Database also did provided some security assistance / pentesting to Silk Road, as far as I could tell this person was quite competent.

Ross certainly seems precocious but there is also an established theory that he had help from at least one heavily involved mentor who may have even shared the DPR handle and access.

Check these articles out, he had at least one mentor

https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/pgajmv/these-are-...

https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/z43e7y/fbi-says-s...

So, he really wasn't the original Dread Pirate Roberts?

Unless the parallel reconstructionism is really that good, the evidence that he was the "original" DPR in the Silk Road context is pretty strong. Whether he was the DPR that ordered the hits or someone else had taken over by/for that point is what is more fuzzy. The 2013 Wired DPR interview was officially with DPR the Second, according to DPR the Second. [1]

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2013/08/14/an-int...

Someone serving life in prison with no chance of parole isn't going to lie to protect anyone. If there were anyone at all to rat out, he'd have done it.

https://slate.com/technology/2013/10/silk-road-s-dread-pirat...

Here is the famous SO question, he later changed his username to frosty, but originally he logged in using FB.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/15445285/how-can-i-conne...

edit: Add link to actual question.

Funny how it says that last time active was 4 months ago.

That probably means someone was active on this question page by commenting or answering. His profile was last active on Jun 15 '13 at 2:33

Reply on news.ycombinator.com