A cold war bunker that became home to a dark-web empire
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
I remember reading this book a long time ago relevant to this idea: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarchy,_State,_and_Utopia
"It's not a state. It's a collectivist system of syndicate guilds that democratically allocate..." let me go ahead and cut you off there. That's a state, and an extremely authoritarian one at that.
As Freud said, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.
The first thing they did was enable a security force, and well, I'll leave the rest out but the decisions and fate are interesting and the correlation you make is similar enough.
Seattle resident here, Capitol Hill, heh.
Surely like most things, it starts by writing badly day after day (for way longer than anybody expects when they start)...
For speaking, this means composing & practicing entire conversations until I've mastered enough variations that I can sound reasonably natural.
With text, I need rewrite my sentences numerous times, before I achieve basic readability between them.
However, when I can pull off mundane communication, getting out something that's excellent or interesting is normally ~0 steps further.
As I recall, at least one of the major drug trafficking sites had gone offline, which would infrequently happen, but the timing seemed obvious that it was being hosted in the bunker - and it wasn't going to be coming back.
Cybercrime and the DarkNet in general are truly fascinating subjects; the analogy used within this article of the group of misfits from the bunker going out in the local town and being regarded as a band of pirates coming ashore seems very apt - cybercriminals are much like the pirates of olde, and the DarkNet their network of hidden islands full of lawlessness and anarchy.
I think, sometimes, they do come back - i.e. via the Feds
It wasn't long before the admin released a subsequent signed message claiming that it was a false alarm with some excuse as to what had happened, but it was clear that the operation was, from that point on, a honey pot.
> Such notions were in fashion during the nineties, when big technology firms had yet to dominate the Internet.
I'm finding this stark use of the past tense personally painful.
Perhaps it's also a matter of scale; the classical groups that would be in to that stuff have changed both shape and size in that area of Europe and are not really all that visible or impactful.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/American-Kingpin-Criminal-Mastermind-...
It's straight out of the TLA handbook for "how to discredit a person 101"
https://www.wired.com/2015/02/read-transcript-silk-roads-bos...
From your link:
> In fact, the prosecution admitted in court that the purported victims of the Silk Road killings were never found, and that Canadian police couldn't even locate records for anyone with their names.
You really need to get up to date with the current evidence rather than some low effort linkposting.
Maybe it's best if we try an alternative situation: Would you say George Floyd was a counterfeiter? The police statements clearly say he is. Last I looked people get to argue their case in court before being convicted of crimes in the Western world and we very much go out of our way to discredit people who threaten existing power structures.
Ulbright never got to defend himself against these claims.
Google says "formal specification language. It’s a tool to design systems and algorithms"
hearing the phrase Mirai-botnet on the dark web and wanting to know where/how it exists is different than saying, "this is a totally great and brilliant idea"
Quite often, they're simply hosted in permissive jurisdictions that are a lot more likely to look the other way wrt. such activity than a place like Germany or The Netherlands. The whole bunker angle was an interesting gimmick that these folks came up with but still, that's what it boils down to: a gimmick. Even the whole "cryptophone" side business is shady as hell, just notice how they all seem to go out of their way to market their products/services to organized crime. Why would anyone wonder when those folks get raided by law enforcement.
Surprise has no intrinsic valence, neither positive or negative, that's why it's often considered its own emotional dimension.
Assuming a positive implication where none exists seems a little bad faith. Might want to watch that if you want to have civil discourse in the future.
However what's banal an uninteresting is highly subjective. So, there's still that to re-calibrate on.