Dark Web – Justice League
analyst1.com
analyst1.com
It also reminds me of the TV show "The Wire" when Stringer Bell, a senior member of a street drug distribution ring of urban thugs, forces them to conduct their meetings using Rules of Order. [5] If you watch to the end, you see that in those circumstances order means nothing, it is just a facade.
I guess you could say that I'm cynical about the prospects of such a court and I tend to see the underlying truth in the satires that point it out.
1. https://www.gocomics.com/tomthedancingbug/2015/02/26
2. https://www.gocomics.com/tomthedancingbug/2014/12/25
3. https://www.pinterest.ca/pin/545850417313484171/
But these comics are great.
If you click on the image, which is a link, it gives you a sign-in form.
Sure, the three dots are there to click; but "Download Image" is the only function listed. Why wouldn't it just be a download button...
Edit: And it's truly a 'download' versus viewing it directly in the browser...
Alternatively, (shift) right click and choose “Inspect Element” to open the browser dev tools. The element covering up the image will be selected. Delete it. With it gone, you should be able to interact with the image itself; right click on it and view it or save it.
However, the point is that you shouldn't have to do any of this. Pinterest took a normal browser behavior, co-opted it, and moved it behind a menu even though it's the only function available in that menu.
My guess is more options become available if you're logged in.
In a forum/marketplace like this, your reputation is worth a lot of money. And if you scam someone and get banned, sure, you can just join again under a new identity, but building your reputation up again means you will lose out on a lot of potential sales.
The crown jewels in such a community is operator/admin access. For both police (basically, for infiltration), as well as for scammers (because they could create or kill credibility with sockpuppets, bans). Remember that's how Reddit was started (sockpuppets), and Assange did it as well.
It's killing me that Poulsen didn't release another such gem. There's plenty of material in this vein, beginning chiefly with the Gonzales saga - which dwarfs Iceman's story.
Mr Poulsen if you happen in this thread, please ! Do it. I'd pay 100$ for a new story.
anyway, it makes me really not care about ordering weed on the dark web from CA. if the feds catch it, its an ounce of weed to a residence, they don't care and im not gonna go in front of some federal judge on federal drug crimes. if CA or NJ catch it, its legal there, who cares.
but the site I use uses an escrow system where if you don't get the product or if you aren't satisfied you can file a complaint. i've never used it as i always have gotten what i've ordered but it is pretty odd.
Customs on the other hand...
Though if it's small volume they will often just send you a scary letter in the mail, especially if it's just sketchy looking pills. Or if the scammer is smart they'll just send you the letter and take your money ! Or at least that's what SWIM said from my wasted 20s. LMFAO I miss earlier internet sometimes
I also recall hearing that the USPS tracking info page is quite complex under the hood and logs a lot of your device/connection information when you enter a tracking number. No idea how true this is, but it wouldn't surprise me at all and I hope people behave as if it is.
Agreed about the wasted 20's on the internet. No doubt I could have better spent my time. But there was some incredible and wild stuff going on out in the wires.
Isn't there a service in Maine where you can pay psychics to find your lost weed and bring it back to you?
https://www.incredibles.me/your-first-order-what-you-need-to...
> If you have LOST your weed, please feel free to reach out to us! Your word is good enough for us. If you say you LOST IT, we will FIND IT, GUARANTEED or you pay nothing.
L = Like,
O = Obfuscatedly
S = Sell Me
T = The Weed
E- Every A- Acid D- Dealer G- Gets B- Busted E- Eventually
Takes a long time for weed to make it to consumers, but it also creates a huge local industry since everyone has to work within the state, at least when dealing directly with the product.
> Under state law, that first day for adult sales at licensed dispensaries is supposed to come next month. The enabling marijuana legalization legislation signed into law by Gov. Phil Murphy last year directs the CRC to begin adult use marijuana sales before Feb. 22, with 30-day notice beginning Jan. 23.
> But there's a catch. The CRC is yet to issue any licenses for recreational marijuana sales, so even if sales are approved as of Feb. 22, there won't be any dispensaries selling it.
Also the quality and honesty of the sellers on the quantity they're selling you is great. It's beautiful to see how the market and a reputation system can work wonders, even among strangers with anonymised identities.
The street experience equivalent is terrible. A friend of mine (who self medicated in one of the western totalitarian regimes who prohibit weed) got a bag of tea, tissues smelling like weed, he got a knife pulled on him, he got scammed in an elaborate plot which involved him keeping a bag of flour (supposedly coke) while the dealer supposedly went to get his weed for a 50, he had homeless dragging him to a gang of criminals under the pretence of buying weed. Eventually he found someone reliable, a middle aged father with a stable but low paying job and a family - but it's a miracle he's still alive.
I'd go even further to make a case that the market and its reputation system works similarly well for the aforementioned ground level networks, if you can find them. Read the room, be a desirable client and behave with everyone's interests in mind and you will likely never have an issue. Good business is good business regardless of whether it happens online or in person I suppose.
As an aside I often wonder to what degree the prevalence of onion markets over the past decade have impacted the availability of weed within these offline distribution networks. My anecdotal experience from my legal-weed-desert neck of the US has been a slow growth of offerings and inventory stability and a 20-40% reduction in prices. No idea how much of that is due to the online markets.
Google returns only your post for what idiom. What does it mean?
[1] http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Legal%20Systems/LegalSystemsCo...
My embassy was quite helpful in negotiating with the guards to get me in a "VIP" cell, which was a room within the cell run by some Iranians. They said if I paid them a certain sum, I'd be under their wing and they'd protect me.
Couple days later one of them woke me up and asked me to check if I had any cigarettes missing, which I did (not that I cared much). Someone had seen a Russian guy take some of my smokes while I was asleep and told the "boss". They went and beat the crap out of him.
The Iranians also had a line to the cleaning crew who would pass in front of the cell once a day. Every morning you could place an order for (almost) anything you wanted from the outside world. They'd take the payments, write it all down and pass it to the cleaning crew through the bars of the cell who would deliver it all the next day. So while most of our cell mates fought over bowls of rice, in the VIP room we had feasts of curries, fruit, soft drinks. It was like a banquet every day.
The main Iranian guy even had Russian girls come over but they couldn't enter the cells.
The day I got out one of them approached me and ever so gently and politely asked me "You are going home yes? Could I please have your towel?". He could have just taken it along with anything else I had but he stuck to the rules.
So yeah, these guys definitely had a legal system!
It helps explain all aspects of the drug trade through the lens of business.
One of the most fascinating takeaways was how they handle “contract enforcement” in the absence of a legal system or courts (hint: Violence)
I recall an anecdote that Mexican cartels would hire Mexicans —- and not Dutch —- in order to serve as drug mules smuggling product into Amsterdam. Dutch mules would get caught less often, but Mexicans were much less likely to steal the drugs entirely. Because when you sign up to be a mule they take down the names and addresses of your entire family (nearby), and will kill them if you steal the product. Contract enforcement.
well, perhaps if there was no state, there could be another mechanism which is comparable or better, but when contract enforcement in a particular area is excluded from state enforcement, while normal areas aren’t, I expect the violence used in that area to be worse.
There's an interesting discussion/description in "The Machinery of Freedom", a book about anarchocapitalism.
It's freely available online - http://www.daviddfriedman.com/The_Machinery_of_Freedom_.pdf
Anyway, we investigated factoring of the invoices and we certainly weren't offered 95%!! This was probably 10 years ago now, but I recall we would only received something like 70% of the total invoice value. I thought it was a real rort.
and now we just have contingency
I hope you'll find it as interesting as I did!
Book: http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Legal%20Systems/LegalSystemsCo...
Talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nOB2qxRO5vQ
[Ed. Seems I'm late, but I'll leave the comment up for the video link.]
Not sure why you assumed they don't exist already. There are apparently many. Google Scholar that shit.
I'll go try that tho!
I find it interesting that the same thing can be achieved online but without the violence that is necessary in person. It's definitely a different space.
1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjwnDF2dRgI&list=PLBEIBBdgAO...
Most companies prefer this, as it's faster and more efficient than the judicial system.
First, waiver of class-action rights. This is a big deal because there's a cottage industry of enterprising lawyers who do find a couple main plaintiffs, generate a suit on behalf of a large class against a deep-pocketed defendant, and settle for something around a dollar per class member plus millions in legal fees.
Second is a limitation on discovery and subpoena rights for plaintiffs. In a traditional court setting, you may be allowed to force a company to turn over extensive communication records and other documents, corporate executives to testify or be deposed, and even burden non-party witnesses (eg, part suppliers).
In many jurisdictions, companies that wish to use binding arbitration have to pay the entirety of the significant fees to fund the arbitration system (and in a timely manner). It's still worthwhile for them to do so, even if they aren't tipping the scales of justice one micrometer. With the exact same outcome as a court case, the arbitration fees are fully worth it to avoid discovery, better protect executives from being forced to testify, dodge class-action fishing expeditions, etc.
The arbiter would risk losing all their customers.
Only in theory, or maybe if you take averages. As soon as you give people rights (to see the evidence against them, to confront witnesses, etc.) you have to create processes to manage those rights, and it ends up resembling the judicial system.
I had a friend go through a wrongful termination arbitration, and it took two years. Lawyers were present on both sides; the larger party could (and did) stretch out the process so as to bankrupt the smaller one; settlement negotiations were interminable. It's not clear to me that a court case would have been appreciably longer.
NOT! You have to get a lawyer, and it drags on and on.
This guy was actually part of a consortium of similar lawyers all over the world.
These disputes are completely normal. The amounts of money involved in these contracts is huge; and it's impossible to write into a contract every detail of what might go wrong. So when something goes wrong that isn't written into the letter of the contract, arbitrators pick up the slack. Contract arbitration is generally a paper exercise. The parties don't normally face-off in a courtroom.
There are even internationally-agreed standards of jurisprudence concerned with this kind of arbitration. The specific rules to be used willl be written into the contract.
https://uncitral.un.org/en/texts/arbitration/contractualtext...
I sympathize because, who wants to shell out $100. But even big name news outlets all use xss.in, you see it everywhere, precisely because it's free and anyone can join. Nothing wrong with using it really, just something amusing I've noticed
The irony is that real world is increasingly moving away from that, toward the "everyone for themselves, nothing matters" chaos.
> social harmony and the rule of law
The association between the story and social harmony seems plausible, but actually superficial.
Social harmony would be that people involuntarily work together without an authority, and reached mutual agreement on their dispute. To me, it is a sign of social conflicts that dark web actors need arbitration.
Although that by itself matches our impression that dark web actors are lawless individuals should be punished. More ironically, the story actually shows that they are not lawless in the absolute sense. They just breakd the laws majority of the society abides by (or the majority actually do not even realize exits).
> rule of law
You know, rule of law is more of a political term nowadays. It refers to a western style of political organization framework centered on written laws and a voting process to revising them, and many other subtle details.
Is arbitration on darkweb an example of rule by law?
I tend to say no. Arbiter is necessary in all steps, and they seem are not codifying their "laws" for dealing with the future occrance of similar litigation at all.
People have been saying that for hundreds of years. We tend to romanticize the past.
The entire topic interested me so much that I went our IRL to take courses in settling disputes and handling arbitration. Based on that I established rules to arbitrate and settle disputes by. Rules for both parties to interact, prior to sale of service/product and during arbitration.
Some cases took minutes to hours to settle, others days or weeks, sometimes even months. Sometimes people get incredibly emotionally involved for a few dollars, sometimes disputes for well over what I earned in a year, where solved by both parties only giving (yes/no) answers to my questions and inquiries, for them to request deletion of their accounts after the dispute was settled. The contents being mostly obscured by encryption, but only my rules allowed their commerce to flow in the first place.
I was tempted often to step in and steal money, but something told me that sitting out the experience would be so much more valuable for my moral compass and the understanding of people. I am happy it went that way, it did teach me so much about people, disputes, conflicts and problems. Now when I face problems and difficult characters in life, its like I have a cheat code of handling the situation.
The other thing I did learn during my ... lets call it 'tenure' was that this type of trade and commerce brings out the darkest characters and the darkest in people. That's another topic on its own ... I am happy to see this get attention on HN. This sort of "justice" has been around since the early 00's, preceding most darknet markets. And somehow I keep being drawn to them ... well until I got scared of by the FEDS (who of course always were around, and sometimes did bust people during ongoing disputes) and then my tenure was over. Good luck to those still in the game.
To be honest, this article is excited about something quite mundane… Have you ever presented an argument against your brother’s actions before your mom? Happens anywhere, in any sizable group of people.
Clicking on the link I kinda hoped it’d be a real shadow court: you send them an email describing how a corporation did you wrong, they ddos it into oblivion. I wish!
World could really do with some decent, non-governmental legal systems to discuss things that are impossible to take to a real court. No matter even if obviously enforceable or not. Just to bring some order into what is done currently by a twitter mob
That's a description of our statist status quo :)
This is just a private dispute resolution system, not too dissimilar from what can be offered by private companies on clearnet (think eBay).
I'm not prepared to defend this but that's the view - if you have a system of governance it isn't anarchy so if the argument is "all systems of governance are at least partially involuntary" then that may be true but doesn't say anything related to anarchy
Is it? Can you just leave North Korea if you please?
It's even worse if you look at history. For example, US routinely denied passports to "communist sympathizers" until 1960s (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kent_v._Dulles).
If you take "involuntary" to mean "faced with consequences for one's actions within a group", then maybe it is involuntary, but that's not how the word is used with relation to anarchism as I've seen it.
Seems pretty anarchist to me.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UDfAdHBtK_Q
Actually, I suspect the new "bosses" of the dark web's newfangled justice system are in fact much worse than the old "bosses" of the traditional, old-fashioned, time-tested justice system -- i.e., judges and lawyers.
yet still, cryptocurrency gets blamed for all the ransomware. nevermind that clearly the law is able to find some course to take, or the unsolved cases unrelated unrelated crypto or any of the myriad of studies about why crime exists. no, the mere existence of monero is why we have international criminal syndicates. never happened with drug cartels or insider trading rings. heck even warlords are bitcoins fault.
odd rant, I know, but the argument that "all that crypto does is encourage criminals" is willfully ignorant. tale as old as time.
"what did they do before crypto then smartie pants"
cash.
and before that: gold. probably shiny rocks before that.
we could try defeat these actors but honestly I am unable to believe it's just human nature. we suck sometimes
I'm curious about who gets this money? I certainly have never heard of a company getting their money back from the feds.
Classically, kidnappers and extortionists were caught when the money passed. It was hard to find an untraceable way to do that. But with modern cryptocurrency technology, criminals have solved that problem.
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=586941
This is like a buy-one-get-one-free comment, not only is the above about evolved dispute resolution systems, it mention the moot.
I imagine its like ratings on ebay but much much higher stakes.
As you mention, eBay for the longest time was one of the only/biggest way to sell things online, and reputation on there could make or break how successful your business would be. Similarly, if this forum is used by the majority of people doing business on the dark web, then obviously it isn't "moot" as not following the decision is equal to heavily handicapping your business..
On the other hand, if the group accused is large enough, like some of the $20M ones mentioned in the thread, I assume said groups could easily spin off their own community or still have business even if they were banned from this forum.
Of course, it's a different topic if the decision was against them for clearly unfair reasons.
- trust
- rules
- enforcement
I'm not even surprised such a system exists, because full anarchy where no one trusts anyone is not good even in theory.
I know what you mean, but it's unfortunate that anarchism is sometimes a synonym for "no rules" when it doesn't mean that at all. I think this system is actually very anarchist.
The idea behind is to get rid of centralised, corruptible bottlenecks and decentralise decision and rule making.
There are different models and theories on how that could work (The Machinery of Freedom gets quoted often) and zero interest from any politician to push for it; the appeal of getting into politics is having power - and a model where politicians should give away all of it is obviously not very popular with career politicians.
And how do you "decentralise" that? There's no decision making and rules without enforcement. So, in a "decentralised rule making" the one with the biggest muscles ends up making the rules.
> the appeal of getting into politics is having power
Yes. And so, in a "decentralised world" you will join the group with the most power. Until, well, you reinvent all the existing structures anyway.
The devotees are more interested in being correct and arguing with each other than in the messy business of making coalitions and keeping them together.
Everytime we get someone on the far left who trades ideological purity for pragmatism, millions seem to die.
I look at leftist infighting with happiness because the kinda of people who infight like this are also unlikely to put me up against a wall.
Some of the best information is exclusively nestled in forums and marketplaces over there.
If you rely on an incentive model of being caught in order to behave, something darknet doesnt offer, that says more about you than anyone else.
Is there a guide? List of places to visit?
Onion addresses frequently change so no use bookmarking them
Dark.fail lists a variety of forums, marketplaces, marketplaces with forums, and their current addresses and whether those sites are up or down
It also has links to a variety of mainstream media news sources and various government resources that you can browse on native onion routes
Dread is the biggest forum, reddit clone. A variety of subreddits to hang out in and chat. It is often down though, at least compared to modern clearnet services.
Every time when I was checking it out it was just marketplaces and otherwise just things I could find in the clearnet.
For the longest time the best information obfs4 bridges (which are one step in masking Tor use to your network and ISP) was most easily found on the Dread forum there. Fortunately TailsOS uses bridges by default now. But when troubleshooting on clearnet I typically only found out of date stuff on the Tor subreddit. Was useful and better for me.
People who rely on an incentive model only are typically psychopaths or sociopaths.
What you are saying is that Darknet has no mechanism for policing sociopaths, and therefore is likely to attract them.
A false statement.
Anyone choosing to use such services should be mindful of the fact that the services are appealing to sociopaths and have no policing mechanism.
And so by proxy you’re trying to shoehorn a boogeyman into a benign technology, pick a different thread there are plenty to fearmonger over the dark web
Where there is not, they do not have to.
> into a benign technology
It’s not benign. It’s unpoliced, so sociopaths have no disincentives.
> If you rely on an incentive model of being caught in order to behave, something darknet doesnt offer, that says more about you than anyone else
I’d like people to recognize that this statement of yours is bullshit.
The Darkweb’s lack of incentive not to misbehace conditions what it is used for and who frequents it.
People can use this information as they see fit.
Its completely diluted, just assume all the “dark scary web” rhetoric is a psyop perpetuated the intelligence agencies themselves