Absentinsomniac

I've been planning to implement an alternate theme but haven't done it yet. Black on white is particularly irritating for people with astigmatism which appears to be a pretty big part of the population.

Well, I don't want to give you the wrong idea. I'm not an authority here. (I'd be a little dumb commenting with this account if I were.) My activity was very minimal, to the point where I doubt law enforcement would find it worth their while even if they knew who I was and the extent of my "involvement". I'm replying because those more involved might not want to share their (more informed) experiences for obvious reasons.

In my experience, at the lower levels I think the vast majority of the community wouldn't have actually done anything. You don't have to do anything to sit behind a keyboard and "support" the idea of an informant getting knocked off or roughed up. How could they justify supporting that kind of violence? In my opinion, the place had kind of a revolutionary appeal. Like the darkmarkets were going to change everything. How could the system maintain these dangerous and harmful laws if we are here, operating in plain sight? I'm sure that would only be bolstered by the extreme convenience and safety the whole thing provided. Nobody really wanted to go back to the old way of buying and selling, for a lot of them online had been their only actual experiences in this area.

Further up the chain, some of those guys had serious amounts of money involved. Some had people under (or worse, over) who depended on access to this site. There was tremendous financial stake involved.

Further, I remember a lot of people felt that there were people in the community who would actually follow through with this sort of thing had there been enough actionable intelligence. I'd be surprised if there weren't. Or they could just hire a hitman. It seemed like a doable thing to have some big-deal drug dealer or one of his guys do something like this. This is literally just speculation though, as there was no public discussion that I ever saw involving anything resembling this. I'm pretty sure at least some of the people would have objected on the grounds that it might draw even more LE attention to the place.

I remember reading some discussion going on about one of the darknet sites that shut down and stole everyones money. A lot of people wanted the stolen coins tracked down so they could go after them and serve them justice. Some people thought it would actually happen. Others thought even if they were found, nobody would do anything. Who really knows.

I wonder if a trusted third party auditor agreed upon by both parties could work.

I can try to give a reply. You have to remember what SR was for. These were people who were not only using SR, but active in the community as well. They were mostly engaged in illegal activities, a good deal of whom were active offline as well taking part in illegal activities.

Law enforcement is a constant point of anxiety for every single person involved in this process. If someone who you thought you could trust is now actively threatening your freedom (or access to a substance, which is also a form of freedom), you take action to prevent this. In general, I don't remember the mindset actually being "pro violence" in an abstract sense, but it was hostile to law enforcement because law enforcement represented the end of ones freedom.

And they weren't wrong. The drug war was (and is) a very real thing. I think it goes without saying that most were for the freedom to consume, produce, distribute, and use any drugs they see fit. Law enforcement were encroaching on that freedom. They were the aggressors coming in and disrupting a pretty peaceful process. In many cases, unprovoked. I don't think that's much of a misrepresentation.

I still feel like there were lines most didn't want crossed, however.

I just updated and recompiled everything a few days ago. Bad timing. Kinda sucks that manual patching is a pain a lot of the time, but oh well, dependencies will do that I guess.

Don't forget the gigantic highway lobby and GM's role in funding the destruction of rail in cities across the country. Remarkably successful strategy. Eventually were convicted iirc, but it was too late.

This is pretty bad news for those who can't stay asleep. Sometimes I'll try to sleep for, say, 3 hours, then my alarm will wake me up and I'll decide to sleep longer. I guess I'll have to stop doing that. Kind of seems like it's pretty difficult not to negatively impact cognition in one way or another.

Exactly. Definitely not enough research taking a harm reduction approach. There's quite a bit of short term research on a lot of things that give some basic insights, but don't add additional variables that are useful even if adding them isn't particularly difficult. Long term studies are obviously harder, but for prescription amphetamines which have been around for a while, you'd think we'd have some decent research on the long term effects on cognition. But nope, there's way more research on long term cognitive effects of cocaine than amphetamines. And even that research doesn't seem to focus on harm reduction and best practices.

To be fair, though, given the non-excludable nature of digital goods, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to make it "stealing" in the first place. Pretty much by definition you can't really prevent access to it. Maybe it makes sense in the context of companies having a hand in the "theft" because they can more readily be made to comply.

Reply depth reached I guess above, so I'll reply here.

Thanks, definitely never knew that. In that case I'll get on it sooner rather than later!

I agree with this. We've gotten a bit of flack on blog.darknedgy.net for this, and we've been putting off making a light-background alternative theme. I'll get around to it eventually because people want it, but I prefer the darker background with lighter text. It feels easier on the eyes for me, personally.

And really, folks who have complained have been the minority anyway. For us anyway.

So essentially, the most beneficial course here is getting into healthy habits and pursuing loss prevention. I haven't seen much evidence at all that otherwise well nurished and healthy people can raise their actual intelligence, but there seems to be a lot of things which can effectively reduce it, both short term and long. Removing or mitigating these can get folks closer to their potential. I think this has a lot of applications for people who worry about this. Like I've read studies quantifying I.Q loss per day of losing just 1 hour of sleep a night. After a few days parts of cognition can be effected heavily.

I use dwm with gimp, it is a little bit of a pain but I'm pretty used to it at this point so for me it's usable. Granted I don't need to do anything in depth.

Seems like more research needs to go into preventing traffic confirmation attacks: https://blog.torproject.org/blog/tor-security-advisory-relay...

"A traffic confirmation attack is possible when the attacker controls or observes the relays on both ends of a Tor circuit and then compares traffic timing, volume, or other characteristics to conclude that the two relays are indeed on the same circuit. If the first relay in the circuit (called the "entry guard") knows the IP address of the user, and the last relay in the circuit knows the resource or destination she is accessing, then together they can deanonymize her."

Interesting technical problem. They patched it, obviously, but similar attacks are still possible. It does say more research needs to be done, when that post was published. Obviously the method they used to send and receive signals from one side to the other doesn't work anymore, but statistical methods presumably do. Sort of like this:

https://mice.cs.columbia.edu/getTechreport.php?techreportID=...

Seems like a very difficult problem to solve.

Pretty much why I prefer distributed markets like OpenBazaar.

Hopefully some kind of OpenBSD support comes along. Pretty much letsencrypt-nosudo until then. The standard letsencrypt program doesn't appear to work on Debian 7 due to outdated openssl and what not.

Most of this thing reads more like an argument for than against.

I agree with this analysis, while I agree with the thrust of the book, sometimes when trying to do in-depth research on some of the topics, it seemed to me as though some of the sources were a bit dubious and/or hard to come by. I still liked the book and feel it's very instructive, but I took some of the detailed work with a healthy pinch of skepticism.

There's some other books that I've felt the same about, like sociopath society by Charles Derber. While the overall thrust is interesting, upon looking further into some of the claims, it was pretty hard to square all of the details with what was written. Either I wasn't privy to the same sources or first hand accounts, or some of it was a stretch from some alternative sources.

If I ever get time I'd love to do a detailed review of the facts vs. other published accounts of some of the specifics in both of these and other books.

Presumably we have to make access to historic CS papers more readily available and research past implementations of concepts before diving in, and what not. This seems sensible. Probably very few programmers actually check the literature before doing anything. Online maybe, but a good deal of the scientific papers in the field are paywalled etc.

I don't even know what fundamentals besides basic ideas of programming might look like.

I used them a long, long time ago. Apparently my stuff is in this leak. Not really concerning given I don't use the same bank info and never reuse passwords, but still...

They also booted me off of their service after my site started to get more traffic than they wanted to deal with... Terrible company.

This was written in 1999, I wonder if his opinion on software engineering practices have changed. I've never worked in industry, but based on what I've read there are some pretty good processes that are supposed to have some empirical support, just not many people adopt them. Like I read a paper from 2002 in which basically no companies would consistently use good processes.

Most of the material in my Software Engineering course is outdated, but I imagine most companies still try to get away with minimum security and slack on good software engineering practices, like code reviews and static analysis and thorough security requirements, or what have you. Using these processes in general tends to force simpler systems. Iterative development with clear thought out implementation per iteration etc.

I noticed this yesterday. Browsing senate.gov and associated domains with https everywhere shows a lot of broken pages. It's fun to peek around on https://republicans.senate.gov and https://democrat.senate.gov because they appear to be test versions of those pages. You can see a list of domains the wildcard does cover by looking at the error the browser provides and what not. Someone should probably fix this mess over there...

Usually folks say "LEO" for Law enforcement officer(s) afaik

I really, really wish I had enough time to sit around and explore stuff like this for weeks at a time. I haven't even played any games in over a year.

My only problem with that is that it stores stuff in different files, iirc, which you kind of have to name something recognizable. That is, the file names are exposed, which if you name them, for example, by which site they access, then presumably someone could figure out which sites you use. Of course, since they're all different files, that also adds some security I think.

I wrote this: https://github.com/Jchase2/simple-pass-manager for that reason. It doesn't even store unencrypted things on disk. I'll still probably keep improving it, like the interface and what not, but I feel like the concept is pretty solid. Granted, it has a very limited feature set. But that's all I need. It doesn't do syncing though. I was thinking about an ocaml pw manager. If I get time.

Glad they added sed -i, that should save some time. For me anyway.

I agree, but that's the only 1 in 400 number I could come up with.

Identical twins?