The Drug's in the Mail - The Silk Road and our very own Tronica!

[Portillo]

Worth reading through the thread, if you're considerring using SR there is plenty of stuff covered throughout this thread and I think it's very worth reading through, for both the questions you asked plus others your probably haven't thought of yet, plus some pointers on the best method of using SR

I probably wont ever order from it, it seems a bit risky. I can just imagine the cops raiding my house for ordering one pill.

 

[Sustanon]

I probably wont ever order from it, it seems a bit risky. I can just imagine the cops raiding my house for ordering one pill.

They most certainly wont raid u for one pill. A very broad example: You will order 10 next time if it makes it then later on 20 and later on 100 so they will nail u for importing 131 pills all up, thats how they usually operate. They dont waste there resources and time for small amounts.

 

[mister]

An interesting article about Bitcoin...........

Bitcoin
Monetarists Anonymous
After a spectacular crash, an online currency makes a surprising comeback

Sep 29th 2012 | from the print edition

“GIVE me control of a nation’s money supply, and I care not who makes its laws.” So said Mayer Amschel Rothschild, founder of the Rothschild banking dynasty. What would he make of Bitcoin, an online currency with no issuing authority whatsoever? Despite being written off following a speculative bubble and crash last year, the online cryptocurrency is still going strong, not least thanks to its ability to circumnavigate the law.

Bitcoin was devised in 2009 by a mysterious figure known as Satoshi Nakomoto. It is the world’s first, and so far only, decentralised online currency. Instead of a central bank, Bitcoins can be issued by anyone with a powerful personal computer: it mints them by solving extremely difficult mathematical problems. The problems are automatically made harder to ensure that the overall supply of Bitcoins cannot grow too fast. They are traded online, with transactions cryptographically authenticated.

These curious capabilities make Bitcoins a combination of a commodity and a fiat currency (creating the coins is referred to as “mining” and they have value only because people accept them). But boosters inflated a Bitcoin bubble. Shortly after the currency launched, articles spread around the internet arguing that Bitcoins would protect wealth from hyperinflation and that early adopters would make a fortune. The dollar price of a Bitcoin currency unit climbed from a few cents in 2010 to a peak of nearly $30 in June 2011 (see chart), according to data compiled by Mt Gox, a popular online Bitcoin exchange. Inevitably, the currency then crashed back down, bottoming out at $2 in November 2011.

But in the nine months since, Bitcoin has recovered. One unit now costs $12, and the volume of transactions is increasing. Though the price still fluctuates against the dollar, it is less volatile than it was, which makes it a better store of value. Its use as a means of exchange is also getting easier: an increasing number of online retailers take the currency, and new smartphone apps make Bitcoins almost as easy to use as cash. A proliferation of exchanges means that it is relatively easy to swap Bitcoins for conventional currencies.

Tony Gallippi, the boss of Bitpay, which processes Bitcoin payments for retailers, says that his client list has increased from around 100 in March to 1,100 now. These are mostly e-commerce businesses, selling things like domain names and web hosting. But the list also includes a taxi-driver in Chicago and a dentist in Finland. “Credit cards weren’t designed for the internet,” he says. Bitcoin transactions cost less and cannot be reversed in the way credit-card transactions can be. This is important for firms selling to customers in countries known for credit-card fraud, such as Russia or Belarus.

But another big reason for the currency’s success is its role in dodgy online markets. Although tracing Bitcoin transactions to real people is not impossible, the currency’s relative anonymity and ease of use makes it a natural conduit for criminal funds. On the website Silk Road, a sort of eBay for drugs hidden in a dark corner of the web known as Tor, Bitcoins are the only means of transaction. Buyers transfer their Bitcoins into an escrow account where they sit until receipt of the goods is confirmed. Bitcoin transactions on Silk Road are now worth $1.9m per month, estimates Nicolas Christin, a researcher at Carnegie Mellon University.

This may explain why users put up with a big drawback. Bitcoins tend not to be very secure, says Richard Booth, a consultant at RSA, a cyber-security firm. As some users have found to their cost, hackers can sometimes steal Bitcoins from users’ online vaults. In the latest raid, on September 5th, hackers stole $250,000 in Bitcoins from Bitfloor, a large American exchange, causing it to shut down its operation. But although the raid caused a dip in the price of Bitcoins, it soon recovered. It turns out that a currency can thrive even when no one is making laws for it.

http://www.economist.com/node/21563752

 

[futura2012]

Thats a fascinating article. I think if there is one weak link in SR it is the bitcoin.

I am sure America may well target the bitcoin in some way. How exactly I dont know but will be interesting to see how it pans out.

 

[alasdairm]

i have unapproved 21 posts in this thread (which go way beyond a generalised discussion and are basically sourcing) until the forum staff can take a look and decide if further action is required.

please desist.

alasdair

 

[futura2012]

i have unapproved 21 posts in this thread (which go way beyond a generalised discussion and are basically sourcing) until the forum staff can take a look and decide if further action is required.

Sorry if any lines have been crossed.

Would it be possible to give some examples of what is and what isnt acceptable on here?

Having some kind of guideline for this thread would be very helpful as due to the thread topic not discussing a source as you can imagine is quite tricky.

 

[poledriver]

Weird.

I have no idea why my post was removed.

 

[Divine Moments]

Sorry, we are in the process of working out more clearly what is and isn't allowed here as there are differing viewpoints. Will get back to you all soon

 

[what drugs????////]

They most certainly wont raid u for one pill. A very broad example: You will order 10 next time if it makes it then later on 20 and later on 100 so they will nail u for importing 131 pills all up, thats how they usually operate. They dont waste there resources and time for small amounts.

Soooo your saying, if I just order one every so often - i am relatively safe?
If I was ever raided though, i wouldn't hesitate to rat on my dealer, ha-ha. Just open the SR screen and ask the officers why i am being raided before username: Aussydrugdealingguyexample1 is??? I mean, THATS where i got this one measly pill from officer ffs! Its all right here on the screen! Look! Hes got 100% positive feedback from well over 300 transactions, right here, openly advertising, and your busting me? WTF!

They don't waste there resources and time for small amounts.

Domestically speaking ONLY, yep, this is the basic conclusion Ive drawn from SR.

 

[opi8]

If you want to score contact me at [email protected]/australia.edu.orgasm

 

[thestudent14]

Love the .orgasm

 

[futura2012]

Soooo your saying, if I just order one every so often - i am relatively safe?

I would say not fail safe but certainly from reading through this thread it would seem a low risk.

They don't waste there resources and time for small amounts.

Domestically speaking ONLY, yep, this is the basic conclusion Ive drawn from SR.

I would say for Aussie, USA, most of Europe this would be my conclusion as well.

I wouldnt fancie my chances in Thailand for example. The punishments there for drugs are off the wall. A certain number of pills can produce death sentence and even posession mega harsh penalties in the most awful prisons.

 

[mister]

couple of articles from bitcoinmagazine.............

Part 1

For better or for worse, Silk Road has been a fixture in the Bitcoin economy ever since the currency first caught the attention of the mainstream media in early 2011. The service is an online black marketplace for goods such as drugs, pirated digital goods, books on topics such as computer hacking and drug manufacture, counterfeits and forgeries, complete with an Ebay (or Bitmit)-style user interface, an escrow system and a Bitcoin wallet that mixes all incoming and outgoing coins so as to obscure their origin. It operates completely anonymously, existing to the outside world only as a so-called “hidden service” on the Tor network, run by a user who is known to others only as “Dread Pirate Roberts”. It maintains the secrecy of its operators and location by combining two technologies: Tor, the largely US military-funded internet anonymizing service intended to help dissidents in authoritarian regimes evade the prying eyes of their governments, and Bitcoin. The former makes it extremely difficult to trace buyers and sellers’ communications, and the latter, combined with Silk Road’s proprietary mixing system, their financial trail.

Silk Road attracts people for many reasons. Some are simply interested in having a safe and easy place to buy and sell illegal items, of which drugs are by far the largest category. Others cite costs as a factor. One writer, Gwern, claimed in his review of Silk Road that he was able to find Adderall on sale for a “price per pill far superior to that I was quoted by one of my college-age friends (less than 1/3 the price) and also better than the Adderall price quote in the New Yorker, $15 for 20mg”. For others, Silk Road is an ideological mission far more than it is about the goods. Dread Pirate Roberts frequently promotes libertarian political principles on his own forum, and there is a common consensus that fining and imprisoning people for putting substances into their own bodies is morally wrong. The crypto-anarchist movement, which seeks to remove the potential for individuals and institutions to exert power over others by moving key social institutions onto mathematically secured, and often anonymous, internet-based protocols, also finds the service attractive. As governments continue attempting to push restrictive internet legislation such as SOPA and ACTA into law, the allure of using Tor to make such government machinations simply irrelevant will only continue to increase. Finally, there are some legal products available for sale on Silk Road, and even for those who are not interested in using Silk Road to circumvent the law the service provides an active community in which entrepreneurs can nurture their online business and potentially develop a second income from the comfort of their own homes.

Silk Road first truly broke into the public view on June 1, 2011, when an article on gawker.com made a detailed review of the service, and membership quickly jumped by an order of magnitude to over ten thousand. A few days later, the US government caught on, and senators Charles Schumer and Joe Manchin called for the website to be shut down immediately, proclaiming that “Never before has a website so brazenly peddled illegal drugs online” and “by cracking down on the website immediately, we can help stop these drugs from flooding our streets.” Since this brief spark, however, Silk Road has faded somewhat into the background. On June 9, the Bitcoin price bubble finally popped, and attention quickly turned to first this, then to further negative attention on Bitcoin’s economic properties, and finally a security crisis involving a series of unrelated events in late June, continuing in August as bitomat.pl was hacked and the first online Bitcoin wallet, MyBitcoin, disappeared with 51% of its users’ deposits.

Silk Road suffered as the price fell from $31 to $2 between June and November, making it difficult for sellers to make money, but the service retained a loyal following and its users were eventually rewarded with the price rebounding and stabilizing in early 2012. The number of accounts is currently at about 22000, and the largest number of people online at any given time is 126 – a stable community, but much smaller than those who see Silk Road as being the single shadowy force keeping up the Bitcoin economy behind the scenes imagine. About three quarters of its users are from the United States, although British and European users are a sizeable minority. One reason for this is the relative ease of buying bitcoins in the US, as well as the higher interest in drugs there, but the divide is also because Silk Road does little to cater to its non-US customers. For example, Silk Road users have the option of seeing prices in BTC or USD, but not any other currency. This is particularly of concern for non-US sellers, because they, unlike sellers who are based in the US, do not have the choice of setting a price for their goods that is fixed in their local currency. Language is another concern; foreign language support is nonexistent, and even dedicated subforums for second-tier languages are lacking.

So far, there have been no reports of anyone being arrested as a result of Silk Road activity, and there are good reasons to believe that while the DEA may find Silk Road worth keeping an eye on, they are not actively attempting to identify buyers or sellers. As one Silk Road user, vlad1m1r, who confines himself to the strictly legal activity of selling bitcoins in exchange for cash in the mail in the UK, writes, “I find it implausible that they are monitoring it on a daily basis as it’s simply not an effective use of resources due to the anonymous nature of the Tor network and the use of GPG encrypted messages to exchange personal information. Users occasionally speculate that this vendor or that may be LE (Law Enforcement) but I doubt very much that a Police officer would sell drugs in order to make arrests as this would be textbook entrapment.” The last claim, that a police officer selling drugs constitutes entrapment, is a legally complicated one; USLegal defines entrapment as being “when [a person] is induced or persuaded by law enforcement officers or their agents to commit a crime that he had no previous intent to commit”; someone actively searching drug listings on Silk Road would likely not fall under the definition. Nevertheless, the argument that it’s not worth it to spend the resources going after Silk Road is a valid one, and law enforcement officials who are more interested in mitigating the social consequences of drug sellers and gangs on the streets than in pursuing a prohibitionist agenda as an end in itself may well decide to leave Silk Road alone simply because buying drugs on the internet is much safer than the alternative.

The relationship between Silk Road’s users and its management tends to be a positive one. As vlad1m1r describes it, “we do get the occasional malcontent who complains that their thread was arbitrarily deleted or that the creator of Silk Road himself DPR hasn’t deigned to address their particular concern, but people are generally polite when asking for new products or help with using the site, and the admins largely reciprocate.” One of the factors contributing to Silk Road’s cohesive community is the high level of trust. Scams are a serious problem on the darknets because of the anonymity of the participants and the fact that going to the police for help necessarily implies confessing to a crime, and Silk Road is one of the few places that attempts to counteract this with a reputation system and a built-in escrow service.

However, there are problems. One major controversy among the service’s users is that of morality. There have been instances of people putting up images which constitute child pornography in some jurisdictions but are acceptable in others, and the Silk Road administration tends to stick to its own moral philosophy in such cases, not taking down consensual images which are slightly underage but strictly prohibiting products of genuine abuse. There have also been requests for credit card skimming devices, which are not allowed under Silk Road law, but which some people believe are no more immoral than counterfeits and drugs. Weapons were another concern, and Dread Pirate Roberts eventually resolved that particular concern with the middle-of-the-road option of banning them from Silk Road itself but allowing them on a specifically designed sister site called The Armory. Services such as theft and contract killing are banned from Silk Road and The Armory entirely, although some Silk Road users point buyers interested in such goods to a competing site with no moral restrictions at all, Black Market Reloaded.

The other issue, although not a controversy, revolves around the escrow system. The default way of making transactions in Silk Road is for the buyer to send his funds not to the seller directly, but to the escrow system, which notifies the seller that it received and is holding the funds. When the buyer receives his product, he notifies the escrow system that the transaction was successful, and the seller gets his money. Some sellers, however, ask their buyers to bypass this mechanism and send directly to them for convenience, a practice which is heavily frowned upon by the Silk Road administration and community, but is nevertheless sometimes done. On April 20, many sellers on Silk Road celebrated the service’s first birthday by hosting special sales of their products at reduced prices, and one established vendor, Tony76, used the opportunity to sell a large number of orders and ran off with the money. There is some speculation as to just how much Tony76 was able to steal, but it is known that he transferred at least $30,000 worth of bitcoins off the site. Since then, the use of escrow has gained in popularity once again, and the possibility of making escrow mandatory, while not currently implemented, is always under discussion.

Outside opinion on Silk Road is split. Some believe that the Bitcoin economy would be better off without such services tarnishing its reputation, as it would be better able to market itself as a currency with legitimate uses, while others openly embrace the underground economy either seeing its liberation as an end in itself or respecting its potential to act as a bootstrapping mechanism for Bitcoin. In terms of its size, Silk Road is currently Bitcoin’s largest e-commerce platform, having about twice as many products as its largest legal competitor, bitmit.net, but it is far from being Bitcoin’s economic powerhouse, a title to which businesses like Butterfly Labs and BitInstant hold a much greater claim. Both supporters of Silk Road’s particular brand of crypto-anarchic freedom and people concerned with Bitcoin’s public image can rest assured that Silk Road is nowhere near taking over the Bitcoin economy, but neither is it going away.

http://bitcoinmagazine.net/the-silk-road-report/

part 2

Much has happened since the first Silk Road report that we released a month ago. In mid-July, a Silk Road user was arrested by Australian police for allegedly transporting unspecified narcotics into the country. The event attracted considerable attention within the Bitcoin community as it was the first “Silk Road-related” arrest ever to take place, and the Australian police eagerly took the opportunity to warn Australians that law enforcement is “well aware of this method of drug procurement” and that “persons who buy or sell through online marketplaces, on so-called ‘anonymous’ networks should understand that they are not guaranteed anonymity.” However, it is important to point out that neither the anonymity of Tor nor that of Bitcoin was compromised. Rather, all evidence points to the seller being caught through the international mail system. It is also well understood that island nations have an easier time controlling their borders, whether against illegal immigrants, drugs or guns, than most others, so on the whole the event is not particularly surprising.

Soon after, Dread Pirate Roberts, the mastermind behind Silk Road, announced that Silk Road’s illegal gun-selling sister site The Armory would be closing. To justify the decision, Roberts wrote in a post on the Silk Road forums (original accessible only through Tor) that it simply was not popular enough to justify the expense; in his own words. “The volume hasn’t even been enough to cover server costs and is actually waning at this point. I had high hopes for it, but if we are going to serve an anonymous weapons market, I think it will require more careful thought and planning.” Unlike its larger cousin Silk Road, the Armory was never well received by the Bitcoin community or the media; many to whom the thought of legalizing all drugs is not even controversial, particularly those in Europe, find the prospect of psychopaths being able to anonymously buy guns much more worrying. The one major article covering it in the news came only weeks before the announcement, in the form of a piece on Gizmodo titled “The Secret Online Weapons Store That’ll Sell Anyone Anything“. The article did misrepresent the Armory to some extent, the largest offense being a claim that its cryptic garbled sixteen-character URL was part of a deliberate strategy of obfuscation (in reality, the Tor protocol offers no way, except perhaps extreme repeated trial and error, to choose one’s URL, as the generation process is a pseudorandom process somewhat similar to that used to generate Bitcoin addresses), but it did provide the Armory a last chance at acquiring a foothold in the illegal arms market. However, even that failed to reignite attention; at the time of this writing, the number of products available is less than sixty, and the Armory will soon be gone entirely. Weapons will not become allowed on Silk Road as a substitute.

The Australian arrest may shed some light on why Silk Road, the anonymous illegal drug store, has been able to succeed and the Armory, the anonymous illegal gun store, has not. The major bottleneck of both is the postal system, and drugs are much easier to sneak through than guns are. The former usually comes in the form of small tablets or a powder which can be reliably placed in vacuum sealed bags, while the latter, even if disassembled into its constituent parts, is made up of large pieces, any of which can trip a metal detector. The requirement for the customer to assemble the weapon also hampers usability, and the requirement for the seller to disassemble and spend more time packaging it drives up costs, which are another major reason why many potential customers opted to continue purchasing their weapons through offline channels instead.

Finally, a few days ago, Nicolas Cristin, a researcher at Carnegie Mellon University, released a detailed analysis of Silk Road in which he discovered considerable evidence that pointed to a, to some, exciting, and to others, frightening conclusion: that, unlike its arms-dealing sister site, the Silk Road is booming. According to Cristin’s paper, at the end of November 2011, Silk Road had 220 active sellers, increasing to 290 on March 1, but the number then started to quickly climb, leading to the site having over 550 active sellers at the end of July. In the previous Silk Road report it was mentioned that the majority of sellers were from the US, with a sizeable minority in the UK, a fact which Cristin’s paper corroborates: the most popular shipping origin, the USA, is the home of 43.86% of all sellers, followed by “undeclared” with 16.28% and the UK with 10.14%. Customer satisfaction on Silk Road is mostly positive, with a 97.8% positive feedback rate, although less than that on white market sites like Ebay, which boasts a positive feedback rate of 99%. But the most surprising figure of all is Silk Road’s sales volume. The volume was about 8,000 BTC daily in March, increasing to a peak of 15,000 BTC per day in May and then slowly falling to 10,500 BTC a day in July. But, as the paper points out, the fall was merely a nominal one, caused entirely by the rise in the Bitcoin price over the same period. In USD, the total sales volume in each of the past two months, June and July, exceeds $2 million. And, as Cristin points out, that does not even include the hidden listings.

For comparison, BitPay processed $170,000 in May and hit a record of $250,000 in one day with Butterfly’s ASIC launch. BitInstant transferred $1.1 million in April, and MtGox had a trading volume of $18 million these last 30 days, although the latter figure is hardly comparable to the others because the vast majority of Bitcoin exchange trading volume is a result of arbitrage and speculation. Silk Road’s revenue compares even better: while BitPay’s commission of 0.99% brought in $1,700 and BitInstant’s 0-5%, at most $60,000, Silk Road’s average commission of 7.4% nets the site over $180,000 USD per month, exceeding even the $45,000 to $108,000 earned by MtGox.

Given Silk Road’s low-profile stance in the Bitcoin community, these figures come as a shock. Far from being an easily ignorable sideshow, Silk Road is, in fact, a mainstay of the Bitcoin economy. Furthermore, Silk Road is not merely a particularly popular toy. Dividing Silk Road’s monthly volume of $2 million by its 550 active sellers gives an average revenue of $4500 per month, strongly suggesting that there are dozens of individuals earning a living largely or exclusively using the website. On the one hand, Bitcoin advocates can rejoice; there is now definitive proof that Bitcoin has found a stable and serious niche, one that is not merely a byproduct of novelty or community patriotism, and there are individuals beyond infrastructure providers like BitInstant and MtGox who are employed in the Bitcoin economy full time. But at the same time, as the law is beginning to turn its eyes toward Bitcoin with Brazil’s securities commission targeting a Bitcoin investment group and two legal actions being brought forward around the events of the Bitcoinica crisis, one cannot help but worry about the effect that this will have on Bitcoin’s public image in the months and years to come.

http://bitcoinmagazine.net/the-silk-road-report-part-ii/

 

[mister]

Riding the Silk Road: the flourishing online drug market authorities are powerless to stop

Australians are now regularly buying drugs online from vendors who go by aliases such as "PostmanPot" – and the government is yet to figure out how to stop them.

The existence of Silk Road, an anonymous online marketplace functioning as a kind of eBay for illegal drugs and other contraband, was first reported in June. But now Australian sellers are trading regularly on the site. Online records show they have made more than 100 sales of drugs such as marijuana, magic mushrooms and a range of pharmaceuticals, and sales are increasing daily.

Demand is increasing beyond my expectations, beyond my ability to keep up with customers.

The government's mandatory internet filter, which is now on the backburner, could have been used to try to force ISPs to block the site, but even that is unlikely to be effective. As it stands there is no way to prevent Australians using it and police say the site is beyond their remit because it is hosted overseas.

PostmanPot is the collective username of a group of Australians - "no more than seven" - selling marijuana in small quantities on Silk Road. "All of us have experience selling afk (away from the keyboard)," one member of the group said via a private message on the Silk Road website.

"I myself sold cocaine in an earlier life [...] some of the other postmen are currently active [offline] in the cannabis and psychedelic market". He hastened to add that none of the group dealt any longer in so-called habit forming chemicals.

He described himself as in his early 20s and studying physics at university. "There is profit made but it's more 'take the mates out to dinner' kind of money rather than 'buy a sports car'."

The "postmen" offer one gram of marijuana for around $20 – or 1.87 bitcoins, the currency used on the website. According to the Australian Crime Commission this price is roughly in line with national median street prices for a gram of marijuana.

Bitcoin is the peer-to-peer online currency favoured by people who prefer to keep their transactions anonymous. Their value fluctuates wildly: one bitcoin is today worth around $11 Australian dollars; at the start of June it was worth $30.

Avoiding the censors

People can only access Silk Road by first downloading a program that channels their internet connections through a complex international web of proxy servers that and conceals their identities in the process.

A spokesman for the office of the Minister for Communications, Broadband and the Digital Economy, Stephen Conroy, said that the Silk Road website had been refused classification by the Australian Communications and Media Authority in June. The government's policy is to require local ISPs to block the URLs of Refused Classification websites, the spokesman said, but this would not happen until after a review of the classification system being undertaken by the Australian Law Reform Commission.

But even if the government were to exercise such power over ISPs, it's unclear how this would stop people accessing Silk Road. Because users must first direct their home connections through encrypted overseas servers, blocking access to such sites was "pretty well beyond the reach of government," said Dr Chris McDonald, an associate professor in Computer Science at the University of Western Australia and Dartmouth College in America.

The office of Senator Conroy declined to comment on these obstacles.

Surging demand

Silk Road records show that PostmanPot has made fewer than 20 sales. Another Australian seller, operating under the name "novocaine", specialises in magic mushrooms; his Silk Road profile shows he has completed 50 transactions in two months of operation.

"Demand is increasing beyond my expectations, beyond my ability to keep up with customers. I have had to look elsewhere for stock. I went from a couple of orders in my first week to getting several a day," novocaine said.

Novocaine described himself as being in his early 40s and said he squeezed his illegal online enterprise in between working a full-time job in education. He styled his business as a protest against drug laws, one motivated by his conviction in the mind-expanding power of drugs.

"I was anti-drug, homophobic and extremely racist up until my early 30s before I took my first substance, mdma. That one dose changed my life.

"I think it's hypocritical that users of 'illicit' substances are classified as a criminal under current legislation while other highly addictive and harmful substances can be purchased legally".

Other Australian vendors are currently offering drugs such as Phenazepam, a powerful benzodiazepine developed in the former Soviet Union, and have previously sold psychedelics like LSD and DMT and obscure research chemicals.

As on eBay, buyers on Silk Road can rate the quality of a seller's product and customer service. Neither PostmanPot nor novocaine said they had ever encountered difficulty shipping products to customers, which are typically packed in vacuum-sealed packages and sent through the domestic post.

But Australians who buy from Silk Road do not do so without risk. Those who buy from international sellers may have their packages screened by Customs. A spokesman for Australia Post said that they conduct ongoing covert monitoring of domestic mail but declined to detail these arrangements, citing security concerns. The spokesman also noted that Australia Post handled five billion articles of mail each year.

Both sellers said they feared prosecution: "How's business?? stressful haha," said novocaine.

Authorities rendered powerless

But it remains unclear how law enforcement will respond to the emerging online front in the Australian drug trade.

An AFP spokesperson said while they were aware of Silk Road, the site was beyond their remit because its content is hosted on servers outside of Australia.

The office for the Minister for Home Affairs and Justice noted that the government was committed to disrupting the drug trade, citing activities such as seizing drugs at Australia's borders, but it would not say what the government was doing to stop the domestic online trade.

Dr McDonald said the government would find it difficult to monitor activity on Silk Road because the site's visitors were passing their home connections through overseas servers encrypted by algorithms of the same sophistication as those commonly used to protect online banking : "I doubt very much they could do that".

http://www.smh.com.au/technology/technology-news/riding-the-silk-road-the-flourishing-online-drug-market-authorities-are-powerless-to-stop-20110830-1jj4d.html

 

[mister]

Take A Trip Down The Revamped Silk Road Website

I know that a bunch of Silk Road users are more than a little peeved by all the press that the online drug shop has been getting, but at this point, everyone who cares about it has learned about it by now. So suck it, I’m going to talk about it. Not only am I going to give you a heads-up on why the changes they’ve made are for the better, I’m going to give you step-by-step instruction guide on how to access the site.

By Wyatt

For obvious reasons, the man behind the site (dubiously known as Dread Pirate Roberts) doesn’t want you or anyone else on the site to be found. For that reason, Silk Road requires you to connect to the website by using Tor (download here) and only Tor. Essentially, the private browser creates a series of networks that you connect through (similar to a VPN), making you as invisible as it gets in the online world.

Once you’ve succesfully downloaded Tor, a new browser window should open up (called TorBrowser). Now you need to connect to the site’s URL, something that we haven’t showed you yet. That’s because it’s really just a series of numbers and something that’s changed a few times in the past. At the moment, this is the current URL. Once you access the site (it’ll take a little longer than your normal non-drug-selling page), you’ll need to create a password, username, and PIN number. Taking a page from the DailyAnarchist’s advice, I would suggest creating a new username you’ve never used before.

After it goes through, you’ll be taken to Silk Road’s new web page. What’s new about it? Well for one thing they no longer sell guns. True, Silk Road proper stopped selling guns on it’s site a little while ago when they created The Armory but even that site has been removed. Probably a good idea considering how much gun violence has been attributed to buying ammunition online. If you’re “only” selling drugs, you definitely don’t want to draw unneeded attention to yourself by selling firearms.

As far as looks go, Dead Pirate Robert has updated the page so that SR now only looks like something from the 20th century, not the 19th century. At the end of the day, though, who cares? They’re still selling what you’re looking for and as long as the seller “feedback” continues to function successfully, the site will work.

Once you’ve found what you’re looking for, you’re going to want to pay for it. Since using your mom’s credit card probably isn’t a good idea here, you’ll head to Bitcoin to sign up for their “money.” The site that calls itself “P2P Digital Currency” is actually super easy to use and sign up for. I’m not sure exactly how you’d extract bitcoins for real money, but all you’re concerned with (as a buyer) is trading over your Bitcoins for drugs or whatever else you want to buy.

Now that you know how to use, access, and browse the site, I’ll let you go have fun. Remember, I’m not suggesting that you actually get anything off of the site, I’m simply showing you what it is and how to access it. Learning about the dark corners of the internet is always kind of fun.

http://coedmagazine.com/2012/08/08/take-a-trip-down-the-revamped-silk-road-website/

 

[laugh]

id suck on that big md crystal on the left there (drools) god damn there must be a lord almighty 8(

 

[poledriver]

This may be related to SR, it doesn't say, but who knows.. I threw it in the drug busts thread and thought i may as well see what people think here.

Woman charged with drug offences - Batemans Bay

Police investigating the importation and supply of illegal drugs on the state’s south coast have arrested and charged a woman at Batemans Bay.

Officers from Far South Coast Local Area Command launched Operation Whisker in May this year to probe the activities of a local drug supply syndicate.

As a result of exhaustive inquiries, the alleged ringleader, a 34-year-old woman, was arrested at a Batemans Bay motel yesterday.

She was taken to Batemans Bay Police Station and charged with nine offences – including supply prohibited drug on an ongoing basis, import controlled substance and import border controlled drugs.

The Merimbula woman was refused bail to appear in Batemans Bay Local Court today.

During the course of their investigation, police allegedly seized quantities of cannabis, liquid MDMA (ecstasy) and crystal methyl amphetamine (ice) – some of the drugs imported through the post from Canada.

Meanwhile, a 21-year-old Merimbula man was arrested by investigators on Tuesday 23 October 2012.

The man was charged with similar offences and appeared in court.

He was remanded in custody to reappear in Bega Local Court on 12 November 2012.

http://www.police.nsw.gov.au/news/la...bWwmYWxsPTE=

 

[MasterVampire]

^ no customs love letter but an arrest instead?

 

[Jabberwocky]

^am completely missing whatever it is you're seeing there..

 

[poledriver]

the part in bold, imported drugs via the mail system, which may mean SR was used. As I said, i have no idea from the article if it was or not, and im not going to bet my left nipple on it, but good chance it was I rekon.