When a journo becomes the story
Last Wednesday I went along to sit in on the plea hearing of the first major Australian ‘Silk Road’ case, expecting to perhaps get a blog post out of it. I never expected what would come next. The court heard evidence of 12 parcels containing drugs that had been intercepted between 27 March and 29 June 2012. […]
Who’s got it in for the Silk Road?
Ever since the suspected DDoS attack in November, the admins at Silk Road have been combating a number of different scams and attacks on the site. It’s hard to tell whether this is a concerted attack by one group determined to piss the website off or each one is separate. The most pervasive ones have […]
An identity crisis on the darkweb
WARNING (JUNE 2014): BUYER BEWARE ANYONE COMING HERE THROUGH A LINK FROM A WEBSITE THAT CLAIMS THIS BLOG IS ABOUT THEM. THEY ARE LYING TO YOU 🙂 Unless you’ve been under a rock, you would be aware that there are thriving underground black markets on the darkweb, offering everything from drugs to shrunken heads for sale. […]
Common misconceptions about child porn and sex offenders
When researching my story The New Underbelly, I wound up, as you do, with reams of information, the vast majority of which didn’t make it to the article due to space constraints or because it wasn’t what my editor asked for. I briefly quoted Dr Bill Glaser (and I hope I did not misrepresent him […]
Agony over Ecstasy
I haven’t yet written a background blog to my latest Fairfax Feature, Dancing With Molly. If you happen to have come to my page as a result of that article, please have a quick look at a couple of relevant earlier posts: Crap analysis shows wee problem with tough ecstasy laws – what happens when […]
What the hell’s going on at Silk Road?
For two weeks, users of online drugs marketplace Silk Road have been unable to log in to the site more often than not, reporting timeouts, missing catchpas and other technical difficulties. Millions of dollars in Bitcoin has been inaccessible to the site’s thousands of members and trading has halted. The reactions of the community have […]
Is Aussie law enforcement using creative techniques on Silk Road?
Some time back a report, supposedly commissioned by Qld police, was leaked via the dark web. Of course, being the dark web, it was impossible to confirm its legitimacy. The discussion paper ‘Hidden in Plain Sight’ was called an extensive critique and response to Silk Road, the online drugs marketplace, well researched and referenced. The […]
The Apathy of Strangers
Yesterday, walking along Flinders Street at peak hour, I watched the crowd in front of me part like the Red Sea. Rather than Moses, there was a man who, if not homeless then certainly down on his luck, was stumbling along the footpath, bleeding from his head. A few feet before he reached me, […]