Ten years after Silk Road falls, Variety Jones is sentenced
The sentencing of Silk Road’s Variety Jones, aka Plural of Mongoose, aka cimon, aka Ross Ulbricht’s mentor, aka Roger Thomas Clark was held at 10:00am on July 11, 2023, in courtroom 23A of the Daniel Patrick Moynihan United States Courthouse that houses the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York. This […]
So what’s been happening on the Dark Web?
The problem with writing a new book is that you save all the good stuff for the book and that leaves you with nothing for the blog. So in desperation, I’ve been clicking on random links from Onion crawlers to see if there’s anything new, relevant and/or even vaguely interesting happening in the deep dark web. […]
Ugly kids are cheaper – The Besa Files
Another story from the dark web “murder-for-hire” site hack. Read The Curious Case of Besa Mafia first. There are stories of people paying real money, verifiable through the blockchain, that have come out of the hack. Both targets and their would-be killers can be identified, so it’s only fair to leave those to the authorities for […]
If you found it by browsing, it’s probably not dark web
Fun fact: the proper technical term for dark web sites is hidden services. It’s easy to forget what this implies, but as I’ve been researching the past couple of months for a new book, I’ve been reminded of how the dark web is designed to work. When people ask what’s on the dark web, those […]
Did Silk Road plagiarise Landmark’s charter?
Last month a friend who had just started reading my book rang me almost hyperventilating. “It’s Landmark!” she said. “It’s fucking Landmark!” She had noticed some startling similarities between the Landmark Forum’s 2020 Charter (which seems to have been superseded since it was written in the 90’s) and the Silk Road Charter, which is quoted […]
Scales of Injustice – Silk Road’s SSBD
SSBD had no role to play in the Silk Road marketplace where drugs were bought and sold. He was a moderator of the Silk Road discussion forum, which had its own URL and was hosted on a different server to the marketplace. So why is the US so determined to extradite someone who may or may […]
This tinfoil hat fits me well
Since the arrest of Ross Ulbricht, allegedly Silk Road’s Dread Pirate Roberts, conspiracy theories have been coming thick and fast and they range from the plausible to the absurd. A lot of them involve his friend Rene Pinnell, for whom Ulbricht relocated to San Francisco – either that Pinnell is the real DPR and set […]
How many pirates are there? An update
If the Bitcointalk hackers are reading this, can you please let me know if I’m a lousy journo and missed the smoking gun, or if it was part of a deleted post? I originally wrote the below in response to a lengthy, well thought-out comment by a reader on a previous blog about the changing […]
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 […]
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 […]