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I continue to be fascinated by this sort of stuff.
The unkindly-named Sheep Marketplace is gone, taking all the money in escrow down with it. Its creator claimed that they'd been hacked, but the online stoner consensus is that he/she is the actual culprit. Its name had long been a source of suspicion as to the owner's motives, but that didn't stop people who wanted drugs from using it when Silk Road went down. Addiction: not good for your risk-assessment skills.
A longer-running site, Black Market Reloaded, is down for an ostensibly temporary break due to security concerns. You will be unsurprised to learn that it was preceded by another defunct site called "Black Market." A third, Silk Road 2.0, was open only briefly before their servers were overloaded with traffic fleeing the other two.
This site's owner, who I guess I'll call the Dread Pirate Roberts 2.0, put up a note blaming the Tor protocol for the problem. This is plainly not the case. If it were, then the original Silk Road, which must have had much greater volumes of traffic, would not have existed.
What's especially fun about all this is that the absconding Sheep owner suggested that their users move to yet another newly-minted alternative illicit marketplace, Tormarket. Tormarket quickly posted an unhappy-sounding message saying that they had nothing to with Sheep and asking that Sheep take that recommendation down: "This is the worst PR we can get right now. Please admin remove the link. Please."
The subreddits on the subject are, as when Silk Road was seized, a tragicomedy - lots of people trying to figure out where to get their next hit, other people mocking them, others muttering darkly about conspiracies and assassinations. There's a debate raging as to whether Tormarket is the Sheep owner's latest con, or whether it's actually a fifth site called Pandora, and the link to Tormarket a strategy to blacken its competition's eye.
My pretend internet money's on Pandora as the honeypot, if you were wondering. Similar aesthetic sense in terms of names.
The unkindly-named Sheep Marketplace is gone, taking all the money in escrow down with it. Its creator claimed that they'd been hacked, but the online stoner consensus is that he/she is the actual culprit. Its name had long been a source of suspicion as to the owner's motives, but that didn't stop people who wanted drugs from using it when Silk Road went down. Addiction: not good for your risk-assessment skills.
A longer-running site, Black Market Reloaded, is down for an ostensibly temporary break due to security concerns. You will be unsurprised to learn that it was preceded by another defunct site called "Black Market." A third, Silk Road 2.0, was open only briefly before their servers were overloaded with traffic fleeing the other two.
This site's owner, who I guess I'll call the Dread Pirate Roberts 2.0, put up a note blaming the Tor protocol for the problem. This is plainly not the case. If it were, then the original Silk Road, which must have had much greater volumes of traffic, would not have existed.
What's especially fun about all this is that the absconding Sheep owner suggested that their users move to yet another newly-minted alternative illicit marketplace, Tormarket. Tormarket quickly posted an unhappy-sounding message saying that they had nothing to with Sheep and asking that Sheep take that recommendation down: "This is the worst PR we can get right now. Please admin remove the link. Please."
The subreddits on the subject are, as when Silk Road was seized, a tragicomedy - lots of people trying to figure out where to get their next hit, other people mocking them, others muttering darkly about conspiracies and assassinations. There's a debate raging as to whether Tormarket is the Sheep owner's latest con, or whether it's actually a fifth site called Pandora, and the link to Tormarket a strategy to blacken its competition's eye.
My pretend internet money's on Pandora as the honeypot, if you were wondering. Similar aesthetic sense in terms of names.
