Tag: drugs

Police seize Swiss druggie robot

Posted on January 20, 2015 by - News

Robbie_Forbidden_PlanetA Swiss art project entitled “The Random Darknet Shopper” has been spending $100 in Bitcoins to buy random products off the Darknet.

The project used a Darknet-surfing robot and apparently managed to buy 10 ecstasy tablets and a bogus Hungarian passport scan.

The London-based Swiss artists !Mediengruppe Bitnik – Domagoj Smoljo and Carmen Weisskopf  wrote on their blog that the robot’s artistic habits did not impress Swiss coppers.

After the exhibition in Switzerland closed,  the public prosecutor’s office of St. Gallen seized and sealed their work with the purpose of “impeding an endangerment of third parties through the drugs exhibited by destroying them.”

The artists describe their medium as the use of hacking as an artistic strategy and say that they programmed The Random Darknet Shopper to answer the basic human questions like what does it mean for a society, when there are robots which act autonomously?

They are also curious to see who is liable, when a robot breaks the law on its own initiative.

Apparently the artists have discovered that it is them.

“We are the legal owner of the drugs – we are responsible for everything the bot does, as we executed the code. But our lawyer and the Swiss constitution says art in the public interest is allowed to be free,” they said.

Swiss prosecutors have yet to decide that point. But it does seem that the robot managed to have an interesting stash of illegal goods. This included a counterfeit pair of Diesel jeans, A Sprite stash can that you can hide drugs or cash in, a decoy letter, a baseball cap with a hidden, remote control, mini video camera, and a platinum Visa card, a carton of Chesterfield cigarettes from Moldavia and a master set of fire brigade keys.

 

Tor wonders how US spooks shut down sites

Posted on November 11, 2014 by - News

tor-browsingTor has been left scratching its encrypted head over how US and European law enforcement shut down more than 400 websites, including Silk Road 2.0, which used its technology.

Tor was set up, not to hide criminals, but to allow dissidents in autocratic countries to make contact with the real world. The fear is that if the US cops could break Tor, then lives could be at risk in countries whose governments would like to shut down dissident sites.

The websites were set up using a special feature of the Tor network, which is designed to mask people’s Internet use using special software that routes encrypted browsing traffic through a network of worldwide servers.

Tor—short for The Onion Router—also allows people to host ”hidden” websites with a special “.onion” URL, which is difficult to trace. But law enforcement appears to have figured out a method to find out where sites are hosted.

Last Week the Department of Justice shut down more than 410 hidden websites as part of ”Operation Onymous” and arrested more than 17 people, including Blake Benthall, 26, who is accused of running the underground marketplace Silk Road 2.0.

However, Tor is broke and does not have the cash to play a cat and mouse game with the well-funded European and US cops.

Andrew Lewman, the project’s executive director, in a blog post said that it was a miracle that its hidden services have survived so far.

It is possible that a remote-code execution vulnerability has been found in Tor’s software, or that the individual sites had flaws such as SQL injection vulnerabilities.

“Tor is most interested in understanding how these services were located and if this indicates a security weakness in Tor hidden services that could be exploited by criminals or secret police repressing dissents,” he wrote.

Dark net raided by police worldwide

Posted on November 7, 2014 by - News

seizedPolice in Europe and the United States have shut down over 400 so-called dark net sites and made multiple arrests.

The police forces shut down Silk Road 2.0 and other sites using the Tor network, that some have dubbed the unternet of fangs.

The sites were alleged to have sold weapons and drugs, according to the BBC.

Out of those arrested, six were British and have been bailed.

The report said Bitcoins worth over £630 thousand were seized.  Troels Oerling, who runs Europol’s cybercrime unit said the combined forces had closed web sites using Tor – crooks had thought themselves out of reach of the law.

Tor was originally created by the US Navy and still gets funding from the US government.  It uses many different levels of encryption in daisy chains across the globe, each link being separately encrypted.