There is a comic I remember from my childhood, "Tom the Dancing Bug" written by Ruben Bolling. He had a character called "Harvey Richard, Lawyer for Children". I linked a couple of examples [1], [2], [3], [4] but the satire, IMO, is incredible. It lampoons humanities proclivity to layer pseudo-rationality onto the irrational things that we do.
It also reminds me of the TV show "The Wire" when Stringer Bell, a senior member of a street drug distribution ring of urban thugs, forces them to conduct their meetings using Rules of Order. [5] If you watch to the end, you see that in those circumstances order means nothing, it is just a facade.
I guess you could say that I'm cynical about the prospects of such a court and I tend to see the underlying truth in the satires that point it out.
If you try to use your browser's standard right-click Pinterest intercepts and gives you the option to Save (to Pinterest), open link (the very one you are viewing) in a new tab, see more ideas about education (on Pinterest!), see more from renee ma (on Pinterest!), or login or sign up for Pinterest.
If you click on the image, which is a link, it gives you a sign-in form.
Sure, the three dots are there to click; but "Download Image" is the only function listed. Why wouldn't it just be a download button...
Edit: And it's truly a 'download' versus viewing it directly in the browser...
In Firefox, open the Page Info window (it’s in the tools menu these days). The image will be in the media tab.
Alternatively, (shift) right click and choose “Inspect Element” to open the browser dev tools. The element covering up the image will be selected. Delete it. With it gone, you should be able to interact with the image itself; right click on it and view it or save it.
Page Info > Media does work. Inspect Element doesn't work great. It highlights the body tag. You have to go through a series of about a dozen nested div tags to get to the relevant image tag, at which point you can open the image link in a new tab or copy and paste it.
However, the point is that you shouldn't have to do any of this. Pinterest took a normal browser behavior, co-opted it, and moved it behind a menu even though it's the only function available in that menu.
I completely agree with you. However, getting companies like Pinterest to stop requires teaching ordinary users how to bypass their idiocy so that users will see it for what it is and thus begin to vote with their feet or wallets.
That's the worst part. If you're logged in, it'll flat refuse to show you the picture you logged in to see, and will instead dump you into a timeline of completely irrelevant images calibrated to improve your engagement.
There's a good book by Kevin Poulsen called "The Kingpin: How one Hacker Took Over the Billion-Dollar Cybercrime Underground" that is a bit out of date at this point (2011), but it goes into great length on all of the dynamics of the early forums where all of carding/spam/botnet operators did business.
In a forum/marketplace like this, your reputation is worth a lot of money. And if you scam someone and get banned, sure, you can just join again under a new identity, but building your reputation up again means you will lose out on a lot of potential sales.
Great book, indeed dated because its pre-dark web (think a place like Hackforums, before Tor was widespread used -- though it did exist, as did Freenet).
The crown jewels in such a community is operator/admin access. For both police (basically, for infiltration), as well as for scammers (because they could create or kill credibility with sockpuppets, bans). Remember that's how Reddit was started (sockpuppets), and Assange did it as well.
That book is fascinating and markedly well written. The underground.. the schemes.. those characters !
It's killing me that Poulsen didn't release another such gem. There's plenty of material in this vein, beginning chiefly with the Gonzales saga - which dwarfs Iceman's story.
Mr Poulsen if you happen in this thread, please ! Do it. I'd pay 100$ for a new story.
I live in NJ where weed is legal but you can't buy it (legally) so we are sort of in a weird spot.
anyway, it makes me really not care about ordering weed on the dark web from CA. if the feds catch it, its an ounce of weed to a residence, they don't care and im not gonna go in front of some federal judge on federal drug crimes. if CA or NJ catch it, its legal there, who cares.
but the site I use uses an escrow system where if you don't get the product or if you aren't satisfied you can file a complaint. i've never used it as i always have gotten what i've ordered but it is pretty odd.
> If you have LOST your weed, please feel free to reach out to us! Your word is good enough for us. If you say you LOST IT, we will FIND IT, GUARANTEED or you pay nothing.
I used that and got my money back when a shipping didn't arrive.
Also the quality and honesty of the sellers on the quantity they're selling you is great.
It's beautiful to see how the market and a reputation system can work wonders, even among strangers with anonymised identities.
The street experience equivalent is terrible. A friend of mine (who self medicated in one of the western totalitarian regimes who prohibit weed) got a bag of tea, tissues smelling like weed, he got a knife pulled on him, he got scammed in an elaborate plot which involved him keeping a bag of flour (supposedly coke) while the dealer supposedly went to get his weed for a 50, he had homeless dragging him to a gang of criminals under the pretence of buying weed. Eventually he found someone reliable, a middle aged father with a stable but low paying job and a family - but it's a miracle he's still alive.
Oh my god. If anything I applaud his willingness to stay on the hunt :)
Presumably this was in a larger city, as most of the places I have been have had ad hoc, safe and established distribution networks that weren't too difficult to break into after some time. This is in the US though and I can't quite tell what country you're referring to (though I could see someone referring to the US tongue-in-cheek that way)
I'd go even further to make a case that the market and its reputation system works similarly well for the aforementioned ground level networks, if you can find them. Read the room, be a desirable client and behave with everyone's interests in mind and you will likely never have an issue. Good business is good business regardless of whether it happens online or in person I suppose.
As an aside I often wonder to what degree the prevalence of onion markets over the past decade have impacted the availability of weed within these offline distribution networks. My anecdotal experience from my legal-weed-desert neck of the US has been a slow growth of offerings and inventory stability and a 20-40% reduction in prices. No idea how much of that is due to the online markets.
Do you mean taste-wise or in terms of effects? It definitely has a strong cannabis flavor, but so do most other edibles. In terms of effects, can't say I've noticed any difference from regular products here in WA.
> Under state law, that first day for adult sales at licensed dispensaries is supposed to come next month. The enabling marijuana legalization legislation signed into law by Gov. Phil Murphy last year directs the CRC to begin adult use marijuana sales before Feb. 22, with 30-day notice beginning Jan. 23.
> But there's a catch. The CRC is yet to issue any licenses for recreational marijuana sales, so even if sales are approved as of Feb. 22, there won't be any dispensaries selling it.
That time delay is due to needing to spontaneously build an entire supply chain for weed in-state, as it can’t be moved across state borders. Farms, transportation, financing, retail space, zoning, regulations, and more.
Takes a long time for weed to make it to consumers, but it also creates a huge local industry since everyone has to work within the state, at least when dealing directly with the product.
I can't speak for NJ, but in CA it's mostly local opposition that keeps pot stores out. It can be legal at the state level, but if the cities won't give you a permit to open a store, your choices are limited.
Cannabis is still federally illegal, and sending it through the mail is on top of that a federal mail crime. Not too wise, though I'm not at all against using cannabis.
It would be pretty amazing for within the US USPS to not only search but find powdered drugs or pills. It's protected and they need a search warrant. Reasonable cause etc. Maybe if they already had an investigation on you and you were distributing.
Customs on the other hand...
Though if it's small volume they will often just send you a scary letter in the mail, especially if it's just sketchy looking pills. Or if the scammer is smart they'll just send you the letter and take your money ! Or at least that's what SWIM said from my wasted 20s. LMFAO I miss earlier internet sometimes
That's how it generally happens from what I understand. A local or isolated investigation is started and during the process they may uncover a reasonably high-level source of the product. Should they be lucky enough to get a warrant to scan an email server that has plaintext business contents, they might come across a trove of tracking numbers. From there the three letter agency will disseminate tips and intel to more local police forces and field offices and innumerable people start getting love letters, visits, surveillance.
I also recall hearing that the USPS tracking info page is quite complex under the hood and logs a lot of your device/connection information when you enter a tracking number. No idea how true this is, but it wouldn't surprise me at all and I hope people behave as if it is.
Agreed about the wasted 20's on the internet. No doubt I could have better spent my time. But there was some incredible and wild stuff going on out in the wires.
These kinds of alternative justice systems always seem fascinating to me. I feel like a sociological study on "alternative forms of justice" could be very fruitful.
There’s a book I really enjoyed called Narconomics.
It helps explain all aspects of the drug trade through the lens of business.
One of the most fascinating takeaways was how they handle “contract enforcement” in the absence of a legal system or courts (hint: Violence)
I recall an anecdote that Mexican cartels would hire Mexicans —- and not Dutch —- in order to serve as drug mules smuggling product into Amsterdam. Dutch mules would get caught less often, but Mexicans were much less likely to steal the drugs entirely. Because when you sign up to be a mule they take down the names and addresses of your entire family (nearby), and will kill them if you steal the product. Contract enforcement.
judgements from the usual court system are enforced by the police, who are authorized to use force - i.e. violence - in the event of non-compliance. this is not a unique feature of the drug trade.
While this is true, the quantity of the violence needed, and like, the legibility of the conditions under which violence is to be meted out, can be much better in the case of, like, laws and state, than,
well, perhaps if there was no state, there could be another mechanism which is comparable or better, but when contract enforcement in a particular area is excluded from state enforcement, while normal areas aren’t, I expect the violence used in that area to be worse.
I’d say the amount of violence is related to the amount of resources available in the economy where trust needs to be established. If you have a lot of resources, you can spend more on monitoring and surveillance, and afford more losses. When resources become scarce, you climb the control ladder faster and resort to physical violence because you can’t afford not to.
Interestingly, the trust is established by the use (and threat) of violence by the state. Not that it is a bad thing, it is worth it for the resulting order. The state "violence monopoly" is essential in a shared value system.
The thing that really opened my eyes to this now-obvious (to me) truth was reading the history of the Scottish clan system. A state is essentially (or at least begins with) organized crime with a monopoly on crime organization. Or put another way, an organized crime majority.
There's been some good research into the history of legal systems. See David Friedman's book Legal Systems Very Different From Ours [1]. There's a small section about prisoners. But a new chapter could definitely be written about cyber-criminals!
Personal anecdote: quite a while ago I got thrown in jail in Thailand (80 people in a cell, a hole in the ground to shit in, one bowl of rice per day, sleep on the concrete floor kind of place).
My embassy was quite helpful in negotiating with the guards to get me in a "VIP" cell, which was a room within the cell run by some Iranians. They said if I paid them a certain sum, I'd be under their wing and they'd protect me.
Couple days later one of them woke me up and asked me to check if I had any cigarettes missing, which I did (not that I cared much). Someone had seen a Russian guy take some of my smokes while I was asleep and told the "boss". They went and beat the crap out of him.
The Iranians also had a line to the cleaning crew who would pass in front of the cell once a day. Every morning you could place an order for (almost) anything you wanted from the outside world. They'd take the payments, write it all down and pass it to the cleaning crew through the bars of the cell who would deliver it all the next day. So while most of our cell mates fought over bowls of rice, in the VIP room we had feasts of curries, fruit, soft drinks. It was like a banquet every day.
The main Iranian guy even had Russian girls come over but they couldn't enter the cells.
The day I got out one of them approached me and ever so gently and politely asked me "You are going home yes? Could I please have your towel?". He could have just taken it along with anything else I had but he stuck to the rules.
So yeah, these guys definitely had a legal system!
That sounds similar to creditors selling the right to collect debt repayments to a debt collector, or patent holders selling their patents to a patent enforcement company or patent troll (usually the same).
Here in Belgium there's a platform on which you can sell invoices that have say a 90 day payment term to someone who'll give you say 95% of it, if you need that money immediately. They then get the full invoice after 90 days.
There's collection agencies with no cure no pay (who add up their own fee upon the debt), and there's debt traders who buy a debt for a lower price and who then harass the person who (allegedly!) owes the money. Its a scoundrel market, IMO. Heartless, Ellisonish. County court bailiff (gerechtsdeurwaarder) is a government variant which has legal merit (unlike the other 2). Still, doesn't mean they are morally right (and those in debt have a harder time to defend themselves, legally), but at least it does have that legal merit. The problem is that, yes, often people who are in debt are in the wrong and should pay it, but there's all these corner cases and cases where the debt is incorrect, its an underlying dispute, it was started because of bad communication, etc (been there, done it).
I don't think that's what the parent comment is talking about. It's talking about selling non-defaulted invoices as, essentially, a form of secured financing for the vendor company. The invoices are highly likely to get paid in the ordinary course and usually the company selling them even continues to "service" them, ie, to liaise with the underlying customer and receive payment. It's a very different business to debt collection.
I had a small business once with a few large outstanding invoices. These were owed to us (small company) by a very large organisation. Our payment terms were 30 days and the invoices were now out to 120 days. We were hurting very badly, but had pretty much no leverage over the very large organisation to make them pay - we weren't the only game in town and they could just take their business elsewhere.
Anyway, we investigated factoring of the invoices and we certainly weren't offered 95%!! This was probably 10 years ago now, but I recall we would only received something like 70% of the total invoice value. I thought it was a real rort.
From the circumstances you were describing I'm surprised you were even offered 70%, as it sounds like there was a significant risk those invoices would not get paid. The 95% (or there abouts) is for invoices that will almost certainly be paid on time. Defaulting debts are often sold for cents on the dollar.
Yeah, I should have phrased it differently. I'm sure these exist, but maybe sociology isn't the right discipline, and/or I assume I really don't have enough familiarity to find what I'm looking for.
Funny, my friend and I were just talking about this kind of thing last night. I've been watching lots of Soft White Underbelly[1] interviews with gangsters, mafia , etc. and my friend's been reading about the transition from honor culture to state obedience in 1600's in Norway. The conclusion is that any time you create a black market by banning something in demand then a parallel state (competing with the "legitimate" state) will always pop up to protect property, trade and tax because not only is the "legitimate" state enforcing the ban, but they are simultaneously abstaining from their typical "duties" in that regard, leaving a gap to be filled.
I find it interesting that the same thing can be achieved online but without the violence that is necessary in person. It's definitely a different space.
It's a bit more specific than just being "faster" and "more efficient". There's two main advantages:
First, waiver of class-action rights. This is a big deal because there's a cottage industry of enterprising lawyers who do find a couple main plaintiffs, generate a suit on behalf of a large class against a deep-pocketed defendant, and settle for something around a dollar per class member plus millions in legal fees.
Second is a limitation on discovery and subpoena rights for plaintiffs. In a traditional court setting, you may be allowed to force a company to turn over extensive communication records and other documents, corporate executives to testify or be deposed, and even burden non-party witnesses (eg, part suppliers).
In many jurisdictions, companies that wish to use binding arbitration have to pay the entirety of the significant fees to fund the arbitration system (and in a timely manner). It's still worthwhile for them to do so, even if they aren't tipping the scales of justice one micrometer. With the exact same outcome as a court case, the arbitration fees are fully worth it to avoid discovery, better protect executives from being forced to testify, dodge class-action fishing expeditions, etc.
> it's faster and more efficient than the judicial system
Only in theory, or maybe if you take averages. As soon as you give people rights (to see the evidence against them, to confront witnesses, etc.) you have to create processes to manage those rights, and it ends up resembling the judicial system.
I had a friend go through a wrongful termination arbitration, and it took two years. Lawyers were present on both sides; the larger party could (and did) stretch out the process so as to bankrupt the smaller one; settlement negotiations were interminable. It's not clear to me that a court case would have been appreciably longer.
I've heard the same stories. People imagine "arbitration" is like Judge Judy: you both tell your side, and then she issues a ruling. Badda bing, badda boom.
NOT! You have to get a lawyer, and it drags on and on.
I had a friend, a barrister and an architect, whose main business was arbitrating big international deals in the construction and mining industries. By writing arbitration into the contract you get an arbitrator who is a top-notch lawyer and knows the industry, whereas if you rely on the court system the parties are going to have to spend time (and money) educating the judge, possibly unsuccessfully.
This guy was actually part of a consortium of similar lawyers all over the world.
These disputes are completely normal. The amounts of money involved in these contracts is huge; and it's impossible to write into a contract every detail of what might go wrong. So when something goes wrong that isn't written into the letter of the contract, arbitrators pick up the slack. Contract arbitration is generally a paper exercise. The parties don't normally face-off in a courtroom.
There are even internationally-agreed standards of jurisprudence concerned with this kind of arbitration. The specific rules to be used willl be written into the contract.
Ha, these articles always use xss.as instead of exploit.in, despite the latter being vastly more popular and appropriate, because exploit.in charges $100 for membership.
I sympathize because, who wants to shell out $100. But even big name news outlets all use xss.in, you see it everywhere, precisely because it's free and anyone can join. Nothing wrong with using it really, just something amusing I've noticed
This just shows that people naturally gravitate toward a system of social harmony and the rule of law, as it lets you reasonably adjust your behavior, as the expectations are formalized, and everyone else is assumed to be abiding by them.
The irony is that real world is increasingly moving away from that, toward the "everyone for themselves, nothing matters" chaos.
Words are thoughts. Thoughts are mental processes. Be careful with treating similarity in appearance with equivalence in substance.
> social harmony and the rule of law
The association between the story and social harmony seems plausible, but actually superficial.
Social harmony would be that people involuntarily work together without an authority, and reached mutual agreement on their dispute. To me, it is a sign of social conflicts that dark web actors need arbitration.
Although that by itself matches our impression that dark web actors are lawless individuals should be punished. More ironically, the story actually shows that they are not lawless in the absolute sense. They just breakd the laws majority of the society abides by (or the majority actually do not even realize exits).
> rule of law
You know, rule of law is more of a political term nowadays. It refers to a western style of political organization framework centered on written laws and a voting process to revising them, and many other subtle details.
Is arbitration on darkweb an example of rule by law?
I tend to say no. Arbiter is necessary in all steps, and they seem are not codifying their "laws" for dealing with the future occrance of similar litigation at all.
Well, obviously, this is almost a metaphor, as it's a stretch to literally apply the term Rule of Law to something as sketchy as the dark web. Also, note that I did not use something like "Law and Order", as that can have a pretty unpleasant meaning.
Obviously I am posting this from a throw-away (also, hail qubes) and am obscuring a few facts. Over a decade ago I was part of a illicit forum where goods and services were sold, and both parties had mandatory escrow with optional arbitration. Over my runtime I have settled between 1 and 100.000 ( ;) ) arbitration cases, ranging from a few cents to well over $100k. For those who may think they know what operation this was ... you probably never heard about it. All I can say that it wasn't ransomware, and nothing porn or trafficking related.
The entire topic interested me so much that I went our IRL to take courses in settling disputes and handling arbitration. Based on that I established rules to arbitrate and settle disputes by. Rules for both parties to interact, prior to sale of service/product and during arbitration.
Some cases took minutes to hours to settle, others days or weeks, sometimes even months. Sometimes people get incredibly emotionally involved for a few dollars, sometimes disputes for well over what I earned in a year, where solved by both parties only giving (yes/no) answers to my questions and inquiries, for them to request deletion of their accounts after the dispute was settled. The contents being mostly obscured by encryption, but only my rules allowed their commerce to flow in the first place.
I was tempted often to step in and steal money, but something told me that sitting out the experience would be so much more valuable for my moral compass and the understanding of people. I am happy it went that way, it did teach me so much about people, disputes, conflicts and problems. Now when I face problems and difficult characters in life, its like I have a cheat code of handling the situation.
The other thing I did learn during my ... lets call it 'tenure' was that this type of trade and commerce brings out the darkest characters and the darkest in people. That's another topic on its own ... I am happy to see this get attention on HN. This sort of "justice" has been around since the early 00's, preceding most darknet markets. And somehow I keep being drawn to them ... well until I got scared of by the FEDS (who of course always were around, and sometimes did bust people during ongoing disputes) and then my tenure was over. Good luck to those still in the game.
We were doing this around simple small freelance jobs as well - there were, and still are, websites that will simply list fraudsters, people who wouldn’t pay, or take an advance payment and run away. This, and escrow, are quite typical para-legal means. In many cases you don’t want to go into real contractual stuff because the laws and forms seem to be too complicated, the sums too small, the taxes too annoying to pay, the government to cold and indifferent, and your age is too fourteen.
To be honest, this article is excited about something quite mundane… Have you ever presented an argument against your brother’s actions before your mom? Happens anywhere, in any sizable group of people.
Clicking on the link I kinda hoped it’d be a real shadow court: you send them an email describing how a corporation did you wrong, they ddos it into oblivion. I wish!
World could really do with some decent, non-governmental legal systems to discuss things that are impossible to take to a real court. No matter even if obviously enforceable or not. Just to bring some order into what is done currently by a twitter mob
This makes a whole lot of sense. How can a transaction happen if reputation is not vouched for or established? It is why crooks start building networks and start asking lots of questions about groups. Wherever there is a case of money , there is an angle for reputation building. For the more mature, they categorize this as acceptable losses.
Some enterprising prosecutor is probably, even now, getting ready to bring those judges in and depose them. They don't have any attorney-client privilege, and they certainly know all about some illegal activity.
The best explanation of anarchy I've heard is by debunking the common view that people think anarchy is when a a disaster happens and a warlord takes over - but it's really when a disaster happens and neighbors start checking on each other to make sure everyone is alright and see if anyone needs help. If the community isn't voluntarily doing it then it isn't anarchy
I wouldn't describe this as involuntary. The losing party can simply leave (be banished) at any point, rather than face the consequences prescribed by the group. There's no threat of violence or imprisonment, at least as described in this article.
If you take "involuntary" to mean "faced with consequences for one's actions within a group", then maybe it is involuntary, but that's not how the word is used with relation to anarchism as I've seen it.
Isn’t any system of governance in a given region (geographic, or virtual) involuntary? Unless you just mean “you can leave if you don’t like it,” but that’s true for all systems of governance.
Not in practice. For example, not issuing an international passport effectively amounts to a travel ban, and many countries do it for all kinds of reasons (e.g. to combat conscription or child support evasion, or for "national security" reasons).
Yes, that is why many anarchists consider government a coercive system and seek alternatives to that coercion. Of course, coercion can't be eliminated, but we can acknowledge the right of legitimate self defense against that coercion.
Not an expert on the topic, but my understanding is that anarchy rejects governance in general - there wouldn't be any "elevated decision-making body". It's not as much "you can leave if you don't like it" as it's "if you're here then you can change things".
I'm not prepared to defend this but that's the view - if you have a system of governance it isn't anarchy so if the argument is "all systems of governance are at least partially involuntary" then that may be true but doesn't say anything related to anarchy
Maybe we're just getting philosophical about word meanings here but how can you have governance that isn't imposed/hierarchical/authoritative? If whoever is making the rules says you can't do something and someone wants to, then the governance is the process that stops them. If someone is prevented from doing something, that implies a hierarchy capable of preventing the action, and that capability would have to be imposed by an authority.
When I say "governance" I mean in the broadest sense possible: the ways in which interactions between people are organized. If there's a better term for this I will happily use it!
I don't think it's naturally emergent. It's just another case of a centralized entity making some rules people need to follow or else they get banned. It's not too dissimilar from what would happen on eBay if someone complains about a seller.
Most anarchist theories revolve around formal power structures, just decentralized ones, but, they are all voluntary. This seems to be involuntary, as being are being "brought" to court.
There doesn't seem to be an involuntary component; it's a virtual court so 'brought to court' just seems to mean that proceedings have started. You can simply not show up anymore and sort of self select for banishment (once again, from a purely virtual marketplace, not a physical location).
Actually, I suspect the new "bosses" of the dark web's newfangled justice system are in fact much worse than the old "bosses" of the traditional, old-fashioned, time-tested justice system -- i.e., judges and lawyers.
> Over the past few weeks the FBI, Department of Justice (DOJ), Interpol, and other international law enforcement agencies have worked together to incarcerate and indict ransomware threat actors. Through this effort, millions of dollars in ransom payments have been recovered.
yet still, cryptocurrency gets blamed for all the ransomware. nevermind that clearly the law is able to find some course to take, or the unsolved cases unrelated unrelated crypto or any of the myriad of studies about why crime exists. no, the mere existence of monero is why we have international criminal syndicates. never happened with drug cartels or insider trading rings. heck even warlords are bitcoins fault.
odd rant, I know, but the argument that "all that crypto does is encourage criminals" is willfully ignorant. tale as old as time.
"what did they do before crypto then smartie pants"
cash.
and before that: gold. probably shiny rocks before that.
we could try defeat these actors but honestly I am unable to believe it's just human nature. we suck sometimes
Classically, kidnappers and extortionists were caught when the money passed. It was hard to find an untraceable way to do that. But with modern cryptocurrency technology, criminals have solved that problem.
How well this system works depends directly on the delta between how influential the platform is vs how influential the accused is.
As you mention, eBay for the longest time was one of the only/biggest way to sell things online, and reputation on there could make or break how successful your business would be. Similarly, if this forum is used by the majority of people doing business on the dark web, then obviously it isn't "moot" as not following the decision is equal to heavily handicapping your business..
On the other hand, if the group accused is large enough, like some of the $20M ones mentioned in the thread, I assume said groups could easily spin off their own community or still have business even if they were banned from this forum.
If they're known to scam customers, I doubt that their community will take off. People will research you when they offer such sums. You can, of course, start anew, but it will take a lot of work to get back to the reputation level where people are trading 7 digits with you. Getting banned from the forum is more of a gesture, the impact is a lot larger.
Of course, it's a different topic if the decision was against them for clearly unfair reasons.
"When the parties agreed, they could lay their dispute before the moot, whose members, much like present-day mediators, attempted to facilitate an accommodation that the disputing parties found acceptable. When reached, such accommodations resolved the dispute in a way that preserved the peace of the community."
This makes a lot of sense. In the case of the Dark Web I had always wondered how people felt secure in their purchases, especially considering the wide degree of fentanyl contamination in the recreational drug movement right now.
The drug markets have escrow systems and releasing the funds usually requires a review. This means that most sellers have tons of reviews. If a seller ever gets below 95% satisfaction they're basically done, which forces quite a bit of honesty. Since most purchases are $100+ astroturfing seems pretty uncommon. Many sits also have reviews per item, and if the price changes the reviews start from scratch, further disincentivizing astroturfing.
This can only point to one thing - Dark Web will have its own Darker Web which doesn't abide even by the rules of the Dark Web. It will however have its own rules, and justice. And so on, recursively.
Not surprising at all. Most criminal organisations, especially larger ones have these mechanisms in place both for internal and external situations. For instance if there are two gangs with overlapping territories,disputes start and can get escalated very quickly into situations where each side is focusing on fighting instead of bringing on money. Sometimes the gang leaders would try to resolve it but often external help is required. Usually it's a well respected person by both sides who is impartial and has the necessary negotiation or political skills to make both sides happy. This is almost universal across the criminal world.
This is a common misconception. Anarchy doesn't stand for "without rules", it stands for "without ruler".
The idea behind is to get rid of centralised, corruptible bottlenecks and decentralise decision and rule making.
There are different models and theories on how that could work (The Machinery of Freedom gets quoted often) and zero interest from any politician to push for it; the appeal of getting into politics is having power - and a model where politicians should give away all of it is obviously not very popular with career politicians.
> The idea behind is to get rid of centralised, corruptible bottlenecks and decentralise decision and rule making.
And how do you "decentralise" that? There's no decision making and rules without enforcement. So, in a "decentralised rule making" the one with the biggest muscles ends up making the rules.
> the appeal of getting into politics is having power
Yes. And so, in a "decentralised world" you will join the group with the most power. Until, well, you reinvent all the existing structures anyway.
I know what you mean, but it's unfortunate that anarchism is sometimes a synonym for "no rules" when it doesn't mean that at all. I think this system is actually very anarchist.
Right. I used to think this as well. In its most basic form, it means no ruler. I view anarchism as the ultimate counter to authoritarianism. The older I get, the more it becomes apparent to me that all of our world governments are authoritarian to a degree, including supposed democratic ones, and there seems to be this arbitrary threshold of "ok now we call this regime authoritarian". But every government rules through multiple forms of coercion. Some are more authoritarian than others, but nonetheless, authoritarian.
My personal theory is that it's straight up impossible to have a non-authoritarian government involving more than Dunbar's number of people (counting both the governors and the governed). For larger numbers, the best you can do is a multi-level federated approach where the governing assemblies on each level have no more than that number of delegates from the level below.
Then you're likely run into a problem with communication. You can see in basically any large company: communication gets lost, misinterpreted, you end up depending on many other entities to do anything etc.
The lengthy discussions about what qualifies as "anarchy" is a perfect illustration of why anarchists (and libertarians) never take power.
The devotees are more interested in being correct and arguing with each other than in the messy business of making coalitions and keeping them together.
What information? The only thing I can think it's easier to find on the Dark Web than on the open web is illegal drug prices and shitty grey hat software, because like you can't check ebay or Amazon for those. Everything else I found at least from the wikis and link sites was conspiracy bullshit or porn.
Typically over a Tor circuit I visit dark.fail and then switch to the onion url so that exit nodes arent being used
Onion addresses frequently change so no use bookmarking them
Dark.fail lists a variety of forums, marketplaces, marketplaces with forums, and their current addresses and whether those sites are up or down
It also has links to a variety of mainstream media news sources and various government resources that you can browse on native onion routes
Dread is the biggest forum, reddit clone. A variety of subreddits to hang out in and chat. It is often down though, at least compared to modern clearnet services.
I'm curious about the dark web like I am with a lot of technology, but I've always been subject to a (perhaps self-imposed) chilling effect where I fear being "marked" simply for researching the tools. Am I just being paranoid/chicken?
I have little doubt that my ISP logs each time I connect to Tor. What happens to this information from that point? Who knows. I won't live in fear, as that is the same thing as oppression, only self-imposed.
I'd imagine you're also on some NSA lists. Depending on what's going on around you and what else you've done within the profile they've built for you they may be surveilling you a bit closer than they otherwise would be.
For the longest time the best information obfs4 bridges (which are one step in masking Tor use to your network and ISP) was most easily found on the Dread forum there. Fortunately TailsOS uses bridges by default now. But when troubleshooting on clearnet I typically only found out of date stuff on the Tor subreddit. Was useful and better for me.
Everything is appalling to sociopaths, the whole concept is that they blend in to places that do have a policing mechanism
And so by proxy you’re trying to shoehorn a boogeyman into a benign technology, pick a different thread there are plenty to fearmonger over the dark web
How would you like people that aren't sociopaths to behave there differently? Be more self sufficient? Not believe everything written on the internet? This is a thread about an arbitration court what do you think people need to browse onion services? Is there any specific PSA in your post?
It also reminds me of the TV show "The Wire" when Stringer Bell, a senior member of a street drug distribution ring of urban thugs, forces them to conduct their meetings using Rules of Order. [5] If you watch to the end, you see that in those circumstances order means nothing, it is just a facade.
I guess you could say that I'm cynical about the prospects of such a court and I tend to see the underlying truth in the satires that point it out.
1. https://www.gocomics.com/tomthedancingbug/2015/02/26
2. https://www.gocomics.com/tomthedancingbug/2014/12/25
3. https://www.pinterest.ca/pin/545850417313484171/
4. https://www.pinterest.ca/pin/178807047675716661/
5. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xO1zxPRRf4g