If you are a seller on Alphabay — a darkweb site that sells "drugs, stolen data and hacking tools," you'll have to use two-factor authentication (based on PGP/GPG) for all your logins.
The iconic "Don't Tread On Me" flag, aka the Gadsden flag, originated during the American Revolution in 1775 as a statement against British rule. Over the years though, it became popular among libertarians, the American Tea Party movement, and most-recently, far right groups. — Read the rest
The web is a lot like outer space. For all its amazement and transcendent wonder, it's ultimately cold, dark, and endless.
While that may seem harsh, consider the consequences of your identity or other critical information about you or your family is stolen and used by dark forces hiding all over the Internet. — Read the rest
Who needs the darkweb when you can just go on social media, enter your drug of choice in the search bar, and buy whatever turns your crank? In this video, Vice's Tir Dhondy finds out just how easy it is to buy drugs on these platforms.
In 2002, Microsoft security researcher Peter Biddle (previously) published The Darknet and the Future of Content Distribution, a paper that argued that DRM would always fail and that traditional forms of censorship would be harder and harder to execute online (it also coined the term "Darknet"); today, in honor of America's mass freakout over 3D printed guns, he's published an updated version, which mostly consists of adding "this applies to guns, too" over and over again, for people who are unclear on the concept.
When last we met the Four Thieves Vinegar collective — a group of anarchist scientists who combine free/open chemistry with open source hardware in response to shkrelic gouging by pharma companies — they were announcing the epipencil, a $30 DIY alternative to the Epipen, Mylan's poster-child for price-gouging and profiteering on human misery.
The US Department of Education's Free Application for Federal Student Aid program requires any student applying for federal aid for college or university to turn over an enormous amount of compromising personal information, including current and previous addresses, driver's license numbers, Green Card numbers, marital details, drug convictions, educational history, tax return details, total cash/savings/checking balances, net worth of all investments, child support received, veterans' benefits, children's details, homelessness status, parents details including SSNs, and much, much more.
Muckrock filed Freedom of Information Requests with multiple US police forces to find out how they were using "mobile phone forensic extraction devices" — commercial devices that suck all the data out of peoples' phones and make it available for offline browsing.
The Torist is a newly launched literary journal, edited by University of Utah Communications associate professor Robert W Gehl and a person called GMH, collecting fiction, poetry and non-fiction. It is only available as a file on a Tor hidden service — a "darkweb" site, protected by the same technology as was used by the likes of Silk Road.
Researchers exploring the so-called "Dark Web" analyzed 86 websites from groups labeled as terrorist orgs by the US government, using data mining software. In a report titled "Analyzing Terror Campaigns on the Internet," a team of tech and culture experts from several US universities compared them to 92 US state and federal government websites. — Read the rest