Hasta La Gadget!

Now there’s really no shortage of instant messaging services, apart from the ones built by third party developers, major vendors such as Apple, Google and BlackBerry have their own messaging services. However since last year when word of NSA’s clandestine spying operations broke, a lot of questions have been raised about the security provided by such services. It seems that the market could do with a service that was built around security, and Tor appears to be doing just that. Documents presented at the Tor 2014 Winter Developers Meeting in Reykjavik, Iceland reveal that the folks behind one of the world’s most popular anonymity service are now working on an anonymous instant messaging service.

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Tor Building Anonymous Instant Messenger original content from Ubergizmo.

If you had any faith left in anonymous email services, now would be the time to let that go. New court documents show that in chasing down associates of Freedom Hosting, the FBI managed to download the entire email database of TorMail. And now it’s using that information to take on the Darknet.

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The man alleged to be "Dread Pirate Roberts," the founder and operator of the Silk Road—an online marketplace where bitcoins were traded for a range of goods and services, including drugs—was arrested by the FBI in San Francisco Wednesday. The criminal complaint, released today, provides many details about how the site and its users relied on widespread anonymity technology, including Tor and Bitcoin.

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Light just reached one of the darker corners of the web: the FBI has seized Silk Road, a site infamous for hosting anonymized, Bitcoin-based drug and gun sales. The move follows a sting operation that also led to the arrest of site founder Ross Ulbricht (aka Dread Pirate Roberts) for alleged hacking, money laundering and narcotics trafficking. While the seizure isn’t likely to stop online contraband purchases, it’s potentially a big blow. At current Bitcoin values, Silk Road generated $1.2 billion in revenue from just two years of operation — the kind of cash that we’d expect from a large, legitimate e-commerce venture. The FBI’s move also demonstrates that anonymizing technology like Tor won’t always keep law enforcement at bay.

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Via: Brian Krebs (Twitter), The Verge

Source: Nicholas Weaver (PDF)

The anonymous, secure Tor network has always had a reputation as a place for botnets, porn kings, and drug dealers. "But it’s such an amazing tool for political dissidents, a way to escape the spying government!" you might think in the wake of this NSA debacle. Then again, first impressions are often correct.

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