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Australian authorities say they can detect dark net transactions.
We know this because the nation's Border Force (ABF), the black-shirt wearing guardians of Australia's frontiers, says as much in its takedown notice of a "31-year-old man from Port Neill" in the State of South Australia. Said man fell foul of a joint ABF and South Australia Police (SAPOL) operation that "linked him to the importation and distribution of numerous border controlled drugs via the dark net."
"We are well aware of these websites and take any attempts to import illegal border controlled drugs very seriously," said Craig Palmer, the ABF's acting commander for immigration and customs enforcement. "
[...] The ABF hasn't previously publicised arrests made as a result of dark net activities, but early in 2016 advertised for workers with information security skills. Perhaps those hires' feet are well and truly under the desk? ®
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 26 2016, @06:39PM
I would not be so quick to say that.
https://torflow.uncharted.software/#?ML=127.96875,-21.943045533438166,4 [torflow.uncharted.software]
They can see where the packets are going. Both at the tor level and the ISP level. Just the message is encrypted.
Lets say they 'own' 10 exit nodes and 10 relays. Just keep pinging on the website. Eventually a pattern will appear. Would it be slow and a PITA? Sure. But on the long term everything is crackable. Just a seat of the pants guess within 100k pings you would start to see where the real hardware lives.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Tuesday September 27 2016, @01:38AM
Thus, the question mark in the title of my post. As you point out, the government and corporations have huge resources at their disposal. They can track packets, and given some kind of a lead to go on, they can probably attempt to crack encryption and/or applications. But, I insist that they need a reason to focus on some group or pattern of packets.
Excellent link, but I'll note that it looks entirely different after enabling scripts on the page. I seriously thought that an MMO game was loading when I clicked the link. The scriptless page loads a background that resembles an online game that I play from time to time.
(Score: 2) by edIII on Tuesday September 27 2016, @03:00AM
TOR is not a dark net though. It's novel, and useful, but not a true dark net.
A true dark net would be something like Freenet, and Anon's method is not viable against that. In fact, 100k requests for a particular Freenet key would likely make the government the closest geographical node to have that content. In fact, it may be highly likely that the government would be hosting the encrypted content afterwards ;)
Freenet, like any good and true Darknet, distributes the datastore across all nodes. Like TOR, it provides plausible deniability and is impossible to prove actual consumed content. Meaning, it may be possible to prove you received all of the Freenet encrypted data for that key, but not that you decrypted it, or possessed the proper keys to do so.
However, TOR services in contrast are standard traditional centralized servers. An .onion address does not provide anonymity, nor does it suitably hide the location of the server, and nor does it offer a distributed datastore in any way.
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 27 2016, @03:22AM
It's "Tor". It is not "TOR'. Even a cursory glance at their website should tell you this much.
(Score: 2) by edIII on Tuesday September 27 2016, @04:40AM
I'm simply amused that you called me ding dong :)
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.