<story><title>Inside the ‘DarkMarket’ prototype, a Silk Road the FBI can&apos;t seize</title><url>http://www.wired.com/2014/04/darkmarket/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>pmorici</author><text>What an unfortunate name.  Not only does it share a name with a cyber crime forum taken down a few years back but it invokes the thought of trade in illicit goods.  There was a thread on reddit a few days back talking about how they should have called it &amp;quot;FreeMarket&amp;quot; because it would be harder for politicians and media pundits to dismiss out of hand since it would sound like they were against one of the tenants of capitalism ie: the free market.</text></comment>
<story><title>Inside the ‘DarkMarket’ prototype, a Silk Road the FBI can&apos;t seize</title><url>http://www.wired.com/2014/04/darkmarket/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>tokenadult</author><text>Never say never. The one thing the history of online networks teaches all of us is that some attack surfaces are very hard to imagine--until someone imagines the attack surface and uses it to interfere with the network. There is plenty of interest on the part of law enforcement authorities in figuring out ways of enforcing the law on networks like the proposed (not yet implemented) network described in the article kindly submitted here.&lt;p&gt;The article begins by saying, &amp;quot;The Silk Road . . . still offered its enemies a single point of failure,&amp;quot; referring to Silk Road being hosted on a single server. Well, that is the KNOWN point of failure for keeping Silk Road impervious to law enforcement, but there may have been other points of failure in Silk Road&amp;#x27;s design. About the proposed DarkMarket, the article writes, &amp;quot;DarkMarket, Taaki and its other developers admit, is still just an experimental demonstration. They have yet to integrate anonymity protections like Tor into the software; currently every user’s IP address is listed for every other user to see.&amp;quot; The proposal needs a lot more work to become a practical proposal for attempting to evade law enforcement scrutiny. Whether or not DarkMarket is ever implemented, and whether or not it will work as expected  if it is implemented, are still open questions. The biggest open question is whether or not there will be ways for law enforcement efforts to reach into the DarkMarket even if it works in practice as the proposals suggests it is meant to work.</text></comment>