ijktdot

True, but at least Taler allows for the consumer to chose merchants who specify they don't sell data. Right now I can't buy anything online and not be tracked by the payment provider unless I use bitcoin. The prepaid credit cards here all require online registration and in store identification, Visa/Mc/Amex then track my purchases. If I show ID to buy $200 worth of Taler in a 7-11, there's no way for my Taler provider to see what I used it for.

There's a global racket in market data mining too, to track demographics and see what they are buying. This system defeats any large payment entity from payment tracking.

Taler can also compete with Ukash, since it's free/open any merchant can implement their own Taler for cash business without signing large exclusive contracts with Ukash or waiting a month to be settled by them, as you can freely choose which Mint to do business with.

This is a digital payment scheme that respects the customers privacy, when buying from merchants. The alternative besides a cryptocurrency, would be a prepaid cc you buy with cash in a store, but then VISA knows everything you buy with it, whereas this system the payment provider (the "mint") and merchant are separated. If you directly buy things with SEPA then your bank knows everything you buy. This allows for lawful payments, allows any company to become a mint (no payment monopolies) and is free software so you can make your own wallet client and not have to rely on proprietary software wallet apps.

People can still become a black market escrow, keep creating new merchants and facilitate user to user transactions unless there is some kind of cost or identification required to accept Taler payments, or exchange Taler for bitcoin. US law makers will likely try to prohibit Taler though if any online gambling accepts it as payment, for example Paysafecard had to design a special UIGEA compliant card in order for it not to be able to be plugged into a gambling site to get into the US payments market.

Speaking of bitcoin pretty much every online exchange will start accepting Taler, then they aren't so exposed to banks shutting them down and can trade in any currency.

In 5 years we'll all just be using a SoC as the entire computer, so likely there will be no free operating systems considering they'll also make it illegal to tamper with any approved operating system bootloaders/firmware so can't replace anything on it.

The exodus was from the Kenmou board who refused affiliate marketing on their board they claimed was data mining their IPs. The desktop clients weren't banned, just really old browsers they were using were no longer supported due to new methods of embedding ads. A lot of them used legacy browsers like this one which is no longer in development https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kazehakase

Most of the chans (2ch/8ch/4chan/420chan ect) are just FreeBSD boxes and cgi/perl scripts

http://news.dieweltistgarnichtso.net/interviews/moot-4chan.h...

2ch also offered a paid post deletion service used by political parties when Nishimura was running it, after the 2ch coup he scraped the site and started 2ch.sc

This is the guy who runs 2ch/8ch https://twitter.com/xerxeswatkins

The title for this is confusing, they are talking about detecting and attacking regular Tor connections not internal hidden services (like a DarkMarket). That illustration showing not encrypted is the exit node to a regular clearnet site.

The methods for attacking hidden services (DNM) are the same as any other site such as exploiting misconfiguration, exploiting unpatched software or finding new ones, and looking for pieces of opsec like the Czech guy who's darkmarket used some obscure Czech php framework which was identified by viewing the CSS. Every so often a research paper comes out too that identifies some new scheme of analysis of guard nodes/pattern matching/fingerprinting ect to identify hidden service IPs as noted in this Wooyun article. https://news.mit.edu/2015/tor-vulnerability-0729

Snowden docs also talked about QUANTUM which was some NSA/GCHQ scheme to try race conditions against relays to lure Tor users to their own relay farm for analysis detailed here https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/10/how_the_nsa_a...

Torblog has a recent (Sep 2015) write up on how the great firewall detects and kills Tor connections/bridges hence the need for using Obfsproxy4 as a pluggable transport https://blog.torproject.org/blog/learning-more-about-gfws-ac...