[sjclemmy]

Fun fact and one of my dinner party anecdotes; I have the accepted answer for one of Ross Ulbricht’s (Silk Road’s Dread Pirate Roberts) SO questions that got him busted.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/9563675/destroying-a-spe...

[eveningsteps]

details:

* https://web.archive.org/web/20140705203439/http://www.slate....

* https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/199353/did-the-stac...

[spockz]

Wow CodeIgniter, blast from the past. Funny at the time it was a pretty nice ORM/Framework. Apparently I still used SVN also. https://alessandrovermeulen.me/tags/codeigniter/

[skinnymuch]

CodeIgnitor. What a blast from the past. I was able to read the entire code base and then again and grok all of it fairly quickly. That gave me a lot of confidence then and helped with imposter syndrome

[bad_username]

Raymond Chen answered my question. And then blogged about it in Old New Thing.

[notRobot]

Link?

[jmkni]

I remember being obsessed with that trial when it was going on, Ars Technica in particular had excellent coverage.

The fact that his SO question led to his demise is particularly nuts IMHO.

[digianarchist]

It wasn't just the SO question. He posted on the Shroomery message board advertising the site in it's earlier days.

[TenJack]

Woh, how did this lead to his demise?

[polynomial]

1. He originally submitted the question using his real name before quickly changing his user name to "frosty." Oops, too late.

2. Forensic testimony in the complaint asserted Silk Road used this method and in fact used code identical to that in the answer.

3. Silk Road server encryption was signed with Frosty@Frosty.

#2 and #3 were evidentiary, but #1 is what tied everything to a real person's name.

[deepfriedrice]

How did they find out he originally posted under his real name? They must have known that was his profile, and then SO handed over the data proving it?

[thamer]

> then SO handed over the data proving it?

Yes, something like that.

The very first mention of the Silk Road online was from a user named "altoid" on Shroomery – the post is actually still up: https://www.shroomery.org/forums/showflat.php/Number/1386099...

altoid was also the name of the account that had originally posted another question on SO, not the one about sessions, but one about Tor services: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/15445285/how-can-i-conne...

The SO account was later changed from altoid to frosty. The email address used to register the SO account was [e-mail].

Also when the FBI imaged the Silk Road server, the username was "frosty". There were just so many links going back to him :-/

There have been long articles about the Silk Road and its demise, the Wired ones have a lot of details including what I mentioned above. Part 1 is here: https://www.wired.com/2015/04/silk-road-1/

[deepfriedrice]

good stuff, thanks!

[bigtones]

Yes, the DOJ subpoenaed Stack Overflow as part of the investigation. It's pretty standard.

Normally the DOJ gets access to all the emails of the target of the investigation, then from there they look through the emails and subpoena any companies that might hold additional information - such as Stack Overflow.

[polynomial]

it's a good question, and i could only speculate what sleuthing led them to ask SO for information about that account, but yes, they sent an info request to SO, who complied.

[LegitShady]

Not exactly on topic but I click on this link and it's been a long time since I went on SO...it popped up the cookies choice thing...except it remembered my choices from last time so there was no reason to...I think it was just hoping i'd mistakenly hit 'accept all'.

[thirdsun]

Did it really remember all your choices or did your choices just match with the default settings (strictly necessary = on, everything else = off)?

In either case, it's still a problem. It's my impression that if you make the effort to actually customize and decline those options you'll have to do it repeatedly since very few sites will remember those choices - probably on purpose. Luckily uBlock Origin hides most of those annoying consent popups.

[jimueller]

Yeah, that’s getting really old. Especially since it’s each site in the family.

[polynomial]

Where did his 3,675 reputation come from? He only asked 2 questions and has a small number of badges.

[shagie]

You keep reputation on sufficiently old, sufficiently voted posts even if they are deleted.

Presumably, there are also deleted questions or answers that were up voted.

Additionally, there was a "up votes on questions are also worth 10 points" recently (past few years).

[scandinavian]

His questions have 444 upvotes, so he should actually have 4400 rep. He lost some to users being deleted. Looking at the reputation log he actually has less than he should have, but I'm not an expert.

[w-m]

Missing rep could be explained by the daily reputation limit of 200. Many upvotes on the same day when the questions get linked from news articles and discussions like this, only will count until daily cap is hit.