Growth hacking is hard. We had to learn a few tricks to grow our Hacker News alternative (https://laarc.io)
Suppose you were to start a site similar to HN. How would you get the word out?
The most reliable way to grow is to have an audience (or access to one). But they have to be interested in what you're showing, else you're little better than a spammer.
Looking over the traffic for the last month (https://imgur.com/a/O1wtzav) the spikes were from comments posted to lobse.rs:
This won't keep working, but it might have been enough. The site seems to be spreading through word of mouth now, and about 400 people show up each day.
Communities are also a strange thing to grow. Grow too fast, and you'll spoil it. Ditto if you grow from the wrong source of people.
Fundamentally, you have to have a product that users love so much that they spontaneously tell their friends about it. But press coverage – or at least social media coverage – seems to matter a lot. You probably need both.
It looks like I was wrong about this. Will multiple datacenters allow you to continue setting up new accounts using nothing but bitcoin? If you don't need to provide identification, then this might be an interesting avenue to explore. Thank you for fact checking me.
There's the chance that datacenters will be more inclined to image your server for authorities if you've set up a server using bitcoin and are hosting large amounts of Tor traffic, but at this point we must assume authorities will image your server anyway, so there's no reason not to go this route if it's as good as you say.
You may need anonymous money for other things, but server rental was the primary case I had in mind.
I just tested it. It looks like I was incorrect. People told me that Reddit shadowbans you if you create a new account using Tor. Maybe that was the case for awhile, or maybe it's true for a certain subreddit, but it doesn't seem to be true anymore. Thank you for fact checking me.
This is a perfect illustration of how to get busted. For example, the whole idea of "How can I acquire a burner phone?" is misguided, because as soon as you speak into a burner phone, your voiceprint alone is enough to identify you.
Various assumptions like "I doubt it's that easy" are also the road to getting busted.
Trying to forge or steal legal documents, let alone a license plate that you drive around with and which officers can notice at any time, is also how to get busted.
Then the authorities trace the server component to the person who sold it on Craigslist. And if your opsec isn't perfect, you're busted right there: Did you forget to set up a new email account for all of your craigslist transactions? Did you forget to set them up and connect to them only through Tor?
Did the person you met with write down your license plate number? Seem unlikely? Think again. Cameras write down your license plate number as you drive. Constantly. So the authorities will simply look up where the person drove to meet you (parking lot, etc) and any cars that drove to the area at the time. You'll probably be on a highway at some point, which is a highway of data collection. There weren't that many people who drove a long distance to go to the meetup area. Now the authorities know which of 1,000 people you are. The more times you do this, the fewer the number of suspects there are, until they're down to a number that they can just investigate one by one. Then you're caught.
Or did you take your cell phone with you, and did the person who sold you components take their cell phone? Yes, you're caught. The operation in the previous paragraph, which assumes that you're just driving to meet someone and both parties are leaving their cell phones at home, is already busted. So if you've taken your cell phone on top of it, then it's even easier. Anything involving correlating cell phone movements is trivial for authorities. And if you don't take your cell phone, how are you going to let them know you've arrived? What if they're late? Or you're late? Now you have two problems: Set up a burner phone in an anonymous way (hello, in-store security cameras) and then never, ever use this cell phone in the same place as your main cell phone. Not a good position to be in.
I've ignored the whole "fake ID" aspect, because if you're in a position where someone is putting their face onto a forged legal document, that person is going to be persuaded by authorities to betray you. And if that person is you, then obviously you're caught at this point. Your face is probably on Facebook, and facial recognition software is getting pretty good nowadays.
In general, physical ops are the most dangerous of all ops, and should be avoided until every other avenue has been explored. Better to anonymize your cash (which is also a physical op) and then use that cash to rent a single remote server.
Not a bad idea, assuming you don't care about taking other people's property and using it in ways they don't expect for personal gain. But it's difficult. Once you no longer control the underlying hardware guarantees, availability chief among them, it's hard to design a reliable webservice. There has been some research in this area, though I'm not intimately familiar with it. Find it and read up on it. In general, the problem is how to organize some kind of store of data across multiple unreliable machines. That sounds like a solved problem (bigtable et al) until you realize it also needs to be secure, and you're running on an unsecure network of infected computers. At some point, some computer needs to access the secure info. If you're letting infected computers do that, then that means its operator can also do that. Though, in fairness, maybe you don't need to care about that threat. A bigger threat is that the operator would also have write access: they could corrupt your data or forge transactions in your system.
Agreed, but the sheer scope of this operation forces us to consider whether the authorities are playing by all of the rules. Since we don't know which rules are still reliable, the best defense is simply to assume your server is compromised from the start. And, incidentally, your support staff.
By the way, I'd also like to thank everyone for the thoughtful responses. It's great that people are thinking about this problem.
It's an open question whether Tor has been compromised to the point that it's now trivial for authorities to locate where darknet websites are hosted. I'm simply making the observation that if your opsec is good enough, you shouldn't need Tor's hidden webservice capability to protect you. You could simply run your website as a standard .com website, except for the fact that authorities can take the .com domain from you.
Or, put another way, if you're relying on Tor's hidden webservice capability as your sole defense, then you're in a bad position.
It's an interesting idea. I think physically shipping a server to a datacenter is precarious. Remember, it is known that your server is hosting a darknet website. You can't really hide this fact. Timing correlations make it possible to figure out which server is doing what. The reason that Tor users are generally safe from this is because they're not constantly connected, and an adversary generally can't cause a client to issue a web request on demand. But a webservice is constantly connected, and any adversary can cause it to issue responses since it's a webservice. Whether it's a timing correlation from a global passive adversary, or it's simply noticing that "silk road is extremely popular and this webserver in this datacenter seems to be hosting a huge amount of Tor traffic," you have to assume that it's known that the location of your server is compromised.
And if you assume that, then it suddenly becomes very, very bad if you've personally shipped a computer to the datacenter, colocation-style. First, clever hardware won't protect you if it's a running box. But beyond that, you can be traced simply by the components that you've assembled. You have to order those components from somewhere. You have to assume the worst: that authorities will take your box using a power adapter that lets them physically remove the computer from the datacenter without turning it off (such things exist), dump an image of your server while it's running (so that encryption keys won't help you), and then dismantle your server and trace the origin of the components. Congratulations: you're caught.
I think the model of "rent a bunch of servers using opsec" is also precarious, but less precarious than relying on hardware protections to save you.
There are some interesting theories being tossed around. I'd like to add one more.
The common thread across all darknet websites is the fact that they generally run from datacenters. Most people don't host websites from their residence.
Further, most people don't colocate servers anymore. I would be surprised if any of the 414 websites operated on boxes that had been colocated. However I won't rule out that colocating is also compromised.
I'd like to posit the following law of nature: You can't run a darknet website from a datacenter and think you've hidden the location of the server, regardless of whether it's using Tor or other anonymity software.
Why not? Because the datacenter has the ability to image servers, along with the ability to notice that you're generating large amounts of outgoing Tor traffic (or other anonymity software).
Here's how the attack may have happened: Step one, collect data about which computers are sending and receiving large amounts of Tor bandwidth. Step two, if the server resides in a datacenter, request an image of the server. Step three, you now know whether the server is a darknet website.
Remember, the point of Tor is to hide the final IP address of a web request or web service. It does not hide the total volume of traffic that must be delivered. And it can't. If you operate a darknet marketplace, you're probably serving a large volume of traffic. Guess who notices? ISPs and datacenters. Guess which datacenters can be trusted not to divulge an image of your server to authorities? None of them.
What do I think the future of darknet opsec will look like? Well, if you're reading this, and you're an individual or group interested in pursuing your ideology through a darknet website, you will need to run your website from a datacenter and not rent your server in your name. In fact, your opsec needs to be so good that there's no way to trace the account back to you. This sounds hard, and it is, but it's possible. Secondly, you must assume at all times that the server you're using is compromised. Assume that aurhorities can access the contents of the server, can manipulate it, and can subvert anything you put on it.
This is a grim situation, to be sure. The above assumption is that you are never safe from authorities gaining a copy of the contents of your datacenter-hosted darknet website (including any databases), and from a takedown of the service whenever authorities deem to do so.
Here's the ray of hope: Just because they takedown your website doesn't mean they take you down. This is where opsec comes into play, and it's our last hope. Every other link in the chain of trust for darknet websites has been broken. The one and only chance is that you can figure out a way to create accounts at datacenters without authorities being able to trace them back to you.
Authorities takedown your service? Okay, start it again at some other datacenter. Authorities get a copy of what's on your server? Okay, no problem: you were assuming it was compromised anyway, right? Authorities install a program to make your software malfunction? That's unfortunate, and will shake the trust in your website, but it's possible to recover from this.
Do your best, and do not get caught. The rest follows from this.
At a minimum, you need to research opsec. Read history of how groups have evaded detection. Do your research using Tor, because associating such Google searches with your home account is a terrible mistake.
One of your biggest problems is going to be anonymous money. No, bitcoin won't help you. You can't rent a server from a datacenter using bitcoin. But you can anonymize your money and then use that money to rent your server.
It's a long shot, but it's all we've got left. Be perfect. There's no room for error. Or realize the truth: If you can't be perfect, you will get caught. And you may get caught anyway. Being perfect sounds impossible, but human history has shown that there are situations in which no or few mistakes are made. I would recommend you research those situations and how to minimize the total number of mistakes you make. Use software to help you do this, while realizing that clever software alone won't be enough. For example, if you're configuring an individual piece of software on your personal computer to connect to your darknet website, even through Tor, you're doing it wrong. You need to isolate yourself from this equation at all times. Sound hard? Oh, it's hard. It will slowly dawn on you how hard this method of operating is. Convenience? No. You don't get to enjoy the benefits of convenience. Convenience is the opposite of security.
Oh, and if you do happen to somehow make a lot of money, you should keep it as bitcoin for the forseeable future. What good is it? Maybe converting small amounts won't be noticed. On the other hand, converting large amounts of bitcoin to dollars will be noticed, and it's extraordinarily dangerous to your opsec.
I'll be around to answer questions if you have them. If you'd like to ask a question anonymously using Tor, create a new HN account and post your question. I'll see it, but it will show up as dead on HN, so I won't be able to reply to it directly. So I'll reply to my own comment with a copy of your question, along with a response. Then you can reply to that, and I'll repeat the process.
HN is one of the few websites that we can even have these kinds of conversations on using Tor. Everything on Reddit is autokilled. 4chan doesn't let you use Tor. Maybe we should work on this problem first: How to make the equivalent of unlisted Tor exit nodes so that Tor isn't so trivially blocked?
There are a lot of ideas in my comment, and some of them are better than others. I hope that the bad ideas can be discarded and the good ones refined until we have someting workable.
All the comments below that link had a downvote except one of mine. I tried to correct it, but I use Tor. I noticed when I tried to upvote the comments that upvotes from Tor users don't actually register. This makes sense, because allowing access from Tor will make it too easy to create sockpuppet accounts that game the system. But I was wondering if I might be able to be granted an exception based on good behavior? If it's not possible at the software level then don't worry about it, I understand. It's an unfortunate fact that Tor citizens won't be able to fully partake in HN, but it seems like that's the price of anonymity (and it seems like a reasonable one too!)
I was also wanting to check with you: has Tor caused the mod team many problems? I'm hoping that by setting a good example, I can convince others that it's possible to allow strong anonymity to good effect in a community. So I'm crossing my fingers that Tor will continue to be allowed on HN. (Thank you from the bottom of my heart for resisting the urge to ban it from the start.)
This is what happens today. Not in some far off distant distopioan future meant to invoke fear in the ignorant/lazy.
Why not talk with me without the snark? This topic seems like it interests you a lot, so it seems like we have some shared ground.
one can clone the sc[1] and go through the source code for what could possibly define one as a Tails user, replace that with something else, build their own image and voila, you just avoided being in the dragnet.
This won't work because it's extremely difficult to analyze your network card and discover its behavior, and without this knowledge you'd be changing things blindly. There are far too many ways to detect an OS to change them all. Tweak-and-recompile would work if they use a naive and brittle heuristic like "look for the first 64 bytes of whatever is loaded into memory when Tails is booting up," but they wouldn't employ such a brittle heuristic in the first place because every time a new version of Tails is released, they'd need to update their entire infrastructure to look for a new pattern. Something like monitoring the network traffic for a unique "Tails signature" is more likely in this scenario; for example, how many computers start Tor immediately after a network card is connected? Detecting that condition would be a decent starting point for detecting Tails, and they'd want to combine it with some other hard-to-evade condition to cut down on false positives without introducing false negatives.
One interesting way to detect that someone is using Tails would be to notice that their system clock is set to UTC time. Most of the computers connected to the internet aren't using UTC, so UTC time plus Tor usage on startup is pretty commonly associated with anonymity OS's. That said, it seems like it might be difficult for the network card to detect whether the system clock is UTC time, but it's just an example of how difficult it is to fully conceal your usage of an anonymity tool. It's not just a matter of tweaking the source code.
This seems to prove the seriousness of this threat, though. Once you agree that it might be possible for your network card to be your adversary, there are endless ways that it can be used to defeat you. Hardware manufacturers have evidently been thinking along these lines, so why shouldn't we try to think of ways to prevent this from happening? As the BIOS exploits have shown, that dystopianic future may be closer than anyone's comfortable admitting.
EDIT: Someone went through and downvote bombed our whole converastion on both sides... I tried to correct it, but it looks like upvotes from Tor users under a certain karma threshold aren't registering, so I wasn't able to help fix it.
The reason it's good to proactively think of future threats is because so many past concerns have proven to be true. Several months ago, no one on Hacker News really believed that BIOS backdoors were much of a threat. But today it's a well-established fact, for example.
The tools of law enforcement probably aren't going to be revealed, and they're hard to discover. Nobody knew about the zero-day exploit employed against Tor browser, for example, and there are almost certainly many more tricks like that up their sleeve. They already take steps to conceal them; parallel construction is an unfortunate reality. And since there's not much justification for a whistleblower to reveal the techniques, it's unlikely someone will come out and talk about them. We'll probably need to think along the lines of "What's technologically possible, and how is it useful to law enforcement?" It's not a good idea to wait until a weapon is used before thinking about how to react to it.
The history of communications technology and how governments have reacted to the technology is actually quite fascinating. Wiretaps used to be extremely commonplace, and since there's not too much legal protection from the government rifling through your digital life at will (at least compared to getting permission for wiretapping your phone), it seems like it's better to err on the side of caution.
It's also important to realize that even though some governments follow due process, several powerful ones don't. Also, there are other global other considerations. The US has made it pretty clear that their legal restrictions are designed to apply to US citizens, not any foreign person. You may be forced into a situation of choosing which governments you'll trust, especially when cross-nation collaboration becomes even more pervasive. Assuming that other countries adopt a similar attitude of "Our citizens are protected; other citizens are examined," then the US may simply outsource their databases of information to be examined by some other government, like any other member of the Five Eyes.
I understand your concern and skepticism though. It was a question I've often wrestled with myself.
Also to note that offensive/defensive technical capabilities aren't as asymmetric as they appear for all possible targets of nation states, some yes, but probably not as much to those with the technical knowledge who can create/use such and derivative systems.
If you concede that your computer has a chip with DMA access which can be used by the government, then you must concede that the same chip can monitor you for activity that triggers active surveillance. For example, I think Tails is going to force governemnts into monitoring at least which operating system you're using. There's no way to target a specific Tails user, so the only recourse is for the government to do dragnet surveillance of everyone using Tails, or ignore the activities of those using Tails. Since the latter seems politically untenable, the former is becoming more likely with time. When the government can passively check whether your activity is fitting the pattern of some kind of criminal activity, the situation is about as asymmetric as I can imagine. Is there really any technical knowledge that could protect you?
The notion that the government ought to not be allowed into your computer, ever, doesn't seem grounded in either reality or historical precedent.
I didn't intend to argue that. I'm saying that strong anonymity OS's like Tails will force governments to do dragnet surveillance using compromised hardware in order to track suspects down. There is no way to tailor surveillance to an individual using Tails, because it's set up to hide your IP address at the OS level (assuming Tails is implemented correctly).
Assume child molestors begin using Tails or whatever environment that prevents FBI browser exploits from working. What then? There's one recourse: the government can set up your network card to monitor when you're using Tails for unlawful activity. And since it's very difficult to come up with a "footprint" of an individual Tails user, i.e. some way to monitor or attack one specific individual, this is likely to force the government into monitoring all activity. This can be done via compromised hardware, like a network card, which can be remotely configured to monitor memory for specific trigger conditions like "user is running Tails, and main memory contains specific terms for underage children."
Sure, it sounds unlikely right now. But this is the general direction that technology has been headed in. How much ground should we concede in this debate? Is it ethical for a government to be able to subvert someone using strong anonymity tools if it forces them to broadly target everyone using such a tool?
More broadly, what mechanism should we approve of the government using to inject your computer with code? If the government has DMA access to everyone's computer, then that hardware could be configured to monitor which operating system you're using, and only triggered into actively targetting you specifically when certain conditions arise, such as using a strong anonymity tool, or a certain specialized browser that child pornographers also happen to use. Should the government be allowed to be proactive in its hunt for offenders? Are we comfortable with a hardware device watching which OS we're running? There are a lot of issues that seem worth thinking carefully about.
Unfortunately, projects such as DROPOUTJEEP confirm that the iPhone isn't to be trusted.
This is impossible to guarantee today. Certainly if you run the zero-day magnets known as browsers, and even if not, there is always some possibility of physical intrusion.
Today you can use OS's such as Tails to prevent most exploits from embedding themselves into your computer. This is what Snowden used, for example. But if hardware becomes compromised, Tails will offer much less protection.
Here's an interesting section of the article:
The department must describe the computer it wants to target with as much detail as possible. For example, an investigator may be covertly communicating with a suspected child molester and know an IP address, and then obtain a warrant to use malware to find the actual location. In the case of botnets, malware might be used to try to free the compromised computers from a criminal’s control.
Imagine if child molestors begin using Tails. The government response may be to try to set up some kind of "Tails dragnet" via compromised network interfaces. It should be possible for a network adapter to detect that Tails is running. At that point, since it has DMA access, and since few people use Tails at any given time, it should be possible to instuct a network adapter to search through a computer's memory for evidence of activities that the government doesn't like. Since Tails offers strong anonymity protection, there's no way to describe a computer "as specifically as possible" other than to say "it's running Tails while watching child porn."
The unfortunate conclusion is that in the future, someone like Snowden might immediately be caught. "If someone is using a strong anonymity tool and GPG to hide their conversation, we should probably configure their network card to monitor their activity."
Once hardware begins to turn against you, there seems to be nothing anyone can do to protect themselves. Encryption doesn't work against an adversary that has access to your computer's memory.
A couple weeks ago, when I asked someone how to verify on demand that a BIOS isn't compromised, someone else quipped "Could be the processors too, better forge those by hand." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7609780
In fact, it turns out the future is probably headed in that direction. All mobile phones are already compromised; every phone has a proprietary baseband chip with full remote DMA access that no amount of open software running on your phone can stop. And as laptops become more and more mobile, it's going to seem strange that we've spent so long trying to tether our mobile phones to our laptops. Perhaps future laptops are going to have 3G access embedded right into them which consumers can subscribe to for some low monthly fee. Consumers would probably love it, because it's very enticing: you get internet access in most of the world without having to find a public hotspot or tether your phone. No more dealing with hotel wifi; no more dealing with logging in to someone else's.
The takeaway is that your children may grow up in a world where it's impossible to guarantee the government can't get into your computer if it really wanted to. Desktop computers aren't ever going to go away, but hardware design seems to be trending towards having built-in theft prevention. One feature of theft prevention is having the ability to locate the computer, or send it remote kill signals. If trends like that do catch on with consumers, it's "gg no re," because once our hardware is compromised to the point of third parties being able to remotely access it on demand, we've all lost something precious, and there won't be any opportunity to fix it. The more I think about it, the more it seems like it's just a matter of time until this happens, precisely because once it's here, it's never going away.
More and more network adapters seem to have DMA access to your computer. It would be interesting if the protections afforded by open source software were defeated at the hardware level without most people noticing. There doesn't seem to be any way to defend against it, because open source hardware simply can't survive: no money is necessary to develop open source software, whereas large investment would be necessary for development of open source hardware down to the chip level.
What I mean is, how would we verify the BIOS firmware matches what that source code should produce? If it's possible for us to make our own builds (i.e. there's no cryptographic signing for the BIOS binaries) then an adversary can insert a backdoor into the source code, make their own build, and then remotely flash your hardware with it. Or does flashing the hardware require some kind of manual operation, like holding down a button for 30 seconds?
Suppose you were to start a site similar to HN. How would you get the word out?
The most reliable way to grow is to have an audience (or access to one). But they have to be interested in what you're showing, else you're little better than a spammer.
Looking over the traffic for the last month (https://imgur.com/a/O1wtzav) the spikes were from comments posted to lobse.rs:
https://lobste.rs/s/jqkqwb/what_are_you_doing_this_weekend#c...
https://lobste.rs/s/kx4ojt/what_are_you_doing_this_weekend#c...
This won't keep working, but it might have been enough. The site seems to be spreading through word of mouth now, and about 400 people show up each day.
Communities are also a strange thing to grow. Grow too fast, and you'll spoil it. Ditto if you grow from the wrong source of people.
Fundamentally, you have to have a product that users love so much that they spontaneously tell their friends about it. But press coverage – or at least social media coverage – seems to matter a lot. You probably need both.
We've been using https://playbook.samaltman.com/ as a mantra, and it's been effective so far. But it's only been a month. We'd like to try Michael's advice next: http://www.michaelseibel.com/blog/getting-press-for-your-sta...