Item — HN Reader

Wait - he posted something about php, curl and tor on StackOverflow, using - for less than one minute - his real name? And that is supposed to link to the operator of Silk Road?

I don't know about you, but that seems very far fetched to me. Also, it indicates that SO saves all changes made to a user profile, forever, which I think is a bit unusual.

However, if thy caught the right guy, hats off to the prosecutors for making the link.

3 comments

That's only one of many pieces of evidence they found, if you read the original complaint. It helps corroborate other pieces, too.

SE community mod here; SE devs are good old delete-nothing guys, they collect everything ever posted and a lot of metadata. Likely in good faith to fight spam, but bits are bits.

This sounds like incidental corroborative evidence. It hardly seems like it was what "brought down" the site, as claimed by the linked.

The site was likely brought down because the FBI or others found the server and took an image of it, and everything else seems to be backtracking corroboration from that. How did they find the server? Well therein lies the mystery, and it is likely because the FBI and other three letter agencies have a very strong interest in Tor, almost certainly having thousands of nodes that can statistically winnow down to real IPs.