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I like theGrapheneOS idea writing the pin on a piece of paper, to let LE put it in, thinking it's the actual pin LOL

Nice. I've approved the post.

I have a few comments. My first one is about the The German and Netherlands Tor Nodes problem article and some of its assumptions. Saying

Monero couldn't have been the source of their opsec mistakes, otherwise they and their users would have been arrested a long time ago
Tor couldn't have been the source of their opsec mistakes either, because otherwise the infrastructure would have been immediately taken down upon showing up and being on the cops' most wanted.

isn't based on anything but pure speculation. We've discussed this several times but not everything you read is how things are in reality. That especially applies to Tor and Monero.

You can find the references yourself on Dread and elsewhere but Monero isn't a magical solution. Millions of transactions to specific entity would provide much more information used to guesstimate with good accuracy the nature of transactions. The whole nature of Monero boils down to hiding with other inputs but when all the other inputs in that time frame would be yours, it defeats the purpose. Funny enough the Black Marble attack explains this very similar scenario.

Archetyp was a market whom displayed pre generated public addresses. Without a doubt that is something exchanges could see if users (buyers or vendors) were sending their XMR from exchange directly to any kind to those addresses, all conveniently starting with the same characters. That's why I and others have always said adding an extra hop (own Monero wallet) can prevent many of these issues.

If we talk on the network level running Monero service as market isn't easy either. Transactions need to be announced from certain nodes, certain IPs. While a few can be managed when we are talking about millions of transactions hiding it can be much more difficult. LE should be considered a global adversary evident by the amount of countries collaborating in the takedown of Archetyp. Given such identifying where transactions are announced from becomes a problem.

Tor on the other hand is for sure swiss cheese if comparing to Monero. I've explained in my posts /post/12b9f500f87bba5c3a0d and /post/5db0f0bba862e4c9a5fd that Tor entire model is defeated once countries start collaborating. As you pointed out rightfully so in your article majority of the Tor nodes are hosted within 14 eyes countries. When those countries collaborate, they can see where the traffic flows and can redirect, log it and much more. It isn't a Tor specific problem but an Internet one and one whom Tor inherits automatically. Being a low latency network doesn't help either and comes with its own challenges.

That's actually why mixnets is a good concept to be explored. NymVPN wouldn't be of my choice as they haven't matured first and second anyone who can read their whole can see their approach isn't built in with security. I certainly hope so that changes in the future.

LE don't need to instantly seize markets once they identify their infrastructure. Watching incoming and outgoing connections would hold more value as eventually they wish to identify admins and staff.

That's why both Monero and Tor could have very well played their own roles in the downfall of Archetyp.

but upon said 0day being revealed as such, the Tor developers fixed it afterward.

As I was writing this comment I remembered an interesting fact. Do you remember when a Tor developer was exposed for informing I believe it was the FBI of a Tor vulnerability BEFORE patching it? I wouldn't speak with such certainty on zero days of any nature being fixed quickly. I mean see RapTOR, years later nothing has been done.

On your Signal anonymity article. I agree with a lot of what was said on there. SimpleX has the same federated model as XMPP and that can be useful when having done the appropriate steps some of whom were listed in the article. I would like to add though Signal can be used entirely through a computer, no need for a smartphone at any stage and a number anyone can obtain easily for a one time SMS.

This is cool

Thank you for all your work!!

Great post! Tysm! Crossposting on our subdread <3

thanks for everything you do boss. will check these out.

interesting, thanks

Very helpful, thanks :)

Great info!
Thank you very much!

ss

Great post I upvoted!

I am going to go through the list and review each source but I think this is a good effort.

I ask the community if there is value in someone as myself who is a database seller, and informed very well in the hacking community for a long time if it is better to write a guide on real opsec that deals with non drug user activity. I think there is a lot of overlap but many users seem to think that because they are casual users on this community they are safe.

Some of the issues I wish were discussed more were ISP's spying, companies like team cymru paying poor countries for all their pcap/netflow data to spy on people, and the overall state of spying that makes it difficult for anyone to remain anonymous forever. Too many of these posts are dealing with fringe ideas like style-listic matching of a person based on their writing but not on the overwhelming idea of nations getting together to correlate traffic to you. You can route your traffic through 10 network jumps but if all those routes are still correlated to countries that will work together you are doomed.

I appreciate the post I think it is great.