Weirder Web

A tour of Weirder Web’s longform articles

May 24, 2013 — Leave a comment

Weirder Web is back. Here’s a quick look at all the big longform articles that have been featured here over the months. Expect more weird stuff in the future.

From blue to black: a shrine to an online drug forum’s dead May 23, 2013
An odyssey from hacking on Xbox to building a cyberweapon used in the Syrian civil war February 28, 2013
The freest: The beginnings of online drug culture February 25, 2013
Do you trust the black hat? A $300,000 internet marketing ponzi scheme at work February 5, 2013
A history of Silk Road, the net’s largest hidden service and drug marketplace January 1, 2013
A hacker’s race to build the Amazon.com of stolen credit cards December 21, 2012
The dying bloggers: documenting terminal illness from first ache to final day December 17, 2012
A blogger’s final post solves his own murder December 16, 2012
A politician attempts to disconnect from his online life of white supremacy December 13, 2012
A serial killer blogs December 10, 2012
The top seller on the web’s biggest drug marketplace is gone December 3, 2012
A hit man advertises his services November 26, 2012

WW will be keeping track of these articles here and, as always, they’ll be easily readable under thelongform tag.

If you have any suggestions or comments, don’t hesitate to reach out here or leave a comment.

In Weirder Web

From blue to black: a shrine to an online drug forum’s dead

May 23, 2013 — 1 Comment

smile1 smile2

The most viewed thread in the Bluelight Shrine begins with two pictures of the same smiling girl. Under the picture are the dates of her birth and death (“9-27-74 to 9-29-05″). Kristen Marie was 31 when she died. The thread’s author, chaos23, then wrote 13 more names. These were the pictures and names of the people he’s lost to drugs.

“I may be leaving a few out,” he wrote. “I had so many students who died. This is just a thread based on those loved and lost. I believe the constant reminder of death may help others to either stop, or be more careful. My heart goes out to all of your losses. (I lost most of my pics, and those were the only ones I had on my computer)”

The Bluelight Shrine is “a memorial to Bluelighters who have passed away.” Bluelight.ru is one of the oldest and biggest drug discussion forums on the web. It has a history stretching back into the 1990s. The shrine itself is younger and incomplete. Even so, it serves as a memorial to hundreds of people — friends, sisters, brothers, mothers, fathers, names on glowing screens — who have died drug-related deaths. The names and pictures of the dead come paired with messages from the living who knew them.

Beneath a photo saved as amberbeautiful.jpg, wingnutlives posted this:

Amber P. - 19 – died in July 2007 from heroin overdose
I miss her so much…..

The Frog posted his own list of lost:

B.J. T.–heroin addict, shot himself
Scott J.–heroin addict, shot himself
Jason B.–heroin overdose
Michael E.–heroin overdose
Paul E.–hung himself
Jimmy B.–speedball overdose
Matt C.–hung himself depressed about meth addiction
David A.–”Lost” in Everglades in South Florida
Rory C.–heroin/benzo/alcohol intoxication
Josh C.–asphyxia/morphine overdose
Matt S.–IV cocaine overdose
Gwen R.–heroin overdose
Mary H.–drunk driving/car accident
Diana C.–murdered/bad drug deal
Zack D.–car accident/oxycodone and cocaine
RIP
You guys haven’t been forgotten–those of us still here, we talk about you often…forever in our hearts…we love you and we miss you….see you when we get there……..

Smiling teenagers and twentysomething make up the lion’s share of the dead at the shrine.

“This is such a sad thread,” wrote the_ketaman, “its definitely made me have a good hard think. Usually im worrying about other drug related things apart from death. I really get the feeling that its time to move on from drugs. It does make me smile a little that most of the photo’s people have put up are happy photo’s, people are smiling and dont look all drugged up. Its great that we are able to remember them this way.”

Moving on is easier said than done: the_ketaman has been in and out of rehab and has written about at least three nonfatal Xanax and heroin-related overdoses on Bluelight in 2013.

drug_wench wrote:

i wish i had pictures but im a technophobe
RIP kate m. - heroin OD (19 yo at the time)
taylor n. w. (my first bf) – heroin OD (19 yo at the time)
christopher s. - heroin OD (20 yo at the time)
crystal s. - meth lab explosion (24 yo at the time)

ClubbinGuido followed:

Anastasia – Heroin

Sean – Heroin

My Inner Child – Heroin

RIP

Several members of the community were obviously shaken by the growing thread — only one of many in the shrine.

“Jesus,” wrote user Tioski. “I’ve stared death in the eyes several times during drug experiences only over the past 3 years as a result of my detrimental albeit common attitude towards drugs - go big or go home. And somehow, I still don’t know if I’ve learned my lesson, having the most recent one of those experiences only last night with 15 pills in one sitting (pure and large dose). I’m the kind of guy who’d get the “Most Likely To Overdose” award in the high-school yearbook. So with that said, this thread really gives my head a shake, presenting the very real risks I take when choosing to dance with the devil.”

Tioski stopped logging into Bluelight four months after he made that post.

More deaths by suicide were listed. Chaos23, the thread starter who had already listed 14 drug-related deaths of people he’d been close to, listed one more.

I don’t have a picture, but one of my best friends killed himself yesterday… He slit his wrists in the bathtub. His girlfriend found him.

I know it is not an overdose, but he was struggling with drug and alcohol problems for years and I can’t deny the correlation between the drugs and his suicide…

I have lost so many fucking friends. It makes me sick.

RIP Ryan Blevins… and fuck you for killing yourself. selfish….

“I hate to say this to someone who just lost a good friend, but you’re obviously the selfish one for thinking he’s selfish,” responded bow-viper1. “People who kill themselves are not selfish. Life isn’t meant to be lived for others.”

Chaos allowed that his feelings were colored by his anger.

“yeah. you are entitled to your beliefs…,” he wrote. “life involves a lot of suffering, and in the instance of most suicides, those left behind feel angry and pissed. It is all part of the normal grieving process. I am just upset, and his whole family and girlfriend are just completely devastated. i stick by my conviction that his act was wholly selfish. This interpretation is open to change as time passes and my anger wears off and turns into sadness and grief…”

“Suicide is never easy to understand,” wrote user drugfukkdrockstar. “My Uncle Kierran committed suicide due to his drug, alcohol and gambling problem about 4 years ago. He gassed himself in his car, parked outside the primary school he attended when he was a boy. He was completely wacked out on sleeping tablets and alcohol, and apparently smoked 4 packets of cigarettes through out his lead up to his moment of death. He drugged himself to make sure he couldn’t back out of it because he tried to kill himself a time before but backed out due to fear and managed to only just survive. He left his wife with all of his debts. So selfish also came to our minds at first unfortunately as well. It’s after you get over the initial shock that you learn that they were battling mental illness.”

More pictures were posted. User EveryStar wrote:

Holy shit, this thread makes me scared as fuck. Never have I been so scared to face my own mortality. I don’t want to find my picture in here one day.

The morbid debate over suicide continued. A sick person’s desire to die was measured and weighed against the devastation it caused loved ones. The scales broke down under the weight, nothing was decided. The shrine continued to grow.

In Communities Bluelight.ru, longform

Here’s a $43,890 methylone buy on Silk Road

May 23, 2013 — Leave a comment

25kilos

Normally, Silk Road reviews show transactions for hundreds or thousands of dollars.

A March 28 buy from DRG0NZO shows the purchase of around $43,890 worth of methylone. Not only that but the buyer trusted Gonzo so much that he or she finalized the transaction early — that is, the buyer bypassed escrow and put the money in Gonzo’s hands.

The review inspired raised eyebrows on Silk Road. It was never updated with positive or negative results. For his part, Gonzo says the product has reached the intended recipient (who resides outside of the United States, where methylone is a schedule 1 substance).

In Communities DRG0NZO, Silk Road

Has the hacker Dennis “Coolio” Moran died?

May 22, 2013 — Leave a comment

On April 16, a post went up on the international drug discussion forum Bluelight.ru announcing the death of Dennis “Coolio” Moran.

“Coolio has died last night from an OD,” wrote user cr00k. “I don’t know anything about the substance he used or the circumstances. He had been contemplating suicide for a while. Any info on his death would be appreciated!”

Coolio is a Berkley, California-based hacker who first gained notoriety in February 2000 when a potent 1 gigabit per second denial-of-service attack on Yahoo!’s routers brought their websites down for several hours. Over the next week, eBay, Amazon, E*Trade and Buy.com were also attacked and temporarily brought down.

CNN reported on the investigations following the attacks:

It’s a name that keeps popping up as the FBI continues to seek parties believed to have information connected to last week’s attacks on popular Web sites.

Agents from every FBI field office are involved in the investigation.

One hacker they are focusing on uses the name “Coolio” and is believed to live in the Midwest. He was identified by investigators at the private firm Securify and Stanford University in California.

Investigators have associated a name and address with this “Coolio.”

But since “Coolio” also is the name of a popular rap artist, many Coolios pop up as nicknames.

Another popular “Coolio” the FBI has spoken with resides in Southern California, sources said, and has been linked to “Global Hell,” a group of teens known for hacking into government computers.

“‘Coolio’ is such an incredibly popular name among the script kiddies, also being gangsta’ rap wanna-be’s, it could be an entirely other hacker calling himself ‘Coolio,’” said B.K. DeLong, a staff member with Attrition.org, which chronicles Web site defacements.

The authorities couldn’t connect Coolio to the February 2000 attacks (mafiaboy was later charged) but, by March, the attention he’d received led to Coolio, then 17 years old, being arrested in his parent’s basement “on felony charges for allegedly gaining unauthorized access to [the anti-drug site] DARE.com computer system in Los Angeles,” reported CNN.

He was also charged with defacing cwc.gov (Chemical Weapons Convention) and RSA.com, the website of RSA Security Inc., the firm that investigated his involvement in the February attacks, reported ABC News.

The first defacement of Dare.com took place on November 14, 1999:

The second defacement took place on November 17. ”The anti-drug site was defaced with pro-drug slogans and images, including one of Donald Duck with a hypodermic syringe in his arm,” reported USA Today.

Coolio’s work is saved at http://frigo.ca/coolio/.

CannabisNews.com summarized the affidavit that led to Moran’s arrest. Coolio had tagged his name on Dare during both attacks (“Coolio is k-r4d and so are drugs” and “Craftily owned by Coolio :D.”)

Detective Michael Brausman of the Los Angeles Police Department, the first investigator on the case, used the search engine Locoseek.com to find a Web page that included an email address for “Coolio@k-r4d.com.” This he traced to an Web site called: http://leet.k-r4d.com hosting a directory with the name Coolio. In this directory the detective found one of the images that was posted on the defaced DARE site.

A search warrant was executed and the owner of the leet.k-r4d server handed over logs and email conversations related to Coolio.

They found that the person using the Coolio account was also using the email address coolio@k-r4d.com and had sent email messages to the Web sites hacked@attrition.org and hacked@2600.com. The messages announced that the Web sites www.DARE.com and www.cwc.gov — a federal site that deals with the reporting and inspection requirements of the Chemical Weapons Convention — had been hacked. The attrition.org Web site is well known to hackers, according to Swindon, and hosts a gallery of archived hacked pages for future viewing.

Vanity and the email record would prove Coolio’s undoing. A message dated Nov. 4, 1999, from coolio@r4d.com to admin@io.io, read: “Hello, I was wondering if it’s possible to register cool.io and host the NS for it like Internic domains. I’m not interested in it for a Web page, but just to allow an IP to reverse resolve to Cool.io (my nickname). If there’s any way I could buy the domain for this, please email me pricing and information. Thanks, Dennis Moran.”

Further, a message dated Nov. 14, 1999, included Moran’s name, address and phone number.

rsa

Moran was interviewed by police for the first time in February 2000 when, after speaking with his father in private, he admitted and explained his attacks on Dare, CWC and RSA.

Billing itself as “the most trusted name in e-Security,” RSA Security, which is based in Bedford, Mass., was hacked on Feb. 12 by Coolio, who posted taunting messages — “Owned by Coolio,” “Copyright 2000 Coolio”, “RSA Security Inc. Hacked,” “Trust us with your data! Praise Allah!”

Moran denied involvement in the Yahoo! attacks. He was ordered to pay a fine of $15,000 ($5,000 to each victim), serve nine months in prison and to help program jail computers according to USA Today.

In Communities, Hacking, Users Bluelight.ru, Coolio, Dennis Moran

A happy Silk Road customer enjoys his new package.

Posted on May 17, 2013 In Image Silk Road

Dictionary of Numbers: from raw numbers to human-understandable

May 15, 2013 — Leave a comment

dictnumb

Programmer Glen Chiacchieri has released a curious new app with an interesting goal: to humanize numbers.

Randall Monroe explained why he took a shine to the project:

I don’t like large numbers without context. Phrases like “they called for a $21 billion budget cut” or “the probe will travel 60 billion miles” or “a 150,000-ton ship ran aground” don’t mean very much to me on their own. Is that a large ship? Does 60 billion miles take you outside the Solar System? How much is $21 billion compared to the overall budget? (That last question is why I made my money chart.)

The solution: build a Chrome extension that converts raw numbers into something a human can understand.

A 300,000 acre forest fire is about the size of Hong Kong.
A $21 billion budget cut to NASA is about the net worth of Larry Page or Sergey Brin of Google. It’s also the size of the American video game industry.
3,000 people killed is about the population of the Falkland Islands.

It’s a really interesting tool that might be worth giving a try. I’m going to give it a grace period to get used to it and see what use I really get out of it. So far, I’ve been loving the search feature. Being able to easily obtain context like that is very useful.

The other two features – entering numbers directly onto websites and giving suggestions during writing — both feel seriously obtrusive.

The extension can even be surprisingly funny, like when it seems to be making an oblique suggestion for how to solve a problem—e.g. “The telescope has been criticized for its budget of [≈ Mitt Romney assets in 2011].” It can also come across as unexpectedly judgmental. Glen told me about complaint he got from a user: “I installed your extension and then forgot about it … until I logged into my bank account. Apparently my total balance is equal to the cost of a low-end bicycle. Thanks.”

You can grab the extension here.

In Software Randall Monroe, XKCD

New Yorker launches an anonymous submissions system powered by Tor

May 15, 2013 — Leave a comment

nyerstrongbox

The New Yorker is using Tor to launch an anonymous whistleblower submission system called Strongbox.

Strongbox is a new way for you to share information, messages, and files with our writers and editors and is designed to provide you with a greater degree of anonymity and security than afforded by conventional e-mail.

To help protect your anonymity, Strongbox is only accessible using the Tor network (https://www.torproject.org). When using Strongbox, The New Yorker will not record your I.P. address or information about your browser, computer, or operating system, nor will we embed third-party content or deliver cookies to your browser.

Boing Boing has the story.

The New Yorker’s own blog explains things further:

This morning, The New Yorker launched Strongbox, an online place where people can send documents and messages to the magazine, and we, in turn, can offer them a reasonable amount of anonymity. It was put together by Aaron Swartz, who died in January, and Kevin Poulsen. Kevin explains some of the background in his own post, including Swartz’s role and his survivors’ feelings about the project. (They approve, something that was important for us here to know.) The underlying code, given the name DeadDrop, will be open-source, and we are very glad to be the first to bring it out into the world, fully implemented.

Strongbox is a simple thing in its conception: in one sense, it’s just an extension of the mailing address we printed in small type on the inside cover of the first issue of the magazine, in 1925, later joined by a phone number (in 1928—it was BRyant 6300) and e-mail address (in 1998). Readers and sources have long sent documents to the magazine and its reporters, from letters of complaint to classified papers. (Joshua Rothman has written about that history and the magazine’s record of investigative journalism.) But, over the years, it’s also become easier to trace the senders, even when they don’t want to be found. Strongbox addresses that; as it’s set up, even we won’t be able to figure out where files sent to us come from. If anyone asks us, we won’t be able to tell them.

Hear Ye, Future Deep Throats: This Is How to Leak to the Press by Nicholas Weaver in Wired.
How to submit material to Cryptome anonymously

In Links New Yorker, Strongbox, Tor

The Future of Weirder Web

May 15, 2013 — 2 Comments

Hi!

I’m happy to see people still reading this site.

Many of you came to the site to read articles about the deep web and strange happenings on the internet. You may be wondering why those articles stopped coming and what to make of these recent video game reviews.

Weirder Web will continue to produce content about the deep web and all the subject matters that made it popular in the first place. You’ll begin to see most of that type of material return next week. In addition to that, I’ll dabble in the gaming world. Recent posts (What to play today) have been recommending good games. I’ll also be interviewing indie developers.

On top of all of that, I’m hoping to include more and more strange stuff from around the web. The hope is that the content can be diverse. WW will be establishing a regular interview series and I hope you give it a chance. You’ll catch that next week as well.

That’s all coming up very soon. How long will it last? That’s for the big guy upstairs to know. Right now, though, I’m having fun posting about fun video games. I hope you can enjoy a few!

If you have any suggestions or questions, feel free to leave a comment or contact me in private.

Thanks for sticking around. Talk to you all soon.

In Weirder Web