Does Ross Ulbricht deserve to be in jail?

>catch all the buyers and sellers who are ruining our countries
niceme.me

when you make g men look bad this is what happens

He made a website not dissimilar to ebay, except it used cryptocurrency and had privacy features by default.

He literally wrote code into a text editor.

And is in jail for life for it. That's what it comes down to when you break it down. Future generations will see this as one of the more barbaric cases of injustice in the 21st Century.

Oh well.

Outside of managing a website, what the fuck are you guys talking about that actually got him in trouble?

And before you reply, I fully believe the government will give a life sentence to anyone, regardless of who they are, a life sentence just for managing something like Silk Road.

He created and organised a marketplace for criminal activity

Yes.
>B-B-BUT MY SON DIDNT MEAN TO GREAT A HAVEN FOR DRUG DEALERS AND CHILD TRAFFICKING

He created a site for organized crime to take place. He is literally one of the biggest problems when it comes to crime. Buyers are plebs who make no difference. People like Sellers and organizers are the big targets. This fucking moron operated it using his real name and didn't cooperate with the FBI. He deserves every day in jail.

He made a website not dissimilar to ebay or craigslist which also deal in all the same things silkroad did. Even Facebook to this day is used for such things.

At the end of the day, he was just a web developer hosting a website. What people bought, sold, traded, or discussed on there is irrelevant.

So? The criminals should go to jail for that. He simply made a platform. Imagine if we organized crime here and Hiroshimoot went to jail for it. It doesn't matter. You can make a site for hookers, and it shouldn't land you in jail because you aren't the one prostituting yourself.

Right but this thread is making it out like there's other factors. He looks like a guy that ran an illegal website for money and now he's in jail, that's it.

maybe it shouldn't land you in jail but thanks to new regs it will, why do you think craigslist dropped their personals section

If this website, for instance, went back to posting child porn like it did back in the early days, and the FBI confronted Asianmoot about it, and he cooperated and got it off the site, then nothing would happen to him.

And before you go off on a Jow Forums spiel, no, there isn't anything else the US government cares about on domestic internet than CP.

Wasn't he the guy that tried to hire that hitman?
I'd say he deserves jail time.

They offered him a deal to plead guilty and He turned it down. He could have avoided life sentences but he forced the government to put him on trial and they don't like having to do that.

He wrote ideological stuff that made fbi butt hurt... So several different agents infiltrated and schemed on him. 2 independently acting agents were later arrested with bitcoins they tried to pilfer from the site during the takedown.

No, and certainly not a life sentence.

Attached: 1544166212507.gif (127x13, 317)

Stop pretending to be an oldfag.

He was an example of just like Kevin Mitnick was. Sad story all around. Being held accountable for the actions of persons unknown to you who simply use the platform you created is very wrong. Its like hotwheels being prosecuted for running 7+1chan after tarrant offed the kiwi muzzies. That way of thinking is a slippery slope to all kinds of people getting in trouble simply for creating or running platforms or services.

You don't even need to be an oldfag, a guy from Poland posted CP on /tv/ for years because none of the non-anime boards were properly moderated until like 2014 or some shit.

Stop pretending to be a smartfag. Jow Forums history is pretty well documented, not too hard to learn about the early days.

>Child Trafficking
Can I have a source on that?

The boards were definitely moderated, but there was way fewer janitors overall and far less stringent rules. I came to /x/ in 2011 and i distinctly remember /b/tard-tier posts getting taken down pretty quick.

Meanwhile moot openly encouraged /v/ being a worksafe version of /b/ and /tv/ was basically /mu/-tier discussion except with personal attacks as the only mode of discussion + CP. Honestly I don't expect anyone who ever willingly browsed /x/ to be able to actually tell what's going on.

>well documented
Or you know, you could have just experienced it.
>none of the non-anime boards were properly moderated until like 2014
This is just false.

All forms of blackmarket goods and services could be obtained through the silkroad. Fake passports, hitmen, cp, hackers for hire, etc. Drugs were just the most prominent ware.

mods should revert to banning very freely but exclusively for low quality posts, fix the site with a fucking shitposter genocide

Kek. Old /x/ was fun, legit conversations about ayys and such. Megathreads with tons of details and quality diacussion. I stopped visiting the board back in 2015 though, its all garbage schizoposting and "how summon loli succubus/tulpa gf" now. Modern /x/ isnt even paranormal per se, its almost exclusively occult/religion/mysticism stuff.

No it's very true, deep-sea threads became a standard on /v/ while moot was busy doing nothing about it, despite how trivial it is to respond to reports. It takes ten seconds to click on an alert, look at the shitpost, and ban the guy who did it. The mods would do this no matter what on /a/, /c/, etc and would refuse to do it for any of the other boards.

I actually distinctly remember in Sept 2010 when they hired a mod who actually gave a damn about /v/ and he began moderating the board correctly. For two months it was thousands of bans, with so many crying /b/tards who weren't used to the fact that the board is supposed to be about video games. Eventually they won because he apparently got burned out and just quit.

>could've experienced it
Well I didnt and my time machine has a busted flux capacitor, so I guess Ill just have to live with experiencing this place from 2011 on.

Low quality/off topic threads should be priority number 1 for all boards. Overall board quality across the whole site is abysmal compared to even 5 years ago.

is this a bait or am i missing something?
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silk_Road_(marketplace)#Products
>When the Silk Road marketplace first began the creator and administrators instituted terms of service that prohibited the sale of anything whose purpose was to "harm or defraud".

>actually believing shit on the "dark web"

top kek

no illegal industry that requires experience in that industry is gonna actually publicly list shit for any random fuck to buy on what was the biggest website on the platform at that time

you honestly have to be retarded to think you could actually traffic people through silk road

Wasn't he sentenced for ordering a killing?

I meant in particular about CP, my bad for not making that clear. I just don't like how people who didn't experience it make it out like this site used to be filled to the brim with it.

Nope

No, user, I took a break from Jow Forums in 2009 but up until that point there were daily cp threads on /tv/ and when I came back in 2011 people still knew who the guy was.

That is far longer than the supposed cp blackout that took effect in 2005.

>At least he only got life, unlike Aaron Swartz who got death.
;_;

The ToS of the silk road were basically never enforced. That whole harm or defraud thing was just created as an attempt at legality. I mean the entire point of the site was to provide a way to engage in illegal sales and purchases.

There was an episode of Orville based on this...
m.imdb.com/title/tt6845666/

I agree with you on it being intended for illegal goods, but I am curious if you could provide me with some sources on the rules not being strictly enforced.

Trafficking people, no. Thats a whole other ball game, huge logistical challenges involved. Selling drugs, fake ids, cp, fake documents, etc sure. I even recall hearing about rumors of a few people offering murder for hire services but that just speculation as I cant cite you any sources on that part.

Not him but the website was an open black market. It's actually on you to show that the ToS was enforced, since many of the goods and services the site was known to broker from multiple sources make that logically impossible.

I cant cite anything honestly, im just going off memory and if memory serves me what I recall is that the site was only moderated from a technical perspective, making sure the site was up and running 24/7 but virtually no rule enforcement. I think that was inentional, after all if the rules were strictly enforced the site would've started losing a huge amount of traffic and users.

>"you're selling cp"
proof?
>"that's on you buddy"

how can you even prove that something wasn't being sold?

>how can you even prove that something wasn't being sold?
You just layed out the basic premise of the site. Gray areas, ambiguity, deception, are what made the silk road what it was. There was little in the way concrete evidence of any one person or organization doing anything. Maybe i bought heroin from someone maybe I didnt, maybe that guy sells fake university diplomas maybe he doesnt. There was also the issue of two or more parties being able to engage in sometimes highly illegal transactions without anyone ever meeting each other, without any identifying information being shared and without any financial trail.

>Does Ross Ulbricht deserve to be in jail?
did he knowingly break the law to make money?

Consumer-level, end-to-end encryption. How can we prove people aren't discussing terror plots?

>Do drug traffickers deserve to be in jail?
>Do people who try to hire hitmen deserve to be in jail?
>Do people who commit crimes deserve to be in jail?

Attached: download (3).jpg (234x215, 12K)

>>Do people who commit crimes deserve to be in jail?
No

Prison is a flawed concept

If there's a website where multiple court cases on terror charges lead back to it then that's a concern.

When it later turns out, as in the case of Silk Road, that the majority of the site's purpose is such illegal instances, then it's more than a pattern.

You say this like you WANT to live with murderers and crack dealers.
You don't, r-r-right?

Wanting to commit crimes is usually a more flawed concept.

>/tv/ was basically /mu/-tier discussion except with personal attacks as the only mode of discussion + CP
>was
I still visit /tv/ just to shit on people who defend Arrival. I'm pretty sure I got a 2 week ban specifically because of the butthurt I may have caused.

Did you post the CP at the same time or did you forget that par of the post

I believe we're better off spending money on fixing the problems surrounding the circumstances that led people to commit those crimes as opposed to the insane amount we spend just keeping people locked in cages whilst just ignoring the problem

Or y'know, create a society where people can live comfortably without having to resort to crime to survive

Novel concept eh?

I have no interest in cheese pizza. No, what I have noticed is that jannies and mods are major shits who selectively decide when to issue bans. Shit talking shouldn't be bannable if it's still constructive. But Arrival defenders get extremely sensitive when people call them out or being morons.

But Arrival is a good movie, especially the first half when there's still some mystery.

Very few people have to resort to crime to survive. There's nothing you need that you have to steal. There's more than enough social safety nets for people that are actually trying to better their lives.

>I believe we're better off spending money on fixing the problems surrounding the circumstances that led people to commit those crimes
Governments would do well to institute a financial incentive program to sterilize poor/criminalized people. Like if you're making less than $8k a year or already have a decent rap sheet, earn $3k to get your ballz snipped or tubes tied.
>But Arrival is a good movie, especially the first half when there's still some mystery.
My biggest complaint simply revolves around the protagonist learning a language and gaining super powers from it (specifically seeing the future). It's absurd and destroys any notion of "science fiction." It's squarely a fantasy movie in the same way that Star Wars is with it's use of the force and other tropes. I also dislike it's gray, flat and bland cinematography but that's an unfortunate consequence of digital film making which plagues most modern releases.

Fpbp. E real reason he is being sent away is for being the poster child for communications tools the three letter agencies cannot crack

Science fiction is when you make a change an accept it as fact, then build a world around it. The change doesn't even need to be science base or whatnot, just the attitude you apply to the world you're creating after selecting the change. You'd at best have a grey line argument because the movie is about its chosen change specifically taking shape, which is usually fine.

Ender's Game is a highly celebrated science fiction book and it's about a society that, in order to defeat aliens, adopts a regimen of raising children as generals to lead the military of the future. The child that ultimate defeats the menace accomplishes this through a unique worldview and sometimes genocidal determination. The book is important because it very acutely describes the mental process the main character is going through, rather than his blow-by-blow decisions, his decisions are presented to the reader as facts he has already decided. The fact that it also includes zero-g segments and spaceships isn't why it's science fiction.

for money laundering and for having fake ID, Yes

El Chapo only got Life + 30 years, compared to Ross' Life + 40. If the fact El Chapo got a lighter sentence than Ulbricht doesn't put this whole thing into perspective I don't know what does.

Look man, I can suspend my disbelief up to a certain point. If a "science fiction" movie establishes that by learning to read chinese backwards, a character will gain telekinetic abilities then I'm gonna write it off as fantasy because it's no longer in the realm of plausible scientific scenarios using fictitious settings/rules. And I specifically lampoon Arrival because that turd of a flick was marketed as serious hard sci fi when it was a melodramatic joke.

>If a "science fiction" movie establishes that by learning to read chinese backwards, a character will gain telekinetic abilities then I'm gonna write it off as fantasy

Yeah but you're pitching this as the movie's problem when, as written, this is your problem.

>serious hard sci fi when it was a melodramatic joke

The movie is hard science fiction and melodramatic. The point of the story is what happens when an idea changes your perspective of reality enough that it immediately becomes a cornerstone of your outlook on the world, and then conflates it with something important that lots of people go through, like raising a family through the new paradigm.

This is literally what scifi is for, no ifs, ands, or buts.

I mean, the movie has flaws, but you better come up with something better than marketing. The only marketing I heard about the movie was some youtube ads I skipped after five seconds, and I enjoyed the movie on its merits.

>I believe we're better off spending money on fixing the problems surrounding the circumstances that led people to commit those crimes as opposed to the insane amount we spend just keeping people locked in cages whilst just ignoring the problem
That's what people try to do but

>we're spending billions of dollars on criminals to get them educated and off the streets
gets trumpfags and conservatives riled up.

Well there's no money in helping people and lots in running prisons.

>The point
It doesn't negate the stupidity of how it's framed. It's fucking stupid and lazy storytelling. If that character can see the future after learning that language then anyone can. It's the dumbest idea I've ever seen proposed in a modern sci fi flick. Like just think about it for a second. We are biological beings and our memories are imprinted from the experiences we endure - from the chemical reactions that are a direct result of the stimuli that affect our bodies. By learning this alien language, suddenly memories that never existed because of actions that haven't happened are now flaring up in the brain. PHYSICAL changes to the chemical reactions in your head exist because you learned alien word vomit. It's just so asinine and makes zero sense even in the context of the story.

It's hard sci fi for soft brained people alright.

Very little about Arrival was lazy. The movie spends a lot of time setting up its concept and spends almost as much time showing you the consequences.

>If that character can see the future after learning that language then anyone can
Again, you are presenting a problem with you as a problem with the movie. Yes, it's about a society that is going to learn how to discern the future with a good degree of accuracy on a common sense level. And? You're seriously pitching this as not science fiction? How much science fiction do you read?

this post is pure bullshit. ulbricht had no computer skills. he had no knowledge of coding and would have to go on stackoverflow for help. in one of his posts he included the onion link to SR in the curl req in his PHP script.
>PHP
>stackoverflow
if this already doesn't paint the picture, early in the development of SR he requested for programmers using the 'frosty' username for an "online marketplace that handles transactions using bitcoin" (or something closely related to that). the 'frosty' username was also used for his stackoverflow acct. then he links his clearnet [email protected] on the post as well.
the crazy thing was that the fbi had knowledge of Ulbricht and were also accusing some random rich dude of running the website. it wasn't until these two pieces of evidence surfaced when they zeroed in on Ulbricht.
even up until that point, he would have been able to avoid a fed case against him. he sent himself fake ids and passports and when questioned by the FBI, he told them "anyone can theoretically go to an online marketplace named silkroad, purchase these and send them to me." dude literally namedropped his own site when being questioned by the FBI.
i dont think he deserved the life sentence tho, but that was a clear showing that he believed he was some of genius and was above the law. he was a very smart man who graduated with a PHD in physics. that doesn't always translate well to technology.

Jesus dude, you just don't get it. The story telling is ironically ass backwards because it's written by hacks. Do you think if you met an alien, and they communicated a certain way because of inherent differences in their biology and how they perceive the world, and learned the language it would then GIVE YOU those same abilities?

That's what you're arguing.
>character A meets crazy tentacle monster with 8 heads, 30 eyes and it also hears noises by touching everything
>character A learns their language which is highly impacted by their perception of the world
and finally...
>character A now has the same perception as this character all because they learned the language

There you go. I spelled it out as plainly as I can. That's why it's a moronic story. If you enjoy it, more power to you.

Writing PHP code in a text editor is not impressive.

>Jesus dude, you just don't get it.

I've heard much better criticisms of the movie than yours, and I get where you're coming from, and why you're wrong, completely. I haven't left anything out, either, everything you've said I've responded to.

>Do you think if you met an alien, and they communicated a certain way because of inherent differences in their biology and how they perceive the world, and learned the language it would then GIVE YOU those same abilities?

The aliens can't see the future because of their biology, in fact they're not the inventors of the language they're giving to humanity in the book. If you were approaching the concept with an open mind, you wouldn't attribute their futuresight to biology, especially since this actually punches a hole in your argument in that you claim aliens can see the future but more mundane animals like humans can't, when there's no reason to draw a line in the sand like that in the first place since if there was one, it's up to the story to draw it, not the critic.

By the way the movie goes out of its way to explain why humanity is given futuresight. It's not given freely, Costello explains this in his last scene.

>The aliens can't see the future because of their biology, in fact they're not the inventors of the language they're giving to humanity in the book.

I'm only going off of what the movie presented and I thought the original story featured them gifting humanity a "faster than light" engine blue print. I don't know what you're talking about. I assumed these beings existed on some higher dimensional plane and that's why they could perceive time non-linearly. That's why I used my example of biological differences to present what I see as a logical fallacy in the writing.

But now you're saying that the language itself induces time bending changes to reality. That is something else. Why is it an issue that anyone disagrees with that concept? Why is it even a concept? Explain to me in layman's terms why it's reasonable that learning french would enable me to perceive the future.

Depends. He did nothing wrong with creating the site, in fact he did the world a service. However if the allegations that he tried to hire a hitman to kill a dude is true, then yes he deserves jail. Not for life though.

>I'm only going off of what the movie presented
The movie explicitly told you their biology isn't the reason they can see the future, the movie said it's the language. There's nothing special about the aliens except that their technology (which is apparently unrelated to their futuresight) is more advanced, and that they are in trouble and want humanity's help at some point in the future.

>But now you're saying that the language itself induces time bending changes to reality
No I'm not, I've said several times it is perception of reality. Perception of time and time are not the same thing, otherwise you wouldn't be able to plan out your day tomorrow because in reality it hasn't happened yet.

>Explain to me in layman's terms why it's reasonable that learning french would enable me to perceive the future.
I do not have to, because we are discussing a hard science fiction story. This discussion is about how you claim this somehow makes it soft science fiction when that's actually not the case. You just don't like hard scifi.

>The movie explicitly told you their biology isn't the reason they can see the future, the movie said it's the language.
ok
>But now you're saying that the language itself induces time bending changes to reality
>No I'm not, I've said several times it is perception of reality.
wait...

>the reason they can see the future, the movie said it's the language
>No I'm not, I've said several times it is perception of reality.
uh huh... so which is it? Please do remember, by learning this language, you literally create chemically induced changes in the brain that are a direct result of future actions that have yet to occur.

user if you really can't figure out that difference between time travel and futuresight then, again, it's a problem with you and not the movie.

Like, you literally are claiming the movie isn't allowed to make this distinction, and you're doing it without basis. The fact that you're sticking to some chemical change argument is evidence of this. Can you cite where the movie made mention that the brain was fed information from the future? Cause that's not the normal definition of futuresight in science fiction.

Dune is the first modern hard science fiction novel by many accounts. One of its central tenets is prescience, or in another term futuresight. It's provided a drug (worm poop from a specific planet). There are, no joke, so many thousands of novels, short stories, TV shows, movies, games, etc that lift huge amounts of material from this landmark novel, and you're claiming the concept isn't hard scifi.

Attached: Leo.jpg (852x1244, 173K)

>Like, you literally are claiming the movie isn't allowed to make this distinction, and you're doing it without basis. The fact that you're sticking to some chemical change argument is evidence of this. Can you cite where the movie made mention that the brain was fed information from the future? Cause that's not the normal definition of futuresight in science fiction.
>""""science fiction""""
These aren't established principles. This is like made up rules for what the jedi can do with the force. Hilarious man. Are you actually prescribing different rules to what memories are and how they're formed? Get a load of this guy. Please do go on and enlighten me as to why "future sight" is heavy hard hitting sci fi stuff ahahahaha.

Ah, so you're wrong and out of arguments, cool.
>These aren't established principles
What isn't? The only thing in your greentext that could even remotely apply is the fact that futuresight is just the ability to see the future and isn't the ability to travel into the future or for the future to affect the past, which very well established in scifi. I'm even pointing out the original definition that 99% of scifi follows.
>This is like made up rules for what the jedi can do with the force.
No, it's a synopsis for a story that is followed faithfully as it is fleshed out while pointing out potential societal changes in the process, as I described up here . Jedi force powers are things like being able to run really fast sometimes when the story wants them to, but not usually being able to do that. This is really just proving that the problem is you, because you can't tell the difference between an action movie trying to use gotchas to escape the shielded robots and a story built from the ground up around, again, the events in my post up there.

He also tried to hire five different hitmen

>Ah, so you're wrong and out of arguments, cool.
huh?
>Can you cite where the movie made mention that the brain was fed information from the future?
>Cause that's not the normal definition of futuresight in science fiction.
>Cause that's not the normal definition of futuresight in science fiction.
>Cause that's not the normal definition of futuresight in science fiction.
>Cause that's not the normal definition of futuresight in science fiction.
>Cause that's not the normal definition of futuresight in science fiction.

No, I was referencing this here. Like the "normal definition of futuresight" means the way memories develop can't be applied in a fictitious story... even when it's supposedly sciency. And I'm still waiting for to be addressed. Again if you enjoyed the story, that's great. I explained why it's stupid that learning french can allow you to see the future and I just really have to emphasize it's a pretty lame concept.

It seems disproportionate to the crime. But I guess people want to stick it to white collar criminals these days.

Ross Ulbricht had a strong sense of ethics. The website did not allow human trafficking or paying for murder , among other things. It was meant to follow libertarian values. Drugs bought there were cheaper and safer than elsewhere, both by beong pure and basically straight from a farm/lab but also because it cut out street dealers and cartels that are not safe people.

Now, these days, i believe the websitw was created by the same CIA informant that created bitcoin itself. i think it was a way for him to get out of the radar and "go legit", ross ulbricht only came along as an admin to the website. of course all the involved people are in prison now and the cartels have basically won the battle against internet dealers. So whatever, honestly it wouldnt matter if the silk road had child trafficking at this point. Human propensity for evil knows no bounds, that shit happens whether or not its through a website run on tor or in the basement of some shitty bar or strip club. If evil loses reach in one direction it just goes another. There's no solution, just struggle. Its sad that the silk road lost but i think it was simply ahead of its time. one day people will look back and laugh that centralized trade ever existed

It was a was not him; according to him, people who know him, people who knew him from the site, and the multiple people who shared the name.

CIA took over moderation of /b/ because of the cp mostly. back in the day, it was like clockwork that every night youd see a thread that said something like "mods asleep?" then filled with childporn, it was kinda like the loli threads are now only more common and active. i like to think that many participants were simply trying to be edgy, but these days im not sure. Dont pretend you cant see that a place like Jow Forums would attract that. It was when smartphones were called blackberries and the internet was still seen as a place to learn not a place to socialize. Back when "anonymous culture" was "cool." Now, the whole world is watching...

Just like they punished all those people at HSBC for knowingly recycling money for the Sinaloa the drug Cartel directly responsible for most of the cocaine in the US and for murdering competitors, cops and civilians, cutting their head and hanging them on the highways, oh wait nobody got arrested or fired because it would have "hurt the economy".

If people found out tomorrow that Amazon helped fund terrorism do you seriously think Bezos or anyone around him would be arrested?

i was there man, there were not hitmen or cp or human trafficking. as far as porn there was some shit on there that was just normal porn, i guess for people in countries where porn is illegal. there were hackers for hire i think but maybe im wrong. absolutely never anything that directly harmed anyone. it was mostly drugs and guns, as time went on it was basically just drugs. You are thinking of the onion network itself, theres plenty of fucked up shit on tor like hitmen, sex slaves, cp, etc. Silk road was supposed to be ethical outside of the law itself

RIP Ian , only one i care about

Attached: 1562002325669s.jpg (162x250, 5K)

hey dont tell facts this is supposed to be a thread about shitting on a kid that managed a website that wouldve cut the cartel out of the drug game. he was worse than chapo. the first international kingpin he was! he shoulda got death by firing squad. No one fucks with the cartel+banks+interpol+cia and gets away with it!

Yes, but that sentence is way too long. Life long sentences should be reserved for those who are a danger to other people and thus can't be allowed to be near them.