Wednesday, September 24, 2014

Moral collapse down the cloud's rabbit hole

The cloud, is of course that virtual world contained in various servers that we access when we use internet based applications.  The rabbit hole?  Well go ask Alice when she's ten feet tall (or Woodstock with lyric scroll)*.
 
Andy Greenberg, Wired, 18 September (hat tip: NC)
In the digital drug trade as in the physical one, taking out one kingpin only makes room for another ready to satisfy the market’s endless demand. In the case of the FBI’s takedown of the Silk Road, the latest of the up-and-coming drug kingpins is far more evolved than its predecessor—and far less principled.
Since it launched early this year, the anonymous black market bazaar Evolution has grown dramatically, nearly tripling its sales listings in just the last five months. It now offers more than 15,000 mostly illegal products ranging from weapons to weed, cocaine, and heroin. That’s thousands more than the Silk Road ever hosted. And Evolution’s popularity has been driven not only by a more secure and professional operation than its competitors, but also by a more amoral approach to the cryptomarket than the strict libertarian ethos the Silk Road preached. Case in point: About 10 percent of Evolution’s products are stolen credit card numbers and credentials for hacked online accounts.

And if you go chasing rabbits, and you know your going to fall...
 
*Grace Slick's voice is some sort of weapon.  I recall reviews noting that she sang like an electric guitar.  I always thought it odd, that she did not have more mega-hits to her name. But if you look at her two big hits, "White Rabbit", and "Somebody to Love" they were written when she was with her band prior to Jefferson Airplane, "Great Society", and whatever musical combination created those huge songs, no longer existed.

No comments: