Sunday, November 9, 2014

SilkRoad 3.0

Online marketing has a huge influence on our lives - I know I'm constantly scrambling for those free shipping deals on websites. However, today I learned about another online platforms which users can use to buy and sell drugs. This website is called Silk Road and it is used to make transactions for any materials on a server that is untrackable.According to USNews, "[the] Silk Road, the original, fundamentally changed how many drug users, particularly young and tech-savvy ones, acquired their contraband. Accessible only through the anonymous Tor network, the market allowed buyers to make relatively well-educated and seemingly risk-free purchasing decisions."

This website is currently operating on its third version - the two previous versions of the website has been cracked down upon by the FBI and was taken down. The second installation of the website was operating for one year and then was recently shut down on November 6th. The users of the website were met with this notice when trying to access the web service:

What scares me the most about this service is the very fact that it exist - people are able to buy and sell illegal drugs on a deep part of the internet where regulation does not exist. Silk Road enables people of different background - drug traffickers, drug addicts to name a few - to easily acquire contraband goods and do whatever they please. This type of unregulated web scares me and leads me to think of the millions of possibilities that are out there for people to delve into.

Sources:
http://www.businessinsider.com/theres-already-a-silk-road-30-2014-11
http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2014/11/07/silk-road-30-opens-for-business

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