Free Republic

Ross Ulbricht was jailed for life after he was accused of being Dread Pirate Roberts who ran online black market site But his horrified mother Lyn claims there has been a miscarriage of justice and is fighting for his freedom In a revealing interview she described her 'gentle' son as an idylistic graduate with little money But she says he was branded as a cyber-criminals by a legal system that rode roughshod over natural justice

For the past two weeks, Reason, a magazine dedicated to "Free Minds and Free Markets," has been barred by an order from the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York from speaking publicly about a grand jury subpoena that court sent to Reason.com. The subpoena demanded the records of six people who left hyperbolic comments at the website about the federal judge who oversaw the controversial conviction of Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht. Shortly after the subpoena was issued, the government issued a gag order prohibiting Reason not only from discussing the matter but even acknowledging the...

[caption id="attachment_1512" align="aligncenter" width="620"] Image source: Wired.com[/caption] See that over-the-top, anti-Obama comment on Facebook or your favorite blog?  It could be a paid Russian troll.  See the picture above?  He's serving a life sentence without parole because he started an illegal website.  He claims to be a Libertarian, but he certainly made a ton of money (the Feds claim over $100 million) selling--well, everything, sort of like Amazon, but much smaller and very much in the shadows of the "dark web." What do Russian trolls have to do with a guy in prison for life?  One of them was caught...

The United States Department of Justice is using federal grand jury subpoenas to identify anonymous commenters engaged in typical internet bluster and hyperbole in connection with the Silk Road prosecution. DOJ is targeting Reason.com, a leading libertarian website whose clever writing is eclipsed only by the blowhard stupidity of its commenting peanut gallery. Why are the government using its vast power to identify these obnoxious asshats, and not the other tens of thousands who plague the internet? Because these twerps mouthed off about a judge. Last week, a source provided me with a federal grand jury subpoena. The subpoena1, issued...

The convicted mastermind behind the world's largest online narcotics emporium has been sentenced by a federal judge to two terms of life in prison and three lesser sentences, USA Today reports. The judge also ordered Ross Ulbricht, 31, to forfeit $184 million dollars. The website made over $187 million before it was shut down in 2013. The government estimated that roughly $1.2 billion in illegal drug transactions took place on Silk Road. The judge said it was a "demand expanding operation" and that what Ulbricht did was thoughtful, as opposed to just being an economic experiment. She added that he...

Syria - Archeological Findings Palmyra- Syria 29-05 (SANA)- The Finnish archeological team working in Bashir Mount in the desert area of Palmyra ( Tadmor ) has unearthed 46 archeological sites that date back to 80,000 years B.C. Member of the team Prof. Margo Alstawt Watsing of Helsinki University said her group used sophisticated equipment to survey the mountain’s archeological traces that extend along the Euphrates River on the ancient famous Silk Road, some 180 KM east of Palmyra. She added that clay, copper, bone and granite pieces were unearthed at the scene, an indication that man had very long ago...

Gerbils are cute and furry creatures. They may also, according to scientists, have been responsible for killing millions of people across Europe by spreading the plague. Researchers now believe that gerbils from Asia, rather than native black rats, were behind the repeated outbreaks of the bubonic plague in Europe.

It is astonishing that scholars of religion refer so little to the Manichaean faith, which in its day -- roughly from the third century AD through the fourteenth century -- was a fully fledged world religion, which interacted with Christianity, Buddhism, Islam, Zoroastrianism and Judaism. At various times, its adherents could be found across the whole of Eurasia, from France to China. It also created a substantial body of scriptures and commentaries, most of which are now lost. Manichaeanism (Manichaeism) is, I believe, the only example of a world religion that has arisen and then vanished entirely, seemingly without trace....

Things are really starting to heat up regarding the Silk Road marketplace (as if things already weren’t hot enough). Following the start of Ross Ulbricht’s trial last week, a bitcoin trader has been sentenced to four years in prison due to his unveiled connections to the underground illegal market. Robert M. Faiella (who often operated under the code name “BTCKing”) has recently pled guilty to operating an illegal money transmission business.  Often times, the business saw to the exchange of fiat currency for bitcoins, which would then be used to purchase drugs and other items from Silk Road. Faiella, a...

Although M. tuberculosis probably first emerged some 40,000 years ago in Africa, the disease did not take hold until humans took to farming... A previous analysis by his team had shown that the common ancestor of all the M. bacterium strains circulating today began spreading around 10,000 years ago in the ancient Fertile Crescent, a region stretching from Mesopotamia to the Nile Delta that was a cradle of agriculture... 4,987 samples of the Beijing lineage from 99 countries... the information to date the expansion of the lineage and show how the strains are related... the Beijing lineage did indeed emerge...

James Cook November 6, 2014 The FBI and Europol have conducted a joint operation to take down the internet's thriving "deep web" drug marketplaces. The official FBI New York Twitter account just confirmed the seizure of Silk Road 2.0, saying that the site's alleged operator, Blake Benthall, was arrested in San Francisco on Wednesday. He now potentially faces life in prison, the FBI says. Benthall appears to be an employee of SpaceX, Elon Musk's private rocket company. (snip)

An ancient town that was discovered 6.3 kilometers west of the Lop Nor Creek Tomb in Xinjiang is most likely the mysterious town of Zhubin, according to a report from Chongqing Evening News. After more than one year of investigation and study, Lu Houyuan and others recently released the important research results in China's authoritative magazine, the Chinese Science Bulletin. According to sources, the ancient town is one of the three archaeological discoveries made between November and December in 2008 by the Lop Nor Scientific Exploration Team, led by Xia Xuncheng, researcher at the Xinjiang Institute of Ecology and Geography...

Silk Road’s Dread Pirate Roberts won’t be getting his case dismissed By Sam Reynolds on July 10, 2014 A bid to get the case thrown out due to the technical definition of money laundering is denied. Bit coins Silk Road’s Dread Pirate Roberts won’t be getting his case dismissed. The former proprietor of the drugs and vice bazaar known as Silk Road has suffered a major legal setback, after a US court denied his defense’s request to have the case dismissed. The federal charges against Ross Ulbricht, better known by his online handle Dread Pirate Roberts, include money laundering, running...

A list of potential bidders for the Bitcoin auction was accidentally leaked by the U.S. Marshals Service on Wednesday, according to the agency. The Marshals Service confirmed that it accidentally released the names in an email to update interested parties on the auction’s guidelines. The U.S. government said last week it plans to auction about 30,000 bitcoins, the electronic currency, valued at about $17.4 million, on June 27 the U.S. Marshals Service said. FBI seized the bitcoins during a raid in October on the Internet marketplace Silk Road, known as a hub for transactions involving illegal drugs and criminal activities.

Dale doesn't exactly look like an international crypto-criminal. He's soft-spoken, baby-faced, and a senior at an Ivy League college. But every couple of weeks the political science major logs onto the Silk Road, an online black market that has been described as an "amazon.com of drugs" to buy wholesale quantities of "molly" (also known as MDMA, a particularly "pure" form of ecstasy), LSD and magic mushrooms. Some of these will be for his personal use, and the rest he'll flog to less tech-savvy classmates at a mark-up of up to 300%. On a good weekend, he can net a profit...

Charred grains of barley, millet and wheat deposited nearly 5,000 years ago at campsites in the high plains of Kazakhstan show that nomadic sheepherders played a surprisingly important role in the early spread of domesticated crops throughout a mountainous east-west corridor along the historic Silk Road... "Ancient wheat and broomcorn millet, recovered in nomadic campsites in Kazakhstan, show that prehistoric herders in Central Eurasia had incorporated both regional crops into their economy and rituals nearly 5,000 years ago, pushing back the chronology of interaction along the territory of the 'Silk Road' more than 2,000 years," Frachetti said... ...several strains of...

For some cheese lovers, the older and stinkier the cheese, the better. Well, what about a cheese that's been aging for 3,600 years? Yellow lumps, believed to be the world's oldest cheese, were found on mummies buried in the Taklamakan Desert in northwestern China. The cheese, which was found during archaeological excavations that took place between 2002 and 2004, dates to as early as 1615 BC. The cheese was found on the necks and chests of the mummies. The multiple layers of cowhide the mummies were buried in, and the dry, salty desert helped preserve the cheese....

The same bug that has plagued several of the biggest players in the Bitcoin economy may have just bitten the Silk Road. On Thursday, one of the recently-reincarnated drug-selling black market site’s administrators posted a long announcement to the Silk Road 2.0 forums admitting that the site had been hacked by one of its sellers, and its reserve of Bitcoins belonging to both the users and the site itself stolen. The admin, who goes by the name “Defcon,” blamed the same “transaction malleability” bug in the Bitcoin protocol that led to several of the cryptocurrency’s exchanges halting withdrawals in the...

Bitcoin is here to stay and will continue to grow, according to experts speaking on separate panels at Money2020 in Las Vegas. The recent prosecution of Silk Road, an underground online market for drugs that traded Bitcoins and the FBI’s confiscation of approximately $3.5 million in Bitcoins, looked like a severe blow to the virtual currency. But Carol Van Cleef, partner in Patton Boggs and moderator of a session on maths-based and virtual currencies, said the bust showed growing sophistication on the part of federal law enforcement agencies, reports Tom Groenfeldt. “They decided to go not after the system itself,...

Ross Ulbricht’s last moments as a free man were noisy enough to draw a crowd. Employees at the Glen Park branch of the San Francisco library heard a crashing sound and rushed to the science fiction section, expecting to find a patron had hit the floor. Instead, they found a handful of federal agents surrounding a slender 29-year-old man with light brown hair and wearing a T-shirt and jeans. The goal of the arrest, at 3:15 p.m. on Oct. 1, 2013, was not simply to apprehend Mr. Ulbricht, but also to prevent him from performing the most mundane of tasks:...