The Silk Curtain
The Silk Curtain
On May 29, Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht received a stern sentence for his involvement with building and operating the world's first global anonymous supermarket for everything. Some were surprised with the severity – life in prison without parole for the 31-year-old "Internet entrepreneur." But the Silk Road led its wayfarers way out beyond the cutting edge, and if you live your life as a pioneer, sometimes you get surprised.
Dear Linux Pro Reader,
On May 29, Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht received a stern sentence for his involvement with building and operating the world's first global anonymous supermarket for everything. Some were surprised with the severity – life in prison without parole for the 31-year-old "Internet entrepreneur." But the Silk Road led its wayfarers way out beyond the cutting edge, and if you live your life as a pioneer, sometimes you get surprised.
The recent history of the Internet is littered with tales of technology leading out in front of the legal system. It is pretty obvious the law allowing a life sentence for a criminal boss was not created for a guy like Ross Ulbricht. One gets the vision of Ulbricht as an extreme libertarian who also happens to be an entrepreneur, who also happens to be a computer whiz. Still, he didn't get $13 million in bitcoins on his laptop by reprising his childhood role as an Eagle scout.
[...]
Buy this article as PDF
(incl. VAT)
Buy Linux Magazine
Subscribe to our Linux Newsletters
Find Linux and Open Source Jobs
Subscribe to our ADMIN Newsletters
Support Our Work
Linux Magazine content is made possible with support from readers like you. Please consider contributing when you’ve found an article to be beneficial.

News
-
CachyOS Now Lets Users Choose Their Shell
Imagine getting the opportunity to select which shell you want during the installation of your favorite Linux distribution. That's now a thing.
-
Wayland 1.24 Released with Fixes and New Features
Wayland continues to move forward, while X11 slowly vanishes into the shadows, and the latest release includes plenty of improvements.
-
Bugs Found in sudo
Two critical flaws allow users to gain access to root privileges.
-
Fedora Continues 32-Bit Support
In a move that should come as a relief to some portions of the Linux community, Fedora will continue supporting 32-bit architecture.
-
Linux Kernel 6.17 Drops bcachefs
After a clash over some late fixes and disagreements between bcachefs's lead developer and Linus Torvalds, bachefs is out.
-
ONLYOFFICE v9 Embraces AI
Like nearly all office suites on the market (except LibreOffice), ONLYOFFICE has decided to go the AI route.
-
Two Local Privilege Escalation Flaws Discovered in Linux
Qualys researchers have discovered two local privilege escalation vulnerabilities that allow hackers to gain root privileges on major Linux distributions.
-
New TUXEDO InfinityBook Pro Powered by AMD Ryzen AI 300
The TUXEDO InfinityBook Pro 14 Gen10 offers serious power that is ready for your business, development, or entertainment needs.
-
LibreOffice Tested as Possible Office 365 Alternative
Another major organization has decided to test the possibility of migrating from Microsoft's Office 365 to LibreOffice.
-
Linux Mint 20 Reaches EOL
With Linux Mint 20 at its end of life, the time has arrived to upgrade to Linux Mint 22.