- A post-mortem of the Silk Road takedown highlighted classic op-sec failures—SQL injection, PHP leaks, unencrypted logs, real-name reuse, and failure to expatriate despite holding 26 000 BTC—framing Ulbricht as a cautionary tale for high-risk projects.  
- Participants outlined layered anonymity tactics: chaining SSH/VPN hops through multiple foreign jurisdictions before Tor, memorized-only encryption keys, and rapid evidence-destruction workflows to avoid single-point failures like those of Manning and Ulbricht.  
- Concern was raised about Sci-Hub’s weaker operational security and the ease with which “stalklogs” can correlate pirate activity, underscoring the need for improved tradecraft in open-science piracy.  
- A live dump of Silk Road users’ PGP keys surfaced via onion.to, demonstrating the enduring availability of dark-net metadata for research and the risks of persistent cryptographic identities.  
- Hardware discussion centered on the ThinkPad W520 as the last model with the classic IBM keyboard, 32 GB RAM, and 1 TB SSD support, while newer models were criticized for keyboard regression and the industry’s failure to advance beyond 1920×1080 on 12″ screens since 2003.  
- Paperbot routinely retrieved pay-walled articles via libgen mirrors, including PRL 10.1103/PhysRevLett.111.130505 and PNAS 10.1073/pnas.1300832110, illustrating the channel’s systematic use of open-access literature for research.  
- Lavabit founder Ladar Levison resisted a court order by printing the 2,560-character SSL private key in 4-point type across 11 pages, forcing the FBI to claim illegibility and highlighting the practical limits (or legal theater) of compelled key disclosure.