The summary is poorly worded.

It's not that clearing your browsing history, throwing out old logs/emails or flushing your toilet are inherently illegal, it's when you use them and why.

If the cops are knocking at your door and you decide to flush the drugs, that's obstruction, if you just hacked someone's system and then wiped all of the local logs on your machine to hide the evidence, that's obstruction. If however you have as a routine process... not to retain any email older than say... 30 days and purge pretty regularly (either manually or automatically), that's not obstruction, that's just good cleanliness, and if some incriminating evidence happens to be wiped out on day 30, it's a lot harder to prove that you were doing so to hide your wrongdoing rather than simply not wanting to have to keep around old Amazon offers which clutter your inbox.

You realize the last "Media Center Edition" was XP... right? Media Center was built into the higher SKUs of Vista & 7 and available as a quick and relatively cheap add in ($15?) for 8... free keys for which they gave away for quite a while. ... or are you saying that XP was crap? ... which would be an unusual view on /. these days.

you cannot vote directly for your senators

The Seventeenth Amend disagrees... unfortunately.

Or the statute of limitations for the crime the allegations point to has expired.

Betting the dude who wrote PuTTY is not in a good mood right about now...

Oh? How much do you think he was making through donations for PuTTY?

Hell, I even played with scripting text to speech alerting just to see if I could, and it was really easy!

I know a guy who did that with a telephony system which calls him when something goes wrong then accepts voice input for what to do next... including executing a limited # of PS commands.

I've not seen the code, but like you said, I'm told it's pretty easy.

PowerShell primary commands are formatted Verb-Noun. This is awfully convenient, as a PowerShell user can guess hundreds of commands just by learning a few verbs and a few nouns.

Not to mention built in tab completion for arguments where you can read the man page after finding the cmdlet to know which arguments you will have to use, or just quickly tab through to what you know is going to be there.

From the WSJ:

After a three-week trial in New York City, Mr. Ulbricht was found guilty in February of seven criminal charges, including conspiracies to sell drugs, launder money and hack computers.

So a gun, knife or rope manufacturer should be label anytime someone misuses their products?

You forgot "9/11 was an inside job"

Except for that you are speaking of what really amount to common carriers which transport bits without much worry about what they are.

Now if Comcast was in the business of advertising they have the best internet pipe for looking for slaves, chemical weapons or terrorists for hire... you might have a point.

There is a big difference between something legitimate being used for illegitimate purposes and something being built explicitly for illegitimate purposes... this is why guns tend to be legal while building a bomb is not.

There is also the issue of noise in the signal and filtering of it.

While a good radar system is probably able to pick up a bird or a drone flying about, that also means it could probably see a baseball, a kite, or someone throwing a 12"x12" piece of aluminum foil into the air... and that in addition to general noise which may get picked up.

Rather than have all such items show up on an operators radar, there is likely a threshold that only objects over a certain size or moving at a certain speed (or both) end up being 'visible'.

So your best/only response is to accuse me of being a paid shill?

Truly now we see the depth of your intellect... though I doubt even a new born could drown in such waters if one were to try.

Never can it be that someone on their own might had a different opinion, no, never that.

Or would you like to cite specific and tangible EVIDENCE of what you claimed? I hear lots of claims of the NSA being involved yet so little to back it up... that must be part of why the judge (another NSA shill?) rejected those claims.

First off, even getting that laptop was fruit of the poisoned tree because they got it using evidence the NSA gathered through illegal wiretapping programs.

Citation?

Even then, Ulbreit admitted he built the site. He just didn't run it during the period in question. The entire point of the name "Dread Pirate Roberts" is that anyone can use it.

So he admitted buying the gun and evidence puts him at the murder scene... but you are still going to fight the idea that he pulled the trigger? You can be an accessory to a crime without directly taking part.

But then lets just ignore the other evidence on his laptop which did show him being a more active runner of the site than you suggest.

Besides, the site did use Tor correctly.

Really? So you've personally audited it and certified that in your capacity as an AC Tor expert?

FYI: Posting to Stackoverflow with your own name when trying to learn how to setup a Tor hidden service isn't the brightest thing when you are trying to not have the site tied to you.

It didn't help because the NSA has infiltrated Tor, which should surprise no one, because it was originally built by the US DOD anyway.

Like many, I'm still waiting to see/hear of these secret backdoors in Tor that were somehow inserted not through rouge check-ins... but through large checks to the Tor foundation.

Lemme guess... 9/11 was an inside job?

Secret evidence, discovery denied for obvious things...

When you get a hold of the accused laptop which is logged in and has ample evidence of being an administrator of the site in question... what exculpatory evidence do you think existed that could have gotten him off that he was denied?

And they proved Tor is not secure; arguments to the contrary are just not convincing anymore.

Tor is secure if you use it right... many do not. Bitcoin however we did find is far from anonymous and the evidence in the blockchain could be used against you years or even decades after your illicit purchase.