Recon is Live
Recon, the largest archive of darkweb vendor profiles, just launched data from 40 marketplaces. Searchable data includes more than 21,000 vendor profiles, 24,000 product listings, and 1.3 million reviews. Data from a number of active marketplaces is updated daily.
After almost two years in development, Recon is live. HugBunter announced the launch on the /d/Recon subdread but a copy of the announcement is available below.
Recon is available here: reconponydonugup.onion
From HugBunter in “Announcing the launch of Recon: DNM Search Engine and Vendor Database” -
Hello one and all, I’d like to invite you to a huge DNM-related event and hope you will take pride in being here for the highly anticipated launch of our first additional service, as part of a wider Dread network.
May I proudly present, the official launch of the Recon Beta. http://reconponydonugup.onion
This marks the beginning of the Public Beta testing phase for the platform, in which we will be establishing initial feedback and bug reports. We want to act on this feedback, to make this service extremely useful as a tool for everyone.
What is Recon?
Recon is the largest Dark Net Market vendor archive service and multi marketplace search engine, providing up to date content from the majority of established markets all in one place. We strive to serve a fast and easy to use platform allowing you to cross reference vendor details, listings, statistics and marketplace addresses.
This is all accomplished through years of data archiving from past marketplaces and the integrating of an API system for active markets to easily share their public vendor and listing data to us on a regular basis.
As well as serving you with this useful data we also implement promotion tools for vendors, markets and other services through Advertising banners available across the Dread network and Ad Words style listing promotion in the product search.
Vendors can provide updates to their followers on Recon after claiming their profile and submitting a post. These posts are combined into a newsfeed where users can keep up to date with their favorite vendors.
Make sure to read the lazy, minimal FAQ over at Recon (Available here) as there may be answers to questions that I didn’t clarify within this post.
Some things to clarify at this point is that firstly, CannaHome’s API is not fully functioning right now and it has only been able to import 500 of their active listings right now and no vendor reviews. They are working on this and it should be running properly within the next 48 hours I would guess.
Empire have integrated the Recon API, last year actually, but have had it disabled. I will try to reach out to them to get it enabled, otherwise this data will be fulfilled from actively taken scrapes of the market. This means that there are no Empire listings in the search currently or vendor profiles linked to PGP keys.
Any vendor’s who have changed PGP Key and their profile’s have been separated without a link between them (This has been attempted to be automated, but I will need proof of key ownership for most profile linking), open a ticket at Recon through the account pages with a signed message from each key you would like to merge and this will be resolved within the next week or two.
Search filters and some other features are lacking at this moment in time, but I am hoping to build a lot more into the service, including further tools for Vendors and had previously discussed drug test warnings with /u/DoctorX that could be distributed within the site. This could also lead to providing test results within vendor profiles as part of Harm Reduction efforts.
I’d like to take this moment to credit everyone who has assisted directly and indirectly with this project.
/u/Paris of course, resident problem solver right here.
/u/syntax For the continued awesome UI/UX work.
/u/wintermute for assistance with graphics, copy and data entry.
/u/wombat2combat for providing additional market scrape data that he conducted.
/u/swansong , /u/ceramicoutdent , /u/Astrid for their great contributions in filling in the blanks with the Dream scrapes.
Of course, Gwern Branwen (https://gwern.net) for his extreme collection of past market scrapes, sourced from various published papers and their data sets. I’d like to credit everyone who contributed to Gwern’s archives, names are listed over at his site.
Thank you to Grams Admin, you built something great that has inspired many other projects and is the complete basis behind the idea of Recon, good luck for the future.
A massive thank you to everyone else who has contributed towards data and anyone who took part in the platform’s closed Alpha testing, you have been extremely helpful.
Special mentions for /u/HumanPie , /u/samwhiskey, /u/DarkDotFail , /u/darknetlive and all Market admins who have contributed in sharing their data.
Now to lose all professionalism, FUCK YEAH. Getting this platform released has been the biggest fucking headache I have ever experienced. I first started work on this, believe it or not, JUNE 2018. The work involved to track down previous market data for this project was something I completely underestimated, outside of the outdated public scrapes, there isn’t much to go on and gaining access to anything through IMPACT seems like an impossible task. Now once you find the data, it actually goes further downhill. You see, it should be pretty straight forward to extract the data I need from scraped archives of past markets, you know, write a script to pick out the relevant info from the same elements on each page and amend it for each market’s UI, right? Wrong. When scrapes take place over time, different months, dates, years. By this point, the market has made many changes such as their data placement, formatting of information etc. That is a task that I severely disliked. Then you have the markets that separate important details onto completely different pages of a vendor’s profile (looking at you, AlphaBay). It also surprized me how many of my extractions failed due to poorly fomatted PGP keys, which I mostly had to fix by HAND and also the common ocurrence of Vendors who have had their PRIVATE KEY listed on their market profiles… how do you achieve that in the first place, but what market doesn’t validate this shit? Not many apparently, that includes recently defunct Dream marketplace everybody. Now it came to early 2019 and Recon was ready to shine, markets began to implement the API and all looked great. Then the DoS attacks began, so all progress on Recon completely halted, I wasn’t too worried though, this will pass and I’ll continue where I left off.. Dream shuts down without any prior warning, I don’t have their data yet, they were supposed to be implementing the API! Without a doubt, this was one of the most painful scrapes I conducted myself having to crowd source username lists and search for vendor profiles individually by username, over 90% of which didn’t exist on Dream or had been locked out by the corrupt staff member that was emptying vendor wallets at the time. Scrapes done, data extracted, phew! Oh, now Wall Street has decided to fuck everyone over, same process again. Shit, CGMC unexpectedly shut down! Which has continued in a cycle between DoS attacks over the course of the past year. The attacks have also been a priority which has prevented me from focusing on any market scrapes. Unfortunately this has left me in the position where I had to put funding into a bounty for some 6 month old (at time of shut down) CGMC data and am still currently missing Grey Market and Cryptonia data.
Sorry for the wall of text, I have put literal hundreds of hours into everything involved with Recon, whilst dealing with a handful of shit at the same time.
I hope you like the platform and hopefully there aren’t too many bugs remaining.
Enjoy, its time for me and /u/Paris to get some well-deserved sleep!
Show signed message
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA512
Hello one and all, I'd like to invite you to a huge DNM-related event and hope you will take pride in being here for the highly anticipated launch of our first additional service, as part of a wider Dread network.
May I proudly present, the official launch of the Recon Beta.
http://reconponydonugup.onion
This marks the beginning of the Public Beta testing phase for the platform, in which we will be establishing initial feedback and bug reports. We want to act on this feedback, to make this service extremely useful as a tool for everyone.
What is Recon?
Recon is the largest Dark Net Market vendor archive service and multi marketplace search engine, providing up to date content from the majority of established markets all in one place. We strive to serve a fast and easy to use platform allowing you to cross reference vendor details, listings, statistics and marketplace addresses.
This is all accomplished through years of data archiving from past marketplaces and the integrating of an API system for active markets to easily share their public vendor and listing data to us on a regular basis.
As well as serving you with this useful data we also implement promotion tools for vendors, markets and other services through Advertising banners available across the Dread network and Ad Words style listing promotion in the product search.
Vendors can provide updates to their followers on Recon after claiming their profile and submitting a post. These posts are combined into a newsfeed where users can keep up to date with their favorite vendors.
- --------------
Make sure to read the lazy, minimal FAQ over at Recon as there may be answers to questions that I didn't clarify within this post.
- --------------
Some things to clarify at this point is that firstly, CannaHome's API is not fully functioning right now and it has only been able to import 500 of their active listings right now and no vendor reviews. They are working on this and it should be running properly within the next 48 hours I would guess.
Empire have integrated the Recon API, last year actually, but have had it disabled. I will try to reach out to them to get it enabled, otherwise this data will be fulfilled from actively taken scrapes of the market. This means that there are no Empire listings in the search currently or vendor profiles linked to PGP keys.
Any vendor's who have changed PGP Key and their profile's have been separated without a link between them (This has been attempted to be automated, but I will need proof of key ownership for most profile linking), open a ticket at Recon through the account pages with a signed message from each key you would like to merge and this will be resolved within the next week or two.
Search filters and some other features are lacking at this moment in time, but I am hoping to build a lot more into the service, including further tools for Vendors and had previously discussed drug test warnings with /u/DoctorX that could be distributed within the site. This could also lead to providing test results within vendor profiles as part of Harm Reduction efforts.
- --------------
I'd like to take this moment to credit everyone who has assisted directly and indirectly with this project.
/u/Paris of course, resident problem solver right here.
/u/syntax For the continued awesome UI/UX work.
/u/wintermute for assistance with graphics, copy and data entry.
/u/wombat2combat for providing additional market scrape data that he conducted.
/u/swansong , /u/ceramicoutdent , /u/Astrid for their great contributions in filling in the blanks with the Dream scrapes.
Of course, Gwern Branwen (https://gwern.net) for his extreme collection of past market scrapes, sourced from various published papers and their data sets. I'd like to credit everyone who contributed to Gwern's archives, names are listed over at his site.
Thank you to Grams Admin, you built something great that has inspired many other projects and is the complete basis behind the idea of Recon, good luck for the future.
A massive thank you to everyone else who has contributed towards data and anyone who took part in the platform's closed Alpha testing, you have been extremely helpful.
Special mentions for /u/HumanPie , /u/samwhiskey, /u/DarkDotFail , /u/darknetlive and all Market admins who have contributed in sharing their data.
- --------------
Now to lose all professionalism, FUCK YEAH. Getting this platform released has been the biggest fucking headache I have ever experienced. I first started work on this, believe it or not, JUNE 2018. The work involved to track down previous market data for this project was something I completely underestimated, outside of the outdated public scrapes, there isn't much to go on and gaining access to anything through IMPACT seems like an impossible task. Now once you find the data, it actually goes further downhill. You see, it should be pretty straight forward to extract the data I need from scraped archives of past markets, you know, write a script to pick out the relevant info from the same elements on each page and amend it for each market's UI, right? Wrong. When scrapes take place over time, different months, dates, years. By this point, the market has made many changes such as their data placement, formatting of information etc. That is a task that I severely disliked. Then you have the markets that separate important details onto completely different pages of a vendor's profile (looking at you, AlphaBay). It also surprized me how many of my extractions failed due to poorly fomatted PGP keys, which I mostly had to fix by HAND and also the common ocurrence of Vendors who have had their PRIVATE KEY listed on their market profiles... how do you achieve that in the first place, but what market doesn't validate this shit? Not many apparently, that includes recently defunct Dream marketplace everybody. Now it came to early 2019 and Recon was ready to shine, markets began to implement the API and all looked great. Then the DoS attacks began, so all progress on Recon completely halted, I wasn't too worried though, this will pass and I'll continue where I left off.. Dream shuts down without any prior warning, I don't have their data yet, they were supposed to be implementing the API! Without a doubt, this was one of the most painful scrapes I conducted myself having to crowd source username lists and search for vendor profiles individually by username, over 90% of which didn't exist on Dream or had been locked out by the corrupt staff member that was emptying vendor wallets at the time. Scrapes done, data extracted, phew! Oh, now Wall Street has decided to fuck everyone over, same process again. Shit, CGMC unexpectedly shut down! Which has continued in a cycle between DoS attacks over the course of the past year. The attacks have also been a priority which has prevented me from focusing on any market scrapes. Unfortunately this has left me in the position where I had to put funding into a bounty for some 6 month old (at time of shut down) CGMC data and am still currently missing Grey Market and Cryptonia data.
Sorry for the wall of text, I have put literal hundreds of hours into everything involved with Recon, whilst dealing with a handful of shit at the same time.
- --------------
I hope you like the platform and hopefully there aren't too many bugs remaining.
Enjoy, its time for me and /u/Paris to get some well-deserved sleep!
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