“It wasn’t ever seriously in doubt,” writes Kevin Poulsen at Wired, “but the FBI yesterday acknowledged that it secretly took control of Freedom Hosting last July, days before the servers of the largest provider of ultra-anonymous hosting were found to be serving custom malware designed to identify visitors.” Freedom Hosting was a provider of so-called “Tor hidden service” sites. Their addresses end in .onion, their geographic locations are masked behind layers of routing, and they can be reached only over the Tor anonymity network. [Threat Level]