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 StartX, the Stanford-funded and affiliated incubator, just held its demo day for the Fall 2014 batch of startups at its headquarters in Palo Alto. The companies presenting ran the gamut from bitcoin and cybersecurity to open source machine learning. Read More

The parents of the man convicted of running online narcotics emporium Silk Road spoke out just a day before his conviction about their frustration with the way the trial was proceeding.

Ross Ulbricht, 30, was convicted on Wednesday of all seven counts including trafficking drugs on the internet, narcotics-trafficking conspiracy, running a continuing criminal enterprise, computer-hacking conspiracy, and money-laundering conspiracy.

His mom, Lyn Ulbricht, spoke to CNN Money on Tuesday maintaining her son's innocence. "The most frustrating thing is that evidence that is favorable to Ross is being suppressed," she told CNN. "This came out in the cross examination for the first witness."

The evidence Lyn refers to emerged during defense attorney Joshua Dratel's cross-examination of DHS agent Jared Der-Yeghiayan. That agent investigated Silk Road for two years and admitted at the end of the trial's first week that, Mark Karpeles, founder of the now-defunct Bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox, was the DHS' main suspect only a month and a half before Ulbricht's arrest.

Der-Yeghiayan confirmed that at one point he sought a warrant to search Karpeles’ Gmail account based on “probable cause” that the Mt. Gox owner had secretly administered the Silk Road in a bid to boost the price of bitcoin, Wired reported. In an affidavit, Der-Yeghiayan also mentioned an interview conducted between Forbes' Andy Greenberg and Dread Pirate Roberts in 2013 "that sounded very much like Karpeles."

The defense suffered a major blow when, the following week, Judge Katherine Forrest dismissed this part of the Der-Yeghiayan's testimony as "hearsay" and instructed the jury to disregard any mention Der-Yeghiayan had made of Mark Karpeles during the cross-examination.

"He never came across Ross' name but did ... pinpoint another name which he said was Mark Karpeles," Lyn continued, in the CNN Money interview. "He was closing in on Karpeles when another DHS agency [inadvertently] tipped off Karpeles."

The stricken testimony incriminating Karpeles was not the only part of the trial Ulbricht's family and supporters found frustrating.

"We believe there were significant errors at trial, including the limiting of defense cross-examination, the preclusion of defense experts, and the exclusion of certain defense evidence in the form of documents and other exhibits," Ulbricht's lawyer, defense attorney Joshua Dratel, said in an emailed statement to Business Insider.

Ulbricht's supporters have alleged that the case could have a huge impact on internet freedom, as it is one of the first times an individual has been charged for building a website. 

Ulbricht was arrested by the FBI at a public library in San Francisco in October 2013. After many delays, his trial began in Manhattan on Jan. 13.  

Prosecutors accused Ulbricht of being Dread Pirate Roberts (a reference to the cult movie "The Princess Bride"), the founder and operator of the Silk Road website. Ulbricht pleaded not guilty to every charge.

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NOW WATCH: Here's the incredible story behind the guy who was just convicted for creating the 'eBay for drugs'

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My dealer was 15 minutes late.

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TIME is up for the Dread Pirate Roberts. Ross Ulbricht, the 30-year-old Texan physics graduate accused of setting up the first major drugs marketplace on the web, the Silk Road, has been found guilty of all seven drugs-trafficking charges in a Manhattan court room today. And so comes to a close one of the first great criminal cases in this new era of internet-enabled crime.Mr Ulbricht’s crime was the sort of thing that in other industries would have made him a millionaire. He saw the potential of combining Tor, a technology devised by the US Naval Laboratory which makes it possible to host a website without revealing where the servers are, with Bitcoin, a currency that can be exchanged online without relying on banks. The website he created, the Silk Road, essentially functioned like an Amazon for illegal drugs. By using encryption and Bitcoin, buyers and sellers could exchange information without ever revealing to each other or to the rest of the internet their real identities.The only surprising thing about Mr Ulbricht’s conviction is that it came so quickly. The evidence assembled by the US government was so overwhelming that even before the trial began, it seemed likely they had caught their man. In the warrant produced for his arrest, the FBI showed that Mr Ulbricht’s movements and personal life matched up cleanly with information acquired from the Silk Road’s ...