Fills me with 1990 nostalgia of IRC being ddosed and no one being able to trade ccs or dcc them 0daywarez. Ah the sweet chaos and drama.
Fun times, glad to see people are still having fun :0)
The part about childporn though... That's pretty abhorrent. Nearly half. I just don't understand child porn. Why? I wonder if there are child porn "Hunters" that go after these scum. (by Hunters I mean White hats)
This very hack was undertaken by those "hunters" you're asking about. There was also Operation Darknet, an Anonymous-driven takedown of Lolita City (one of the worst child porn onion sites) and the original Freedom Hosting, back in 2011.
I mentioned this awhile back when a similar topic came up. Awhile back I wrote a small crawler/search engine for onion sites that didn't log visitor info, just the search terms. After about a week if running I went back to see what people were searching for and the majority of it was child porn. I was totally shocked. I had anticipated cracking and warez type stuff but not child porn, or at least not at the levels I was seeing. I shut down the app after that :(
I always assume when some vandal/vigilante takes down a service is that they're just interfering with an investigation to actually catch these criminals instead of scattering them to new unknown services. Reminds me when Assad, early in the Syrian war was using an insecure private email server to dictate all actions of the military and police, which some idiots discovered so decided to spam it with threats and he shut it down. Meanwhile the opposition (before they became foreign terrorists) had also broken into the server and were able to counter the military and police actions against them until they lost this golden intelligence source from the idiotic actions of vigilantes purporting to be on their side.
You can be pro-Syrian government and still see from that example how naive vigilantism can screw your cause more than it does your enemies. A different example would be some terrorist run Telegram channel full of Assad moles who lost their intel access because pro-Assad vigilantes successfully managed to guess a password and showed up to spam shutting the channel down.
I'd bet on this Tor host being an active sting operation considering the fate of the previous one, FreedomHosting.
Well in my world view and i could be totally wrong most of these were kids. There are A LOT of kids on the darknet. Looking for free steam keys was one of the other dominant searches i noticed.
That's a really dangerous game to play. In order to shut it down you have to seek out the sites that host it. Unless you have the protection of working for law enforcement, it's not worth the risk. Even if you do work for law enforcement, the psychological damage from seeing those acts can be very high.
Plenty of CP hunters. I'm hunting it right now on the Candid App, not like you need to hunt it there since it seems to get blatantly advertised by all the idiots. Funnily enough, I've told the CEO several times and she doesn't seem to care that it's happening, as many of these groups on Candid are still operational, and she's dead silent on the issue.
Bindu Reddy seems to be overwhelmed with the balance between half of the core product being effectively censorship, while the other half is about countering self censorship. Tough company to run.
And even to set up a machine learning model to prevent CP sharing, they would need to find a jurisdiction where it's legal to store the training data.
Because of the specific way that child porn is, you are basically admitting to breaking the law by reporting it. If you want to go after child abusers then you have to do it anonymously. And of course, in the U.S. you can't even use synthetic images to lure child abusers, because they can count as child porn in some cases.
The system discourages everyone from the public to law enforcement from doing anything productive about child sexual abuse.
> The system discourages everyone from the public to law enforcement from doing anything productive about child sexual abuse.
Using "synthetic images" (lolicon?) to lure "child abusers" (even before you have evidence of them doing crime) and conducting vigilante justice is surely going to be productive if you don't weight in false positives.
Do you think the means of current drug war in Philippines is justified by its goals? Want to extend this practice to CP?
That's quite an extrapolation. Murder is illegal, just because you're investigating something doesn't mean you are entitled to decide or enforce the law. That is what courts are for.
By synthetic images, I mean believable CG images of the illegal acts in question. I'm under the impression that paedophilic criminals are careful only to associate with people who are also committing the same crime. If you could gain the trust of traffickers and offender parents(parents are sometimes (often?) involved) through reasonable proof, then I imagine you could stop a lot more child sexual abuse and trafficking.
Law enforcement agencies often seem to rely on tools developed by private businesses to investigate certain types of crime. Developing useful niche tools for this task is not legally viable (unless, I suspect, if ordered by a court), so I wonder if LEAs are getting the tools they need.
One thing that forensic teams need is to identify locations. Things that help are databases of coca cola (etc) labels, and computer vision recognition of those product labels. (Or carpet patterns).
This works by programmers making a general purpose tool, and then law enforcement approach them with censored images to train the software.
Just go play some wargames and CTFs. Attacking systems intended by their developers to be attacked is perfectly acceptable. Attacking other people systems just because you think it is accepted by society without at least getting warrant from a judge is not.
It was intended to be a joke about false positives. Thought to put ":)" in the end but decided to keep HN emoticon-free. Jokes aside, I think vigilante justice always ends up being a witch-hunt dealing harm to lots of innocent people.
For example, sites to reach people in places where there is state sponsored censorship. Sure it's not legitimate as far as the country do the censorship is concerned but people/governments outside that country it may be considered defensible.
Security researchers (white hat and pen testers) often have onion sites to provide some street cred.
If you want to blog but want to stay anonymous for personal reasons.
Although with several of those I see no reason not to use a legitimate web host or VPS providers.
No but you can bet your money on that at least half of those sites are trading sites of one sort or another trading in illegal goods and services.
As for blogs out of 150 researchers/security professionals I know including myself no one is running an onion site for street cred if it's not anonymized there is no point having an onion address is not the same as running a hidden service.
> As for blogs out of 150 researchers/security professionals I know including myself no one is running an onion site for street cred if it's not anonymized there is no point having an onion address is not the same as running a hidden service.
I may know one or two but yeah, it's a stretch. I was trying too hard to think of examples.
There aren't many "legitimate" sites that operate as pure hidden service out there, out of all the studies I've been involved in I can't actually remember any of note.
With most hidden services mapping projects you'll see 50-60% being pure CP and the rest are various forums and trading sites that are about as far from being legitimate as possible while not hosting CP.
Buying drugs, zero-days, guns and w/e isn't a legitimate site, neither is any of the "hacking" boards that require you to submit a good data dump and a few defacements before being allowed in.
Same goes for exit nodes, I've been running traffic analysis on 2 nodes I have access too for the past 3 years, the vast majority of it isn't really legitimate.
People don't access their bank account, facebook, or their email, from my own personal research the vast majority of the traffic an exit node operator is going to see is going to be from automated tools primarily web vulnerability scanners, nearly half the traffic I see comes from SQLmap, Vega and pirated versions of Acunetix also make a large part of the bulk traffic.
Even traffic which is end to end encrypted I can more or less estimate that it is some sort of a vulnerability scan or an exploit, while I can't peek into SSL nor do I wish to attempt at time based demasking attacks against the TOR network when I have like 100-1000 sites being accessed randomly within a short time window on my exit node I can pretty much guarantee you that some one is running some sort of a vulnerability scan or an exploit.
I know that we would like to think that TOR is being used primarily for good but it doesn't, it doesn't mean that we should ban it for that anymore that we should ban email because 90% of email traffic is spam.
But we do need to admit that the percentage of legitimate traffic going over TOR and the percentage of legitimate hidden services at this time is more or less a rounding error.
A cynic will wonder; is that really any different from when the FBI raids the servers for a hosting company due to illegal content stored there and ends up leaving a ton of legal sites offline as a result?
Hidden service will operate as long as at least one introduction point is not censoring. The concept of semi-static nodes (guard nodes, introduction nodes etc.) is what makes Tor secure against voluntary deployment of black lists and many probabilistic attacks.
What we are talking about is a "sufficient number of tor nodes" blocking access to a service for everyone. If a majority can block some content by vote, it is a censorship.
> I had anticipated cracking and warez type stuff but not child porn
Your analysis is heavily biased by censorship, including self-censorship present in our society [1].
Cracking and warez type stuff is way more acceptable than CP. You can tell your friends you found some warez site that you like, but you can't tell your friends you found some CP site that you like.
Ban something else from the normal web and see it driven into the dark web. Just ban, for example, religion, and you will see everyone using your search engine to find religious literature on a much larger scale.
Btw it is non-consensual porn production which is harmful, not distribution. Distribution is a victimless crime that everyone stands up against due to copyright propaganda [2]. If it was a product of society becoming conscious, we will see everyone setting up neighborhood watch and other "grassroots" measures to prevent actual crime. In reality nobody gives a fuck until he watches the news and then the only thing they do is vote to setup CP, then porn, then warez censorship. After that it turns political censorship but nobody speaks up anymore. Just watch what happens in the UK.
You're being naive at best here. The state CP today is essentially pay for tourture using bitcoin and tor. If there's anything that's going to ruin the Internet it's not understanding that not everyone wants this nihilistic future forced on them.
I am challenging "pay for it with bitcoin" part here. Sure you can rephrase it as torture, sure someone pays for content access with bitcoins. But can you say that paying for actual production with Bitcoin over Tor is "the state CP today is"? If there is no evidence for this, as in at least some news article with made up statistics, then @rekord is not saying anything new.
Someone already quoted the Peter Sully case above, that's a concrete example.
Reporting about the issue also often stresses that in order to join or the cp communities you first need to provide material yourself. That makes it difficult for law enforcement, and it grows the community's content. So even if you think most cp is not 'bought', that's another concrete way how distribution encourages more production.
I'm not claiming you're wrong, but do you have any evidence that there are a substantial number of people paying for CP via Bitcoin over Tor sites? I think people tend to overestimate how sophisticated criminals are.
> The reason the majority of the group was able to avoid capture was in a small way due to the technology they were using (Tor), but primarily it was adherence to the security rules of the group.
I think you're overlooking a few key differences here (between CP and copyrighted content in general).
For the former, viewing or downloading it encourages the sick individuals making it to create more of it, since it brings them hits for their sites or (in some cases) literal money from paid purchases or subscriptions. In that case, consuming it any way encourages the more harmful production. It provides an incentive to create this stuff.
That's not true of standard copyrighted content. In those cases, distributing it (legally or otherwise) is not encouraging something illegal to be done since producing said content isn't illegal to begin with.
TLDR:
Distribution or downloading illegal content is bad, because it encourages people to do something illegal to provide said content.
Distributing or downloading legal content isn't bad because creating said content isn't bad to begin with.
> viewing or downloading it encourages the sick individuals making it to create more of it since it brings them
> hits for their sites
It is doubtful that hits for .onion sites are enough to encourage someone to produce CP. Download and seed more, maybe. But producing more just because someone downloads it?
> literal money from paid purchases or subscriptions
Subscriptions work mostly because of copyright. If content is available free of charge elsewhere, it is not profitable. Free of charge distribution of existing content will drive its price down. If distribution is banned, it will be cheaper to produce new content than download existing one.
> That's not true of standard copyrighted content. In those cases, distributing it (legally or otherwise) is not encouraging something illegal to be done since producing said content isn't illegal to begin with.
Standard copyrighted content (music etc.) is different because it is possible to support artists by buying tickets for live performances, so piracy may benefit them. It is not true for CP.
> It is doubtful that hits for .onion sites are enough to encourage someone to produce CP. Download and seed more, maybe. But producing more just because someone downloads it?
Attention and popularity is one hell of a drug. If I'm running a website (about pretty much anything) and I see my views go up significantly, then that encourages me to work on the site more. And the opposite is true if no one gives a toss.
Criminals and scumbags are just as human as the rest of us, and their motivations are often the same. They want popularity, friends, money, fame and power. Even at the possible expense of getting caught doing whatever illegal activity they're doing at the time (like those kids posting pictures of them taking drugs on Facebook or psychos boasting about their crimes on social media sites).
They'll stop doing that stuff when there's no pay off. When there's no audience left.
> They'll stop doing that stuff when there's no pay off. When there's no audience left.
They will likely stop running a website, but not abusing children. Child abuse was a thing even before photography existed, way before Tor and Internet emerged.
> Btw it is non-consensual porn production which is harmful, not distribution.
Victims of child sex crimes have ongoing trauma from the knowledge that images of their abuse and suffering continue to be used for the sexual gratification of others, without their consent.
While I think that's probably true to some degree, why don't we use this to justify banning any sort of media that people wish didn't exist about themselves? For example, secretly filmed or leaked sex videos or pictures containing adults would have a similar effect on the unwilling adult participant(s) but to my knowledge they are not illegal. Something being traumatic or embarrassing to someone is not generally sufficient reason to criminalize its possession.
This is a appears to be a different issue. People asking to have search results removed that relate to their previous publications or lawfully public information about themselves is not the same as victims of sexual abuse enduring ongoing trauma from the proliferation of images of their abuse, which were not made consensually or legally.
Most of these laws have provisions that explicitly exclude individuals or issues of public interest from being deleted. That people might still try to use the laws for such cases is then not a fault of the laws but rather due to eg companies like Google not being able to/not trying to/not wanting to invest enough to do due diligence.
As others have noted, not every country is as absolutist about free speech as America. I am happy to live in a country where revenge porn is often illegal, and cyber bullying has repercussions.
Actually those are illegal in lots of countries. Details differ but it ranges from it not being allowed to share any images, or at least not any sexual images, without permission, to this being covered under damage to reputation or privacy laws, to fairly new laws specifically against "revenge porn".
In many places such laws still don't exist/aren't used in this way, especially in more conservative/religious places often the victim is blamed. But that's not surprising given that there are still countries where rape victims have to marry their rapist, so what seems obviously wrong to us might not be as obviously wrong for everyone.
I don't think that the anguish that someone feels due to having photo/video of them distributed justifies censorship, and I think that there is even less justification in the case where the 'victim' (I put that in quotes, because they may not have been victimised by the act itself) consents to the distribution (if they are able to consent).
Granted that we probably have different standards for what we deem to be enough to censor people, I do not believe any curtailment of freedom of speech or expression ought to be allowed in a free society. This is one of the reasons I am an anarchist, actually. Laws that prevent me from sharing materials once I have received them I believe to be inherently unjust.
The act iteslf of child abuse is heinous, very few people deny this (though I believe there ought to be a good debate and scientific and philosophical and psychological investigation into the concept of 'age of consent', and what age that is), though I do not believe that to merely create a video of the act should be illegal, unless it has been demonstrably in order to cause psychological anguish, and I certainly do not believe that distribution of such video should be made illegal for those who have not contributed at all to the act.
I think that it is totally disjoint from privacy laws, and just as I believe copyright is unjust, so too I believe any kind of censorship is unjust. Child abuse may be illegalised, so too may cracking into a bank account, so too may installing secret cameras in someone's home - but the distribution of the materials obtained therein, unless demonstrably causing harm (and even this is a dubious concept, though worthy of debate as if it justifies censorship) should not be illegalised, at least in my opinion.
Not only does it set a dangerous precedent that censorship is in fact OK but it also causes people to police what they say for fear of censorship, and furthermore influences truly stupid laws such as those criminalising drawn pornography of fictional characters who appear to be under the age of 18. Such a law as is present in the US, UK and many other countries, would have no basis at all if it were not for the fact that people think censorship is OK at any level.
And if you do not think these are bad things, observe that in Canada a man was let off a criminal conviction which would have given him jail time. His crime? Importing a sex doll torso from Japan, which appeared to represent one of a personage under the age of 18.
When people go to prison for having certain drawings or sex dolls, there is a problem with society.
> though I believe there ought to be a good debate and scientific and philosophical and psychological investigation into the concept of 'age of consent', and what age that is
All arbitrary ages and numbers should be questioned. What I like about arbitrary numbers and ages is that copyright, patents and "intellectual property" have never been defined without arbitrary ages as it would make an idea of wheel and lightbulb someone's "property". So even if someone believes property is there due to "natural laws", intellectual property is either not a property or not natural, just a privilege and a protectionist measure.
Tough question for anarchists is what age a child is not a child anymore. It is not only the "age of consent", but the age when someone is not considered to be his parents property anymore. What if this age is 0? Is there any reason it is not exactly 0?
I completely agree. One common thread of argument re the age at which one is not one's parent's property is that it's adulthood, the age at which someone can be reasonably expected to make informed and rational decisions for oneself, but arguably even by that (arbitrary) standard 14 and 15 year olds may qualify for example.
An often used justification is that parents usually know what's best for children - to eat vegetables rather than chocolate, to do homework rather than play games all day, to be active rather than sedentary etc. yet again it's an arbitrary measure, and there are many examples where parents do not know better than the children.
Ultimately these questions need decision either at the state level or at the familial level or at some other level of relationship between a parent and child. I don't know what the answers are, but we should most certainly not deny discussion of them.
Intellecutal property is a horrible beast, the idea that because ideas have value by virtue of having them first is silly, and is actually a by-product of the capitalist system where the first entrant into a particular market status is valued. What's worse is the fact that someone can say "I had this idea first therefore I can stop you from doing things with that idea, even if you came up with it independently of me".
The problem is that there is nobody to listen to you. Democracy does not want these arguments (preferring instead silly arguments about tax) and leaders do not want to hear it anyway (for risk of losing power). Even within philosophy, daring and controversial ideas are shunned (on the concept of property, capitalism, copyright, age of consent).
I am not denying it. But even for distribution the criminal is someone who produces, not someone who distributes or downloads. That is why it is impossible to prosecute someone for storing drugs or CP for personal use, reading or distributing leaked documents, and things like that.
Ban on distribution is a half measure that is justified by the lack of power to ban actual production as it usually takes places in some other part of the world. However, it should be reevaluated from time to time and taken down as soon as possible.
I honestly believe that no one in this debate, not even those claiming to be their lawyers has there interests at heart.
People typing on I-phones assembled with child-labour, in sneakers glued together by child-labour, foaming at perverts watching the security footage of the phone&shoe-factory.
Its the good old power-triangle of the proto-state crafted from instincts rearing its ugly head.
Men hate pedophiles.
Men love woman.
Woman sanction pedophile existence as religion.
Religion promises to uphold basic contracts.
To build a 3-pillar state from nothing but brain deformations. Is the one you consented on in your constitution, not good enough, anymore?
What a atrocity crafted from electric charged pudding. What disgusting deformed figures in each pillar playing the weakest for their own profit in each pillar.
Nothing in this debate is self-evident, but the self-interest of every party. Thought crimes and social justice warriors, trying to erect a new church, men trying to bring back the likes of the old catholic church, where the non-compliant weak and widdows would be fed to the third pillar.
And maybe even worser, lazy monks getting what they desire, not being forced to work, not being under constant surveillance by the all watching eye of the algorithms watching social media.
I refuse to be part of anything, that your instincts crave. I choose my own middle ground.
In this in Zuckerberg and Google i trust more, then in your and my own guts.
So if someone were to go around kidnapping people's kids and torturing and murdering them, and film it, you think it should be totally legal and completely victimless for people to distribute those videos? I think you've lost touch with morality and sense.
> you think it should be totally legal and completely victimless for people to distribute those videos?
It should be totally legal to distribute those videos, especially if it helps identifying the kidnapper. I think the case you presented here is even easier as those videos will not damage reputation of someone murdered, it is even more obvious it is not a mistake of murder victim than in a case of rape.
By the way, isn't it already legal? Parts of such videos (video footage of murderers performing their crimes and other evidence archives) were even put on TV.
No snuff films are not legal and trying to scew that as crime scene evidence or documentary evidence to try and find the culprit is a logical leap so far fetched that I doubt your sincerity in having a rational discussion on this issue.
>Distribution [of child porn] is a victimless crime that everyone stands up against due to copyright propaganda .
That's foolish reasoning. The distribution network is what incentives the creation of child porn. People are making it and putting it up on the net so it can be distributed. Child porn is a multi billion dollar a year business. Also feeding into pedophilic fantasies, which is what child porn does, will further act as an incentive for the creation of child porn.
> The distribution network is what incentives the creation of child porn.
It is true only for the part of the distribution network with backwards money channel. It is paying for downloading which incentives the creation of child porn, not downloading itself or even uploading.
> Also feeding into pedophilic fantasies, which is what child porn does, will further act as an incentive for the creation of child porn.
That's ridiculous you can't demand citations for basic and obvious points. What you need research to tell you that child porn is made by pedophiles and encouraging pedophilic fantasies means more child porn?
> What you need research to tell you that child porn is made by pedophiles and encouraging pedophilic fantasies means more child porn?
I need some evidence that distribution of child porn can turn people child abusers. Until proven otherwise I tend to believe that it is impossible. Some people believe you can turn people gay by propaganda: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_gay_propaganda_law
Who do you think consumes child porn? Pedophiles. Maybe you need evidence for that, but in the ordinary course of evaluation most people would agree that child porn is consumed by pedophiles.
Gay pron is viewed largely by gay men to fulfil homosexual fantasies. If someone wanted to not engage in homosexual activity, viewing a ton of gay porn is obviously a bad strategy to anyone but the willfully ignorant. Fortunately, homosexual activity is between consenting adults and does not involve torturing children. Pedophilic activity is very different.
(Also, the downvoting shows that you're wrong, you can't come up with a reasonable argument so you try and punish dissent)
> Who do you think consumes child porn? Pedophiles.
Right, so distributing child porn will not make more pedophiles. Those who watch it already are.
> If someone wanted to not engage in homosexual activity, viewing a ton of gay porn is obviously a bad strategy to anyone but the willfully ignorant.
It is strange to watch gay porn if you don't like it, but how is it a "bad strategy"? Do you believe it has some strategic value, as in it will have long-term consequences?
> Fortunately, homosexual activity is between consenting adults and does not involve torturing children.
It is not always the case. Male can be raped my male and women can be raped by woman. Further, woman can be raped by man, but it does not justify banning straight porn.
> (Also, the downvoting shows that you're wrong, you can't come up with a reasonable argument so you try and punish dissent)
I am not sure how voting on HN works, its rules are not public, but AFAIK I can't downvote replies to my posts from the same account, at least for some time. 1 hour passed, I still have only the option to upvote your post and have not voted at all.
Again, source of the crime is recording without consent.
You don't need separate law to prosecute revenge porn uploads. It should not matter if you recorded and uploaded porn with your girlfriend or if you recorded and uploaded a conversation you had with her at the dinner table. Both are privacy violation.
> Btw it is non-consensual porn production which is harmful, not distribution. Distribution is a victimless crime that everyone stands up against due to copyright propaganda
Unrestricted distribution allows entities to profit from the production of child porn. Therefore, distribution incentivises harm in the form of new content with non-consensual victims.
> Unrestricted distribution allows entities to profit
It is the other way round. Restricted distribution drives up the price and allows entities to profit. That is how copyright and pretty much any other monopoly works.
Just try to profit from free (libre) software distribution. You can set whatever price you want and try to sell it, like, for example, https://conversations.im/ does, but you will get no profit besides what you get from selling additional services and making donations more convenient.
Prosecuting the consumers (vs. the producers) of child pornography is an attempt to increase the risks of obtaining it, hopefully disincentivizing demand. This line of thinking and policy is akin to prosecuting customers (as opposed to the providers) of prostitution, or prosecuting users (as opposed to makers and sellers) of controlled drugs.
We can debate about how effective or ineffective or smart or misguided this is, but that's where it comes from, and is a frequent tactic to split the customerbase into two parts: the ones who may have been interested when the risks were lower and are now dissuaded, and those who are not deterred by the risks and choose to pursue it anyway.
Society can then point to the fact that everyone was given this choice to paint the latter group as not only morally corrupt, but also risk-taking, thoughtless, irresponsible, or simply people who "had it coming". This is a common way of providing for a permanent underclass in ways that promotes good societal mores, doesn't discriminate along ethnic lines, and doesn't disproportionately punish the economic poor.
Nice to see it put in such a clear way. Nothing to add, just hope more people see the goals of the laws and evaluate them by what they actually achieve.
Probably you are talking about HN comments, not the source comments.
I am presenting unpopular opinion here (score for my comment [0] goes wildly from -4 to +4) and you probably believe I am doing it because I am consumer. What actually make me questioning current state of laws is this simple experiment: can you run an FTP site (or Syncthing folder, or automated seedbox) at home where everyone on the Internet is free to upload and download anything and leave it unattended? What kind of laws prevent you from doing it?
The only laws are pretty much the copyright laws and CP distribution laws. As for copyright you at least have an option to setup DMCA abuse address, but you still have to actually process requests. As for CP laws things are worse: you will get your house raided without a warning.
These things damage net neutrality and make content distribution the privilege of companies which manage to make responsibility non-personal and keep the damage taken from data center raids under control.
There are enough people questioning copyright and at least we begin to understand that copyright is not some sort of "natural law", but a protectionist policy. Discussions on CP are pretty much taboo in our society. People mess up terms (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13567776) and believe witch-hunt is justified (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13568255). My point is that ban on CP distribution is, like copyright, is not the result of distribution being a crime by itself (even in current state it is a "victimless crime"). It should be made clear that it is only justified as long as it harms producers (https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=13567612). If it does not, then the law should be abolished, similarly to how we had to abolish marijuana possession and distribution laws.
Refusing to defend what one regards as an odious law is not the same as consuming the material yourself. I am also against such laws, yet I do not consume the content myself.
Please do not misrepresent or mischaracterise people in order to dismiss their point, it is used to silence debate (such as by calling people 'perverts' because the watch porn to discredit them). If you have an argument, post it - but please do not silence debate. I'm sorry if it wasn't your intention to do this, but it's a recurring theme to call people certain words or names in order to silence them nowadays.
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[ 6.0 ms ] story [ 211 ms ] threadFun times, glad to see people are still having fun :0)
The part about childporn though... That's pretty abhorrent. Nearly half. I just don't understand child porn. Why? I wonder if there are child porn "Hunters" that go after these scum. (by Hunters I mean White hats)
http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/events/operation-darknet
How persuasive is your example depends on which side the reader takes in this war. (I don't take either)
I'd bet on this Tor host being an active sting operation considering the fate of the previous one, FreedomHosting.
And even to set up a machine learning model to prevent CP sharing, they would need to find a jurisdiction where it's legal to store the training data.
You make it sound like they are hunting for porn. Child porn producer, child porn distributor, rapist and pedophile are all different things.
The system discourages everyone from the public to law enforcement from doing anything productive about child sexual abuse.
Using "synthetic images" (lolicon?) to lure "child abusers" (even before you have evidence of them doing crime) and conducting vigilante justice is surely going to be productive if you don't weight in false positives.
Do you think the means of current drug war in Philippines is justified by its goals? Want to extend this practice to CP?
By synthetic images, I mean believable CG images of the illegal acts in question. I'm under the impression that paedophilic criminals are careful only to associate with people who are also committing the same crime. If you could gain the trust of traffickers and offender parents(parents are sometimes (often?) involved) through reasonable proof, then I imagine you could stop a lot more child sexual abuse and trafficking.
It does? Last I heard, law enforcement shut down this stuff regularly, and even have teams dedicated to it.
One thing that forensic teams need is to identify locations. Things that help are databases of coca cola (etc) labels, and computer vision recognition of those product labels. (Or carpet patterns).
This works by programmers making a general purpose tool, and then law enforcement approach them with censored images to train the software.
If you are looking to build a skillset these are the only acceptable targets in my opinion.
You are already mistaken, I don't.
Already mentioned, just repeating: http://www.euronews.com/2016/10/21/does-killing-drug-dealers... What if it is not children, but "just" drug addicts. Do you believe you are free to harm drug dealers?
For example, sites to reach people in places where there is state sponsored censorship. Sure it's not legitimate as far as the country do the censorship is concerned but people/governments outside that country it may be considered defensible.
Security researchers (white hat and pen testers) often have onion sites to provide some street cred.
If you want to blog but want to stay anonymous for personal reasons.
Although with several of those I see no reason not to use a legitimate web host or VPS providers.
As for blogs out of 150 researchers/security professionals I know including myself no one is running an onion site for street cred if it's not anonymized there is no point having an onion address is not the same as running a hidden service.
I may know one or two but yeah, it's a stretch. I was trying too hard to think of examples.
With most hidden services mapping projects you'll see 50-60% being pure CP and the rest are various forums and trading sites that are about as far from being legitimate as possible while not hosting CP. Buying drugs, zero-days, guns and w/e isn't a legitimate site, neither is any of the "hacking" boards that require you to submit a good data dump and a few defacements before being allowed in.
Same goes for exit nodes, I've been running traffic analysis on 2 nodes I have access too for the past 3 years, the vast majority of it isn't really legitimate. People don't access their bank account, facebook, or their email, from my own personal research the vast majority of the traffic an exit node operator is going to see is going to be from automated tools primarily web vulnerability scanners, nearly half the traffic I see comes from SQLmap, Vega and pirated versions of Acunetix also make a large part of the bulk traffic.
Even traffic which is end to end encrypted I can more or less estimate that it is some sort of a vulnerability scan or an exploit, while I can't peek into SSL nor do I wish to attempt at time based demasking attacks against the TOR network when I have like 100-1000 sites being accessed randomly within a short time window on my exit node I can pretty much guarantee you that some one is running some sort of a vulnerability scan or an exploit.
I know that we would like to think that TOR is being used primarily for good but it doesn't, it doesn't mean that we should ban it for that anymore that we should ban email because 90% of email traffic is spam. But we do need to admit that the percentage of legitimate traffic going over TOR and the percentage of legitimate hidden services at this time is more or less a rounding error.
[1] https://www.torproject.org/docs/hidden-services.html.en
Your analysis is heavily biased by censorship, including self-censorship present in our society [1].
Cracking and warez type stuff is way more acceptable than CP. You can tell your friends you found some warez site that you like, but you can't tell your friends you found some CP site that you like.
Ban something else from the normal web and see it driven into the dark web. Just ban, for example, religion, and you will see everyone using your search engine to find religious literature on a much larger scale.
Btw it is non-consensual porn production which is harmful, not distribution. Distribution is a victimless crime that everyone stands up against due to copyright propaganda [2]. If it was a product of society becoming conscious, we will see everyone setting up neighborhood watch and other "grassroots" measures to prevent actual crime. In reality nobody gives a fuck until he watches the news and then the only thing they do is vote to setup CP, then porn, then warez censorship. After that it turns political censorship but nobody speaks up anymore. Just watch what happens in the UK.
[1] http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html
[2] https://torrentfreak.com/the-copyright-lobby-absolutely-love...
This is actually the first time I hear about things like that. Any reference?
Reporting about the issue also often stresses that in order to join or the cp communities you first need to provide material yourself. That makes it difficult for law enforcement, and it grows the community's content. So even if you think most cp is not 'bought', that's another concrete way how distribution encourages more production.
http://grugq.github.io/blog/2013/12/01/yardbirds-effective-u...
Here is another case of literal pay-per-view on the deep web:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Scully
Good thing it does not justify banning Tor:
> The reason the majority of the group was able to avoid capture was in a small way due to the technology they were using (Tor), but primarily it was adherence to the security rules of the group.
For the former, viewing or downloading it encourages the sick individuals making it to create more of it, since it brings them hits for their sites or (in some cases) literal money from paid purchases or subscriptions. In that case, consuming it any way encourages the more harmful production. It provides an incentive to create this stuff.
That's not true of standard copyrighted content. In those cases, distributing it (legally or otherwise) is not encouraging something illegal to be done since producing said content isn't illegal to begin with.
TLDR:
Distribution or downloading illegal content is bad, because it encourages people to do something illegal to provide said content.
Distributing or downloading legal content isn't bad because creating said content isn't bad to begin with.
It is doubtful that hits for .onion sites are enough to encourage someone to produce CP. Download and seed more, maybe. But producing more just because someone downloads it?
> literal money from paid purchases or subscriptions
Subscriptions work mostly because of copyright. If content is available free of charge elsewhere, it is not profitable. Free of charge distribution of existing content will drive its price down. If distribution is banned, it will be cheaper to produce new content than download existing one.
> That's not true of standard copyrighted content. In those cases, distributing it (legally or otherwise) is not encouraging something illegal to be done since producing said content isn't illegal to begin with.
Standard copyrighted content (music etc.) is different because it is possible to support artists by buying tickets for live performances, so piracy may benefit them. It is not true for CP.
Attention and popularity is one hell of a drug. If I'm running a website (about pretty much anything) and I see my views go up significantly, then that encourages me to work on the site more. And the opposite is true if no one gives a toss.
Criminals and scumbags are just as human as the rest of us, and their motivations are often the same. They want popularity, friends, money, fame and power. Even at the possible expense of getting caught doing whatever illegal activity they're doing at the time (like those kids posting pictures of them taking drugs on Facebook or psychos boasting about their crimes on social media sites).
They'll stop doing that stuff when there's no pay off. When there's no audience left.
Taking drugs is not a crime.
Making possession illegal is a measure to reduce consumption and harm producers. It introduces "victimless crime" that does not harm others per se.
They will likely stop running a website, but not abusing children. Child abuse was a thing even before photography existed, way before Tor and Internet emerged.
Victims of child sex crimes have ongoing trauma from the knowledge that images of their abuse and suffering continue to be used for the sexual gratification of others, without their consent.
We do: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_be_forgotten
Some recent news on this: http://www.imdb.com/news/ni60685881/
http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-27423527
http://m.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/jul/11/politicians-cr...
http://fortune.com/2015/08/24/twitter-right-to-be-forgotten/
http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/googles-right-be-forgotten-70000-po...
A bit of a false equivalency.
I absolutely think we should. Secretly filmed or leaked sex videos are pretty messed up.
In many places such laws still don't exist/aren't used in this way, especially in more conservative/religious places often the victim is blamed. But that's not surprising given that there are still countries where rape victims have to marry their rapist, so what seems obviously wrong to us might not be as obviously wrong for everyone.
Granted that we probably have different standards for what we deem to be enough to censor people, I do not believe any curtailment of freedom of speech or expression ought to be allowed in a free society. This is one of the reasons I am an anarchist, actually. Laws that prevent me from sharing materials once I have received them I believe to be inherently unjust.
The act iteslf of child abuse is heinous, very few people deny this (though I believe there ought to be a good debate and scientific and philosophical and psychological investigation into the concept of 'age of consent', and what age that is), though I do not believe that to merely create a video of the act should be illegal, unless it has been demonstrably in order to cause psychological anguish, and I certainly do not believe that distribution of such video should be made illegal for those who have not contributed at all to the act.
I think that it is totally disjoint from privacy laws, and just as I believe copyright is unjust, so too I believe any kind of censorship is unjust. Child abuse may be illegalised, so too may cracking into a bank account, so too may installing secret cameras in someone's home - but the distribution of the materials obtained therein, unless demonstrably causing harm (and even this is a dubious concept, though worthy of debate as if it justifies censorship) should not be illegalised, at least in my opinion.
Not only does it set a dangerous precedent that censorship is in fact OK but it also causes people to police what they say for fear of censorship, and furthermore influences truly stupid laws such as those criminalising drawn pornography of fictional characters who appear to be under the age of 18. Such a law as is present in the US, UK and many other countries, would have no basis at all if it were not for the fact that people think censorship is OK at any level.
And if you do not think these are bad things, observe that in Canada a man was let off a criminal conviction which would have given him jail time. His crime? Importing a sex doll torso from Japan, which appeared to represent one of a personage under the age of 18.
When people go to prison for having certain drawings or sex dolls, there is a problem with society.
All arbitrary ages and numbers should be questioned. What I like about arbitrary numbers and ages is that copyright, patents and "intellectual property" have never been defined without arbitrary ages as it would make an idea of wheel and lightbulb someone's "property". So even if someone believes property is there due to "natural laws", intellectual property is either not a property or not natural, just a privilege and a protectionist measure.
Tough question for anarchists is what age a child is not a child anymore. It is not only the "age of consent", but the age when someone is not considered to be his parents property anymore. What if this age is 0? Is there any reason it is not exactly 0?
An often used justification is that parents usually know what's best for children - to eat vegetables rather than chocolate, to do homework rather than play games all day, to be active rather than sedentary etc. yet again it's an arbitrary measure, and there are many examples where parents do not know better than the children.
Ultimately these questions need decision either at the state level or at the familial level or at some other level of relationship between a parent and child. I don't know what the answers are, but we should most certainly not deny discussion of them.
Intellecutal property is a horrible beast, the idea that because ideas have value by virtue of having them first is silly, and is actually a by-product of the capitalist system where the first entrant into a particular market status is valued. What's worse is the fact that someone can say "I had this idea first therefore I can stop you from doing things with that idea, even if you came up with it independently of me".
The problem is that there is nobody to listen to you. Democracy does not want these arguments (preferring instead silly arguments about tax) and leaders do not want to hear it anyway (for risk of losing power). Even within philosophy, daring and controversial ideas are shunned (on the concept of property, capitalism, copyright, age of consent).
It's unfortunate.
Ban on distribution is a half measure that is justified by the lack of power to ban actual production as it usually takes places in some other part of the world. However, it should be reevaluated from time to time and taken down as soon as possible.
It is means justified by the goals, but not the crime by itself.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13567284
Its the good old power-triangle of the proto-state crafted from instincts rearing its ugly head. Men hate pedophiles. Men love woman. Woman sanction pedophile existence as religion. Religion promises to uphold basic contracts.
To build a 3-pillar state from nothing but brain deformations. Is the one you consented on in your constitution, not good enough, anymore?
What a atrocity crafted from electric charged pudding. What disgusting deformed figures in each pillar playing the weakest for their own profit in each pillar.
Nothing in this debate is self-evident, but the self-interest of every party. Thought crimes and social justice warriors, trying to erect a new church, men trying to bring back the likes of the old catholic church, where the non-compliant weak and widdows would be fed to the third pillar. And maybe even worser, lazy monks getting what they desire, not being forced to work, not being under constant surveillance by the all watching eye of the algorithms watching social media.
I refuse to be part of anything, that your instincts crave. I choose my own middle ground. In this in Zuckerberg and Google i trust more, then in your and my own guts.
I disagree. Production would be pointless without a way to distribute it.
This fact does not make distribution a crime.
For example, environment harmful production may be a crime, but it is not consumers or distributors who are criminals.
It should be totally legal to distribute those videos, especially if it helps identifying the kidnapper. I think the case you presented here is even easier as those videos will not damage reputation of someone murdered, it is even more obvious it is not a mistake of murder victim than in a case of rape.
By the way, isn't it already legal? Parts of such videos (video footage of murderers performing their crimes and other evidence archives) were even put on TV.
Well I have no good source for this, lots of people believe it is legal here for example: https://www.quora.com/Why-isnt-footage-of-9-11-illegal-to-di...
Edit: how can I have good source anyway if it appears to be legal? There is no law saying "you can distribute snuff video".
That's foolish reasoning. The distribution network is what incentives the creation of child porn. People are making it and putting it up on the net so it can be distributed. Child porn is a multi billion dollar a year business. Also feeding into pedophilic fantasies, which is what child porn does, will further act as an incentive for the creation of child porn.
It is true only for the part of the distribution network with backwards money channel. It is paying for downloading which incentives the creation of child porn, not downloading itself or even uploading.
> Also feeding into pedophilic fantasies, which is what child porn does, will further act as an incentive for the creation of child porn.
Citation needed
I need some evidence that distribution of child porn can turn people child abusers. Until proven otherwise I tend to believe that it is impossible. Some people believe you can turn people gay by propaganda: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_gay_propaganda_law
Gay pron is viewed largely by gay men to fulfil homosexual fantasies. If someone wanted to not engage in homosexual activity, viewing a ton of gay porn is obviously a bad strategy to anyone but the willfully ignorant. Fortunately, homosexual activity is between consenting adults and does not involve torturing children. Pedophilic activity is very different.
(Also, the downvoting shows that you're wrong, you can't come up with a reasonable argument so you try and punish dissent)
Right, so distributing child porn will not make more pedophiles. Those who watch it already are.
> If someone wanted to not engage in homosexual activity, viewing a ton of gay porn is obviously a bad strategy to anyone but the willfully ignorant.
It is strange to watch gay porn if you don't like it, but how is it a "bad strategy"? Do you believe it has some strategic value, as in it will have long-term consequences?
> Fortunately, homosexual activity is between consenting adults and does not involve torturing children.
It is not always the case. Male can be raped my male and women can be raped by woman. Further, woman can be raped by man, but it does not justify banning straight porn.
> (Also, the downvoting shows that you're wrong, you can't come up with a reasonable argument so you try and punish dissent)
I am not sure how voting on HN works, its rules are not public, but AFAIK I can't downvote replies to my posts from the same account, at least for some time. 1 hour passed, I still have only the option to upvote your post and have not voted at all.
You don't need separate law to prosecute revenge porn uploads. It should not matter if you recorded and uploaded porn with your girlfriend or if you recorded and uploaded a conversation you had with her at the dinner table. Both are privacy violation.
(2) Once its uploaded, even if you do go to jail for doing so, it will continue to exist and be replicated on the internet.
Unrestricted distribution allows entities to profit from the production of child porn. Therefore, distribution incentivises harm in the form of new content with non-consensual victims.
It is the other way round. Restricted distribution drives up the price and allows entities to profit. That is how copyright and pretty much any other monopoly works.
Just try to profit from free (libre) software distribution. You can set whatever price you want and try to sell it, like, for example, https://conversations.im/ does, but you will get no profit besides what you get from selling additional services and making donations more convenient.
We can debate about how effective or ineffective or smart or misguided this is, but that's where it comes from, and is a frequent tactic to split the customerbase into two parts: the ones who may have been interested when the risks were lower and are now dissuaded, and those who are not deterred by the risks and choose to pursue it anyway.
Society can then point to the fact that everyone was given this choice to paint the latter group as not only morally corrupt, but also risk-taking, thoughtless, irresponsible, or simply people who "had it coming". This is a common way of providing for a permanent underclass in ways that promotes good societal mores, doesn't discriminate along ethnic lines, and doesn't disproportionately punish the economic poor.
I am presenting unpopular opinion here (score for my comment [0] goes wildly from -4 to +4) and you probably believe I am doing it because I am consumer. What actually make me questioning current state of laws is this simple experiment: can you run an FTP site (or Syncthing folder, or automated seedbox) at home where everyone on the Internet is free to upload and download anything and leave it unattended? What kind of laws prevent you from doing it?
The only laws are pretty much the copyright laws and CP distribution laws. As for copyright you at least have an option to setup DMCA abuse address, but you still have to actually process requests. As for CP laws things are worse: you will get your house raided without a warning.
These things damage net neutrality and make content distribution the privilege of companies which manage to make responsibility non-personal and keep the damage taken from data center raids under control.
There are enough people questioning copyright and at least we begin to understand that copyright is not some sort of "natural law", but a protectionist policy. Discussions on CP are pretty much taboo in our society. People mess up terms (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13567776) and believe witch-hunt is justified (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13568255). My point is that ban on CP distribution is, like copyright, is not the result of distribution being a crime by itself (even in current state it is a "victimless crime"). It should be made clear that it is only justified as long as it harms producers (https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=13567612). If it does not, then the law should be abolished, similarly to how we had to abolish marijuana possession and distribution laws.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13567284
Please do not misrepresent or mischaracterise people in order to dismiss their point, it is used to silence debate (such as by calling people 'perverts' because the watch porn to discredit them). If you have an argument, post it - but please do not silence debate. I'm sorry if it wasn't your intention to do this, but it's a recurring theme to call people certain words or names in order to silence them nowadays.