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Gnutella's Wall Of Shame?
Sleen pointed us to a ZD story about ZeroPaid.com's Wall of Shame.
Its pretty amusing actually: since gnutella is truly distributed, you know the IP of people who download things from you. ZeroPaid is posting the IPs of people who try to download their faked kiddie porn. This is an obvious side effect of using a totally distributed application to distribute information: the information can be distributed like wildfire, but the privacy concerns are significant.
Actually, if you want this subject in some pretty serious depth, try Lolita , by Vladimir Nabokov. It's a really good book, but not a happy one.
Public shaming is GREAT! It's about a community. It's about poeple.
I am an advocate of privacy! I'm an advocate that the government does not have the right to strip me of that privacy.
And I also know that when I make a tcp connection to a server, that server KNOWS my IP address, and the time the connection was up for, and what was transferred over it, and I have no legal contract with that server stating what can and can't be done with that information. In other words, I have *NO* expectation of privacy.
Just like cellular phones. You have NO expectation of privacy on an analog cellular phone... oh.. unless you live in the US, where cellular scanners are illegal.
Up here, in Canada, you have no reasonable expectation of privacy when using the public airwaves. Period.
its safe to say there are exceptions to every rule and everyone has a little something to hide, insurance company's are looking out for themselves. The internet will do the same, its an evolving entity and will always find a way to survive, the least we can do is help it along and embrace things that make it a little more pleasant to interact with, and if publishing people's IP's accordingly (as to what they download) then so be it.
its nice to a see a coherent thought out post, unlike some that have responded, thanks for your time to respond with an intelligent post (sometimes they are hard to come by!)
Atticka
No sig here...
this is not a troll. Okay? You may think it is a stupid question but it is not a troll. "Please note that I in no way support child porn. I am just bringing up an interesting question." I thought that was interesting as well btw but keep this in mind: Even though those under 18 can legally have sex they cannot view porn legally. I am not sure about the *creation* of porn though.
Host Name: <hemos.slashdot.org> IP Address: <192.168.1.53>
Host Name: <cmdrtaco.slashdot.org> IP Address: <192.168.1.83>
Host Name: <cowboyneal.slashdot.org> IP Address: <192.168.1.82>
Host Name: <emmet.slashdot.org> IP Address: <192.168.1.24>
Host Name: <xyzzy.slashdot.org> IP Address: <192.168.1.153>
Host Name: <plugh.slashdot.org> IP Address: <192.168.1.29>
(before anyone goes ballistic, it's a joke. Really! Look it up!)
Someone should set up a communist Wall of Shame with Mao jpgs so I can make sure he never gets a security clearance again.
'Ye Old FBI' could not do anything. As these pictures do not contain porn then the law has not been broken. What if someone wanted a picture of a school girl for a web site and downloaded schoolgirl.jpg? They would be branded as a 'Pedo'. Thats Libel. Under UK law the ISP (who published the page) would be held responsible. Even downloading a picture with an incriminating name is not illegal, as it just tells them they have been 'busted'.
Monitoring the people who do this is no different from publishing a caller ID log to a sex chat number. You give up your privacy when you contact somebody's network.
...on what charge, smartass?
Ever get the impression that your life would make a good sitcom?
Ever follow this to its logical conclusion: that your life is a sitcom?
"I don't care about the Constitution!" --Bill O'Reilly, November 17, 2009
The internet is a public place. No one ever said your IP address was confidential.
This bait-and-switch tactic has been used by the government for years. Under-cover cop drug dealers spring to mind.. "Sting operations"...
The illusion of freedom offered by the internet is extremely deceptive. You should act on-line how you would act in public. If you would lift up 12 year old girls' skirts in public, then by all means get on with your kid porn trading!
wish
---
$ su
who are you?
$ whoami
whoami: no login associated with uid 1010.
> It's been said many times by others: if you have :)
> done nothing wrong, you have nothing to be
> afraid of. Accountability is good, unless you're
> an anarchist
Well actually I am an anarchist and I am all for
acountability. However, I am certainly against
this type of tactics.
This reminds me of those right-to-lifers who
stand in front of Clinics that perform abortions
and take down the licence plate numbers of EVERY
person who enters the clinic....
then they take the licence plate numbers, find out
who ownes the vehicle and harass them...never
mind that they may have only gone to the clinic
for counseling, or some other procedure, they
get harassed just for parking in the parking lot
and entering. (by harassed I mean recieve packets
with pictures of stillborn babies that have been
mislabeled as fetuses for impact and called
"baby killers" etc)
As far as using this information...well its not
as hard as you might think. Require a valid
email adress to get a "password" or any number of
sinister methods. Call the ISP and demand the name
of the user who had that IP...claim that they were
distributing illegal copies of some IP you own,
need to know who to sue.
Never mind that ALL they did was download a file.
You have no idea whatsoever what their intentions
were. You have no idea what they thought the file
was.
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
Nope, I'm trying to point out that the statement "If you aren't doing anything to be ashamed of (or illegal) then you have nothing to hide" is counter to the ideas put forth in the 4th and 5th amendments to the constitution of the United States and is all in all a very simplistic idea.
"...but I do care if you go around DL'ing illegal material that has a negative affect on our society."
So DLing illegal material that does not have a negative affect is ok? Who decides on what has a negative affect? I think guns have a negative affect on society, so can I post people who buy guns' names on the internet as murderers?
"your whole view on the subject is narrow, and you seem to be too engrossed with yourself to have a truly valid argument."
My view is narrow!? You are the one who cannot see that such arguments while sounding good fighting kiddie porn can be used to stifle political dissidence, free speech, and all of our other freedoms. Ken Starr has shown that when you can't hide your actions all it takes is someone willing to look hard enough to find something you have done illegal to get you into trouble.
"nobody cares what you do at home in your own privacy..."
You may not care who I have sex with in the privacy of my own home, but the state of Georgia does care who (or at least what gender) and how.
"...but people do care what you do in public (and yes, the internet IS public property), so no, we dont want to see you getting a lewinsky in the street (maybe some people do.....)"
But I thought if I wasn't ashamed it was OK. The people that care so much can bite me, tell 'em to mind their own fucking business. I sure as hell can tint my windows, hide things in my pocket, and encrypt my data in public so what on earth is your point?
"supose you're gooing ot flam m3 for bad grammer and speeling....."
Why?
Insanity is the last line of defence for the master diplomat. But you have to lay the groundwork early.
As others have mentionned, yes it is illegal and no you're not a pedophile.
An interesting twist on all of this, is that it's illegal for you to possess pictures of yourself naked if you're underage. You can't stand in the mirror and photograph yourself naked if you're under 18. Well... I suppose you could, but you'd be a criminal.
hm... I just thought of something. What if you photograph a mirror image of a naked underage person. Is it still child porn technically? Yeah... ok. Now that I've written it out, it sounds stupid, but technically it's not really a pornographic picture of an underage person.
Disclaimer: Just in case the following should confuse anyone with poor reading comprehension, I find pedophilia as repugnant as anyone else does, and firmly believe that people who sexually abuse children (or adults, for that matter) need to be removed from polite society.
That said, there is an important difference between pedophiles on the one hand and rapists and serial killers on the other. Pedophilia is a desire (a disgusting one, yes), where as rape and killing are actions. Not all pedophiles act on their desires.
While 99.9% of us may find their sexual fantasies abhorant, we cannot legitimately make desires crimes. And we should not make fictional portrayals of abhorant acts illegal.
It is a strange thing that if I had a videotape - real or faked - of two young teenagers who were having consensual sex (as consensual as immature people could have, anyway) and were discovered and grusomely murdered by some psychopath, the sex part of the tape would be contraband but the tape of the murders would be perfectly legal to own and view.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
Many people have static IPs. These can easily be traced back to a computer by law enforcement. If you are assigned an IP dynamically, law enforcement goes to the owner of the IP and says "Who was assigned this IP at this exact minute?" and the ISP gives them the info. AOL and all the big ISPs do this for law enforcement all the time. I can only imagine that without this effort, there would little to stop child pornography.
If you are collecting Caller IDs of incoming calls (in which case you are part of the communication) that's quite different from snooping IP-numbers n'est pas? Also, in some places (in Europe) lawmakers are quite strict about companies collecting information to databases, and so creating this kind of a black list (not to mention publishing it), so it might well backfire. In ye bad ole US, of course, any company (or individual) is probably free to collect all kinds of black lists for any purpose (to the raise the lynching spirit, for example) . :-)
I like paying taxes. With them I buy civilization -- Oliver Wendell Holmes
This is how it all starts. First you go after people for supposedly doing
something that most people would find abhorrent. It's alright if we misidentify
a few people, they shouldn't have been there in the first place. The good out
weighs the bad. As shown time and time again in history it will only get worst.
Cyber neighbor monitoring cyber neighbor. Today you may be afraid to log in to
Napster because you might be misidentified as pirate or into Gnutella because
that picture of your 19 year old girlfriend might mistakenly get you labeled a
pedophile. What will it be tomorrow? How long will it be before you are afraid
to login on the net? I don't think it's a discusion of "that will never happen"
but a question "how soon"?
This is somewhat amusing but I don't get what they're really trying to prove. It seems they think they're fighting some sort of actual crusade this way. I agree that child pornography is a terrible thing, but this is just silly. It would be much worse, of course, if anybody tried to do anything with these lists (which I'm sure is not far off). Maybe I should set one up that logs the IP of everybody who downloads faked Country or Boy Band MP3s from me. :)
-- atomly
Copyright owners DO NOT have control over how their work is distributed. In the event that fair use does not apply, the copyright owner has the right to sue for damages he sustained from unauthorized copies, and the right to seek punitive damages under certain circumstances, as well as certain other rights.
But this is very, very different from "control".
Caveat: I am not a lawyer. This is not legal advice.
Hmm, this could come back and bite them legally...
BlackNova Traders
Noone? well hell I will openly defend it.
Is Child Porn a tough issue? Yea, it deals with
alot of issues. When is a person old enough to
consent to sex? When are they old enough to
consent to sexual photos?
When you turn 18 there is no fairy that flies by
and sprinkles dust on you and magically makes you
able to make decisions for yourself. Its NOT as
cut and dry an issue as legalists would have you
believe.
But anyway...drawings? Drawings! The very idea
that a person can set pencil to paper and somehow
comit a crime by merely moving its tip across
the page! The very idea of that offends me.
In fact...the very idea that someone could sit
alone in their room, involve no other people,
could possibly do anything, short of detonating
thermonuclear devices, and somehow break a law
is simply insane.
I supose it is things like that which have led to
the word SNAFU
-Steve
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
Have you read The Scarlet Letter?
Whoever said that kiddie porn is a wedge issue was very correct. People overlook a lot when it comes up in a discussion like this.
The problem - what is kiddie porn? Who defines it (I know it when I see it?)? In the US, anyway, laws need to be very clear about what is and what is not legal. (Remember the Montana non-speed limit?)
There are *hundreds of thousands* of people out there who have pictures of their kids taking a bath, naked at the beach, or whatever. Is that illegal? Just because the kid is under 18? Or do you have to _enjoy_ it for it to be kiddie porn? Maybe you have to be male? Or a "pedophile"?
The law is decidely unclear. We have, instead, delegated responsibility for defining the law to web site operators, photo-mart technicians, and small-town cops.
I completely and totally reject the idea that you and others who think like you do should be able to define what is wrong for me. That's why we have government - so that everyone can have a say in creating the law and so that everyone gets a fair trial and the presumption of innocence.
For you to suggest that seizing control and forcing your own laws on others is desirable puts you in league, 100%, with the abortion-clinic bombers.
What if I'm not breaking the law and I don't feel that I'm doing something wrong? Should I be fired because my employer disagrees? (Not because I surfed at work, but because he/she saw my IP listed there.) Should I need to worry about some "save the children" crusader firebombing my house?
I feel strongly that it's wrong for a 40-year-old to molest his 10-year-old daughter and I certainly don't want to watch. But I also don't want to get killed because some unnamed, undated jpeg on my hard drive happens to be of a 17-year-old or a 40-year-old masquerading as a 16-year-old. (Not illegal, but I would get 'caught' by these standards!)
Peer pressure works with clothing styles. It doesn't work so well with more serious issues.
(Salon had a good article about this in Mothers Who Think a few weeks ago.)
You appear to have some major misconceptions about sexual development and sexaul predations. Your post is full of misunderstandings, but to keep matters short I will focus on one statement:
I tend to think that by the time a person is physically capable of sexual activity, they should be able to decide for themselves what they wish to do
This is seriously out of step with reality. My mother achieved menarch ( a commonly used physical marker for physical sexual maturity) at age 11. This is not exceptional. Do you honestly believe that 11 years olds are mature enough to evaluate the risks and responsibilities of parenthood?
While one can argue with the arbitrariness of the 16 year old designation, the statutory rape laws exist for sound reasons well-supported by extensive clinical data: the vast majority of people who have sex with underage children (1) were abused themselves as children, (2) have a high recidivism rate and (3) cause long-term emotional damage to their "partners". Your "pedophiles aren't sick" is so completely out of step with clinical reality that I'll just assume you have the same cluelessness about this topic that many Windows users have about OS's.
"one treats others with courtesy not because they are gentlemen or gentlewomen, but because you are" --G. Henrichs
Okay, some of the file names do indicate that there would be child pornography to be found. But others aren't so clear. For example, "hot teen.jpg", "schoolgirl.jpg", and "teen-sucking.jpg" aren't really too indicative of child pornography. There are plent of sites / images out there touting "teens" and "school girls" that don't have anyone under 18 pictured. Now, I realize that they do indicate which files the particular IP addresses have downloaded, but even so, this has potential to get out of hand and I think they should be a bit more responsible trying to choose their fake file names.
It's illegal for the server to hold them. It's illegal for you to download them or possess them (though since you would be 12 you would not be called a 'pedophile' or punished in any serious way). It is NEVER legal for sexually explicit photos of underage children to be possessed or transferred.
I believe that this kind of thing is not possible with FreeNet - would that make it a better project to support?
Atticka
No sig here...
Private, invitation only networks seem like the next obvious step.
Does that not defeat the purpose of the Gnutella "comunity"?
I am become Troll, destroyer of threads
child pornography is not "speech".
Then what is it? Please, feel free to enlighten us. Very likely, you won't be able to link it to anything else which is not already protected, and you cannot apply double-standards.
"free speech" is not absolute. If it were, there would be no such things as libel and slander.
Again, correct, however this is not quite the same thing. Free speech is absolute. But that does not mean you can use it to commit some other crime. For example, libel and slander are crimes of defamation (or character assassination, if you prefer). Free speech will not protect you from that. As to where kiddie porn fits here, I refer you to my post "A question for you..." in reply to another respondent to this thread.
If you study what the framers of the Constitution intended, you discover that they were talking about Free Political speech. Free Political speech guarantees the right to participate in political activities without your voice being censored. It has nothing to do with frivolous things like pornography.
Wrong. So wrong it's laughable. Read the other writings of these people, at least those who have other writings out there. In some cases (such as Thomas Jefferson) it's more dramatic, but in every single work you will find a common thread: the necessity of the spread of knowledge and freedom. Knowledge is not always political; I may know that the sky is blue but I fail to see how that could possibly become politically important.
No, read the other writings of the Framers, and you'll find that they truly believed in freedom, including freedom for all speech. And yes, this does mean that you will be offended sometimes. You don't, however, have the right to be an immature clod and demand that it be eradicated; we were supposed to have evolved beyong that long ago. Yes, everyone feels the urge to censor sometimes; even me. But it's as wrong as killing, for while murder takes a human life, censorship takes the human spirit, and I'm not sure which is worse.
It's ridiculous how much this has been twisted in the time since then.
Indeed it has. By people like you who would destroy beliefs opposed to your own. The Constitution is an extremely specific document. Do you have any idea how much time was spent poring over the wording, just to ensure it could not be twisted? The Framers would not possibly have allowed such an oversight as to omit the word "political" from "free speech" unless they wanted all speech to be covered.
And I apologize in advance to those who are disturbed when common sense is interjected into these discussions. Sorry.
Apologizing to oneself is generally a sign of self-esteem problems. I suggest you see someone. And while you're at it, I suggest you learn to respect beliefs other than your own, no matter how much you may disagree. I deplore pedophilia. I consider it among the sickest perversions in existence. But I have no right to condemn those who have not acted out on their sick fantasies, and someone who merely downloads kiddie-porn is not acting out. Those who make the stuff generally are, but even then there can be exceptions; I refer you to my post "A question for you..." in reply to another respondent in this thread. What, then, do you do about that?
How is doing this different than someone making observations and critizing their actions?
Lets try this analogy: Person A is sitting in a coffee shop mind their own buisness. Another person, Person B, walks up to the Person A and asks "Can you show me child porn?" mistaking them for someone who can sell child pornos to them. Person A, having nothing to do with child pornography and is deeply and morally offended by the very thought of it, tells Person B to "go away" and then stands up in the coffee shop and says "Person B just asked me for child pornography!" Now everyone in the coffee shop knows what Person B was up too.
I am unclear how anything illegal has been done to Person B in this hypothetical example or in ZeroPaid's actions. Is there something in documentation that says "all querries are private and protected?" Gnutella had nothing to do with it...they were asking ZeroPaid for the stuff. I don't see anything particularly wrong with voicing your outrage like this and I think this is what the ZeroPaid's guys are trying to accomplish. "Freedom of Speech" doesn't mean "anonymity". Also, you don't need to see "schoolgirlxxx.jpg" to accomplish acedemic research on any subject releated to child pornography (like the pyschological damages) so I'm unclear how someone could be mistakeningly identified.
ps: I'm personally disgusted with any moral and ethical abuses like this and even more disturbed by the invoking of moral and ethical arguments in its defense! I can't imagine how anyone could believe child pornography is anything close to a "Freedom of Speech" issue. The people who produce and consume this aweful stuff are enjoying the "freedoms" at the expense of some of the weakest and most vulnerable members of our society. Bleck. >-(
Number one, these people never even downloaded actual porn. The pictures are those that show up on the main linked page. Of course, I read through the file lists and a large number of the files do not seem to suggest illegal pornography anyway.
"youngest teen ever" What in that suggests porn? The word youngest? The word teen? The word ever? None of those seem extremely pornographic either. Maybe someone accustomed to downloading porn might think it's porn, but I think they're gonnna "Catch" alot of innocents with this. Others that don't suggest porn that I see on their lists are "veryyoung" (very young what? asparagus?), "nohairteen" (so we have a bald-headed child, so what?), etc.
Then there's the problem of all these "teen" ones. 18 is a number, 19 is a number... Hmm, if those denoted ages, I don't see anything illegal here. I'm not a huge porn freak, but I have seen enough to know that "teen" attached to a website denotes >=18 but not too many years greater. It doesn't mean 13-17. I'm betting that very few of the people downloading most of these were truly looking for kiddieporn.
Next are the ones that say "preteen" so what? Anyone not net savvy and not understanding that if it's ambiguous like that, it's probably porn, might download that confused. Then bam, they're posted onto this site.
The should take all this stuff down immediately, it's poorly done. Most of the names look like they'll fool people. People looking for child-porn would download them, but so could someone not looking for that.
If they want to keep this up, they need to do two things. First, they need to delete all current content to protect those that they're falsely accused, and I'm sure there are many. (Mostly on the ones that just say "teen" probably). Second, they must change all filenames to include XXX (who's gonna get confused then?) and also give them such depraved names that no one would for one second consider the file to be porn of the more legal type.
(Should I go into their sharing of the iggy pop song as well?) Nah, I didn't think so, I'm assuming that's a copyrighted work....
Oh, btw, I'm perfectly aware that I sound like I must be on there list, lol. But I saw this, and it just screamed at me as wrong.
> blackmail, threat of firing, threats of any
> other kind... or exploitation of authority
> status. In short, adults having sex with
> children are committing rape, in the same sense
> that that rev. Moon character was...
Rape can also be committed without any kind of coercion at all: Most pedos choose victims who generally have a low sense of self-esteem or children who have a lot of problems at home.
They then will (for lack of a better term) stroke their egos, they will tell them that they understand them, that they are sexually attractive, and that they are mature enough to make decisions for themselves and that their parents are being unreasonalble. Some apparently will even offer them assistance with running away from home.
Basically, they build the child up and make them feel good about themselves for the sole purpose of having sex with them. It's a mind fuck, but from the eyes of the victim, it seems consensual.
I think it might even be more evil and insidious than physical sexual assault or sexual assault through threats of losing your job or blackmail.
I like the idea of the wall of shame, though you do have to wonder if some of the people who download the files might be law enforcement types investigating child porn on the net.
[1] Done rm -rf *
The problem is the people that take the pictures, wich I think is a different issue.. I think it's not a thing of "Supply and Demand"; a lot of the people that takes the pictures are just sick and want to have sex with 12 y. o. kids.
I wonder what would happend if the images were not of real people, like porn anime, or maybe a really good painting, or a 3d image, so good that you could not tell the differece.. That would not harm any minor, and people would download it. Would it be OK to watch that and masturbate?
I'm sure a lot of the people that post "ah, that makes me sick" actually mean "ah, that makes me horny" (or at least curious). It's like robbing a bakn. Everybody wants to rob a banks and get away with it.. (of course, not everybody wants to rape a teenager)
--
--
Stay tuned for some shock and awe coming right up after this messages!
I have to ask where does it stop? What is next, someone goes into a adult book store and snaps pictures of you buying "teen ass" magazine and runs it in a local newspaper ad? What if this person offers you the magazine himself then snaps the pic and labels you a pedophile even though "teen ass" is perfectly legal to buy and possess if you are an adult?
My point is, yes pedophiles are the scum of the earth and yes using technology as a vehicle of the exploitation of children is a horrendous crime, but what makes this person the ultimate authority on who is branded with the scarlet letter and who is not?
What if the tables were turned and someone from fbi.gov got a file listing of the supposed child porn this person is offering, what will they say when they are raided for intent to distribute?
People STILL do time for trying to pass oregano off as pot, and bank robbers STILL do time when they use their finger in their pocket to imitate a gun, why shouldn't these people do time for trying to pass off "gotcha" images as child porn?
Let the cops setup the sting operations and let the criminals go through the justice system and THEN label them pedophiles. All this is is a misguided attempt at vigilantism without cause.
So you're saying you're outraged at the government then? Local governments do this all the time. Ever hear of the vicesquad? It's not illegal or wrong for the police to respond undercover to all sorts of illegal propositions. Everything from prostitution to assasination for hire have been pursued using these methods.
The main difference is that the police are usually much more interested in being right in their accusations than this fellow. What happens to the guy who is looking for pictures of Sean Young, types in "young", clicks on the first name in the list, grabs the scroll bar and pulls it down to the bottom, shift-clicks on the last name in the list and hits download, all without ever reading each and every filename? "Golly Gee Batman! He just inadvertantly downloaded a whole slew of files called 'youngassfuck'." Without having any desire or tendancy towards pedophilia. Do you think this irresponsible fellow at ZeroPaid is going to do any checking to see? No, he's going to stick their name up there in some righteous fit of holy retribution.
Oh, he's not trying to get them to stop using his site. If he wanted to get them off his site he wouldn't have filenames that drew them in. Gnutella is not his personal property to dictate what is appropriate or not. And given that he seems to be completely behind the rampant copyright violations, he's not even working from a moral high ground. Apparrently he feels he's some kind of moral policeman. The only problem is that he doesn't have any of the checks and standards that a police force would have in place to protect people who may inadvertantly get involved in his little sting operation.
Oh please. I'm sure there isn't a man among us who doesn't know the inner workings of the Internet pr0nography scene. I say it's common knowledge.
> I'd be more willing to convict a guy of
> statetory rape if he did it to a pre-16 girl.
> Shouldn't that be what age of consent is about?
> First, what bennefits these teens, and second,
> what we as a society find accepable.
I have a problem with statutory rape. The thing
is, OK rape is bad. No IS no. But Statutory rape
says "Yes is no" if the other person is too young.
The real problem is simply this...it is not a
a charge brought by th esuposed victem, it is
brought by their parents. It is not a device for
protecting anyone, its a device for legitimising
parental dominion over the lives of their
offspring.
I tend to think that by the time a person is
physically capable of sexual activity, they
should be able to decide for themselves what
they wish to do. At that point the law needs to
leave it alone. If a person can't decide by then,
there is either something wrong with them, or
their parents didn't do a very good job of
teaching them.
> So we lock away people for something we don't
> have much knowledge about, or lock away someone
> who seriously needs mental help.
Its not too hard to understand...the public
doesn't get it, but the general public tends to
not get alot of things (esp when the media finds
it more profitable to use it as a scare tactic
to keep people afraid and watching the news)
I think its simply a fetish. Have you read the
Cryptonomicon portion where some guys were "van
eck phreaking"? there was a long letter about
fetishes where the writter said he was very
thankful that his was stockings and not little
children...afterall that type of sexual preference
is well laid into the brain by age 7.
These people are not "sick", they simply have a
sexual fetish that is not "socially acceptable".
There is no way to "cure" someone of this, any
more than you can "cure" someone of homosexuality.
Our society always seems to take the least healthy
and most problimatic aproach to social issues.
Make it illegal and hope it goes away. Shun them,
that will make them stop. Just drive everything
underground, make it a black market affair.
Why deal with a problem when you can just jail it
away and call all the people who have any interest
in it at all "sick"?
Just say no to .
-Steve
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
I'm probably mistaken, but isn't that 'entrapment'?
There's a difference between being active and being passive. When the feds worked hard to get John Delorian to run drugs for them, it was active. He had no history of such behavior, and they should have never did it. In the same way, ATF agents asked Randy Weaver to saw a couple shotguns off just a little bit shorter than the legal minimum length. Again, it's entrapment, we don't know if he was into that sort of thing before (or if he even knew it was illegal).
The basic idea is that in these cases and others like them, the crime is actually created by the law enforcement personnel who convince someone else to actually commit it. I don't know why they did that to Delorian. They did it to Weaver so they could subsequently blackmail him into helping to entrap someone else. Charges were pressed only after he refused to go along with them.
The irony of the Weaver situation is that we have one of the whiniest government agencies, the BATF, actually making up crimes for themselves to fight. It's like a fire department setting fires. The BATF whines about needing more money, yet they apparently have enough that they can make up crimes to fight. If I didn't know better, I'd have to guess that actual crime no longer exists and these guys are wandering around trying to look busy.
The situation here (gnutella & zeropaid) is one which I actually have no problem with. Rather than actively recruiting would-be criminals, they are passively providing some bait, and keeping track of those who bite. It seems likely that people who bite in this situation are actually looking for kiddie porn and probably already have some.
So, obviously they've broken no laws since they downloaded something legal. But the fbi now has a list of folks to start watching. I don't think that's so bad.
-Michael
Do you have ESP?
When they tell you on the web page that it's fake kiddie porn, the addresses they grab aren't going to be the I.P.'s of any pedophiles, obviously. So what the hell are they trying to prove?
Ever get the impression that your life would make a good sitcom?
Ever follow this to its logical conclusion: that your life is a sitcom?
"I don't care about the Constitution!" --Bill O'Reilly, November 17, 2009
Out of curiosity, I clicked on the link, and got "You do not have permission, etc." Did these jerks take it down *BEFORE* somebody sued them down to their belly-button lint for entrapment and invasion of privacy?
I don't understand why this is not everybodies first reaction; you're talking about their holier-than-thou attitude, and that attitude is most clear because they advertise having child pornography.
How can it be worse to search for "little girl*" than to offer files with such names implying horrible pictures.
They say there aren't really horrible pictures in there; they say that the file names have nothing to do with the contents of the files.
But how is downloading a file that only pretends to contain horrible material more illegal than offering pretend-horrible material? Aren't these guys creating a market for these kinds of pictures?
Just like police operations of this kind: how do you know that somebody would have bought illegal drugs had the police not offered it to them?
Now, if you want to find out if it is actually true what they say: that these files don't really contain horrible pictures. How do you do that without being labelled a pedophile by them?
I wouldn't yet say that these guys are as sick as those people who create a market for these pictures by collecting them, but they really need to check their heads IMO.
EJB
..that Gnutella would need anonymizers?
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
I seem to recall that some production of the film "Lolita" cast in Lolita's role an actress who was over 18 but looked younger (perhaps much younger, I haven't seen it so I don't know). However, the film was considered child pornography since the *character* was represented as under 18 and engaged in explicit sex. (If I've made any mistakes here, please correct me.)
On the other hand, the novel on which the film was based is perfectly legal. And it could be argued that animation is closer to the novel than to the movie, since it's more abstract (involves no real people at all).
Now, if someone were to create an animated film that was indistinguishable from live-action, then we'd have a sticky situation.
Clearly, something is inconsistent, and I think it's the first case. There is nothing inherently wrong with films, novel, or animation of sex with children, in my opinion. The most that can be argued is that they may tend to encourage actual sex. But down that road, we ban all representation and discussion of violence, crime, and everything else that's illegal, since it might encourage people to do it. I'd be very much opposed to anything so draconian (though perhaps others might not be). We need to be able to have these things in the open, for their artistic, social, and political value. Censorship is not a good thing.
Well, the lamers have stormed the gates of GNUtella. Seeing "PANDA BEAR PORN $39.95" and similar things is cute for about the first five seconds. Then the DoS attacks involving those kinds of idiotic and repeated search patterns just get annoying.
Get a grip!
teensex.jpg: Do you know what most teenage boys think is the greatest thing in the world? TEENAGE GIRLS! Is that wrong? It's no more wrong than the fact that these boys are often having sex with (shock!) underage girls - their girlfriends!
Searching for 15yrold-lesbos.jpg? What if you were a 15 year old lesbian? Is that even slightly wrong?
best wishes,
Mike.
Tales from behind the Lagom Curtain
"Curing" homosexual people with LSD doesn't seem much of a feat. You could probably "cure" heterosexual people with LSD.
The big deal is that there's no centralized server. If Napster was to be "shut down", all they would have to do is pull the plug on the servers, and Napster's gone. For Gnutella, there's literally no plug to pull. There's no-one specific to point the finger at but the people who wrote the software.
No, looking for 'schoolgirl.jpg' is not anywhere near a gaurantee that the seeker is a pedophile. Neither is 'littlegirls.jpg'. These types (and in the case of the latter, the explicit instance) are not only devoid of any indication of desire for sexual pictures of children, they are examples of names people use for their own pictures of family members. A family with daughters may very well have a picture of them titled 'littlegirls.jpg'.
/., MSNBC.com, etc.
After visiting the site, I noticed another alleged CP file 'mylittlesister.jpg' How do you justify this being an indicator of pedophilia? I have pictures of my children, a boy and a girl. I have filenames such as 'mylittlegirl', 'myfirstbath', and 'caughtonthetoilet'. Would you consider these pornographic titles indicative of pedophilia? In some cases (which I will not list here due to the obviousness fo them), the filename may be indicative, but some of the ones noted on this forum, and referred to specifically by yourself are not.
To assume that _any_ of these are indicative of pedophilia is not only absurd, it is quite telling.
Would you likewise assume that someone searching on the net for 'touchmyself' is looking for porn? If so, you make a very critical error. Especially given this is the title of a pop song from a few years back.
Perhaps a little introduction to searching would be in order. If you search for 'school girl', 'school', and 'girl' on a system like GNUTella, it will likely return 'schoolgirls.jpg'. Heck, searching for 'jpg' would as well.
Now, why is this important? Do you think they just came up with these names? Some, sure. But what about those that do not clearly indicate sexual nature or content, such as the two you chose 'schoolgirl.jpg' and 'littlegirls.jpg', not likely. My bet is they sat and watched the search list, and came up with adding these, for the sake of drawing traffic. IOW, they tried to meet what they tailored their empty content to meet what they watched.
This is no different than a company tailoring it's message on a mailing list or newsgroup. Lurk a bit, figure out what is going on, and adapt. Even further, they deliberately attempted to get people to 'fall into their trap'. If police do this, it is usually considered entrapment.
As far as the argument goes regarding the alleged shameful person, has the thought ever occured that perhaps some of them are actually law enforcement agents of investigators? Or perhaps other investigatory agencies private and public? Are these possibilities beyond your realm of acceptibility?
Having worked in the NOC of a national ISP, I can say that there is a lot of this latter activity going on. posting CP is against nearly all ISPs (I say nearly because I can't honestly say all) to provide CP, or use their services to aquire it. If there are reports of such activity taking place (there have been since this started), they are fully justified in verifying these complaints. Will you label them 'pedophiles' or 'people who should be investigated'? Given that some sysadmins and netadmins may peruse this site and block the IP's involved, this may consititute unlawful obstruction or interference in an investigation if it happens to be an investigator's IP. When questioned, the admin will point to this site. New can of worms gets opened.
Another note:
Most surfers aren't using static IPs. So labelling it 'wall of shame' is not only a misnomer, it is nothing more than a marketing ploy to get people to see it. It takes investigation by an ISP to determine who _possibly_ may have had that IP, at that time. So where is the alleged shame? How can one be shamed if one cannot be identified on the 'wall of shame'.
I say _possibly_ above, due to such things as corporate and ISP firewalls, Masquerading, NAT, etc. It is not always possible to track down a user. Then we also have the can-o-worms known as IPSpoofing. Want to get an ISP/individual with a stayicIP on the list? Why not spoof the IP?
Yet another point or two...
In some countries it is legal to have these type of images. Like it or not, not everyone searching for various kinds of pornography is commiting a crime. AIUI, it is legal to possess these types of pictures in British Columbiai (Canada). In the Netherlands, it is legal to pose for pornography at the age of 14, in much of Europe, the age is 16. In Canada, the legal age fo consent for sex with a minor is 14, in other countries it is down to 12. Thus, pictures of 12-18 year old people in sexual contexts is legal in various parts of the world. Remeber as well, that eighTEEN and nineTEEN year olds are both 'teens', and 'legal' in the US.
While on that subject, do you even know what pedophilia is? Is it sexual attraction to under-age people? If so, then yo uwould have to have never been sexually attracted to one under the age of X (where X is 18 in the US, and clearly other ages in other countries). This would include when you yourself were under that age.
But pedophilia as clinically defined is not what people here seem to think it is. Pedophilia 'is the chronic sexual attraction to pre-pubescent children'. There is no fixed age limit. It is usually accepted that the sexual attraction to a young person that presents signs of puberty (breasts in women, and pubic hair in both men and women) is not considered clinical pedophilia.
So, could this not be just a big marketing ploy? A trick to get people to their site? Certainly something to think about. Certainly a cheap way to get 'advertising' on
Could it be a different kind of ploy? Have you considered that some of these 'titles' are the same as 'legal pornography' picture titles? If you insist that someone is looking for pornography when looking for 'schoolgirl.jpg', and that it must be child pornography is to demonstrate a very narrow concept. How about an adult pornstar playing the role of a collegegirl in a college uniform? Certainly qualifies as a 'schoolgirl', and not requiring any children be implied or involved.
Do you know how little, by way of comparison to the claims, child pornography is actually 'traded' over the internet? Could this be a scare tactic, designed to bring more support for such attempts to control the Internet as the CDA? Another possibility.
My Suburban burns less gasoline than your Prius.
'Download one of Zeropaid.com's temptingly named images, and the site logs your time of download, IP address and domain name - and then posts them on a Web site for all to see.'
Also :
'once these networks break up, there is virtually no way for law enforcement to trace the activity.'
Is it me or do those two quotes seem to contradict each other?
> Finally, if you really believe searching for "schoolgirl.jpg" or "littlegirls.jpg"
> is not an indication of pedophilia, you are either a fool, or totally disingenuous.
> What the hell else could it be?
Ever heard of stock photos? Look thru some common everyday magazines (like in Women's Day, etc) and see if you can find any photos of girls. The people putting together articles and ads don't always take the pictures. The net is VERY useful for finding good stock photography.
How about maybe a film/tv agent who is looking for a new child star?
It doesn't matter if those are the most likely people searching. Those are completely possible scenarios, and those users would be slandered by suggesting that they are pedos. I know I'd sue.
A friend of mine used to have a link entitled:
"A picture of some naked chicks"
And sure enough, there were some baby chickens.
We weren't 31337 enough to do logging at the time, but it was amusing.
--Ben
--Ben
As I understand it, Gnutella only asks the hosts your connected to, but they don't know the orgin of who asked. If they don't have the file, they query the hosts they are connected to and so on.
/(Host M) /(Host J) /(Host G)
I'll attempt to describe this visually..
(Host A)
| | |
| | \
| \ (Host D)-(Host L)
\ \ \(Host K)
\ \
\ (Host C)-(Host I)
\ \(Host H)
\
(Host B)-(Host F)
\(Host E)
Now lets pretend that Host G had one of the files I'm looking for and Host J was doing this listing crap. From the protocol, Host G knows that Host B had asked about a file, and tells Host B that either I or another server that I'm connected to has the file or knows where to get it. Host B then tells Host A the same either, I or another server that I'm connected to has the file or knows where to get it.
Host J tells Host C the same. So far, the only thing Host J knows is that Host C, or a client connected to Host C, received a request for this file. Host J does not know how many connections away the requesting client is.
When you start to download something, maybe this model breaks down then. I don't know if the packets are then sent back over that chain again, or if they are sent directly. As I understand it, Gnutella is designed to protect the identity of both the client and server, so I don't immagine that the IP is anything but the host immediately connected and inquiering. In the case of the above example, Host C. Both the requesting client Host A, and the other server that had the real data, Host G are protected.
Time flies like an arrow;
Time flies like an arrow;
Fruit flies like a bananna
While I grant that much of the basis in the adoption of the
First Amendment was to protect the interests of those
who wished to critisize the monarchy of King George, it
is evident that the ideal was to benefit more than just
political speech.
The Constitutional Congress was not of one mind on many
of the issues surrounding the founding of the United States,
but what they could agree upon was the neccessity of
allowance for Dangerous Ideas... Ideas such as Democracy,
and the rights of individual citizens, were considered
in compleat opposition to the idea of Divine Right that
gave the Rulers and Lords of the old world their power.
Such ideas came forth not only as political idealism,
but also as philosophy, scientific, and even religious
discussion. As such, even the founding fathers had to
acknowledge that the protection of all speech must be
considered, as no-one could say where new ideas might
spring from.
I think you are being a little nieve. The people using Gnutella are not your random surfers. These are the people looking for illegal material. If you can relate something else that might have the filename "youngest teen ever" that is not pornography, then by all means tell me.
"Imagination is the only weapon in the war against reality." -Jules de Gautier
"They can't pick and choose the laws that they wish to uphold."
Why not? I do it all the time. I bet the majority of people here do it as well.
I only adhere to laws that I think make sense. Well, and I think I break some of the ones that I agree with (I really have to cut that out). I also probably break a lot of laws that I don't know about.
Proud mother or father snaps a picture of their son or daughter on the instant they turn 13 to commemorate the event. That's what I think when I hear "youngest teen ever".
It is downloaded by the mother of a college student who, upon seeing Gnutella, sets it up at his home. Either for his mom, or for himself. She starts messing with it (once it is set up, it's a snap to use, configuring throws people off). And she's a soccer mom type and wants to get pleasure off looking at someone else's proud moment for their child.
You missed the point completely as well. In something such as this, all it takes is a tiny chance for error and the people running this become extremely irresponsible for doing so.
As I understand it, Gnutella only asks the hosts your connected to, but they don't know the orgin of who asked. If they don't have the file, they query the hosts they are connected to and so on. I'll attempt to describe this visually.. (Host A) | | | | | \/(Host M) | \ (Host D)-(Host L) \ \\(Host K) \ \/(Host J) \ (Host C)-(Host I) \\(Host H) \/(Host G) (Host B)-(Host F) \(Host E) Now lets pretend that Host G had one of the files I'm looking for and Host J was doing this listing crap. From the protocol, Host G knows that Host B had asked about a file, and tells Host B that either I or another server that I'm connected to has the file or knows where to get it. Host B then tells Host A the same either, I or another server that I'm connected to has the file or knows where to get it. Host J tells Host C the same. So far, the only thing Host J knows is that Host C, or a client connected to Host C, received a request for this file. Host J does not know how many connections away the requesting client is. When you start to download something, maybe this model breaks down then. I don't know if the packets are then sent back over that chain again, or if they are sent directly. As I understand it, Gnutella is designed to protect the identity of both the client and server, so I don't immagine that the IP is anything but the host immediately connected and inquiering. In the case of the above example, Host C. Both the requesting client Host A, and the other server that had the real data, Host G are protected.
Time flies like an arrow;
Time flies like an arrow;
Fruit flies like a bananna
Check this link!
http://www.csd.net/~cgadd/the_cleaner.gif
Based on the IP addresses, it appears that users from:
www.zeropaid.com
www.microsoft.com
www.whitehouse.gov
have accessed and downloaded "fake" kiddie pron!
Yes, it's BS. But no more so than the ones that the "wall of shame" posted. It's all unprovable claims.
Think about it. Some of these filenames indicate that they're about pornography only to a dirty-minded observer. What if I was a graphic designer looking for an image of a few young boys playing out in the back yard, to illustrate my article about the benefits of large back yards? I might download young-boys.jpg, thinking that it was just an image of a couple of (dressed) young boys!
Unlikely you say? Maybe, but almost all of the so-called 'child pornographers' on the wall of shame might claim to be that graphic designer, and sue these guys for slandering. It's lawsuit paradise!
Also, now that Zeropaid.com has made public their activities, won't there be people who'll try to download these files just for the hell of it? Or maybe they just want to see their names up on the wall, so they can sue Zeropaid.com and get thousands of dollars!
You are probably right. But could you give an example where statements 1-4 don't imply #5:
1) A person is distributing someone else's copyrighted work
2) They are distributing the work in a way that fair use doesn't apply
3) The creator of the work doesn't want their work distributed in the way the person is distributing it
4) The person continues to distribute the work
5) The person is considered to be breaking the law
If statements 1-4 necessarily imply #5 , then it seems to me the copyright holders have control over how their work is being distributed.
I would consider a hypothetical country to have control over a person's religion if a citizen was punished for practicing another religion. Would you consider this country to have control over religion?
The distribution of copyrighted work is analogous to my hypothetical country's control over religion. The people of the United States are punished if they distribute a person's copyrighted work against the wishes of the copyright holder (fair use issues aside). So, I would argue that the copyright holders do have control over the way in which their work is distributed
Perhaps your definition of control is different then mine, but I think the threat of getting sued for punitive damages is a very effective means of controlling distribution, just as the fear of being punished in a country for practicing the wrong religion is an effective means of controlling the religion of its people.
Sig goes here
Maby Gnutella clients should act as proxies for other Gnutella clients - requests from your Gnutella client for files and file-transfers should be routed through a randomly choseen Gnutella client.After several possible hops - tracing the originating Gnutella client would be quite difficult. Offensive requests and downloads could tarnish the reputation of the IP# of the proxy Gnutella client, but the catch phrase of "my Gnutella client was just acting as a proxy - honest" would take care of that. Bandwidth would suffer - but the real freedom of Gnutella is the transfer of idea-rich textfiles not huge bootleged MP3's and warz.
</possible>
:)
Sig goes here
Exposing supposed child-molestors by showing their IP is totally misguided on three or more accounts: The filenames has nothing to do with the actual content, the IP could point to someone "innocent" and phedophily is an emotional/phsycological damage or disease. Condemning people because they do what they do without understanding why they do it is a display of ignorance and unjust intolerance 100% of the time. Pervertion is not something people *choose*, and what is, is also very subjective. Of course we shouldn't tolerate act of cruelty against children, but you can't kill off phedophily by stamping on it. You can't control what other people think and feel, not even by going out on a witch-hunt.
- Steeltoe
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/
>It's been said many times by others: if you have
;-) and I want them to grow up happy, healthy and secure.
;-)
>done nothing wrong, you have nothing to be afraid
>of.
If you believe that for a second, I have a bridge to sell you. America is currently whipped up into such a 'protect our children' frenzy that it's practically a fetish; one of the few that regularly disturbs me.
I'll state the following for the record: I'm not a pedophile, consumer of kiddie porn, or any number of related horrible things. I don't want to see exploitation or torture of children any more than any sane adult would. I'm planning on having my own kids in the not too distant future (although perhaps slightly more distant than my wife
I am a consumer of net Porn. Not a particualrly rabid consumer, but a reasonably regular one. I see nothing shameful about pornography in general, and I don't care if *you* do. Over the past ten years or so (yes, porn predates the web), I've even had paying memberships at a few of my favorite sites.
Perhaps I'm sharing too much, but I happen to go for the really 'soft' stuff; hardcore action is just... kinda strange... Closeups of genitals and any number of other things that the mainstream porn industry thinks is oh-so-hot is a major turnoff. I like neutral, not particularly sexual poses of healthy, happy women. Pretty, happy women are a turn on... as they should be for practically any healthy het male! For this reason, I also like nudist photos (and generally am a believer in nudism myself). So far, I don't think anyone is particularly surprised or shocked. Feynman himself had more interesting tastes
For some reason though, alot of naturist and nudist sites also advertise themselves (often hidden in meta tags) as 'kiddie' 'illegal underage' or 'lolita' porn. Why? Heck if I know.
I think the whole net-porn industry needs a major dose of truth in advertising, but whatever. So it's the case that naturist sites often run hand in hand with fake (or real) kiddie sites. You can't tell until you visit.
Is someone logging the sites I go to? Am I gonna get a knock on my door at 7am because some asshole Yahoo who thought he was doing us all a major service saw I went to a site with 'kiddie porn' in a META tag and handed it to my local Police department? You might even find a pic or two in my Netscape cache from a site where I only hit the front page, (or more likely a banner ad). It almost makes me want to pull this stunt as a hoax ('turn in' a co-conspirator) in order to discredit the whole idea before it gets started.
When Megan's Law first started being enforced here in CA, several men were *PLACED ON THE SEX OFFENDER LIST ERRONEOUSLY*. One poor guy's neighbors noticed before he did, tried to burn down his house and in general sent alot of nasty death threats. Of course no one believed him when he claimed to be innocent! Who would trust someone on a Police list as a pedophile?
I don't know what it is about groups of people and mob mentality. Admit it: all we're looking for here, rather than a legitimate way of protecting children, is a new excuse for a witch hunt. Don't you just *love* that rush of righteous indignation? That justified feeling of hate for another human? That burning desire to wipe out the evil and ask questions later? The number of times folks in this comment lists have referred to the third-person, evil 'them' is disturbing.
If *I* got on a list by accident, could I trust all of you to stop and think for a second before tearing me to shreds?
I think I could not.
Monty
http://www.xiph.org/
...this has GOT to be the funniest thing I've seen this week...and this is finals week, so I've seen some pretty damn funny stuff.
Okay, raise your hands if you download kiddie pr0n. Now, keep them raised if you're outraged about this "violation of privacy on the net". Okay, now everybody who has no clue what the concept of personal responsibility, please keep'em raised. Thought so.
The Most Clueless Award of the Year goes to the poster who wrote, "...this is so lame! What if I were doing a search on such an innocuous term such as 'young-titties' or 'teen-sex'..." I dare you to find seven people on a libel jury who wouldn't label that as intent... Folks, there is no viable reason at all to be downloading files named "underage-titties.jpg" and "15yrold-lesbos.jpg". Merely downloading and possessing these files are a crime. If you want to be a tattletale and tell a sysop or the authorities about a kiddie pr0n server, notify them of your suspicions, and let them get the proof. And bulk downloading of pr0n won't hold up in court either. What they'll point out is that you took inadequate precautions to avoid getting illegal goods, anyways. If I were at an airport, and didn't have time to look through all six black similar-looking cases, so I decided to take them all and return those that weren't mine later when I had the time, I would still be liable.
You know, if you want to do something, at least have the balls to stand up for what you're doing. Doing something and being so ashamed of it that you try to hide it from everybody else is lame. Either stop doing it, or stop being such a loser about it.
Well, that's my two rants for today.
telnet://bbs.ufies.org
Trade Wars Lives
Light a fire for a man and he'll be warm for a day. Light a man on fire and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.
Here is the link:
http://home.xnet.com/~efflandt/ip2host.h tml
And here is the script itself:
#!/usr/local/bin/perl # # ip2h.pl - 19/Aug/1995 # # by David Efflandt # # Inputs IP addresses from keyboard and outputs to screen. # Loops for multiple entries. # print "\nEnter the 4 numbers separated by periods (no spaces).\n"; print "Press [enter] key without a number to exit.\n\n"; print "Enter IP address: "; $ip = ; chop($ip); while ($ip) { @numbers = split(/\./, $ip); $ip_number = pack("C4", @numbers); ($name) = (gethostbyaddr($ip_number, 2))[0]; if ($name) { print "The host is: $name"; } else { print "This IP has no name"; } print "\n\nEnter IP address: "; $ip = ; chop($ip); }
I'd be pretty pissed too if someone used my software for this type of thing(or worse) Doesn't the GPL state you have to use software for legal purposes?
No, Thursday's out. How about never - is never good for you?
Rico_Suave sez: "Bah. We should bring back public stonings."
What, like Woodstock? 7:^)
If not I'd have to also suggest we get rid of these silly doctors and hospitals to, cause if you can't save all the people it just makes it to hard to save the rest of them.
:)
How does it do this? How does it know which people have clients and which don't?
We need more sites like this to make it dangerous for perverts to use the Net. I'm tired of a permissive society that thinks it is all right as long as they don't know about it. The Master at Saybrook College, Yale University, was dismissed, tried and convicted of downloading child porn last year. He's files were discovered by accident when he used his computer at in his office to down load the stuff. They are going through reversal of tenure proceedings right now to eliminate his last claim to Yale University. He will never teach in a university again. And good for Yale to be vigilant in eliminating this trash. The senior vice president of the largest Teachers Union in California was also convicted of child porn charges. In other words, it is clear that pedofiles gravitate to educational institutions and there must be extra caution in examining the backgrounds of all people in the educational business for such tendencies. The guy that traced the IPs back to edus ought to notify the educational sites that they have people there accessing child porn!
Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darueber muss man schweigen. Ludwig Wittgenstein
I'm a little puzzled here. Why is you program downloading child porn 5% of the time? Especially if the person didn't request it. This is a pretty high number. One out of every 20 downloads. Are you designing your program to search for "random porn" or are you saying that one out of every 20 persons is asking for child porn, or that one out of every 20 web files to download is child porn? Sounds like your program has a "perversion" and should be removed.
Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darueber muss man schweigen. Ludwig Wittgenstein
Hey, I can be crude too. You make me sick Nicolas. PosterBoy, I support your position. I have no tolerance for perversion. None.
Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darueber muss man schweigen. Ludwig Wittgenstein
So what if someone likes to look at kiddie porn, but they have never commited that crime? Does this mean they will commit it in the future?
Just because you like to look at something, does not mean you will do it.
Statistics support the assumption that they will commit it in the future.
Given opportunity, most people will choose to enact fantasies. Unlike most crimes, pedophilia feels unthreatening... the sicko isn't at any risk if he thinks he can't get caught.
People who don't have the potential to commit this crime are generally revolted and nauseated by the images. This is, of course, less than 100% verifiable, but it hasn't been falsified yet, either.
We discovered, through monitoring of traffic, seventeen regular viewers of child pornography in the pre-luser-proliferation era. We monitored them. We've managed to catch eleven of them red handed, to date. Not terribly good statistics.
There are many more of these people online now than there were seven years ago. Perhaps there are more sick fscks who only want to fantasize out there than there are sick fscks who indulge their fantasies. I'd be surprised, but I've been surprised before.
-- Still waiting for the Nike endorsement
--
"Now, if someone were to create an animated film that was indistinguishable from live-action, then we'd have a sticky situation. "
Uhhh..huh.huhh....huhuh.. he said `sticky`....
:)
I didn't say that it downloaded "child porn", I said "random porn". It's never downloaded child porn that I've seen, but I don't watch it much, nor do I log what it downloads.
Interestingly, the past few days that I've checked the contents of my cache, it's been less pornful than before. Perhaps fewer people are searching for porn, or more people are searching for music.
I believe (it has been a while since I read about it) the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act (CAPTA) (1996) makes it illegal to even insinuate such material. To photograph a nude or engaged 20 year old and call him/her 16 is illegal according to this statute. So then would be "reaming_a_12yo_butt.jpeg" by definition, since it alleges and describes an act that is contained within.
I know this is late and so the chances of anyone seeing it are minimal, but I only just found the comment via M2.
Anwyay. The law in the UK is that it doesn't matter whether it _is_ illegal, it's whether it _appears_ illegal. In other words, you can legally publish the material as long as the participants are of legal age - though you may be required to prove it - but modifying the results so they appear to be of illegal age isn't permitted. Otherwise you have a huge hole through which every defence would instantly dive.
My personal view? I'd have to agree with the courts. If you take free speech as an absolute right which goes above all else, it creates problems. Which is greater, the right of the adult to such speech or the right of the child to life without such abuse? I'd have to say the child wins, every time.
Greg
(Inside a nuclear plant)
Aaaarrrggh! Run! The canary has mutated!
Barely Legal is a damn fine porn mag. Not that I buy porn mags, I get all that for free on the net now.
Does RIAA/MPAA already have these servers out? If so I bet they are PISSED that someone publiclly brought out the possibility of this. Before this, how many people gave a second thought to this possibility?
What next? Government monitoring?
What concerns me right now is that you seem to be worried more about the privacy issues than the fact that Gnutella is being used by pedophiliacs. I applaud ZeroPaid.com for their efforts.
First, your pseudo legal arguments suck. Then, if you had taken a look at the pages this article refers to, you would have seen that more than half of the reported entries had VERY UNSPECIFIC filenames (youngass, schoolgirl, hotteen, etc ...) that could perfectly well apply to even non pornographic pictures. Hell, you can find pictures of a 2 yo baby's ass in any image bank. And you see those pics in plenty of commercials. This is really such a nonsense. That kind of vigilantism will have ZERO positive impact, and has only drawbacks.
Try the amazing new game Nuke-A-Ped!
go to http://www.zeropaid.com/busted/ where
zeropaid
will post the "Pedophile of the moment"i.p. address.If we can get
them to.
Then using your favorite nuke,blast away!
Sure,it may be illegal but whats the ped gonna do?
call the cops?
A modified version of this game may be played via
IRC on efnet #gnutella (or a room you make) make up
some bullshit "pedo-files"with all
the obvious names e.g. teen-orgy.mpg
13yr_blows_donkey.jpg
When unsuspecting ped does his download
just post his i.p. to the channel and everyone
ping his ass real hard.WHOOOPEEEEEEE!!!!
Granted,this is a fine way for a Libertarian and
Subgenius to be talking but I'm also a megalomaniac in my spare time and I believe kids
have a hard enough time in the world without
these abherations to be allowed to breathe or take
up valuable space.
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
People downloading a bunch of jpgs?
People looking for teens (16+ is legal here)?
Law enforcment agencies with too much spare time on their hands?
Anti-pedos surfing for such sites to report them and shut them down?
And if it was real pedos.. do you really think an attempt to download files with a possibly illegal content would come anywhere close to probable cause? Not here anyway, above is several good reasons why others would download them. How many links or banners for adult sites have you seen with "lolita" "underage" "illegal" etc etc, while they only lead to sites carrying normal legal porn? Would that be illegal too? If so, I could probably sue as many companies as Metallica want to sue Napster users.
Kjell Rune
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Caveat emptor
There are plenty of LEGITIMATE uses for a distributed file sharing architecture like Gnutella. Right now critics have zeroed in on porn and copyright infringement. If this site scares off lusers who would otherwise post or download pron and/or other illegal materials, great. If you have a legitimate reason to look at youngass.jpg, then surely you don't care if you are singled out and perhaps emailed by the server admin asking why you are requesting that file. On the other hand, if you are some lameass that wants to flood the network with porn files (or some other illegitimate material) or requests then you SHOULD be scared off. Go away. We don't want you ruining the quality of the network and giving it a bad name and attracting criticism. If you want porn that damn bad subscribe to the f*cking Playboy channel or to some porn site...it's not that difficult.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
To most of the world, the net is a buzzword. The image is a mess of pornography, hackers, and lawlessness. The reality is... partly the same. The issue is... nothing's wrong with this.
But pedophilia is a wholly different issue. They use the internet to network, to trade both pornography and victims. They use it to stalk. They use it to lure out new victims.
There is a real issue involved for any of us who administer any service online... public backlash against any community that makes itself pedophile friendly will cause no end of headaches. Moreover, it will cause some of us to attack you by means other than legal.
I am both a geek and, in one state, a licenced therapist for victims of sex crimes. I know pedophilia. I've dealt with it, run up against it time after time. It is not a sexual fetish that is simply not socially acceptable. It is the worst form of mental illness I know, and one of only two things that tends to make me physically ill. The other is extremely bad shellfish. I have never met a pedophile that was even remotely well in the head. Why deal with a problem when you can just jail it away? Well, the problem is, we can't. Too many pedophiles get away with it. There are virtually no exhibitors of the disease who do not practice its manifestation... this is something I've become sickeningly aware of. The least harmful still cop feels from victims too young or too terrified or ashamed to speak up. If we could just jail it away, it wouldn't be a problem.
The issue with age of consent isn't (or shouldn't be, in any case) the choice of minors to be sexually active. It is the choice of adults to exploit minors. The best law, from a therapist's point of view, would be a sliding scale... five years for seventeen, four for sixteen, three for fifteen, two for fourteen and down... I've seen it go to one at twelve, with prosecution shifted to parents, but I'm not sure that's well thought out...
The reason for an age of consent is simple. Sex should not be something a person with power extracts from someone without. Rape can be committed without physical force: blackmail, threat of firing, threats of any other kind... or exploitation of authority status. In short, adults having sex with children are committing rape, in the same sense that that rev. Moon character was...
We geeks are people with power... but often, we are people with neither ethics nor conscience. We consider ourselves a breed apart, above those petty issues. Unfortunately, some of those issues are far from petty.
-- Still waiting for the Nike endorsement
Why didn't ZeroPaid.com actually go out searching for child porn and post IPs from the users from whom they downloaded recognizable child porn? (I assume they can identify nude 7 year olds.)
I've only used Gnutella a handful of times and don't remember if the serving IP could be identified, but wouldn't this be "much more legitimate" than their current method?
If you study what the framers of the Constitution intended, you discover that they were talking about Free Political speech. Free Political speech guarantees the right to participate in political activities without your voice being censored. It has nothing to do with frivolous things like pornography.
It's ridiculous how much this has been twisted in the time since then.
And I apologize in advance to those who are disturbed when common sense is interjected into these discussions. Sorry.
Urrm. So does that mean that the kiddies should download their p0rn brazenly? :-) It might be good that - teach them not to be hypocrites!
I had a friend in university who had a special section of his web page called:
"Dirty Pixxx"
"Hard Wood" and,
"Filthy Pixxx"
When you clicked on them you would get pictures of:
Dirt
A Tree
Dirty Laundry
He then logged your IP address and ISP name and put it up on his web-page with the headliner "People with dirty minds"... it was pretty funny.
It was a good link to feed the "anybody got some pRon" trolls.
I'm going to post a bunch of mp3 files with song names of Britney Spears, Boyz2Men, BackStreetBoys, and all that, and post a Hall of Lame of those people that actually thought those songs were good! muahahah
Go get your free Palm V (25 referrals needed only!)
Obviously downloading this is a crime, but surely the bigger crime is people using covert means to find out that I am doing it. I can't believe these people invading my god given right to be above the law at all times......
Irony or allegory, make your minds up.....
Working for the (other) man
On the other hand, when you can go to jail for using pad and pencil, something is wrong with the law.
You can use the pad and pencil to send explicit death threats to your prime minister or president or whatever. I have no problem with imprisoning such types.
I looked up some of the DNS names, I wasn't sure what I would find, but it looks like lots of dial ups and DHCP addresses.
Host Name: <lsanca1-ar8-048-168.dsl.gtei.net> IP Address: <4.35.48.168>
Host Name: <ci697303-a.lusvil1.ky.home.com> IP Address: <24.2.227.10>
Host Name: <PPPa86-ResalePhoenix6-2R7219.saturn.bbn.com> IP Address: <4.54.182.211>
Host Name: <cachef1-v105.kolumbus.fi> IP Address: <193.229.159.211>
Host Name: <tayhou-229-217.ev1.net> IP Address: <207.218.229.217>
Host Name: <du13055.blo.ptd.net> IP Address: <204.186.13.55>
Host Name: <CHCGB511-10.splitrock.net> IP Address: <209.254.67.10>
Host Name: <annex32.su.ic.ac.uk> IP Address: <155.198.152.42>
Host Name: <proxy2-external.snvl1.sfba.home.com> IP Address: <24.4.254.99>
Host Name: <w098.z208177014.dfw-tx.dsl.cnc.net> IP Address: <208.177.14.98>
Host Name: <host001083.arnet.com.ar> IP Address: <200.43.1.83>
Host Name: <dhcp93101233.columbus.rr.com> IP Address: <24.93.101.233>
Host Name: <c05-148.012.popsite.net> IP Address: <64.24.48.148>
Host Name: <52.atlanta-48-49rs.ga.dial-access.att.net> IP Address: <12.77.19.52>
Host Name: <5-168.casl.du.edu> IP Address: <130.253.5.168>
Host Name: <a24b31n93client144.hawaii.rr.com> IP Address: <24.31.93.144>
Host Name: <b12.med.pcpros.net> IP Address: <208.198.6.12>
Host Name: <p3E9B96E2.dip0.t-ipconnect.de> IP Address: <62.155.150.226>
Host Name: <slkc6400gw1poolC60.slkc.uswest.net> IP Address: <63.226.102.60>
Host Name: <adsl-77-226-243.atl.bellsouth.net> IP Address: <216.77.226.243>
Host Name: <ip229.dayton11.oh.pub-ip.psi.net> IP Address: <38.31.203.229>
Host Name: <dhcp-letts-158-219.american.edu> IP Address: <147.9.158.219>
George
Sure, they're posting the IP addresses and all, which is aparently getting everyone all riled up, but if people think that information isn't easy to get, they're mistaken. Seriously, websites like hitbox (and others) provide even just your casual, not knowing much, webmaster to monitor IP addresses (and other stuff) of anyone to visit a given page. Any common person could make a blank website, submit it to all search engines with keywords involving a ton of sexual words, and then monitor and do whatever with the IP addresses of people who visit.
since when did an IP address give you anything other than an indicater of a pseudo geographic pool eg dialup1.xsrvr.ny.myisp.sucks.com , and really, even if th eisp someho wmanages sessions on this dyn ip, how does that help shame someone?
Which prompts the question, in my mind anway, if the alleged victim doesn't really exist has a crime been committed?
No, it was planned, and there was the intent to carry it through. Wether the victim exists isn't interesting. (If it were, cops could hire a 14-year old for setting the trap, and then bust people.)
Can you accuse someone walking into a bank waving a gun? Before he has time to say anything?
This is a problem with any peer-to-peer file sharing app, including the centralized Napster system. Unless there's a third-party available to proxy the transfer through, your IP will be available. And it's likely we won't see download proxies springing up, simply because of concerns over bandwidth saturation and liability.
I think condemned.org has it right on actually doing something besides complain about kiddie porn. They not only take a stand they do something about it. I am very proud of this group .
There needs to be a to moderate distributed file systems. If theres not then we will have a problem. This is just the tip of the iceberg.
Ignore the "p2p is theft" trolls, they're just uninformed
Yes. I'm sure that waving a gun in a bank is a crime in and of itself. Not a good analogy.
Couldn't our hypothetical pedophile's response be, "I could tell by your messages that you were a cop pretending to be a 14 year old girl, and I really have a jones for guys who pretend to be little girls"??
Or we can talk about what really happened, and reasonable consequences if this becomes common.
Discussing abstract principles is something I love to do, especially after a beer or two. However it seldom leads anywhere. I think (as a matter of principle) that speech should be free, anonymous access to information should be possible (or rather, not necesary) and that children (and adults) never should be forced to pose for porn pics.
*I* have no trouble combining those views. Neither (I guess) have you. Unfortunately there are those who like to act out those liberties to the full extent, and they become uncompatible. 'tis called "real life"
Regarding the *actual* event, though, I have a serious problem with the wall of shame method.
It goes against fundamental priniples of justice, like "innocent until proven guilty" and "right do defend yourself"
Yes if you trace down the IP number you might find a child molester, who gets scared off once he's out in the open. You might also find an average innocent Joe. Wether because (s)he downloaded the file "by accident" or was wrongfully pointed out by a forged IP adress, someone will never be able to clear his name. (to a large group of people, accused==guilty)
I could go on talking about how you could log anything, not just that dreaded kiddie porn, the same way, but it's too obvious and allready done.
All opinions are my own - until criticized
publicised surveillance => public spoofs
People do NOT go to jail for trying to pass oregano off as pot, at least not in the US of A. The penal codes specifically define a crime as one where an actual illegal act took place. Even cops busting pedos have to use _real_ child porn to do it (usually pics of victims used with the family's permission, the FBI has a file of them, and it's a pain in the @$$ to get them). If a cop tries to sell baby powder as coke, he can't bust the buyer...
Think outside the... Hey, where'd the friggin' box go?
This will make using Gnutella just that much more exciting now that you never know what the server you are getting your MP3s from is doing with your IP address. I suppose that some encryption authentification scheme could be thought of that assures that the MP3s are real, but that would just lead to live-bait IP-logging servers. So while Gnutella creates an distribution method impossible to stop, it also cannot protect against the inherent risks in obtaining files across the internet. What is even more dangerous is that one person could obtain the IP addresses of everyone on the network, by recursively requesting the IP address list from every IP address they get. A good solution to that would be to have many separate networks (like IRC). But the baiting method of obtaining IP addresses will probably be used by the copyright 'police' and should result in a cat & mouse type game. I can see Gnutella networks (and other similar ones) becoming fragmented into smaller networks of trusted individuals. Time will tell.
Those who do not know the past are doomed to reimplement it, poorly.
I don't, however, think that what these guys are doing is wrong - but anyone who gets caught-out by it only has themselves to blame.
--
This smells to me of a publicity "look how much we care stunt." Probably in light of the Napster controversy (notice how Napster and such are discussed on the main page) they're putting their best face foward. I mean, who can argue with folks that don't like pediophiles?
However, looking over the pages with the file names, few of them seem to be any different from the usual dross you find on the net or here about in spam or see in newsgroups. The names are rarely distinctive.
I wonder if this is a new trend - trying to find ways to look good so you don't get caught up in the recent controversies over the net and technology.
"The Sage treasures Unity and measures all things by it" - Lao Tzu
Very well spoken... Wish I was one of the lucky few to be able to moderate this up today!
If you think about it, every society sets up limits on what is proper/normal and accepted within that society. Some of these things are taboo or left unspoken (out of sight/out of mind) while yet others are actively punished. Thats why we set up laws and prisons. The internet is a society and people will set up limits--even if they are hard to regulate. One of the oldest ways to curtail unaccepted behavior is to shame the person involved (i.e. the scarlet letter). This is probably just step one in the world defining what will be accepted and what will not be accepted on the internet. I think that a society that can not be regulated enforcably by law, regulating by shame may become the only way to notify others of thier acts against society. You still have a choice whether or not you want to do something not acceptable by the majority, but you face the chances of being uncovered...not unlike the cops who pose as hitmen...
I need a TiVo for my car. Pause live traffic now.
The ATT Crowds system shows how to build these kinds of distributed systems without traceability.
Of course, ZeroPaid's approach is also socially questionable and rather naive from a social point of view. The assumption that most people who download their files are "guilty" is a bad one. Many of them may be other people on the same mission as they are. Others may be automated programs or just promiscuous downloaders. Concretely, wouldn't you assume that the FBI is searching for and downloading just those files?
Wow, I'm realty upset that everyone's favorite piracy tool has a privacy issue. Maybe someone should sue the company that makes it... oh, duh, I forgot its open source, so you are stuck...
DrLunch.com The site that tells you what's for lunch!
You blew my statement out of proportion. I didn't say the admin or anybody else would attempt to "prove" that you were a pedophile or smear your name. I was just saying, that IF you actually had a completely legitimate reason for attempting to retrieve some file from some server, then I don't see what harm there is in the server admin knowing that. However, most of the people attempting to retrieve files like this will be lamers tricked into it, and should deserve to be embarrassed for not having a legitimate reason. I'm completely comfortable with that if it scares idiots off the network. Since you would have a legitimate reason you shouldn't be scared off.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
I've tracked back some of the IP addresses they have posted. Some of them are dial up connections to ISPs, some trace back to .edu and seem to be static addresses.
Without matching the time and port to a specific user login at an ISP, this is mostly useless. But matching can be done quite easily, as most ISPs keep login records and will willingly give them over to law enforcement when asked or marketing research firms when paid.
This is good because it will make people a little nervous about using gnutella and similar distributed file systems to spread around questionable material. If it helps keep the worst pr0n and blatantly ripped copyrighted material off, then gnutella will be more acceptable in areas such as universities. PR stunts such as this will also raise the knowledge level of how anonymity on the internet is a rather dodgy concept. It is so very easy to track you through your IP address, but most of the clueless people believe the hype you are completely out of reach of repercussions when connected to the internet.
We'll have to see if other services like this one pop up, especially those who have an evil political agenda. Marketers who harvest IP info and match it up to other records in doubleclick to spam you more effectively. Imagine a company putting out files named "christs_love.txt", and seeing who DLs it, and then targeting them with religious ads. Or "suicide_help.doc", and then selling the results to insurance companies.
Expect to see more of this in the near future.
the AC
Hemos is like...sci-fi fans;he thinks technology is cool, but he hasn't bothered to understand the science it's based on
f u r r f u ! !
better yet, alter gnutella to forge it's return as zeropaid.com - then see what happens!
PizzaPoweredColdFusion-QuadTransmetta-TotalbodyDol byElectrostatic-Panoramic2meter3D- TFT-LCD-FreeWireless-DistributedNeural-Tradesecret -TeledildonicExoskeletal-TempestCloaked- AntiCorporateCaffinated-LifeExtendedRemixMP3-EASY- to-HACK-InternetAppliance that Runs LINUX for ONLY $29.95
<slashdot>"Would those be good in a Beowulf cluster??"</slashdot>
If you have a legitimate reason to look at youngass.jpg, then surely you don't care if you are singled out and perhaps emailed by the server admin asking why you are requesting that file.
.sig
Come on... this is suuuch a false statement.
I am NOT a racist, but i WOULD care if someone wrote on a big wall that i was one... come on...
Even if you and your wife/children/parents know that you aren't a pedophile, would you like it if someone "proved" it and people started acting funny around you, talked in your back, etc??? Even if there is only a tiny possiblilty that people around you hear about it? No, you wouldn't like it. Even if you know that probably nobody you know will trace you, there is a doubt.
Face it.
phobos% cat
phobos% cat
cat:
The fact that you can find the IP of a person requesting a file has nothing to do with the fact that it's "truely distributed," as there are very few file sharing networks where there is not a direct connection between the person sharing the file and the person getting it. Unless you want a lot of servers that have massive amounts of traffic, or you have a group of people that don't mind if files are cached on their systems, you'll have to do direct transfers.
The other problem with this IP posting strategy is that this in no way reflects people who are actively searching for child pornography. You could log searches for things such as "kiddie porn", but searches are anonymous. Only file connections are direct, and there are some people who go crazy and do things like download every possible jpg image.
One of the things that i value most about the internet is the privacy. You can have true free speech and not have to worry about what is going to happen to you, or who is going to take it bad. Privacy can be done different ways however, even though you are publishing your ip address whenever you look for a file over Gnutella, it is kind of like opening your door. Some people respect your privacy and stay away, unless they ask. Others however, like ZeroPaid, barge in, look at everything, and try to steal whatever they can. What an awfull world we live in where people do this regularily (such as script kiddies). Now, i view kiddie porn as free speach. Please don't take this wrong however. Porn, especially kiddie porn is wrong, and takes advantage of people who do not know better. Seeing how this country is supposed to be free though, i see it perfectly ok if you want to corrupt your mind that way. Distributed networks, such as Gntella or Napster, are vessels of free speech, they allow us to say what is good or bad in the digital world. As an example Napster lets us show the MPAA or the publishing companies that it is time to start doing something different in their distribution methods. However, the beauty of the internet is tainted when people take advantage of that free speech and start showing people's personal habits for all to see. This is kind of like running the looser in high school's underwear up the flag pole. Why do we need to show that other people are worse or better than us? Ok, now i am done raving.... Just food for thought.
If the government set up a sting operation to prosecute people in this fashion, I'd be outraged. If a company tried to convince people to use their site and then did this, I'd boycott. But this is being done by someone who is TRYING to get people to quit using his site. (He wants pedophiles to stop using Gnutella.) I have no problem with that. This would be bad behavior from the police, but it's just fine for a person- he's not making anybody use his stuff.
"If one is really a superior person, the fact is likely to leak out without too much assistance" -- John Andrew Holmes
My roommate? Can you say "little kiddy that wanted to see his name in a wired article?"
Just for the record, today one of CommanderTaco's articles includes the following: '' Update: 05/04 03:12 by CT: My Roommate Kurt "The Pope" DeMaagd has written a better... ''
Gonna remind CT that he's a little kiddy??
Further note - shouldn't the Coppertone people / all the others who carried their ads, be charged with distributing child pornography for their shameless display of a 4 year old girl wearing only a pair of swim trunk bottoms?
It is already happening. Several artist have already been proscuited under child pornography laws for taking nude pictures of children. Sally Man I think was one of them. There is a difference between porn and tasteful nudes that some people don't understand. Not all nude pictures, even those of children, are pornography.
I read at +2. If your post doesn't reach that level I will not see or respond to it.
Unless I'm very much mistaken, that would be entrapment, which is a major no-no for law enforcement. The FBI and the police are supposed to investigate crimes so they can be prosecuted; they are not supposed to create crimes so that they'll have crimes to investigate. Even if they think it would give them a lead on who is 'prone' to these activities... it wouldn't do them much good, and it would do them a lot of harm.
Suppose they put Guy X on their short list of Probable Pedophiles based on the fact that he once downloaded something titled "teen_sex.jpg" (and may I join others in saying that assuming such a title indicates illegal child pornography is utterly stupid; anyone actually competent enough to run such a sting operation would know that 'teen', 'young' and 'lolita' are used with as much precision and accuracy in advertising porn as 'virtual', 'object-oriented' and 'MIPS' are used in marketing computers.)
Now suppose that they catch Guy X downloading child porn that actually exists, i.e., that they didn't invent solely for the purpose of trapping him. Any good defense lawyer would be able to get it surpressed if, for example, he had been previously arrested or convicted on child-porn charges, pointing out rightly that the question is whether he committed this crime. (If not for this, no crime would ever get solved; the police would just look up who was the ex-con with the most convictions for that crime, and pin it on them. If they happened to actually get the right suspect, it would be sheer coincidence.)
So how does it look in a courtroom when they say, "You can be sure that he downloaded this bad stuff because he's done it before... Who did he download this bad stuff from before? Uh, well, it was us, actually..."
If people are to respect the law, perhaps the law should begin by respecting the people.
I realize that these guys aren't exactly under the same rules as the government would be, but what they are doing smells a little too much like entrapment for me to be entirely comfortable with it.
It is too easy for people who aren't really pedophiles, but are just drawn into downloading these files just out of curiosity to get smeared and labeled by things like this.
My question is this: Is this medium really experiencing problems with people using it for transferring kiddie porn? If so, why aren't they targeting the people who upload it? Those are the people who are really the source of the problem.
While I don't have a problem busting people who really intentionally do something wrong, I think it is important to make sure we are getting the right people, not people who just get sucked into things due to stupidity or curiosity.
Quote from the web page:
> I'm all for freedom of data sharing but not when it comes to exploiting children.
Quick vote who here thinks he is really concerned about children and who thinks this guy just wants some attention.
Moreover while we all know molesting children should be illegal why to we legislate against child porn? Does not for profit child porn increase the number of children abused or decrease it?
Who gets busted in regards to free child porn? middle aged men sitting in their basements harming no one. While the commercial rings encourage the abuse of children the man next door just needs some conseling not jail time. Moreover does the availibility encourage more molestation of children or discourage it because their impulses are satisfied other ways?
Does the laws against non-commercial distribution make it easier to catch the actual molesters or harder by encouraging everyone else involved not to squeal so they themselves are not prosecuted.
We don't know the answers to any of the above questions. But we do know making non-commercial consumtion illegal seriously infringes on our rights.
How often have you heard someone say they support freedom of expresion except for child porn. What other crime can you commit in the privacy of your own home with GIMP and artistic skills (yes in order to make child porn laws enforceable they also made images which only appear to be child porn illegal).
The child porn issue is a wonderful wedge which convinces otherwise stalwart defenders of free expresion and privacy to cave and make allowances. It is the first step on a slippery slope which will eventually make illegal bondage photos.
First womens groups campaign and get images of women getting raped made illegal (sounds reasonable just like child porn). But then we need to make images which only appear to show women getting raped illegal as otherwise everyone may just claim they thought it was fake. Eventually all bondage porn is illegal. Then eventually all porn.
This is the issue where we finally see the true color of internet libertarians. The truth is they do nothave a great respect for the first ammendment and the willingness to tolerate that which offends them but rahter they just like porn so they don't want to see it banned.
If you liked this thought maybe you would find my blog nice too:
Next thing you know they will be taking pictures of my license plate when I'm waiting outside the local junior high. this is getting crazy? now do i have to look over my shoulder and worry about getting arrested just because i am hanging out besides the dressing rooms at the kids gap for 4-5 hours a day? i mean seriously guys...this just doesn't make sense. If someone comes up to me in the arcade at the mall after schools get out and tell me to put my pants back on, then i am just going to kill myself. someone has to put a stop to this.
raretshirts.com - cool vintage t-shirts
Hey, deliberatly putting "kiddie porn"-like files on a server they control ain't exactly condusive to what they wanna accomplish. SO WHAT! Even if they wanted to "turn someone in" for downloading FAKED child pornography, what will they prove?
By increasing the content and adding blood to the water they're acting retrograde to what they're trying to do. I hate the thought of child pornography. period. But hypocrisy is almost as bad. Not to mention the false pretenses that they act under.
you never lose in ure razorblade shoes......Beck-Hotwax
Zeropaid.com's behavior is extremely dishonorable. The fact that they are apparently making such accusations behind peoples back makes their actions increasingly disgraceful. There is no excuse to harass innocent individuals in the hope of catching a few criminals. I will, admit, however, that they would have every right to kick such persons off their service, if such a policy were evenly enforced.
The fact is that in the U.S.A. a person has the right to look at people of the opposite sex without being called straight; listen to Rush L. without being called a conservative; go into a Baptist church without being called a Christian; and, yes, even look at an ad of a scantily clad little boy resting on his fathers chest outside in a hammock (potentially scanned in as cute little boy and his hot dad in bed), without being called a pedophile.
Pedophilia is a crime that does untold amounts of damage. However, I think most people have enough trouble just trying to pay bills and getting their kids home safely. We don't need vigilantes making our lives even more difficult.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
"But Hillary, it was a forgery! A prank by one of those Linus longhairs."
"Then you won't mind telling me the root password on your laptop, Bill."
"Um, er, I can't. National security."
---
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
It isn't that small of a chance if he uses a dialup or dhcp cablemodem/dsl connection and he is on a large provider. If you get a different IP every time you connect, and a few other users on your ISP are pr0n surfers, chances are sooner or later you will have the same IP they have had in the past as you will both rotate through the IP pool.
The plan was really just to do it so we could say we did it. The response was insane. We got dozens of hateful emails from all kinds of exciting d00dz..
I have to admit, zeropaid is even more clever, but nothing tops our automatic napster legal threat generator. THREATSTER!
You are correct. Chold pornography, in its current state, is made using some of the most hideous abuses of children possible. This abuse is illegal and has every right to be.
Now, a question. Suppose that someone drew child-porn pictures, using no live models. In other words, not a single child was exploited to create the image. Or perhaps they were created using other means which, again, do not involve actual children in any way, shape, or form. What would you say then?
At baiting.org" there's some (semi)amusing logs of people trolling for pedos.
---
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
The danger is not about napster anymore than about anonymous ftp or the web; it's inherent in downloading from a server, whether those servers be distributed or centralized; the people running that server know what you're doing. The difference is in how much you "trust" servers when they're in the hands of "joe user".
Freenet, I believe, isn't quite there yet, but they are talking about doing a scheme like this--at the moment the "time to live" data in requests provides too much information. By randomly decrementing time to live while forwarding requests, it becomes impossible to know whether a given request is a "true" request or a proxy request. That was the premise of the schemes in CACM, and is (if I understand correctly from browsing the FreeNet mailing list archives) a proposal for FreeNet.
Anyone who uses Gnutella and thinks that it's a _private_ distributed network is seriously mistaken. Just as we don't want the Powers That Be to interfere with our attempts to descramble DVDs and record MP3s, we shouldn't get fussed about other people grabbing IP addresses over what is essentially a broadcast medium.
There are two alternatives, for people who are concerned about privacy: don't use Gnutella for your Pr0n downloads, or invent an encrypted version of the Gnutella protocol.
-- Andrem
There has been a major scientific break-in
Seth
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
As far as I know, there is no presumption that logs of your accesses will remain private on a particular service. People already post aggregate statistics (so many .edu hits, so many from Japan, etc.) that although posting information about individual IP addresses is quite a large step, it is probably legal.
That being said, the real issue is security through legal means versus security through mathematical means. Even if it a law made it illegal to publish non-aggregate server logs with specific access information, you still really aren't safe. Anybody could be sniffing your packets between dialup042.aol.com and pr0nserver.net, whether they publish logs or not.
The situation is analogous to the whole DeCSS issue. Sure, you could just use weak encryption and depend on the law to prevent people from doing something, but there's always going to be someone out there with the tools and the desire to get around that. You can make it illegal to keep or publish access logs, but the tools exist and someone will be able to monitor your access whether you like it or not.
Not that I'm interested in helping out child pornographers here, but if, for example, you're reading this in China and searching the 'net while planning your revolution, don't depend on any laws to prevent your identity from being known. Your only real protection on the Internet is strong cryptography, in this case probably augmented with anonymous proxies in several different countries with - shall we say - recalcitrant attitudes towards cooperation with global law enforcement.
Bottom line: you are ultimately responsible for your own safety and/or anonymity, not the government.
Your right to not believe: Americans United for Separation of Church and
Meaning, if they start keeping track of patterns of a large number of users who visit their sites, they may be tipped off on specific persons' activities and investigate further. Of course, this is likely to be illegal as well, as it will violate some kind privacy law. They would need to show a reason to track the usage in the first place, rather than using the tracked usage pattern data as the reason to start investigating.
So definitely, I agree that while the government could not create and opportunity and induce people to commit crimes, I think they may (though I don't necessarily say they should) use the honeypot tactic just to get some lists of people to watch, perhaps.
Code up a gnutilla client that forges its return address and requests files. Set the return address to whitehousel.gov, christiancoalition.org or godhatesfags.com and let the fun begin!
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
If I understand the Gnutella protocol, there is no way to determine who originally requested the file, because each server acts as a client proxy to every other server it knows.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
FYI
It was tested and thrown out in court, last year I beleive.
The chief litigant??? None other than Larry Flynt, of Hustler fame. Not too supprising there, eh?
Anyway, the crux of that case was a publication of his entitled "Barely Legal". "Barely Legal" seeks out eighteen and nineteen year old girls who look younger than they are, say fourteen to sixteen, and is every bit explicit as Hustler.
And it's all perfectly legal, and Mr. Flynt is making a good deal of money off of "Barely Legal"
john
Imagine all the people...
What this proves is that anyone can see what your downloading at anytime. If the police wanted to crack down on KiddyPorn, all they have to do is setup something like ZeroPaid did, get your IP address, call your provider, and nail your ass.
Its the same with Warez, MP3z or Movies.
Though I doubt any country has the man power to nap every single person on the planet. But if they got a few of them, it'd be just enough to scare people away from using it.
Course then we'd have tons of "Free " banners everywhere...
:)
"Imagination is the only weapon in the war against reality." -Jules de Gautier
So they offered faked kiddie porn? I wonder how they faked them. ;-)
Did they just use small grown-ups? Or maybe they used clever photo manipulation tricks.
I would almost download the pics just to see for myself, but hey, I kindof like my privacy
With enough eyeballs you can allways catch one peeking. Espec. if you really BAIT the TRAP with some FRESHMEAT:l byElectrostatic-Panoramic2meter3D-TFT-LC D-FreeWireless-DistributedNeural-Tradesecret-Teled ildonicExoskeletal-TempestCloaked-AntiCo rporateCaffinated-LifeExtendedRemixMP3-EASY-to-HAC K-InternetAppliance that
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Even if they have to click or sign an agreement!
Joe Torre - X - HardwareEngineer @ Amiga Inc & ZapMedia Amiga, AmigaDE, BeOS, Linuxz, QNX, Rebol, Windoze, ZME: So
First, let me state that Pedophilia is wrong, sick, and should be illegal.
But this brings up the question of the state of the laws against kiddie porn in the US. Possessing it is illegal (as in federal felony), as is looking at it. So despite the fact that they are supposed to find people who use/view/possess his stuff, no agent of the United States can have legally ever seen it! One gets quickly hung up in the, "I know it when I see it..." argument.
Also illegal (although not upheld in court yet) are images which are altered to create what appears to be kiddie porn (cut and paste kid's picture on Pamela Lee's body, etc.). Does this mean every pigtail-wearing porn star is in violation?
Now, are files named to indicate they contain kiddie porn going to illegal as well? What do these files actually contain? If I put up a video of an 18-yo chick doing something maughty, but I mistype and title it 16-yo.jpg, have I felonied?
I don't mean to make light of the crime, but to show that the US in it's zealotry to expunge this activity creates extremely vague and poorly written laws.
As an aside, I have read somewhere that an extremely large percentage of all kiddie porn is maintained and distributed my law enforcement to trap potential pedophiles. Even they admit that the actual creation of new kiddie porn is extremely rare.
Anyone have details on this?
For example, this guy has used a semi-intelligent bot script to troll for pathetic horny teenagers on IRC. The difference there is, however, that the human experience is published without publishing the exact identities of the humans involved.
The Wall-of-Shame fellow ought to be careful about slapping names like "pedophile" on random people. He's just begging for a libel suit.
"If one is really a superior person, the fact is likely to leak out without too much assistance" -- John Andrew Holmes
This should scare a few legitimate people because "Today kiddie porn, tomorrow politicol statements."
It should scare enough kiddie porn searchers because "Today kiddie porn."
Eventually, both camps will move toward freenet or another way to stay anonymous. I believe that anoynimity is a good thing in certain circumstances. It doesn't matter that this time the kiddie porn people are looking for it, because next time it could be someone else. Hell, next time it could even be you!
Here's an "Ask Slashdot": How can we remain as anonymous as possible on the internet while we're downloading porn^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hmaking politicol statements?
I don't like kiddie porn. i'd love to see it all disappear from the Net in one huge system crash. As for rape/snuff film, I'd rather not see those disappear immediately, but rather have the last of the films be made starring the people who had made them before (can you tell I really don't like this?)
But no one has the right to force these things to disappear, least of all the governments. I don't think Gnutella will affect production of either of these much; the spread in popularity that might occur due to increased availability is more or less negated by the fact that no one makes any money off of it. But at least un the U.S., "free speech" is supposed to mean all speech, and that's simply the way it has to be; it's the only totally fair way. And yeah, it means we have to put up like crap like kiddie porn, but it's better than the alternative: a world where we have to watch very carefully what we say or totally innocent speech will land us in front of government and/or private death squads or worse.
My point in all this? It's one thing to protest the availability of kiddie porn on the Net. Protest all you want; you have as much of a right to free speech as the sickos do to download their pr0n. But this crosses the line. This is simple, outright invasion of privacy.
However, I do think it's time for a new feature to be added into Gnutella programs, one which could help cancel out these attacks on Gnutella users without changing the protocol. Simply put: an Ignore list. You put an IP in this list, and your machine will ignore any messages that come from it and reject any actual attempts it makes to connect. If enough Gnutella users do this, you do have an effective ban, but the fact that it's distributed means that the user has to be doing something particularly heinous (such as, say, a Wall of Shame) for everyone else to agree, and it would have to be more or less everyone else to care enough to make it work out.
And even if you didn't get a full ban (probably more like a Usenet Death Penalty, actually), it would still allow individuals to filter out servers they didn't like. A useful feature even if it never actually gets someone effectively kicked off of Gnutella.
What are these morons thinking?? Yes this will result in defamation of character. IP addresses can be traced back even if only to the point of writing a note to the sys admin. How many corporations allow their employees to dial into the corporate server from home as a perk? What about .edu's? Some guy does a wildcard search on *suck* and gets 500 returns, one of which includes younggirlsucks.jpg. Who wants to look through all of them first? Download all of them at once, convert to thumbnails, preveiw them and delete the trash? I look at lots of porn (I'm an adult and this is my right) and this is how I do it. I have gotten lots of pics that were down right illegal or just plain grossed me out. They went to the trash. Now how do I explain to my boss or school officials that I was not by any means looking for child pornography? If I were to loose my job because someone pointed out to the sys admin, that my name had appeared on this site, I would file a law suit in seconds. A law suit against my and employer and one against zeropaid.
Want an even scarier scenario? Look at abortion doctors who get murdered. Look at the gay man who was murdered after the Jenny Jones show. Wasn't her show held responsible for liability? I can't really remember if they were. What if one of these whacko's, willing to kill abortion doctors manages to trace an IP back to the user, and decides to play vigilante. Some guy downloads youngtits.jpg and gets shot for it? You bet zeropaid will be hauled into court. Very extreme scenario, but not impposible.
Who gives these guys the right to play thought police? I am personally biased against public displays like this anyway. I feel that police blotters in newspapers are a violation of consitutional rights. This is no different. Public humiliation is unfair punishment. Not to forget the fact that you are being publically humiliated before even being convicted of anything. This is exactly like putting someone in the stockade to allow people to walk by and spit on them. I had a freind who came home one day to find a party being thrown at his house with the police handcuffing people. He was arrested as well. Some of the people were underage. His name was in the police blotter with the notation "endangering the welfare of a minor". Judge found him innocent of anywrong doing, but he still had the pleasure of explaining to his boss that he didn't have sex with a 15 year old. This is wrong, wrong wrong. Let me make this clearer. It is wrong, wrong, wrong.
I seem to recall that some production of the film "Lolita" cast in Lolita's role an actress who was over 18 but looked younger (perhaps much younger, I haven't seen it so I don't know).
Actually, I know that the actor in the most recent Lolita was 15, and I believe the one in Stanley Kubricks original version was underage too...
In both of these movies sex was depicted, and this was perfectly legal, because they weren't actually having sex. (There are alot of movies like this: Brooke Shields was 15 in the Blue Lagoon , a very explicit film)
The laws of child porn say that you can't show anybody under 18 doing sexually explicit things for real I assume, thats all.
I believe the is truly a bad thing. Assuming if someone searchs for "schoolgirl.jpg", "little girls.jpg", "younggirlxxx.jpg", young-tits.jpg, .etc are necessarily looking for pedophilia is wrong and quite possibly illegal. If I saw my IP address on their Wall of Shame after searching for a innocuous term like the ones above clearly labeling me as someone who is looking for child pornography, I would sue you for defamation of character because you would have no proof that I actually desired child pornography, yet still went ahead and labeled my search as shameful and me a pedophile. Also, they really should not consider themselves holier then thou when they clearly advocate Internet users to break the law by distributing copyrighted music. Remember, outside of the Fair Use portion of our copyright law, an author of a copyrighted work has the sole desecration of how their work is distributed. They can't pick and choose the laws that you wish to uphold.
Sig goes here
He said:
This is an interesting way for the internet community to police itself with respect to behaviour that people find objectionable. As anonymous digital transactions become more commonplace, one's reputation may be one's most valuable asset, just as it is in the world of on-line auctions. Systems which tie one's actions back to one's online identity help maintain the strength of these sorts of reputation effects.
And in a separate comment:
As Tim May once pointed out, it's always easier to shed a bad online reputation than to build a good reputation. Someone with a bad rep can just change his or her online handle and start with a clean slate. This is one of the major weaknesses of using reputation effects to punish bad behaviour (as opposed to reward good behaviour.)
-- Diana Hsieh
-- Diana Hsieh
GeekPress: The Weirder Side of Tech News
I run a number of honeypots spread around the internet, coupled with some additional active trackers to log probe activity. The goal is to identify script kiddies, and then use that information to block them from important sites. The honeypots are simple machines that look for any kind of network activity, and then signal that activity through a secondary channel. Active trackers in other locations then make a number of queries of the attacking machine, to figure out what it is running and possibly the identity of the luser. We also check with the NOC of the ISP, and they usually give us info on who was logged into that port at the time.
The amount of information collected is surprisingly easy to manage, and quite often turns up the same small group of wannabe crackers. It doesn't take much to rattle an upstream provider and get their connection yanked. When we get scans from schools, the administrators are usually very happy to help nail the idiot. We fight over who gets to be "detective chief inspector Gerry Fitzgerald of Scotland Yard" (a UK joke) when calling American uni's. The internet polices itself.
Many in the security world are building similar systems. Rumours have it the FBI's new cyber centre is building a large scale probe monitoring system. They have been quietly approaching a number of schools and large ISPs asking for names and addresses of certain users connected to cyber-crimes, exactly as we do. From my understanding of American law, this is perfectly legal for them to do during investigations, as long as they do not try to use this as evidence in a court case. They can collect any type of incriminating evidence and keep it forever, and will use it later to deny security clearances for stupid script kiddies who graduate and go looking for government jobs, or anonymously refer some to local authorities.
Honeypots and baiting services like ZeroPaid will increase in number. I don't expect one of them to become the next amazon or ebay, but there is a market out there for identifying crackers/script kiddies/pr0n addicts/alcoholics/junkies to law enforcement, employers and insurance societies.
the AC
Hemos is like...sci-fi fans;he thinks technology is cool, but he hasn't bothered to understand the science it's based on
Maybe they should fix their own pages before starting to make any lists, the date on their webserver is May 4, 100 .. Personally, i wouldnt trust anyone who cannot be bothered to fix details like that..
Nothing exists except atoms and empty space; everything else is opinion.
blah blah blah....
Not us. We put in very nicly produced "The song you have attempted to steal is unavailable.." messages.
I know there have been FBI sting operations for piracy and stuff like that, but being that the Internet is so uncontrollable, and we know the proliferation of illegal activities such as MP3 swapping, software piracy and porn is so rampant, I'd think that a large part of law enforcement's plans are to setup such honeypots to just keep track of demographic information on individuals who are prone to participate in certain kinds of illicit activities. I could imagine that the government could run some of the most successful porn sites, etc. to keep tabs on would be offenders.
In fact, Napster can be one such honeypot, and by the look of the thing with Metallica, has been used as such to some degree.
Isn't this something we need to be concerned with?
I have to wonder how long it will be before services like ZeroPaid, which are clearly controversial in nature, become sponsored promotional sites.
"This anti-pedo web site brought to you by Nike, because only we know how to properly abuse children in factory conditions!"
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
Unless my analysis of the Gnutella protocol is incorrect, the IP numbers that is getting logged can be forged fairly easily. Innocent people could have their IP added to the Wall of Shame. Gnutella transfers happen via intermediate servers, so the Wall of Shame cannot just log the IP number of the host that connects to it. This is unfortunate since such IPs are much more difficult to forge. An attack would occur as follows: Imagine that someone wanted www.whitehouse.gov to show up on the Wall of Shame. They could just set up a rogue Gnutella server which would generate requests that it pretends to have recieved from a fictional Gnutella server on www.whitehouse.gov. The Gnutella server hosting the Wall of Shame has no way of telling the difference between real requests from www.whitehouse.gov and fictional requests generated by a rogue server. In fact, the Gnutella routing protocol guarantees that all responses will be routed back along the same path, allowing the rogue server to create a seamless illusion. Would someone with a more detailed knowledge of the Gnutella protocol or exactly what the Wall of Shame logs please confirm or deny this?
Can some gnutella servers act as simple relays to other servers (a la freenet)? When I look at that IP, do I know that that IP is really where my file is going?
This is like, the 8th article mentioning Gnutella specifically since March.
Can anyone please tell me what's so great about this program? From what I understand it's a just another Napster client, and one who's source isn't very open... So what's the big deal?
http://www.talknerdy.org
"This is good because it will make people a little nervous about using gnutella and similar distributed file systems to spread around questionable material."
Right, so they'll start using anonymous remailers and the like, spoiling THOSE for everyone else also.
There is only one way to make someone not do something: Make it against the person's interest to do it. This takes many forms:
1) Money (charge more for products you want to discourage, like cigarettes)
2) Shame (make fun of the person who broke the rule, like the Wall o' Shame in this article)
3) Punishment (typical method of law enforcement, tickets, fines, prison, etc).
#1 works very well because it applies to every instance. #2 is pretty rare because not everyone has any shame and other people want to be "polite" and "nice" (in quotes because real etiquette has no problem with punishing miscreants). #3, if spottily applied, loses its effectiveness. To me, this is the best argument in the world against creation of new laws (and removal of many existing laws). Having unenforced or unenforcable laws weakens the power of ALL laws. With the Internet's current technology, there is no reliable way to link an act to an individual. Making laws that assume there is only makes things worse.
--
Have Exchange users? Want to run Linux? Can't afford OpenMail?
Linux MAPI Server!
http://www.openone.com/software/MailOne/
(Exchange Migration HOWTO coming soon)
We as a free people should have the right to view pipctures of young girls in the nude, if this makes me horny then why should you care? What you do in the bedroom is nobody elses busiess right? And if my computer is in my bedroom and I don't have any little girls in there either am I doing anything wrong? If what I like is illegal to do, should I be prevented from thinking about it too?
Troll? He's obviously taken the unpopular side of the debate. I'm not a fan of child porn, but I agree with the AC. Don't forget that American laws don't apply to the rest of the world, either. Is the FBI going to go after the people with European IP addresses? If so, I don't imagine they'll be too successful.
For kicks, I'll mention that under Canadian law, possession of child porn is legal. There was a big uproar when the courts decided this, but the law hasn't been changed. (For reference, both distributing and producing it is still considered illegal here. Downloading it would be legal... The person hosting it for download is liable.)
------
If a tree falls on an anonymous coward yelling 'first post' in the forest, does anybody hear?
Id. at 759-64 (footnotes and citations omitted).
The idea is stupid: there are plenty of legitimate reasons to want to look at suspicious looking files. If I found *real* pedophilia, I would probably report it to the police. But you would have to know what it is before doing this: hence you'd have to download it. Then just plain curiosity. With all that fuss about pedophilia on the internet, I'd be interested to actually find some to begin with, as opposed to just believing the media gossip on it. So merely downloading what looks like pedophilia does'nt mean that one is a pedophile.
Then the implementation sucks BIG TIME. Come on, youngass.jpg? Is a 21 yo ass OLD? I don't think so! It does'nt have anything to do with pedophilia. What about teenxxx.jpg? Last time I checked 18yo were both teens AND adults. Hardly qualifies for pedophilia! And then, there's plenty of teensomething.com sites out there that just carry playboy style pr0n.
So it's lame. The guy is just looking for attention. He got it!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Did Anyone else notice the Y2K bug at the top of their webpage? :)
Hey, why didn't they use NetPD to get those sicko kiddie pr0n viewers' names, adresses, and phone numbers? That would be great. I would love to call those guys. h0h0h0h0
Confronting this issue is tough because no one wants to publically defend it. It's easier to moderate me down and ignore the issue. On the other hand, when you can go to jail for using pad and pencil, something is wrong with the law.
I could care less if some sicko gets off on kiddie pics. What DOES piss me off is the fact that these kids depicted have to deal with the abuse that was forced upon them. THAT is the issue.
--
I sent this message to cleaner@zeropaid.com:
- -
- -
-----------------------------------------------
This message is informational, not a flame:
I recently added Freenet-style automatic caching to gnut, one of the
gnutella clients. The way the caching algorithm works is that as well
as functioning as a normal gnutella node, gnut also watches the
query_response stream as it routes it to other clients. Every once in
a while, it chooses a random file offered for download in response to
someone else's search request, and downloads it into a local cache,
making it available to gnutellanet from a new location.
The idea is to propagate popular files to make it easier to find them
and to spread out bandwidth usage between servers. Popular files
would, presumedly, be requested more often and thefore occur in query
responses more often as well.
Since the system chooses random responses, it's quite possible that
some queries will occur from the cleaner without the user actually
requesting the file. In testing, my caching gnut client seems to
download random porn about 5% of the time.
I'm not saying that the cleaner is a bad idea, but I wanted you to be
aware that this new feature might lead you to put someone's IP address
up for the world to see even though they haven't tried to download
files from you. Since this feature is fairly new, it's unlikely to
have occurred yet, but if caching becomes widespread, it's likely that
you'll see download requests that have no real user behind them.
One way to prevent misinterpreting a download request is to keep a
list of GUIDs of searches that you've responded to, and use that list
to corroborate download requests. If a client downloads a file
without having searched for it, it's likely to be due to caching.
Just so you're aware,
Ray Jones
-----------------------------------------------
BTW, Gnut is available here:
http://www.umr.edu/~jjp
--
Your arguments about this situation wrongly implicating innocent people are accurate and I agree with you. I'd suggest, however, that zeropaid might have more to worry about than a law suit.
Imagine someone who is guilty as hell, and who becomes aware that his IP address has been listed as being a pedophile on zeropaid's list. What is such a person likely to do: panic. The penalties for doing that kind of thing are quite rightfully severe and last the rest of the person's life. So not only will they panic, they'll likely know what's coming and be full of despair.
Some people, when they panic and despair, have been known to grab guns and go to the places that upset/paniked them, and start shooting. I'd seriously suggest to everyone involved at or with zeropaid to be very very careful from here on out.
Remember, if you can break the pedo's privacy, they can break yours, too. Seriously, be careful guys.
OK first the off-topic part: your ideas on treating child molestors and rapists is interesting, but honestly I can't remember the last time I'd heard such sweeping generalisations. Is it too much to ask that people who are disrupting society be judged on an individual basis instead of being treated as "molestors" or "rapists"? As far as I can tell, rapists look different from one another and, woah shit, they might even be different people.
As to the topic on-hand, judging people on the filenames they're interested in is extremely poor, especially in the shady world of pr0nography. It's not difficult to find pictures of (what appear to be) 20 year olds saved under filenames which contain "14" or "15" or what have you (presumably indicating their age). Likewise, it's not difficult to find "very questionable" material passed off (possibly accidentally) as adult. It's not impossible to believe that if someone were *really* into pr0n, they'd be willing to take their chances and get some of the supposedly pre-15 year old pr0n just because there are so many post-18 year olds in the mix.
If you've ever used *shudder* Alta Vista to search for anything (even something as banal as, say, garden hose), no doubt 70% of the hits will be pr0n sites. Many of them offer child pr0nography and are presumably just a bunch of banner ads with kiddie pr0n terminology scattered about. I'm doubtful that everyone going to one of those sites is sincerely interested in getting some kiddie pr0n.
Overall, their methodology is pretty weak and it seems as though they were just going for sensationalism.
--
An A.C. wrote:
To which the law's response (as quoted herein) is:
In other words, the whole reason possession of child pornography is illegal, is because a child had to be harmed to create it.
But what if child pornography is created without children? Or indeed, without any human beings at all? Would computer-generated child pornography -- artificial children rendered entirely by CPU farms, with no human actors at all, or with only adult actors -- be illegal?
If so, why?
..... we believe you.
No comment at this time
Of course I'm sure the intreped coders that are writing the various gnutella clients will figure out a way to subvert this. Personally I think it's high time they came up with a way of either gaurding or confusing IP addys, in the name of anonymity.. Perhaps the option to make your machine a proxy, thereby muddling any attempt at tracking IPs?
This bit is interesting:
> Me and my roommate (the co-founder of Zeropaid.com) have agreed the attention the Wall of Shame has brought is for the cause," he said.
My roommate? Can you say "little kiddy that wanted to see his name in a wired article?"
In the mean time I think the way to go is civil disobedience. Everyone that runs a guntella client, search for kiddie-porn non-stop! Make their information worthless. I'm going to start just as soon as I get home.
I am Spartacus! No, I am Spartacus!
Praise the Force Field! Praise the Laser Project! Slackware Loon #19830573
"Should the Wall of Shame Stay or Go?"