Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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.
>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/
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.
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
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!)
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
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
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.
Seth
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
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?
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
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.
Hmm. So searching for child porn is free speech and should be protected, but publishing people who search for child porn is not free speech and should be shut down? What a load of crap. This argument doesn't make logical sense.
In fact, your example of someone running the loser's underwear up the flagpole is actually better suited to the anti-porn argument. What if you stripped the loser naked and took pictures of him, and then ran that up the flagpole? Do the people who did that get to remain anonymous?
The reason child porn is illegal is because children can't be reasonably expected to consent to having pictures of them taken--never mind being raped while having their pictures taken.
Civil liberties cut both ways. And, by the way, so does free speech. If the KKK marched in my town, it is their right to do so. However, it is MY right to stand beside them and yell anti-racist slogans. Free speech does not guarantee anonymity. If you bother with U.S. legal precedent, you'll remember that the KKK tried to march in NYC with masks, and were told that they had to march maskless.
Furthermore, some kinds of speech are illegal (fire in a crowded theater, etc.), because they have social harms. Child porn certainly meets that test.
I do care about free speech, and have been a member of the ACLU for 10 years. But "free speech for me" arguments don't just come from people who want to censor--they come from people who don't want to be criticized. This is, in fact, what makes free speech work--people
allowed to say whatever they want, INCLUDING that what someone else said is wrong. That is, the benefit of free speech is that BOTH sides can express themselves. You seem to think that free speech means that someone else can't respond.
Besides that, let's not forget that what we're talking about here is the exploitation of children. It's not just producers who should be punished (and, again, judicial precedent agrees with me). I think people who produce it AND
consume it should be locked away in a deep dark cell, if not subjected to the same kind of torture they either (a) put kids through or (b) enjoyed watching. Every picture tells a story. These things were created out of real human suffering. DB
P.S. I'm only anonymous because Slashdot took forever to send me my password. My username is/will be wdball. And you can post that wherever the hell you want.
"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)
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!