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Tor Project Sued Over a Revenge Porn Business That Used Its Service
redletterdave writes: The Tor Project has been sued in the state of Texas over a revenge porn website that used its free encrypted communications service. The plaintiff in the case — Shelby Conklin, a criminal justice major at the University of North Texas — alleges a revenge porn site called Pinkmeth "gained unauthorized access to nude photographs" she owned and posted them to the internet. She also said Tor, which The Economist once called "a dark corner of the web," was involved in an active "civil conspiracy" with Pinkmeth because the revenge porn website used the anonymous communications service to prevent others from tracking its location.
You forget that this case is in Texas and that Porn and the Internet are involved. Quite literally anything can happen here.
I'm looking at her pictures right now. Unfortunately Pinkmeth is SLOW right now. Might have something to do with all the fuzz about it. :-)
Don't want your nudes to end up in public? Don't take nudes that you wouldn't want the public to see. Then you can be a true victim. The whole concept of "revenge porn," insofar as it applies to nudes and porn freely made and disseminated, is ever so much "I want my freedom.... but I don't want my choices to have consequences of which I don't approve."
We have a term for that behavior. It's called behaving like a child.
She's on quite the fishing expedition. Here is another lawsuit filed by her, from 2012, suing Pinkmeth (again), Katz Global Media (for the crime of providing anonymous hosting), and Verisign. Yeah, she sued Verisign. Maybe that suit didn't work out so well, so she thought she would try her hand against Tor. Not exactly the best way to make a name for herself as a criminal justice major. I suspect that pursuing suits like these will serve is much more of a "loss in earning capacity" than a porn picture ever would. She might also be interested that her Facebook profile is open for the world to see. Here she is.
Maybe she's just trying to clog up the Google search results for her name with information about lawsuits instead of her actual pictures. You have to go to page 4 to find this one (which is not Pinkmeth), page 6 for this one (also not Pinkmeth), and page 8 for this one (again, not Pinkmeth).
I'm assuming she has no proof that would allow her to sue the person actually responsible for distributing the pictures (you know, other than her). Life lesson learned, I suppose. Try not to clog up the justice system.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
Which is a pity. I am seeing a lot of terrible comments lobbed at this woman and people giving a free pass to whoever obtained her images and the site for hosting them.
Nobody's "giving a free pass" to the revenge porn site. We're just not talking about it, because the revenge porn people, in this particular case, aren't the ones making a public ass of themselves. "This woman" is, and thus, shall be the subject of our collective ridicule.
In that, hey, how sad is it that she's making herself look worse than a revenge porn site?
Yeah it was stupid of her to name Tor as a defendant, but that can be explained by her simply not being part of the tech culture and thus not really aware of how things go together. Keep in mind she is only a student.
Yea - a law student. Who apparently doesn't actually understand the law. Again, not helping her own case here, both literally and metaphorically.
But people seem to be focusing on just that, which is pretty much just victim blaming.
No, suing Tor because "people use tor for porn" is victim blaming. This is pure mocking of stupidity and lack of common sense.
It is the same crap people pull on rape victims all the time, finding some way to socially punish them for trying to bring consequences for their attacker's actions.
You know, as a close relative of a victim of violent sexual assault, I take offense to your supposition that what my family member went through is exactly the same as what this woman is doing to herself. Don't bandy about the term "rape" for everything you disagree with, as it desensitizes people from the severity of that particular crime.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
Civil engineers are sued when they make mistakes designing a road.
Yea, but they don't get sued for the things people use the roads they designed for. Which is what's happening here.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese