Would You Rent Out Your Unused Drive Space?

Press2ToContinue writes "There is a new idea out there, proposed by Shawn Wilkinson, Tome Boshevski & Josh Brandof, that if you have unused disk space on your HD that you should rent it out. It is a great idea and the concept may have a whole range of implementations. The 3 guys describe their endeavor as: "Storj is a peer-to-peer cloud storage network implementing end-to-end encryption would allow users to transfer and share data without reliance on a third party data provider. The removal of central controls would eliminate most traditional data failures and outages, as well as significantly increasing security, privacy, and data control. A peer-to-peer network and basic encryption serve as a solution for most problems, but we must offer proper incentivisation for users to properly participate in this network."

Comments

Nope

[Anrego]

Two biggest reasons:

1) Even encrypted, I'd still be pretty wary of having arbitrary files stores on my machines. Even if legally in the clear, just dealing with an LEA when someone uses your machine as a child porn host is going to be unpleasant.

2) Bandwidth is far more valuable to me than storage space. I've got tonnes of storage space, it's cheap. Bandwidth far less so.

Re:Nope

[JMJimmy]

Besides, who has free storage space!?

Re:Nope

[BarbaraHudson]

Storj is based on blockchain technology and peer-to-peer protocols to provide the most secure, private, and encrypted cloud storage.

That's what they all say. Funny how it never works out that way.

Re:Nope

[OzPeter]

Two biggest reasons:

1) Even encrypted, I'd still be pretty wary of having arbitrary files stores on my machines. Even if legally in the clear, just dealing with an LEA when someone uses your machine as a child porn host is going to be unpleasant.

From TFA they talk about "shards" being stored on a computer, so that no one computer holds a complete file. But yeah, if LEA comes a knocking then I bet you will still be in deep do-do.

As for bandwidth, what I don't get is how do you get your files back if you can't guarantee the people you rented disk space from actually have their machines turned on?

Re:Nope

[blackest_k]

makes no sense, how much would you rent out say a 2 terabyte hard drive, cost less than $100 to be worth while. might not be bad if they paid $50 a month for it not so much for $5 a month or less.

So why are you willing to payout $50 a month for encrypted 3rd party storage which is legal.

On the other hand say you have a college which needs offsite backups you have another college in the same area also needing off site backups. Now you could could pay for a third party to provide off site storage or you could trade storage space for storage space. If their systems go down they can restore from you and if your systems go down you can restore from you.

It's not the worst disaster recovery plan ever. However it does need trust between the two parties not so easy between strangers. However you might do it between say your drives and your parents. Assuming your not in the basement of course...

   

Re:Nope

[fustakrakich]

And the worst problem of remote storage is that you need an internet service provider at both ends to access it. Maybe it's the second worst. Liability issues involving content would be the worst.

Re:Nope

[Charliemopps]

Are storage spaces (such as Megaupload) responsible for their users files?

The problem is, that hasn't been decided as of yet. It would make sense to any normal person that they wouldn't be. But law enforcement isn't sure how to deal with such services so they are doing their best to kill the industry with raids, but then drop the cases before they hit court so no ruling can hurt their efforts.

Re:Nope

[The MAZZTer]

As for bandwidth, what I don't get is how do you get your files back if you can't guarantee the people you rented disk space from actually have their machines turned on?

Easy, do it the same way RAID does it: redundancy.

Re:Nope

[radarskiy]

"I don't get is how do you get your files back"

If you keep your files in only one place then many here would say you deserve to lose them.

Re:Nope

[JMJimmy]

Ya... my last drive purchase took me 6 days to fill. It was a 3TB drive.

Re:Nope

[BarbaraHudson]

People with bandwidth caps are going to hate this. People with "soft" bandwidth caps (throttling after x gb) are also going to hate this. But I think the worst is that it now incentivizes people to install a trojan on your system and rent out your storage space without you knowing, same as they did for bitcoin mining.

Re:Nope

[whoever57]

Even if legally in the clear, just dealing with an LEA when someone uses your machine as a child porn host is going to be unpleasant.

Imagine this in the UK:

Police:"We think you have kiddy porn on your computer, what are the contents of these encrypted files?"
You: "I don't know"
Police: "Tell us the password"
You: "I don't know it"
Judge: "Go to jail until you tell us the password!"

Re:Nope

[Rei]

Yes, but they need to make sure that they incentivize it correctly. Having purely a "per gigabyte" cost isn't reasonable. That's only accounting for the capital costs of buying the drives. They also impose wear costs per write and bandwidth costs per seek, and probably come costs for their usage of processing time and ram and the like.

Then there come issues of what sort of uptime / reliability / access times they want to guarantee? Surely they're going to have to distribute a given set of data out in a distributed fashion where any X percent of systems can be down or too slow at a given time and they still get their data back in a reasonable time. But how do you decide how much the system owner gets compensated under different downtime ratios / length of downtime / average access times / peak access times / etc? It'll be a tricky balancing act. Also access times vary from region to region, so certain regions could be more valuable for certain users than others, and some more valuable in general than others. Some people may not want to have their data in certain areas at all. And the system will have to decide when it decides a user to be too unreliable to store a fraction of a given dataset on and to store it on a different system instead. Then there's other things people may want to take into account, such as how green the power is

Technically possible, and a good goal, but quite a complicated challenge to do well.

Re:Nope

[DigiShaman]

I do. Though my drive/s have a finite lifespan. So when I get to the point of using about 3/4th total storage capacity, it's time to replace them; proactively when possible.

Data migration and expanding RAID containers is a major PITA. I absolutely loath the task! Each time it takes longer and longer to transfer date as the growth of storage capacity has far outpaced disk throughput. Because of that, I'm placing all non-essential media (music, movies, games, ISO images..etc) into simple RAID1 or JBOD containers while only my core data (family photos, documents, bills, scanned receipts, etc) gets more hand holding; I have a separate redundant backup scheme for them.

I wouldn't mind a space sharing scheme on a LAN as a last tier form of storage in a corporate environment (complete with co-worker usage tracking), but not for the general anonymous public.

Re:Nope

[marcello_dl]

in fact the tahoe lafs idea (erasure coding, you need e.g. any 3 chunks of the 6 floating around to reconstruct your file) is better suited because you are not hosting the whole document, and you can't even brute force decrypt a single chunk to obtain a part of the document either

Re:Nope

[rtb61]

How about a new metric. Per gigabyte date cost of analysing data and 'DELETING' what you don't need. Are companies becoming stupid data hoarders, keeping useless data that has no value and simply ramps up data handling costs. So rather than spending more and more money to hoard more and more data, how about regular data reviews and start deleting what you don't need or has less value than the cost of handling it.

So the new big thing, data review cycles. Where useless data is eradicated for ever because even though data storage might be cheap, managing data storage is not.

Re:Nope

[dinfinity]

Man, that was the least confusing part of your post. At that point I was still wondering how many Slashdotters own colleges.

After understanding what you wrote, though, it is indeed a solid easy strategy. You don't even need to have drives in the systems of your colleagues or family. Just place a NAS in their network and put BTSync or Syncthing (FKAPulseFKASyncthing) on it. With BTSync there even is a hidden method to create an encrypted key so that the data on the 'untrusted' nodes is only there in encrypted form: http://forum.bittorrent.com/to...
Syncthing is actively considering adding this feature: https://github.com/syncthing/s...

I haven't tested the BTSync encryption yet and am not aware of how secure it is, especially considering that BTSync is closed source, but this approach seems to me to be the future of small scale offsite redundancy (and of ad hoc file sharing in general).

Re:Nope

[maorb]

Why is that bad? It drives down the cost or storage for the rest of us, and incentivizes people to secure their systems. It is certainly better than them using compromised systems as spambots.

Who said that they wouldn't also mine for Bitcoins, send spam, and zombify your computer for their DDoS attacks. They already managed to get the Trojan onto the target computer, no need to limit themselves.

Anyways, while it's definitely good to have a secure system, that doesn't suddenly make the 'incentive' for having a secure system a good thing. It's like saying that living in a bad neighborhood is a good thing because it teaches people to consistently lock their doors and latch their windows.

Re:Nope

[hairyfeet]

Uhhh because courts HAVE and DO jump to the worst possible conclusion and fuck guy's lives up for nothing? For exhibit A how about men accused of CP thanks to virus which a whole 5 minutes with malwarebytes would have shown the PC was infected, but did the courts even bother to check? Nope in fact on a similar case the prosecutor said he believed it was a "trick" and that "the suspect infected himself" so he would have a fucking excuse! The reason? He had enough technical knowledge to build his own tower....yep, if you can read instructions in the USSA "you be a criminal mastermind yo"!

The problem you and many geeks have with the CP laws is you try to treat the courts as rational actors....they aren't. You try to treat the laws as logical and consistently applied...they aren't. You try to treat the judges and prosecutors as individuals that seek justice and apply the law as fairly as possible....do I really need to point out how wrong you are? THIS IS A WITCH HUNT, and by their very definition Witch. Hunts. Aren't. Rational. and trying to apply rational thought to a witch hunt is just a waste of time!

We have seen time and time again, going all the way back to McMartin Preschool, that sanity and CP are two concepts that just don't go together. Doesn't matter how obvious it is that it isn't your CP, doesn't matter if you don't have the key to the crypto, in fact the laws of many states don't have anything about you personally having access to it, merely that you possess it, so your rational statements? Really do not belong in this discussion.

Re:Nope

[ncc74656]

Data migration and expanding RAID containers is a major PITA. I absolutely loath the task!

That's why you don't use RAID. Instead, use something more flexible. I've been running Greyhole for a while now. Adding storage doesn't require shifting files around (unless you want to rebalance storage), you can use drives of different sizes, and you can control the level of redundancy you use (more for important files, less for stuff that's easily replaced). You can yank a disk out of a Greyhole installation and read all of the files off of it with standard file-copy tools.

Important stuff that doesn't take too much space (documents, Git repos, etc.) is backed up daily to Tarsnap. Less-important stuff (movies, music) and larger files (photos) get dumped to BD-R and are stored in binders in my desk at work; images are prepared with dvdisaster for added error recovery capability and are burned to single-layer BD-R HTL media.

Re: Nope

[blang]

Very clever, but you forget one thing.
The dudes showing up at your door is not going to a be gullible fellow nerds.
They will carry it all away, you tablets cell phones, and anyting that looks like sort of computerlike. They are not going to take just the usb stick you hand them, they are going to look at you with blank eyes when you try to explain about vmware.
Then they can with law in hand force you to hand over passwords.
The inconvenience is not that they might find something youre hiding,
The inconvenience us that they will take all your stuff, for who knows hiw longm and werher ut wilk be returned to you intact. The san itself probably should be in a different physical location, preferably on a different address that does not have internet. With wifi or ethernet connectivity to your server location.

So better be more clever. If you have added frequent offsite backup, via net or sneaker, and the ability to recover quickly to a replacement san, ok.

If you have the $$ also review any such deal with a lawyer and have a plan what to do in case of different scenarios.

Re:Nope

[AmiMoJo]

It's cheaper to keep data than to evaluate it. Someone asked about sorting out a large collection of photos they had taken for work (professional photographer) due to the amount of storage space they were taking up on Slashdot a while back. Someone else then pointed out that even if they paid some intern minimum wage to do the evaluation it would be more expensive than just buying more drive space and a NAS.

For companies where people who are well paid generate data, like say engineers or researchers, they would need someone who understands those things to do the evaluation. The cost of deleting something they need years later could be high. I sometimes look at 15 year old files for work. The thing is, 15 year old files are all tiny and can be stored easily. By the time file are old enough to consider deleting them it just isn't worth doing.

Not a chance.

[YrWrstNtmr]

Drive space is cheap. In addition to not being able to use some of what I have here, I also have to dedicate part of my bandwidth?
Not happening.
In addition, whose responsibility is it as to what is 'stored' on my hard drives?

"proper incentivisation"? You couldn't afford enough to pay me for this.

Re:Not a chance.

[Grishnakh]

As for the type of data stored on your disk...those are just bits. They are encrypted and unknown/unavailable to you. Exact and similar patterns of bits show up in hundreds of files. They are just bits.

Have fun explaining that to the SWAT team that just busted down your door and shot your dog and is beating you while you're on the floor.

Re:Not a chance.

[Bengie]

You wouldn't need to dedicate any bandwidth, just set it to low priority. I run several P2P programs that I seed and stuff 24/7. I just have my P2P ports traffic shaped down to just enough to maintain connections, while allowing P2P to use all of my free bandwidth. I will let P2P use right up to 96% of my bandwidth and as soon as my wife starts watching Netflix, Netflix will be allowed to burst, pushing P2P down into the single digits and quickly rebounding once the burst is over. All the while not affecting my pings at all, less than 1ms of jitter.

HFSC is like magic, once you figure out how to configure it. I also recommend having dedicated bandwidth, otherwise HFSC doesn't work very well, or at least setting it to traffic shape to your lowest expected bandwidth. If you have a connection that bounces between 50 and 25, then you target 25.

Wuala used to have this

[ButcherCH]

That's more or less what Wuala used to have but they dropped this quite some while ago: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W... For details why the dropped it http://www.eurecom.fr/fr/publi...

Re:Wuala used to have this

[Donwulff]

Oh, yeah, they should've said that in the summary - the difference to Morpheus, Freenet, Mojonation, Chord etc. (in no particular order) is that with Storj (which, somehow, is supposed to be pronounced "Storage" according to their site) is that to participate at this stage, you'll have to buy (currently) 300 dollars worth of their freshly minted cryptocurrency. No thanks.

Additionally from their FAQ: "As described in the MetaDisk whitepaper, we will use Florincoin as an initial solution. Eventually, we will transition to a system with more direct and scalable access to the Bitcoin blockchain via proof-of-existence. As blockchain technology improves we can use systems like Factom to provide faster throughput, and Ethereum to create enforceable contracts on data storage." So... they're in large part relying on technology not even developed yet. I get the modern rush to put software out before anybody else (Or say, 20 years after...), but this does sound like a prime example of putting the cart before the horse.

Re:Wuala used to have this

[Oligonicella]

That catapults it from no to fuck no. Smells very much like scam.

Re:Wuala used to have this

[Donwulff]

I'm trying hard not to be the token anti-cryptocurrency dude here, but yeah, the theme of the year seems to be "We've invented the wheel - now with Bitcoin!". The glut of different freshly minted cryptocurrencies from everybody who arrived upon the bright idea of starting out a new cryptocurrency, pre-mining it a bit and giving a fancy name has led to people differentiating with different tie-ins to try to get people adopt their coin adopted.

There isn't any instantly apparent reason Storj is tied down to cryptocurrency (which they themselves admit will be changing), although I'll admit it does give a snazzy way to pay for the storage service, but it's nothing new - at least Mojonation was originally based specifically around the idea of micropayments with a cryptocurrency. In fact it sounds exactly like MojoNation from 2000 with Bitcoin like Merkle trees for proof-of-storage thrown in.

While there is absolutely nothing wrong with improvement like that, one thing that catches the eye is that despite copious references, their whitepapers don't really reference any of the prior work on the area of distributed storage like that, and try to sell it as completely new proof-of-concept idea. Oh yeah, along with the "Now with Bitcoin, but all you have to do is buy our new cryptocurrency" :)

Re:Wuala used to have this

[dinfinity]

Yeah, the coin doesn't seem to be doing well: http://coinmarketcap.com/asset...
It's not on any exchange, either.

Re:Wuala used to have this

[super3]

We are going to be using the cryptocurrency as a pseudo-reputation system(writing a paper on this), and a software license. At this point we don't want everyone and their uncle trying to join the network. The cryptocurrency serves as a barrier for now. We get the right type of crypto nerds to get early access to the software, and give us good data and feedback. Based on demand we will lower the barrier of of entry. I understand the hesitance, but I'd wait till I produce another paper on that. I've written two on the system itself so far, and I can only write so fast.

Re:Wuala used to have this

[super3]

We only want cryptocurrency nerds at this point as we slowly scale out the system. That is a purposeful barrier to entry. We will lower it as we scale out the system. Well its just a scale issue, you can't put a hash in the Bitcoin blockchain. Due to tx fees this is prohibitively expensive. Florincoin was a good temporary solution to get it working for one of our sample applications. This worked great as a proof of concept, but we need to support more than 7 Transactions per second(TPS). The Factom system we plan on using is quite simple. Give me a few beers, and a could probably program the base concept in a weekend. Take your metadata, hash them up into a merkle tree, add the merkle root in OP_RETURN of a bitcoin transaction.

Who has unused drive space?

[BitZtream]

I'm constantly wanting more space, never do I have free space. Its a constant matter of managing what I don't delete. I guess I'm a data horder.

On that same note ... do I really want someone's kiddie porn on my drive with all the legal issues that go with that? No.

Even sillier

[YrWrstNtmr]

They 'pay' you in pseudo Bitcoin.
"Now to rent out something means that there is a compensation for services rendered. This comes in the form of Storjcoin X. Storjcoin X (SJCX) is a token that allows people to buy and rent storage as well as being traded on exchanges. It is a Counterparty asset and uses the Bitcoin blockchain for its transactions."

No thanks to kiddie porn on my drive....

[ip_freely_2000]

No way I'd want to support some a-hole keeping some kind of illegal garbage on my system. Is the company running this idea going to indemnify in all jurisdictions? Is some FBI guy going to kick in my door to grab my drive for the contents of some kind of nastiness? Just a bad idea.

Re:No thanks to kiddie porn on my drive....

[grumpy_old_grandpa]

It is sad to see that years of propaganda and fear-mongering by the government, politicians and police have actually worked out so well for them. Twenty years ago, the response to a peer-to-peer hosting network would have been "give me some of that". Today, it's "imagine how the police could fuck you over if they wanted to".

How much more will it take to admit to ourselves that most Western nations are now police states?

Re:No thanks to kiddie porn on my drive....

[YrWrstNtmr]

Years of propaganda? That, and also assholes who will use this for their own means, and screw the innocent user, simply because they do not care.

Re:No thanks to kiddie porn on my drive....

[maorb]

IANAL but the system could be designed such that your system CAN'T have child porn on it even if someone else has added child porn to the distributed network.

Imagine for a moment that all files are encrypted in 64KB blocks, then imagine that the peer-to-peer system, lets say it's torrent based, stores them in 32KB chunks. Lastly, the system does not store any two sequential chunks on the same computer (effectively the even chucks would be like one torrent, the odd chucks a second torrent, and only the originator of the data even would know which torrents correspond to each other). Since 32KB of the 64KB block are not on your computer (and your computer doesn't even know how to find the corresponding other 32KB chunks), the data on your computer cannot be processed in such a way as to result in child porn, thus you are not in possession of, nor distributing illegal content.

Well, it's a pipedream anyway. A lawyer would probably say that since it can be turned into child porn by adding a specific set of additional data and then decrypting the resulting file it constitutes child porn itself. Which would sort of imply that in a more general case that any set of binary data that can be found in a larger but illegal set of binary data is illegal to share if it's likely that someone somewhere will combine the two sets of data at some point in the future. Dang, when I word it like that it even starts to sound reasonable because of the 'likely' clause.

Legally difficult

[15Bit]

In the UK at least, you can go to jail for not giving up the decryption keys/password for data stored on your hard disk. As forgetting the pass phrase is not a legitimate excuse, i doubt they would accept the idea that it is someone else's data. So in the event that the police have any excuse to investigate your hard drives, this is a instant ticket to jail.

Re:Legally difficult

[Anonymous Coward]

Just another reason to not visit the UK, not that people in the UK or anywhere else have much of a reason to visit the US these days. I can't say I'd recommend it anyway, and I live here.

Funny how things that happen all the time are not a legitimate excuse, unless of course they happen to law enforcement. Forget your password (in the UK), potential jail time! Law enforcement "forgets" to share evidence that might cast doubt on your alleged guilt (in the US)--well, that's OK. It must have been a legitimate mistake.

You're not aware of one of the warehouse full of legal codes you're supposed to obey on a daily basis? That's no excuse. Why didn't you memorize something that nobody in the entire legal profession knows in its entirety? Law enforcement arrests you for something that's not actually illegal (like filming the police), they don't suffer any consequences even though that's either ignorance or willful ignorance of the law.

Side comment: it's really time to end this "ignorance of the law is no excuse" bullshit. That particular bit of claptrap has no legitimacy in today's society.

Re:Legally difficult

[ihtoit]

they'll arrest you for something else, like obstructing a police officer, obstructing a highway, ignoring a posted "no stopping" or "no loitering" sign, blocking a public thoroughfare or emergency exit... at which point they have probable cause to seize your camera for evidence and keep it for as long as they want to.

Re:Legally difficult

[ihtoit]

traumatic stress has been known to cause permanent selective memory loss.

Remember this response for the next time you're told that anything you do say will be taken and used in evidence:

"PLEASE DON'T HIT ME AGAIN OFFICER!"

I don't like that idea, but...

[BigThor00]

While I wouldn't want to rent out space on my hard drive, what if I could get everyone in my family to work together and share some HD space and have a family Virtual SAN? That would be cool. Then I can control who is using the space, not everyone in my family does use all of their hard drive. I can put family pictures in the Family SAN, and automatically everyone can access them. While I don't like the original idea, there are potentials for it.

Re:I don't like that idea, but...

[Bengie]

He said "I can put family pictures in the Family SAN, and automatically everyone can access them". SAN is a block device shared over the network. It is a very specific type of network storage. If he meant a "file share", then he meant a NAS.

Freenet has existed since Napster

[preaction]

And that is all this is.

Re:Freenet has existed since Napster

[Kernel Kurtz]

Freenet was the first thing that came to my mind when I read the headline.

This isn't a new idea.

Re: No thank you

[Anonymous Coward]

Who said anything about kiddie porn? I'm adding you to the FBI watch list.

devporn

[Anonymous Coward]

Ya... my last drive purchase took me 6 days to fill. It was a 3TB drive.

Sounds like you used this helpful command:

cat /dev/porn > /dev/hdd1

Re:devporn

[JMJimmy]

Do you know that it is very easy to get any Linux ISO from any version/distro from this "Internet" thingy? Why are you hoarding Linux ISOs? Are you afraid the world might end and you'll need to save it with an old Linux ISO?

I can't tell if you think I'm actually archiving Linux distros or not. Lately I've been finding it hard to find certain "distros" and when I do they're HC with NL/swede/asian scripts. Especially older/less popular ones. The latest greatest stuff is super easy to find that's for sure, but even that is starting to thin... I mean how is Cordelia Chase's latest "linux ISO" not everywhere by now.

Re:devporn

[hairyfeet]

He's talking about warez, the excuse every warez site and protocol uses has been "we also share Linux ISOs" trying to use the old VHS "some non infringing uses" standard as an excuse.

The question is asinine

[TrollstonButterbeans]

If there is any money to be made in "unused" storage space, the LAST people who could economically offer space for the lowest cost is a consumer.

No cutting edge cost management, no benefits of scalabiliy.

And who would want to rely on a average consumer's potentially virus infested, unsecure storage space.

And people who responded to this as if it even could be a serious suggestion didn't think, should be socially reprimanded for being gullible.

Not for me because

[GoodNewsJimDotCom]

I've owned a computer long enough to know it works better when you're using less than 70% of your hard drive. After a certain point, the harddrive starts harder work to find places to write instead of nice continuous blocks. Now by all means, use 80% of your harddrive if you must, but try not to.

I'm Charlie

[ArsenneLupin]

Funny how we all shake our heads at the Muslims, who kill over pictures, but considering this whole kiddie porn madness: we're not any better. It's just pictures. Cartoons even in some cases.

Re:I'm Charlie

[Anonymous Coward]

I dunno and YMMV.

Draw what you want. I have no problems with cartoons, or even very realistic drawn/painted/whatever imagined images depicting all kinds of crazy shit. In my country, even written stories depicting or discussing underage sex is considered illegal by the letter of the law. Which I happen to agree, is madness. Sexuality doesn't just lie dormant and 'switch on' when you hit 18 or 21 or whatever the law says is cool in your neck of the woods. And discussing it in art form is probably healthy. Much of it wont float my particular boat but I don't think that should make 'art work' illegal.

BUT. For a while I worked in a role where I was exposed to kiddie porn.... And, well, I wouldn't think of it as art. To my mind it was just evidence (photo and/or video) of folks actually raping kids. It really wasn't cool. And if it puts a dint in the practice, I don't think I'd characterize aggressively pursuing leads, as madness.

I know you can't put the genie back in the bottle, but if you haven't seen it, you might have a skewed or misinformed view of what kiddie porn actually is. You might think its pictures of kids and adults having sex. But its not.

If you're really not sure, imagine someone you really dislike, from a social group you're not into, quintessentially the last person on earth you'd consider in being with in a sexual context. Imagine that person, with the help of a several buddies, kidnapping you and doing what ever they wanted to you, while you struggle futilely, scream in pain, and as your strength ebbs, plead, weeping and begging them to stop. Only they don't stop until they're all spent. And the whole time, you're under studio lights and there are people with cameras in your face and circling you taking pictures and videos of it to share your pain and humiliation with the world at large. And now imagine its happening to your 8 years old self.

No. Simply turning a blind eye... to my mind that would be madness.

Re:I'm Charlie

[Anonymous Coward]

Funny how we all shake our heads at the Muslims, who kill over pictures, but considering this whole kiddie porn madness: we're not any better. It's just pictures. Cartoons even in some cases.

Well, it is "do as I say not as I do."

http://cryptome.org/2014/09/giganews-fbi.htm

I am not going to argue what constitutes "porn" or "age of consent" and whether distribution hurts or helps child abuse...(when it is copyrighted music/movies, digital copies "hurt" the MPAA and RIAA...yet, when it is "bad pictures" distribution finances + helps the abusers...)

I merely point out there is a huge double standard here.

I have no sympathy for child abuse, but yes, pictures are very different from doing such acts.

I am amazed you got modded up, quite honestly!

Re:I'm Charlie

[Beeftopia]

Pictures of a long dead prophet and caricatures of top officials and warlords. Versus images of real sexually victimized children.

One image is political speech, the other are sexual scenes with those who cannot give consent.

Both are images of course, but images can capture all manner of human experience, from the banal to the brutal.

Re:I'm Charlie

[thegarbz]

And if it puts a dint in the practice

That's kind of the problem I have. I would imagine some fucked-in-the-head paedophile would be better served looking at children online than actually going out and touching them in real life. I'm genuinely interested in the following:

- Does a ban on viewing content decrease the creation of the content?
- Does viewing the content make you more of a paedophile? I imagine it would be hard to do a proper behavioural trial for this stuff.

If so then I'm all for it. If not then I'm afraid that we as a society are locking up people for thought crimes. This goes more so in cases where the legal age for sex is one thing but the legal age for taking a picture of it is another (such as where I live, 16 vs 18). This goes triply so where the laws are written in ways that don't take into account that teenagers will be teenagers and that some of them are ending up on sex offence registries for having a selfie sent to them by their current girlfriend.

Some countries have really lost the plot, but on the whole I get the feeling that a lot of other countries are slowly following suit.

Re:I'm Charlie

[Coren22]

Actually, that is not Islam. Sunni Islam allows no "Idols". Shiite Islam happily allows pictures of M. and Allah, and whoever they please.

The problem goes back to the very roots of Islam. When M. died, the Shiites followed his son-in-law (who M. had designated as his replacement) , the Sunnis follow a leader elected by the followers of M.

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-...
http://islam.about.com/cs/divi...

BTW, I use M. because there are numerous spellings of his name, and I wouldn't want to put the wrong one and offend anyone.

Re:Same in US

[Anonymous Coward]

You are a sex offender by just having it.

This. In some US jurisdictions, you are added to the sex offender registry on indictment, even if you aren't convicted. And then you have to work like hell to get yourself off of it if the charges are dropped or you are found not guilty. The burden is on the accused, when it should be on the State.

Source: I worked in law enforcement for a decade and a half, and a good bit of that time was spent working with the sex offender registry on the back end.

dkj

What happens if someone else's drive crashes?

[Dputiger]

One of the fallacies of modern cloud and backup providers is that they actually provide a backup service. Most, including popular services like Backblaze, Mozy, Carbonite, etc contain prominent statements in their contracts that absolve them of any liability in the event of data loss. Your recoverable value in the event they lose your data is limited to either 12 months of service or is explicitly defined as nothing.

Now plenty of people pay for service with these companies, so I'm not claiming they don't make some effort to provide a genuine backup, but we're *starting* from a position where they explicitly have no liability as defined in the ToS. Now, add in the idea of storing critical or merely important files on someone else's hard drive. What happens if the drive you're storing on is a 5400 RPM Quantum Fireball from circa 1999? When that drive fails, what happens to you?

It's the same lack of guarantee with a *further* risk factor. No thanks.

Re:It's not just Hard Drive space

[gnupun]

Now we're talking bandwidth and processing power (encryption). And electric bills.

And who keeps their PC/laptop on all the time. It's not a server.

Re: Same in US

[hairyfeet]

They have billions and law firms on retainer, you most likely do not. Remember there are laws for the peasants and laws for the elite and just as a poor man can steal $500 and go to prison while a corp can steal 500 million and get to dine with the POTUS so too can they do things you as a peasant cannot.

Re:Would You Rent Space on Someone Else's Hard Dri

[Cro Magnon]

I don't even blindly trust the professionals. I have stuff on Dropbox, Google, and Microsoft, but I also have it on my desktop and 2 laptops. No way would I trust everything to one random person's "cloud".

You missed the madness

[Slashdot Parent]

it was just evidence (photo and/or video) of folks actually raping kids. [...] And if it puts a dint in the practice, I don't think I'd characterize aggressively pursuing leads, as madness.

What you have just described isn't madness at all. I would argue that it makes perfect sense for law enforcement to treat child pornography as evidence of serious criminal activity (child rape) and to pursue aggressively the perpetrators of such a crime.

Unfortunately, there is madness in Western countries surrounding the issue of child pornography and pedophelia. Here are some examples:

1. In the US, any image of an unclothed child is considered to be a serious crime. There have been many documented cases of photo labs reporting photos of unclothed babies in the bathtub (in no sexual context) to the police, and then the babies were taken from their parents and the parents were charged with manufacturing child pornography, a sex crime.
2. In the US, while it is perfectly legal for 17-year-olds to have consensual sex with each other, if they happen to take a photo of this lawful sexual activity, they could be charged with manufacturing child pornography. Several teenagers have been charged with the sex crime of manufacturing and distributing child pornography for simply texting their boyfriend or girlfriend photos of their unclothed selves.
3. In Australia, adult women with small breasts are considered to be children for the purposes of child pornography laws, so they may not appear in any adult entertainment without it being considered to be child pornography.
4. In the US, all doctors and mental health professionals must report to the police anyone who comes to them seeking help with sexual attraction to minors. This discourages pedophiles from seeking the help that they need to avoid committing actual offenses against children. In our lust to burn the witches at the stake, we put real children at risk because pedophiles aren't getting the treatment that they need.

So, yes, our hysteria surrounding child pornography does rise to the level of madness. I'm not sure how we fix it, because it is political suicide to appear to be soft on pedophilia, but in the meantime, the madness is definitely doing more harm than good.