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Child Abuse Imagery Found Within Bitcoin's Blockchain (theguardian.com)
German researchers have discovered unknown persons are using bitcoin's blockchain to store and link to child abuse imagery, potentially putting the cryptocurrency in jeopardy. From a report: The blockchain is the open-source, distributed ledger that records every bitcoin transaction, but can also store small bits of non-financial data. This data is typically notes about the trade of bitcoin, recording what it was for or other metadata. But it can also be used to store links and files. Researchers from the RWTH Aachen University, Germany found that around 1,600 files were currently stored in bitcoin's blockchain. Of the files least eight were of sexual content, including one thought to be an image of child abuse and two that contain 274 links to child abuse content, 142 of which link to dark web services. "Our analysis shows that certain content, eg, illegal pornography, can render the mere possession of a blockchain illegal," the researchers wrote. "Although court rulings do not yet exist, legislative texts from countries such as Germany, the UK, or the USA suggest that illegal content such as [child abuse imagery] can make the blockchain illegal to possess for all users. This especially endangers the multi-billion dollar markets powering cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin."
So -- someone is going to declare that hundreds of millions of people world wide woke up this morning and are suddenly prosecute-able criminals and have been ever since that content was added to the blockchain? That should interesting to see how they work that out.
IDGAF what the "original intent" of networks and The Internet in general was, it has since the beginning been used by criminals for criminal activities, and this is just one more example of that. So-called "The Internet" should be outlawed. By all means use network technology for legitimate, legal purposes, but The Internet clearly and objectively needs to go.
Does possession of a blockchain count as "possession of every possible image that could be derived from it"?
Probably not. To get the "file" or "image data" you need the Blockchain PLUS some 3rd party tool, which is not part of the core implementation of the BTC protocol.
If you've never used the tool, then there is no way you could produce the image.
Ban Cryptocurrency! ...
I guess some academic nobody needed attention.
Well, he did get his 5 minutes.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
This is one of the best long-con trolls that I think I have ever heard of. I wish I could claim responsibility for this masterpiece, and I don't even hate Bitcoin!
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
now the feds can pull the CP line on any bitcoin user and force them into any plea deal that is good for the FEDS.
Bedobear coin ICO in 1..2..3
The accurate comparison would be with currencies. It's not every day that we find child porn on bank ledgers, banknotes, cheques, transfer slips, etc..
Debate is a form of harassment. Do not question my truth.
It seems to me like Bitcoin would be a great place to publish leaked documents and perform whistle-blowing activities. That could be one actually useful purpose for blockchain :)
Debate is a form of harassment. Do not question my truth.
For a moment a few years ago I was interested in some kind of crypto messaging system loosely based on the concept of BitTorrent (I forget the name, like BitMessage or something) but your PC, acting as a node, basically got a copy of every message, encrypted, and your client could only decrypt the messages that were encrypted with your public key, so you could only read your mail. So far so good... if your PC had a copy of a message with illegal material in it, you'd have plausible deniability - there's no way you could read it without the recipient's key so no (sane) court would convict you for possession.
The problem is the system also supported broadcast messages. So I could write a message encrypted with my private key, and everyone who had my public key could decrypt it. It offers a way of authenticating that a certain person sent a message. The problem is, now I've potentially got illegal content on my PC and since the key to decrypt it is public, I can no longer claim I can't read it. Any forensic group could grab my PC and "prove" that it had illegal content on it very easily. In fact, it allows someone to plant easily provable illegal content on everyone's PC. Bad idea.
I brought up this issue, but nobody on the forums took it seriously. I gave up on the whole idea after that. Seems to me the idea of allowing random text into the blockchain is an obviously bad idea. I didn't even realize that was possible.
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." - Mark Twain
The Internet in general was, it has since the beginning been used by criminals for criminal activities, and this is just one more example of that. So-called "The Internet" should be outlawed.
s/The Internet/Guns
s/The Internet/telephones
s/The Internet/cars
s/The Internet/money
Need I go on?
https://app.box.com/WitthoftResume Code: https://github.com/cellocgw
just widening his extreme claim, to show how bad it was in the first place.
There still needs to be a method for correcting or removing data.
Just. No.
The whole system is based on the fact that you can't do that.
You* can dream about sexually abusing children all you want - nobody is disputing that. You can even scribble pictures of whatever you like in that regard - the rest of the planet generally has no legitimate reason to care (unless you're being evaluated as a potential babysitter, youth leader/coach, or suchlike). It's your brain; do whatever you want with it. As long as you're not harming anyone else in the process (or actively supporting such harm to others), do whatever you want in the privacy of your own home. The article itself doesn't;t even come close to disputing what I just typed.
Now passing around photographic pictures of sexual abuse, when such material is prima facie evidence of a no-shit crime? That's going to rightfully fall under the attention of law enforcement.
Best course of action is for someone to come up with a means of excising the bad crap without violating the integrity (or trust) of the blockchain's more important parts. I wish y'all luck on that one.
* This word means "You" in the royal sense, not "you" as in the gent with UID 166417
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
Shouldn't it be fairly simple to determine when this was added to the blockchain? My assumption was this was injected early on, when single systems still had a decent chance to write a block. If we know when it was injected, we should know the wallet to which coins were issued to, then there's a decent probability this could be traced back to the individual running the system, who may (or may not) be responsible.
It doesn't matter if you find who did it, the--likely intentional--damage is done. This is was likely done to manipulate the value of bitcoin by demonstrating a very real problem with the technology. If you really want to find out who injected some of this content, look into why the university performed this research. Maybe somebody tipped them off.
The Daddy casts sleep on the Baby. The Baby resists!
or perhaps we shouldn't make criminals out of people acting as a node with no control over the data flowing over that node.
I'm god, but it's a bit of a drag really...
now the feds can pull the CP line on any bitcoin user and force them into any plea deal that is good for the FEDS.
Makes you wonder who put it there in the first place....
But I found someone has underlined strange and apparently random letter in page 33. When I transcribed all those underlined letters, it revealed links fo dark web, illegal porno content etc. I hurriedly returned the book. Anyone caught with that book is in for it ....
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
After he published the first dictionary of the English language, a high society lady thanked him. "Thank you, Mr Johnson, for leaving certain unsavoury words out of your dictionary!". Johnson replied, " I am shocked, m`lady! You knew them and were looking for them!?".
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
The federal law on the matter is 18 U.S. Code  2252A. It says it's illegal to KNOWINGLY send and receive child porn. Anyone who doesn't know it's there has not committed a crime. Even having read the summary, I know that the chain contains a) porn and b) links to child porn. I don't know/remember if it contains child porn, so it's not illegal for me to send or receive it.
Also, as confirmed in ELONIS, mens rea (guilty mind) is still required. To be criminally responsible for any action, one would have to intend to do something bad. That's true by default unless the statute for a particular crime specifically lays out a different treatment of mens rea for the elements of that particular crime. Since 2252 doesn't specify otherwise, the standard mens rea rule applies and one is not guilty unless they were they had guilty intent, unless they were trying to do a bad thing.
Based on the strings at https://bitcoinstrings.com/all, it appears someone encoded the entire Hidden Wiki main page's text into the chain. Is this the abusive content they're referring to?
[BEGIN PGP PUBLIC KEY]: X5O!P%@AP[4\PZX54(P^)7CC)7}$EICAR-STANDARD-ANTIVI
A link, something like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ?
A link is a pointer. It can point to anything - it could even change after the fact.
If there's a link to something bad, then go after what's linked to, not the link itself.
17 Trillion. And that's just America. If all the bitcoins in the world are mined and they're worth $20k a pop they'd be worth $420 billion (based on 21 million being the estimated max # of bitcoins). The bank industry could buy out and/or crush bitcoin any time they want. They're not behind this.
This is probably just an offshoot of the illegal activity bitcoins are used for. Folks think (wrongly) that BTC is untraceable. So they do dumb things with it.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
An old lady calls the police, complaining that her neighbors parade around, naked, in plain view, putting on lewd displays, even having sex.
The cops come, she leads them to a tall fence, and says: "there".
The cops says, "All I can see is a fence".
The old lady says, "Well, you a have to stand on this chair to actually see them."
-------
It's a terrible joke, but it has a kernel of truth.
No one would know about these images, or care.
You really have to go out of your way to be offended.
Then, the whole system is deeply and truly fucked.
You're not wrong. A lot of people saw and understood this at the beginning.
They are probably the ones that made the most money.
Steganography
I imagine in some jurisdictions, Mens Rea will apply to the local CP possession law. So people there will be able to possess the blockchain so long as they're unaware of what's in it; likely, even then, it'd be excusable so long as one is plausibly only interested in the blockchain for necessary administrative reasons.
While a good theory, all rationality tends to go out the window when CP is involved. And even if you were found innocent, your life would still be irrevocably ruined just because you were accused in the first place.
Someday, sooner or later, people will start to figure out that you can't fight child porn, or any other crime, by pretending that certain large numbers are somehow "illegal". All digital content by definition consists of large numbers. All digital content can be XORed with a certain other large number to transform it into any other digital content. There exist an infinite number of combinations of large numbers, which, when XORed with one another, can be interpreted as "child porn" or any other content. The war against large numbers cannot be won. The war against child pornography needs to be one. Hence, it will need to be fought some other way.
Nonaggression works!