As one who does have a patent to his name, I have thought about this entire patent issue quite a bit.
The original intent of the patent was to give the lone inventor a monopoly over his invention in order to spur innovation. And it may have served that purpose once. But today, patents have taken on a completely different use -- the leverage for big deep-pocket corporations to beat up on other corporations and obliterate any possible competition from "the little guy", who could not possibly afford patent litigation.
So, it is my view that patents no longer serve it original intended purpose, and thus should be eliminated. Monsanto patents organisms and genes and uses that to force small farmers to buy their GMO seeds; Microsoft may use patents to beat down startups they deem as a threat, and so on.
Today, people will innovate whether or not patents exist. And most innovations don't ever see a patent, I think. It's just too expensive to procure a patent -- $5,000 to $10,000 -- and if ever someone -- even another little guy -- violated your patent "rights", you could not afford the litigation, anyway.
So let's abolish all patents and close down the USPTO!
Besides, many radio stations already stream their content over the Internet, anyway, making FM even less relevant.
A typical smartphone plan comes with 2 GB/mo, which is worth about 4000 minutes of 64 kbps streaming. This data allowance is shared with video streaming, web surfing, and other applications that also use up bytes. FM doesn't use minutes; instead of customers paying for the towers and the license, the advertisers pay.
A typical smartphone plan costs 60 USD per month. FM works even if your phone is on a $7/mo Virgin Mobile plan.
My Smartphone Data Plan costs me only $30 per month. What's really wild and unbelievable is that TEXT MESSAGING, which represents a much smaller bandwidth, costs also $30 a month, separate from the data plan. Totally insane, AT&T! (and the others do it as well).
Perhaps I'm a dissenting voice here, but I actually do listen to broadcast radio, and I would love it if my android-based smart phone had an FM tuner in it. There are times when I don't have the music I want to listen to on the device, and I would tune in to either CBC 2 (classical music channel) or the local indy/alternative station.
I don't think mandating it is a good idea. But I do think that if more manufacturers put them in smart phones the devices would find a market.
I'm sure you can find a classical streaming source to get the classical music that you love. Or just buy a separate FM receiver. They don't cost much these days.
If consumers WANTED FM Radios in their devices, they would be there already.
The real truth is that with the Internet, consumers have bazillions of choices already as far as what they wish to listen to or view, and adding FM radio would only add a tiny fraction to those choices.
Besides, many radio stations already stream their content over the Internet, anyway, making FM even less relevant.
Let's face the cold hard facts: Broadcast media is on its way out. Good bye and good riddens. Only a handful of choices, and 99% of them lousy or mediocre.
And the FM "feature" that nobody really wants (nor would listen to in all probability) would be at the expense of some other feature consumers may actually want.
Government needs to stay the hell out of regulating the "free" marketplace. Consumers can and will make the choices they want, and the manufacturers can and will respond to those choices to grab marketshare.
The Government and the RIAA can go please themselves elsewhere. Leave the rest of us ALONE!
Guns and Cars -- yes, there are many people who drive cars, and most are probably less intelligent about it than I am. And the 41000 deaths per year on our roadways speaks volumes to this.
Innocent people are killed in car crashes, too -- lots of them. And yet we are willing to tolerate the risk. Somehow, even if everyone were free to carry, I don't think we'd have a death rate due to idiot gun accidents that would even approach what we see on the roads everyday.
Of course, we can get some ideas from hard facts. The Swiss, for instance. Or States in this country that have pretty open laws about guns, like New Hampshire.
You may be right about the DC sniper -- bad choice on my part. But I dunno. There's a good chance someone may have seen him pulling out his guns that would've been in a position to do something about it. DC is not exactly a rural area. But I would have to dig up the details of each incident, and I don't have the time. But there's been others, like the one you mentioned yourself, and a McDonald Shooting some time back. Not to mention the handful of incidents where a crazed student shoots up all his classmates. If teachers were armed, they could've taken out this individual before much damage was done.
But then there are some crazy teachers as well -- well, the public school system is crazy in its own right, worthy of a thread all its own.
It's all about risk vs. the reward, and realism. We are willing to accept a relatively high mortality rate for our right to travel. I used that as a benchmark to see how realistic our expectations and perceptions are. Everyone goes insane over the 9/11 incident, a singular incident where ONLY 3000 or so people died, but doesn't bat an eyelash to the 41000 annual fatalities on our roads. Trillions of dollars are being wasted on the so-called "War on Terrorism", and just think what that money would do if it were, instead, used to improve road safety and technology in a realistic way! How many US lives (not counting soldiers) are lost due to terrorism? The risk factors are very low and yet an astronomical figure is spent fighting it.
Which convinces me that Government has it all wrong, period. Always has, and it always will.
I know personally of a case where a person failed a Police firearms course when he not only failed to safe a pistol but managed to discharge it (thankfully it was pointing down range). This was a person who had been shown less than 5 minutes before exactly what to do and he still managed to fuck it up. If he had screwed up again in a public place someone could have been killed. And his performance in the course went down hill from there. If I knew that that idiot was allowed to carry a gun in public I would fear for the safety of those around him. I would however defend his right to own a gun, and use it in designated locations. And nothing prevented him from trying to pass the course again, for as many time as it took for him to pass.
All the gun owners I know of are highly responsible and have had training in some regard. Occaionally you get the idiot, but all of the idiotic cases I have ever heard of happened in Massachusetts, which is a lot more restrictive of gun ownership than New Hampshire, where I reside.
Government restriction creates inexperience, and inexperience create the problems you describe.
I am fully for responsible gun ownership, and the State must have no regulation or licensing in the matter. Why do I say this? Because if Government has a list of who owns a gun, it can decide to harass those individuals needlessly.
Case in point? New Orleans. I have a friend who volunteered for relief efforts after the mess hurricane Katrina created, and guess what? The government there were rounding up all the guns owned by "blacks", but leaving the "whites" alone. Pure discrimination, plain and simple, at a time you need your gun the most.
Perhaps you have a blind trust of government, but I know too much history, recent and past, to be that naive. We have few to no problems in New Hampshire with idiots owning guns, as we have a very strong culture of gun ownership here, and neophytes are strongly encouarged by their more experienced peers to seek training -- or are simply taught directly by their more experienced peers.
Places like Massachusetts south of us don't have this, since they hate guns so much, and that's where you see the most inane mishaps, like a young kid being allowed to handle a semi and loosing control of it due to the recoil. That crap would NEVER happen in New Hampsire. I can't imagine why anyone would be so stupid.
And I needn't say that licensing will only affect law-abiding citizens, not actual criminals who will conceal carry despite whatever laws you want to have. Better to allow free gun ownership with the option to freely conceal carry in public for such idiots. They'll be put down after the squeeze off the first shot, I assure you, thus saving many lives otherwise lost -- like in that shooting spree incident that occurred around Washington DC shortly after 9/11, or that case where the loon on the barracks went on a shooting spree recently.
But this would require you to put the usual knee-jerk fears aside and look at what ACTUALLY HAPPENS.
Give me 10-15 minutes to explain, and they'll know. I have to explain it to non-technical higher ups all the time.
"It's software that allows somebody at a distant location to covertly take control of the computer without the owner/user knowing, allowing them to move files/data, steal the user's information, or even perform attacks on other computers."
More techical stuff is explained all the time; and you should make time to explain it in a misdemeanor trial, much less a felony one.
That's a completely functional explanation. Shame on you!:-)
Of course, explaining HOW a rootkit does all of that is another matter. Whether or not that level of understanding is necessary to the investigation is even more of another matter.
I remember hearing about the FBI seeding fake child-porn images that would somehow call home when they were loaded by a computer. This was, of course, to catch people seeking out and downloading the images. However, some person(s) got the idea that it would be funny to take the image (or rather the image link) and place it on a website's background somewhere as a 1x1 pixel image. Thus, people physically unable to even SEE the image were nevertheless downloading the image.
Nice little trick. And then all you'd need is some Flash or JavaScript to copy the images to some place else on the computer.
I can name a lot more countries where bank robberies with firearms are rare due to limits on gun ownership (e.g. most all of europe) than I can nations where peace is maintained by everybody being armed all the time (e.g. Afghanistan, Somalia). So, I really have no clue what you're basing your opinion on. Unless it's a thought experiment of some sort.
I would advocate allowing both open and concealed carry.
If only open carry is allowed those who choose not to carry, or are not allowed, would be easy to spot and become preferred targets of muggers, etc.. By also allowing concealed carry there would always be the deterrent factor to a mugger that even though their potential victim was not openly armed they might still be carrying.
Agreed.
I would also advocate that no one be issued a permit of any kind without first passing a weapons safety course and displaying an understanding of not only how to fire a gun but the laws regulating when you can/can not use it and the legal responsibilities involved.
Here we disagree. The government should NOT be in the business of regulating our rights to bear arms. Period. While I hold strongly that all who do bear arms should also go for a training course or otherwise become HIGHLY educated in the proper use of firearms, it's not the government's place to force that upon us.
Besides, I think most would want to train up as they arm up, anyway.
Why is it that there seems to be no focus on going after those who actually CREATE the child porn? Nailing people for possession of bits and bytes does nothing to save the children. Oh, we can pretend it does, but we're supposed to be able to THINK.
Sorry, I expect too much of the human race...
They're either completely anonymous losers (abusive father/uncle only with a webcam) or making big bucks in parts of the world where that's all that matters and they can buy immunity. It also hard and costly.
And so beating up people in our country who happen to have it on their hard drives does NOTHING to stop the production of kiddie porn in those areas of the world it's coming from.
Why would any normal person draw kiddy porn to begin with?
Maybe they are not drawing "kiddie porn" in their minds -- but something else. Aliens who mature differently. Or maybe they are drawing childhood fantasies. Who knows?
If there was no consumption, there would be no production.
This is wrong in every respect (with the exception of paid for consumption, of course). If someone downloads kiddie porn for free that consumption is largely invisible. I think only true idiots would post the stuff on a website, which would get taken down quickly anyway (and be highly trackable). So the vast majority of the consumption will be by less visible means, such as Usenet, P2P, and the like.
If there is no money incentive, why go through the risks of recording the illicit acts? It doesn't make sense. If one is predisposed to do it anyway just for the hell of it, it is obvious such a person will not be deterred by lack of consumption, so the kid is violated anyway. 1 download or 1000000 downloads would make no difference, since the perpetrator would not ever know about them.
Child porn isn't something you would use a studio for. It is something that is a home-based business.
My point exactly. It's hard to make a profit at your business if people are getting their copies for free.
So again you prove my point -- it's the *paid for* consumption that drives it, not the free consumption. And most likely, the "third-world hovels", as you put it, make their money locally anyway. They will probably not be able to put together the resources to charge for this stuff online, and if they did, would make themselves easy targets to track down. At which point Law Enforcement will actually have some worthwhile work to do -- finally.
And the "third world" people have a tough problem -- sell your kids and eat; don't sell your kids and starve. And it's not just porn -- it's for "terrorist" operations as well. We here in the Rich West have the luxury of being able to moralize about such things, but if you are in their shoes, what would you do? I often find that one's morality is almost always one of convenience. It's always someone else that's "amoral", never oneself. Funny how that works.
Want to end child porn? Want to end the recruitment of kids turning them into human bombs? Then you have to end the conditions that causes people to have to make the choice between their kids and their food. It's just that simple -- and that complicated.
Quite a lot of the CP investigations are actually in conjunction with either molestation or production of child pornography (i.e., the "real perverts").
Not most of the stories I hear about. But then it may be in the way they are reported. If there's an actual child molestation case, then the computers are taken to find more evidence as a part of the bigger investigation, and are probably not even mentioned in the news story.
The noted ones are those where there is no real molestation or exploitation -- just bits and bytes discovered on someone's hard drive.
Creating fake tracks that fools forensics isn't as easy as it sounds. For example, if someone did just as you described and wrote malware that downloaded kiddie porn and created fake tracks, and that malware spread to millions of machines, the whole security and forensics community would hear of it. People would study the malware, determine what false tracks it made, and then it would be easy to demonstrate whether the files on your computer were the result of that malware. (Hell, you'd have to do this -- otherwise every single person caught with CP would say, "Oh, that malware downloaded it," and you'd need to prove otherwise in court.)
If I were to write such a beast (which I would not, of course!) I would have that in mind as I were writing the code, and would make sure it would lay down differently-patterned tracks each time so that it would fool all but the most astute of forensics investigators.
And it wouldn't even be a challenge to fool the point-and-click software most of the lackeys use, in any case.
Probably the biggest headache would be getting past all the different malware detectors out there. That would actually be a much bigger challenge than fooling the forensics investigations.
It can be fun contemplating how to fool the idiot investigators and the virus scanners alike, but I would never DO such a horrid thing, and I hope no one ever does. I am very big on the rights of innocent people.
That being the case, these morons would be totally lost with a computer like mine running Linux. I'm using XFS in most places, and have files I mount as encrypted drives for stuff I want to keep private. They probably wouldn't even recognize those files as mountable drives nor know what to do with the Bash scripts I've written to mount and unmount them. Not to mention the several virtual Windows installations.
And yes, they do hate geeks. The local cops have certainty given me enough hell in the past. I should've sued them for their efforts, but didn't have time. If they screw with me again,this time I'm prepared. They WILL be sued.
Prosecutors (District Attorneys) do not get elected for being soft on crime. Judges don't get elected for being soft on crime. They get elected for being tough on crime, facts be damned. Judges rarely get removed for sending innocent people to jail, and District Attorneys don't seem to get disbarred for pressing charges with false accusations.
True, but how do these guys sleep at night? I mean, knowing you are destroying the lives of innocent people? I've always wondered about that.
Joy, and I've actually FORGOTTEN the pass phrases to some of my encrypted drives.
What's worse is that you could dump a random set of bits on someone's computer and claim it's an encrypted drive of kiddie porn. There'd be almost no way to prove otherwise, unless a really bad PRNG was used to generate the sequence.
Our entire system of jurisprudence works on the principle of guilty until "proven" innocent. And you are never really proven innocent. That's why the call it "not guilty" when they can't make the guilt charge stick. You are never ever declared "innocent".
See, we've all been lied to in Civics class. We'd like to think we're "innocent" until proven "guilty", but that's not how the system works.
Why is it that there seems to be no focus on going after those who actually CREATE the child porn? Nailing people for possession of bits and bytes does nothing to save the children. Oh, we can pretend it does, but we're supposed to be able to THINK.
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The original intent of the patent was to give the lone inventor a monopoly over his invention in order to spur innovation. And it may have served that purpose once. But today, patents have taken on a completely different use -- the leverage for big deep-pocket corporations to beat up on other corporations and obliterate any possible competition from "the little guy", who could not possibly afford patent litigation.
So, it is my view that patents no longer serve it original intended purpose, and thus should be eliminated. Monsanto patents organisms and genes and uses that to force small farmers to buy their GMO seeds; Microsoft may use patents to beat down startups they deem as a threat, and so on.
Today, people will innovate whether or not patents exist. And most innovations don't ever see a patent, I think. It's just too expensive to procure a patent -- $5,000 to $10,000 -- and if ever someone -- even another little guy -- violated your patent "rights", you could not afford the litigation, anyway.
So let's abolish all patents and close down the USPTO!
Besides, many radio stations already stream their content over the Internet, anyway, making FM even less relevant.
A typical smartphone plan comes with 2 GB/mo, which is worth about 4000 minutes of 64 kbps streaming. This data allowance is shared with video streaming, web surfing, and other applications that also use up bytes. FM doesn't use minutes; instead of customers paying for the towers and the license, the advertisers pay.
A typical smartphone plan costs 60 USD per month. FM works even if your phone is on a $7/mo Virgin Mobile plan.
My Smartphone Data Plan costs me only $30 per month. What's really wild and unbelievable is that TEXT MESSAGING, which represents a much smaller bandwidth, costs also $30 a month, separate from the data plan. Totally insane, AT&T! (and the others do it as well).
Perhaps I'm a dissenting voice here, but I actually do listen to broadcast radio, and I would love it if my android-based smart phone had an FM tuner in it. There are times when I don't have the music I want to listen to on the device, and I would tune in to either CBC 2 (classical music channel) or the local indy/alternative station.
I don't think mandating it is a good idea. But I do think that if more manufacturers put them in smart phones the devices would find a market.
I'm sure you can find a classical streaming source to get the classical music that you love. Or just buy a separate FM receiver. They don't cost much these days.
The real truth is that with the Internet, consumers have bazillions of choices already as far as what they wish to listen to or view, and adding FM radio would only add a tiny fraction to those choices.
Besides, many radio stations already stream their content over the Internet, anyway, making FM even less relevant.
Let's face the cold hard facts: Broadcast media is on its way out. Good bye and good riddens. Only a handful of choices, and 99% of them lousy or mediocre.
And the FM "feature" that nobody really wants (nor would listen to in all probability) would be at the expense of some other feature consumers may actually want.
Government needs to stay the hell out of regulating the "free" marketplace. Consumers can and will make the choices they want, and the manufacturers can and will respond to those choices to grab marketshare.
The Government and the RIAA can go please themselves elsewhere. Leave the rest of us ALONE!
Guns and Cars -- yes, there are many people who drive cars, and most are probably less intelligent about it than I am. And the 41000 deaths per year on our roadways speaks volumes to this.
Innocent people are killed in car crashes, too -- lots of them. And yet we are willing to tolerate the risk. Somehow, even if everyone were free to carry, I don't think we'd have a death rate due to idiot gun accidents that would even approach what we see on the roads everyday.
Of course, we can get some ideas from hard facts. The Swiss, for instance. Or States in this country that have pretty open laws about guns, like New Hampshire.
You may be right about the DC sniper -- bad choice on my part. But I dunno. There's a good chance someone may have seen him pulling out his guns that would've been in a position to do something about it. DC is not exactly a rural area. But I would have to dig up the details of each incident, and I don't have the time. But there's been others, like the one you mentioned yourself, and a McDonald Shooting some time back. Not to mention the handful of incidents where a crazed student shoots up all his classmates. If teachers were armed, they could've taken out this individual before much damage was done.
But then there are some crazy teachers as well -- well, the public school system is crazy in its own right, worthy of a thread all its own.
It's all about risk vs. the reward, and realism. We are willing to accept a relatively high mortality rate for our right to travel. I used that as a benchmark to see how realistic our expectations and perceptions are. Everyone goes insane over the 9/11 incident, a singular incident where ONLY 3000 or so people died, but doesn't bat an eyelash to the 41000 annual fatalities on our roads. Trillions of dollars are being wasted on the so-called "War on Terrorism", and just think what that money would do if it were, instead, used to improve road safety and technology in a realistic way! How many US lives (not counting soldiers) are lost due to terrorism? The risk factors are very low and yet an astronomical figure is spent fighting it.
Which convinces me that Government has it all wrong, period. Always has, and it always will.
I know personally of a case where a person failed a Police firearms course when he not only failed to safe a pistol but managed to discharge it (thankfully it was pointing down range). This was a person who had been shown less than 5 minutes before exactly what to do and he still managed to fuck it up. If he had screwed up again in a public place someone could have been killed. And his performance in the course went down hill from there. If I knew that that idiot was allowed to carry a gun in public I would fear for the safety of those around him. I would however defend his right to own a gun, and use it in designated locations. And nothing prevented him from trying to pass the course again, for as many time as it took for him to pass.
All the gun owners I know of are highly responsible and have had training in some regard. Occaionally you get the idiot, but all of the idiotic cases I have ever heard of happened in Massachusetts, which is a lot more restrictive of gun ownership than New Hampshire, where I reside.
Government restriction creates inexperience, and inexperience create the problems you describe.
I am fully for responsible gun ownership, and the State must have no regulation or licensing in the matter. Why do I say this? Because if Government has a list of who owns a gun, it can decide to harass those individuals needlessly.
Case in point? New Orleans. I have a friend who volunteered for relief efforts after the mess hurricane Katrina created, and guess what? The government there were rounding up all the guns owned by "blacks", but leaving the "whites" alone. Pure discrimination, plain and simple, at a time you need your gun the most.
Perhaps you have a blind trust of government, but I know too much history, recent and past, to be that naive. We have few to no problems in New Hampshire with idiots owning guns, as we have a very strong culture of gun ownership here, and neophytes are strongly encouarged by their more experienced peers to seek training -- or are simply taught directly by their more experienced peers.
Places like Massachusetts south of us don't have this, since they hate guns so much, and that's where you see the most inane mishaps, like a young kid being allowed to handle a semi and loosing control of it due to the recoil. That crap would NEVER happen in New Hampsire. I can't imagine why anyone would be so stupid.
And I needn't say that licensing will only affect law-abiding citizens, not actual criminals who will conceal carry despite whatever laws you want to have. Better to allow free gun ownership with the option to freely conceal carry in public for such idiots. They'll be put down after the squeeze off the first shot, I assure you, thus saving many lives otherwise lost -- like in that shooting spree incident that occurred around Washington DC shortly after 9/11, or that case where the loon on the barracks went on a shooting spree recently.
But this would require you to put the usual knee-jerk fears aside and look at what ACTUALLY HAPPENS.
Carrying a gun into the bank should be OK.
We are gun-loving. But that doesn't make us crazy SOBs. Just a part of our long standing tradition and culture, as all...
Give me 10-15 minutes to explain, and they'll know. I have to explain it to non-technical higher ups all the time.
"It's software that allows somebody at a distant location to covertly take control of the computer without the owner/user knowing, allowing them to move files/data, steal the user's information, or even perform attacks on other computers."
More techical stuff is explained all the time; and you should make time to explain it in a misdemeanor trial, much less a felony one.
That's a completely functional explanation. Shame on you! :-)
Of course, explaining HOW a rootkit does all of that is another matter. Whether or not that level of understanding is necessary to the investigation is even more of another matter.
I remember hearing about the FBI seeding fake child-porn images that would somehow call home when they were loaded by a computer. This was, of course, to catch people seeking out and downloading the images. However, some person(s) got the idea that it would be funny to take the image (or rather the image link) and place it on a website's background somewhere as a 1x1 pixel image. Thus, people physically unable to even SEE the image were nevertheless downloading the image.
Nice little trick. And then all you'd need is some Flash or JavaScript to copy the images to some place else on the computer.
Law Enforcement should be spending its efforts going after the perverts that create kiddie porn, where it would actually do the poor kids some good.
They'd have a lot less to validate their paychecks if they did that.
Good.
I can name a lot more countries where bank robberies with firearms are rare due to limits on gun ownership (e.g. most all of europe) than I can nations where peace is maintained by everybody being armed all the time (e.g. Afghanistan, Somalia). So, I really have no clue what you're basing your opinion on. Unless it's a thought experiment of some sort.
More Guns, Less Crime by John Lott.
I would advocate allowing both open and concealed carry. If only open carry is allowed those who choose not to carry, or are not allowed, would be easy to spot and become preferred targets of muggers, etc.. By also allowing concealed carry there would always be the deterrent factor to a mugger that even though their potential victim was not openly armed they might still be carrying.
Agreed.
I would also advocate that no one be issued a permit of any kind without first passing a weapons safety course and displaying an understanding of not only how to fire a gun but the laws regulating when you can/can not use it and the legal responsibilities involved.
Here we disagree. The government should NOT be in the business of regulating our rights to bear arms. Period. While I hold strongly that all who do bear arms should also go for a training course or otherwise become HIGHLY educated in the proper use of firearms, it's not the government's place to force that upon us.
Besides, I think most would want to train up as they arm up, anyway.
Why is it that there seems to be no focus on going after those who actually CREATE the child porn? Nailing people for possession of bits and bytes does nothing to save the children. Oh, we can pretend it does, but we're supposed to be able to THINK.
Sorry, I expect too much of the human race...
They're either completely anonymous losers (abusive father/uncle only with a webcam) or making big bucks in parts of the world where that's all that matters and they can buy immunity. It also hard and costly.
And so beating up people in our country who happen to have it on their hard drives does NOTHING to stop the production of kiddie porn in those areas of the world it's coming from.
Why would any normal person draw kiddy porn to begin with?
Maybe they are not drawing "kiddie porn" in their minds -- but something else. Aliens who mature differently. Or maybe they are drawing childhood fantasies. Who knows?
If there was no consumption, there would be no production.
This is wrong in every respect (with the exception of paid for consumption, of course). If someone downloads kiddie porn for free that consumption is largely invisible. I think only true idiots would post the stuff on a website, which would get taken down quickly anyway (and be highly trackable). So the vast majority of the consumption will be by less visible means, such as Usenet, P2P, and the like.
If there is no money incentive, why go through the risks of recording the illicit acts? It doesn't make sense. If one is predisposed to do it anyway just for the hell of it, it is obvious such a person will not be deterred by lack of consumption, so the kid is violated anyway. 1 download or 1000000 downloads would make no difference, since the perpetrator would not ever know about them.
Child porn isn't something you would use a studio for. It is something that is a home-based business.
My point exactly. It's hard to make a profit at your business if people are getting their copies for free.
So again you prove my point -- it's the *paid for* consumption that drives it, not the free consumption. And most likely, the "third-world hovels", as you put it, make their money locally anyway. They will probably not be able to put together the resources to charge for this stuff online, and if they did, would make themselves easy targets to track down. At which point Law Enforcement will actually have some worthwhile work to do -- finally.
And the "third world" people have a tough problem -- sell your kids and eat; don't sell your kids and starve. And it's not just porn -- it's for "terrorist" operations as well. We here in the Rich West have the luxury of being able to moralize about such things, but if you are in their shoes, what would you do? I often find that one's morality is almost always one of convenience. It's always someone else that's "amoral", never oneself. Funny how that works.
Want to end child porn? Want to end the recruitment of kids turning them into human bombs? Then you have to end the conditions that causes people to have to make the choice between their kids and their food. It's just that simple -- and that complicated.
Quite a lot of the CP investigations are actually in conjunction with either molestation or production of child pornography (i.e., the "real perverts").
Not most of the stories I hear about. But then it may be in the way they are reported. If there's an actual child molestation case, then the computers are taken to find more evidence as a part of the bigger investigation, and are probably not even mentioned in the news story.
The noted ones are those where there is no real molestation or exploitation -- just bits and bytes discovered on someone's hard drive.
Creating fake tracks that fools forensics isn't as easy as it sounds. For example, if someone did just as you described and wrote malware that downloaded kiddie porn and created fake tracks, and that malware spread to millions of machines, the whole security and forensics community would hear of it. People would study the malware, determine what false tracks it made, and then it would be easy to demonstrate whether the files on your computer were the result of that malware. (Hell, you'd have to do this -- otherwise every single person caught with CP would say, "Oh, that malware downloaded it," and you'd need to prove otherwise in court.)
If I were to write such a beast (which I would not, of course!) I would have that in mind as I were writing the code, and would make sure it would lay down differently-patterned tracks each time so that it would fool all but the most astute of forensics investigators.
And it wouldn't even be a challenge to fool the point-and-click software most of the lackeys use, in any case.
Probably the biggest headache would be getting past all the different malware detectors out there. That would actually be a much bigger challenge than fooling the forensics investigations.
It can be fun contemplating how to fool the idiot investigators and the virus scanners alike, but I would never DO such a horrid thing, and I hope no one ever does. I am very big on the rights of innocent people.
Osama bin Laden is to War what Tony the Tiger is to Frosted Flakes.
That being the case, these morons would be totally lost with a computer like mine running Linux. I'm using XFS in most places, and have files I mount as encrypted drives for stuff I want to keep private. They probably wouldn't even recognize those files as mountable drives nor know what to do with the Bash scripts I've written to mount and unmount them. Not to mention the several virtual Windows installations.
And yes, they do hate geeks. The local cops have certainty given me enough hell in the past. I should've sued them for their efforts, but didn't have time. If they screw with me again,this time I'm prepared. They WILL be sued.
I guess it's just not easy being a cop. ;-)
Prosecutors (District Attorneys) do not get elected for being soft on crime. Judges don't get elected for being soft on crime. They get elected for being tough on crime, facts be damned. Judges rarely get removed for sending innocent people to jail, and District Attorneys don't seem to get disbarred for pressing charges with false accusations.
True, but how do these guys sleep at night? I mean, knowing you are destroying the lives of innocent people? I've always wondered about that.
What's worse is that you could dump a random set of bits on someone's computer and claim it's an encrypted drive of kiddie porn. There'd be almost no way to prove otherwise, unless a really bad PRNG was used to generate the sequence.
I believe in all US jurisdictions the browser cache is not considered to be evidence of intent.
Nobody gets convicted because of their browser cache, at least in the US.
The moral of that story, kiddies, is that if you are going to do kiddie porn, hide it in your browser's cache!
If a cop catches you on (1), you're nailed. If (2), then you're humiliated. You just can't win.
And good luck trying to explain what a rootkit is to the jury.
See, we've all been lied to in Civics class. We'd like to think we're "innocent" until proven "guilty", but that's not how the system works.
Sorry, I expect too much of the human race...