Hacker builds tracking system to nab Tor pedophiles

In my opinion, downloading and looking at pictures of naked children shouldn't be a crime. Making child porn also shouldn't be a crime unless it falls under child abuse laws. For example, animated or CGI child porn should be legal because its production and consumption harms no one. (Currently it's illegal and people have gone to jail for it.) We stopped imprisoning and castrating homosexuals sometime ago, but apparently people can't internalize the too-abstract ideas of "victimless crime" and "private business". See that guy? He's a wacko, I tell you. He loves watching movies where people kill other people with guns! One day he'll get a gun and attack our kids, our precious little darlings.

And about that hacker from the article, I wonder if his system can be used to catch copyright infringers? People who download offensive texts? People who visit blacklisted sites, where the blacklist depends on the country? Human inventions are beautiful that way - you never know how other people will repurpose them. I hear the guy who invented dynamite didn't intend it to be used for killing, either.

Great. He's breaking Tor.

I want to see pedophiles in jail too, but if Tor is broken for this purpose, Tor will become useless for any purpose. Governments and others will catch on and take advantage of the same techniques to detect whatever other activity they happen to be interested in.

If you're a supporter of the sort of privacy Tor provides, this is a Bad Thing.

Moore is headed to a massive government paycheck if he keeps it up. "Catching pedophiles" is the best business plan; the name practically funds itself.

We saw the same sorts of issues when freenet came about. The problem is that if you build a purely anonymous system in an environment that is not oppressed (like the US), mostly people look at child porn, or share photos of people being totured/murdered/whatever. There is little logic to going to all the trouble to anonymize if you are doing something that is perfectly legal.

I see several problems with this method.

1. You need to run an exit node for unencrypted HTTP traffic to be able to inject html.

2. Tor warns you when you are potentially leaking DNS requests when you are using an old protocol like socks4 instead of sock4a. Anyone who is using Tor is presumably smart enough to activate this option on Firefox or whatever browser they happen to use,

3. The Java applet leaking DNS requests is a big hole which I believe is fixed by now. Even if it did work, it is entirely dependent on point 2 which is easily preventable.

why would a tor user allow a java applet to be installed on his/her computer?

Tor is being used for nefarious purposes? Who could have anticipated that?

Stuff like Tor is made for purposes that at least somebody considers nefarious. The relevance of this is that he apparently found a vulnerability.

I'm not sure if I should be glad that someone exposed a problem with tor and that the government could be exploiting it already, or if I should be sad that someone just showed the government how to do it.

If the alleged pedophile is savvy enough to use Tor, won't he be running his web traffic over SSL, rendering this sort of attack useless?

Note that this is an article from 2007.