An Anonymous group has taken down a major dark web hosting service
theverge.com
theverge.com
Fun times, glad to see people are still having fun :0)
The part about childporn though... That's pretty abhorrent. Nearly half. I just don't understand child porn. Why? I wonder if there are child porn "Hunters" that go after these scum. (by Hunters I mean White hats)
How persuasive is your example depends on which side the reader takes in this war. (I don't take either)
I'd bet on this Tor host being an active sting operation considering the fate of the previous one, FreedomHosting.
And even to set up a machine learning model to prevent CP sharing, they would need to find a jurisdiction where it's legal to store the training data.
You make it sound like they are hunting for porn. Child porn producer, child porn distributor, rapist and pedophile are all different things.
The system discourages everyone from the public to law enforcement from doing anything productive about child sexual abuse.
Using "synthetic images" (lolicon?) to lure "child abusers" (even before you have evidence of them doing crime) and conducting vigilante justice is surely going to be productive if you don't weight in false positives.
Do you think the means of current drug war in Philippines is justified by its goals? Want to extend this practice to CP?
By synthetic images, I mean believable CG images of the illegal acts in question. I'm under the impression that paedophilic criminals are careful only to associate with people who are also committing the same crime. If you could gain the trust of traffickers and offender parents(parents are sometimes (often?) involved) through reasonable proof, then I imagine you could stop a lot more child sexual abuse and trafficking.
It does? Last I heard, law enforcement shut down this stuff regularly, and even have teams dedicated to it.
One thing that forensic teams need is to identify locations. Things that help are databases of coca cola (etc) labels, and computer vision recognition of those product labels. (Or carpet patterns).
This works by programmers making a general purpose tool, and then law enforcement approach them with censored images to train the software.
If you are looking to build a skillset these are the only acceptable targets in my opinion.
You are already mistaken, I don't.
Already mentioned, just repeating: http://www.euronews.com/2016/10/21/does-killing-drug-dealers... What if it is not children, but "just" drug addicts. Do you believe you are free to harm drug dealers?
For example, sites to reach people in places where there is state sponsored censorship. Sure it's not legitimate as far as the country do the censorship is concerned but people/governments outside that country it may be considered defensible.
Security researchers (white hat and pen testers) often have onion sites to provide some street cred.
If you want to blog but want to stay anonymous for personal reasons.
Although with several of those I see no reason not to use a legitimate web host or VPS providers.
As for blogs out of 150 researchers/security professionals I know including myself no one is running an onion site for street cred if it's not anonymized there is no point having an onion address is not the same as running a hidden service.
I may know one or two but yeah, it's a stretch. I was trying too hard to think of examples.
With most hidden services mapping projects you'll see 50-60% being pure CP and the rest are various forums and trading sites that are about as far from being legitimate as possible while not hosting CP. Buying drugs, zero-days, guns and w/e isn't a legitimate site, neither is any of the "hacking" boards that require you to submit a good data dump and a few defacements before being allowed in.
Same goes for exit nodes, I've been running traffic analysis on 2 nodes I have access too for the past 3 years, the vast majority of it isn't really legitimate. People don't access their bank account, facebook, or their email, from my own personal research the vast majority of the traffic an exit node operator is going to see is going to be from automated tools primarily web vulnerability scanners, nearly half the traffic I see comes from SQLmap, Vega and pirated versions of Acunetix also make a large part of the bulk traffic.
Even traffic which is end to end encrypted I can more or less estimate that it is some sort of a vulnerability scan or an exploit, while I can't peek into SSL nor do I wish to attempt at time based demasking attacks against the TOR network when I have like 100-1000 sites being accessed randomly within a short time window on my exit node I can pretty much guarantee you that some one is running some sort of a vulnerability scan or an exploit.
I know that we would like to think that TOR is being used primarily for good but it doesn't, it doesn't mean that we should ban it for that anymore that we should ban email because 90% of email traffic is spam. But we do need to admit that the percentage of legitimate traffic going over TOR and the percentage of legitimate hidden services at this time is more or less a rounding error.
I am presenting unpopular opinion here (score for my comment [0] goes wildly from -4 to +4) and you probably believe I am doing it because I am consumer. What actually make me questioning current state of laws is this simple experiment: can you run an FTP site (or Syncthing folder, or automated seedbox) at home where everyone on the Internet is free to upload and download anything and leave it unattended? What kind of laws prevent you from doing it?
The only laws are pretty much the copyright laws and CP distribution laws. As for copyright you at least have an option to setup DMCA abuse address, but you still have to actually process requests. As for CP laws things are worse: you will get your house raided without a warning.
These things damage net neutrality and make content distribution the privilege of companies which manage to make responsibility non-personal and keep the damage taken from data center raids under control.
There are enough people questioning copyright and at least we begin to understand that copyright is not some sort of "natural law", but a protectionist policy. Discussions on CP are pretty much taboo in our society. People mess up terms (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13567776) and believe witch-hunt is justified (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13568255). My point is that ban on CP distribution is, like copyright, is not the result of distribution being a crime by itself (even in current state it is a "victimless crime"). It should be made clear that it is only justified as long as it harms producers (https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=13567612). If it does not, then the law should be abolished, similarly to how we had to abolish marijuana possession and distribution laws.
Please do not misrepresent or mischaracterise people in order to dismiss their point, it is used to silence debate (such as by calling people 'perverts' because the watch porn to discredit them). If you have an argument, post it - but please do not silence debate. I'm sorry if it wasn't your intention to do this, but it's a recurring theme to call people certain words or names in order to silence them nowadays.