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Comment by godmodus | Hacker News Reader

Fills me with 1990 nostalgia of IRC being ddosed and no one being able to trade ccs or dcc them 0daywarez. Ah the sweet chaos and drama.

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)

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I mentioned this awhile back when a similar topic came up. Awhile back I wrote a small crawler/search engine for onion sites that didn't log visitor info, just the search terms. After about a week if running I went back to see what people were searching for and the majority of it was child porn. I was totally shocked. I had anticipated cracking and warez type stuff but not child porn, or at least not at the levels I was seeing. I shut down the app after that :(

Can confirm, had the same shocking experience. But i think its mostly curious people and not actually people who would classify as pedos

I don't follow. If you go looking you have issues. I have never been online and been like "hmm i should see what all this CP hype is all about".

Well in my world view and i could be totally wrong most of these were kids. There are A LOT of kids on the darknet. Looking for free steam keys was one of the other dominant searches i noticed.

Maybe it was 50% law enforcement and 49% journalists?

I always assume when some vandal/vigilante takes down a service is that they're just interfering with an investigation to actually catch these criminals instead of scattering them to new unknown services. Reminds me when Assad, early in the Syrian war was using an insecure private email server to dictate all actions of the military and police, which some idiots discovered so decided to spam it with threats and he shut it down. Meanwhile the opposition (before they became foreign terrorists) had also broken into the server and were able to counter the military and police actions against them until they lost this golden intelligence source from the idiotic actions of vigilantes purporting to be on their side.

> Reminds me when Assad, early in the Syrian war

How persuasive is your example depends on which side the reader takes in this war. (I don't take either)

You can be pro-Syrian government and still see from that example how naive vigilantism can screw your cause more than it does your enemies. A different example would be some terrorist run Telegram channel full of Assad moles who lost their intel access because pro-Assad vigilantes successfully managed to guess a password and showed up to spam shutting the channel down.

I'd bet on this Tor host being an active sting operation considering the fate of the previous one, FreedomHosting.

The point made is valid regardless.

This very hack was undertaken by those "hunters" you're asking about. There was also Operation Darknet, an Anonymous-driven takedown of Lolita City (one of the worst child porn onion sites) and the original Freedom Hosting, back in 2011.

http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/events/operation-darknet

I often disagree with Anon due to their disregard of consequences. In rare circumstances they really shine.

To be fair most anons disagreed with this heavily because de-anonymizing people for whatever reason is the most non anonymous thing to do.

Because of the specific way that child porn is, you are basically admitting to breaking the law by reporting it. If you want to go after child abusers then you have to do it anonymously. And of course, in the U.S. you can't even use synthetic images to lure child abusers, because they can count as child porn in some cases.

The system discourages everyone from the public to law enforcement from doing anything productive about child sexual abuse.

> The system discourages everyone from the public to law enforcement from doing anything productive about child sexual abuse.

It does? Last I heard, law enforcement shut down this stuff regularly, and even have teams dedicated to it.

Law enforcement agencies often seem to rely on tools developed by private businesses to investigate certain types of crime. Developing useful niche tools for this task is not legally viable (unless, I suspect, if ordered by a court), so I wonder if LEAs are getting the tools they need.

Could you give some examples?

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.

> 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?

That's quite an extrapolation. Murder is illegal, just because you're investigating something doesn't mean you are entitled to decide or enforce the law. That is what courts are for.

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.

Plenty of CP hunters. I'm hunting it right now on the Candid App, not like you need to hunt it there since it seems to get blatantly advertised by all the idiots. Funnily enough, I've told the CEO several times and she doesn't seem to care that it's happening, as many of these groups on Candid are still operational, and she's dead silent on the issue.

Bindu Reddy seems to be overwhelmed with the balance between half of the core product being effectively censorship, while the other half is about countering self censorship. Tough company to run.

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.

Today's stock markets with all the hedge fund bots remind me of 90s IRC. It grew up. Instead of #warez it's Nasdaq.

That's a really dangerous game to play. In order to shut it down you have to seek out the sites that host it. Unless you have the protection of working for law enforcement, it's not worth the risk. Even if you do work for law enforcement, the psychological damage from seeing those acts can be very high.

> child porn "Hunters"

You make it sound like they are hunting for porn. Child porn producer, child porn distributor, rapist and pedophile are all different things.

>I wonder if there are child porn "Hunters" that go after these scum

If you are looking to build a skillset these are the only acceptable targets in my opinion.

Just go play some wargames and CTFs. Attacking systems intended by their developers to be attacked is perfectly acceptable. Attacking other people systems just because you think it is accepted by society without at least getting warrant from a judge is not.

I'm not concerned about society to be honest. You hurt children, I hurt you. I refuse to compromise on that.

> You hurt children

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?

Lol he wasn't saying you hurt kids, look at the context

It was intended to be a joke about false positives. Thought to put ":)" in the end but decided to keep HN emoticon-free. Jokes aside, I think vigilante justice always ends up being a witch-hunt dealing harm to lots of innocent people.

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