Man found guilty of child porn because he ran a Tor exit node
lowendbox.com
lowendbox.com
> Further, as Kosovo is an extremely corrupt country, we are able to bribe both executive and judicative as well as getting information about court orders and raids before execution, enabling us to move servers out of the affected location, protecting our clients in any situation. Our excellent Serbian connections enable us to also move servers cross-border and play "ping pong" between both countries, essentially keeping content online forever.
Right?
* 2000: Bulgaria 3.5/10, Romania 2.9/10 https://www.transparency.org/en/cpi/2000
* 2007: Bulgaria 4.1/10, Romania 3.7/10 https://www.transparency.org/en/cpi/2007
* 2013: Bulgaria 41/100, Romania 43/100 https://www.transparency.org/en/cpi/2013
* 2022: Bulgaria 43/100, Romania 46/100, Western Europe and EU average: 66 https://www.transparency.org/en/cpi/2022
"2022 Corruption Perceptions Index Reveals Undue Influence And Fragmented Anti-Corruption Efforts Threaten Progress In Western Europe & EU": https://www.transparency.org/en/press/2022-corruption-percep...
I'll never forget during the presidential elections of early 2010s (or around that time) (we joined EU in 2007) when a member of the loosing party (which would then become our prime minister), Victor Ponta, stated frankly, in an interview, that they lost because his party stole fewer votes (bribing the poor with meager amounts of household products to vote for them, which is a favorite campaign activity around here).
However to combat this prolific corruption (in part because of EU mandate), around the same time, our winning president instated the National Anticorruption Directorate (DNA in Romanian) which is a "taskforce" of judges and lawyers investigating these highly profilic cases.
It became moderately successful (there's always room for improvement). The EU took note, and brought in members of the directorate to instate a similar structure centrally as an EU institution (for cross border corruption cases), and afaik the process has been set in motion to instate the same directorare in Bulgaria (under the guide of a certain prosecution attorney that lead this directorare in Romania, Laura Codruta Kovesi).
Just FYI.
If Von der Leyen wasn’t corrupt, I’m sure she wouldn’t have any problem handing over her texts.
This is the same non-reason as is being brought up with cameras filming you 24/7 etc. 'You dont have to worry if you have nothing to hide' ... It's an invasion of privacy, and it is worth fighting against that.
Government has ZERO right to privacy; government agents in their capacity have ZERO right to privacy.
If a government agent uses a private account to do government business, then a) they should be fired/ removed and charged for trying to hide that business and b) those accounts should be turned over to the government, redacted of anything not related to the government business, and everything else made public.
A private individual has a right to privacy. Government, including anyone acting as its agent, do not.
We’re talking about texts between the EU President and Pfizer’s CEO, not some randos.
https://www.politico.eu/article/new-york-times-sue-european-...
VdL should have a private phone and a work phone, just like everyone else.
If these work messages are from her work phone, she should hand them over. If they are work messages on her private phone, she should also hand them over. She simply cannot claim to have been having non-work conversations with anyone at Pfizer.
Haven’t found much on this. Frankly there is no need to allege corruption against this particular EU politician when there are better examples like those involved with the Qatar scandal.
Are you talking about Pfizer related text messages or earlier German MoD/McKinsey text messages?
This is a person who, by their own statement, had out of context IRC logs used by the government to convict him of a different crime.
Corruption is an equal opportunity weapon.
I still remember handing over my passport to a guy on a sports bike in Singapore to get an extended stamp for Indonesia, and only a few years later did it occur to me how sketchy the whole situation was.
Yeah, maybe you can buy yourself out of trouble. But I suspect in many such cases the people involved prefer to be bought quietly.
Make things too uncomfortably public or too embarrassing and the same people might well throw the book at you.
The latter has a system that doesn’t “include” foreigners, whereas someplace like Romania is a lot more Westernized and offering a bribe carries a lot more risk.
Not that I'd shed any tear for Tate or the other guy though, both deserve all they get and more.
> I like living in countries where corruption is accessible for everybody.
The emphasis here was on everybody because this followed a rant about how Western societies are corrupt where the rich gets to ignore the laws and he wanted to do the same. He said this in 2022 so whether he really did move in 2017 for this reason is impossible to say.
Up until recently they basically had free/stolem electricity and they used it to mine bitcoin for free.
What happens if someone else is willing to pay a higher bribe than you are...?
And there is very little trust too. They lie and defraud each other constantly. They do kill each other too, but most often because someone knows too much or has something want.
-Discussion of a rather sinister court official in Isaac Asimov's 'Foundation And Empire'
Relevant concept: Present Value of Future Cashflows (see for example https://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/presentvalue.asp).
Corrupt systems rather notoriously do not tend to feature unity of action or interest throughout what is notionally the government, or even what are nominally single agencies within the government.
Also, a 10X carrot directly to the bribed official receiving the periodic 1X stream can also be combined with a stick.
You don't think the plata o plomo choice only applies to actors not already on someone else’s corrupt (beside the official government’s overt) payroll, do you?
Or just bribing someone else in a position to withdraw the authority that the person you bribed is using to protect you.
Worst case scenario they shut down, collaborate fully with the police and keep all the profits up til then. Better case scenario they make a deal with the police and keep operating and making profits while covertly providing assistance. Best case scenario the issue never comes up and they make all the profits without having to spend those expenses.
My impression is that in this kind of shady web hosting the companies never last that long so you wouldn't want to invest a lot in bribes and multiple data centers and so on when you could lie and make short term profit.
Note also that corruption isn't a boolean flag. First off the cop make take the exact same strategy: take your money, do nothing else, and hope their boss never gets interested in you while planning not to protect you if anything comes up. Furthermore there are all sorts of anticorruption efforts in that area linked to US aid. That doesn't mean there isn't corruption, it does mean that if a major US corp works with the FBI in a major investigation the local police may rather piss you off than lose critical aid funding.
(I am a reporter who covers law enforcement and crime.)
Exact examples are hard to find in the press. One that comes to mind is from a Belgian Telco company that was internally hacked by an employee hiding behind NordVPN. Nord when approached by the telco responded with the usual no logs, but after the telco involved the Interpol, logs were given and the attacker doxxed.
This article (edited multiple times!) is not evidence of anything, let alone Nord co-operating with law enforcement to log customer data.
> Exact examples are hard to find in the press.
You said there are countless examples of Nord logging user data, why are you backtracking now?
> One that comes to mind is from a Belgian Telco company that was internally hacked by an employee hiding behind NordVPN. Nord when approached by the telco responded with the usual no logs, but after the telco involved the Interpol, logs were given and the attacker doxxed.
Give source or it did not happen.
Not sure what is not clear from this: “We will comply with lawful requests as long as they are delivered according to all the laws and regulations," NordVPN says. "We are a company that protects the security and privacy of our customers, but we operate according to laws and regulations.”
Why you don't find articles googling is that Nord puts a lot of effort in removing or burring it (google their dispute with TorGuard). Same what they tried to do with the breach in 2018, they half-ass disclosed at least 6 months later after being known to them. (at a point in time the breach already leaked)
Example I gave was a talk in a hacker conference, with no recording (common request for hacker conference talks).
This is obviously true for every VPN company that intends to keep operating. And in itself is not evidence of anything.
If all the links were taken down, how come no one saved a copy on wayback machine because the burden of proof is on you to provide these backups every time you make such allegations. Otherwise I'll just assume you are just being disingenuous.
In the US, you have to be a common carrier to be covered by CALEA. Internet services are not required to keep logs.
I could be wrong though.
The (law enforcement) agencies can just go to the few biggest VPN suppliers. Just like they go to FAANG.
Based on what? You just seem to be making a wild unsubstantiated conjecture here.
1. Do these agencies have the motivation to do the above? I think the answer here is an obvious yes to everyone
2. Do these agencies have the technical ability to hack the VPNs, the finances to pay them for access, or some other reasonable measure to coerce compliance?
If 1 and 2 are both true, then the OP claim is also certainly true.
Given that 1 is true, I don’t think it’s “wild” to claim that these agencies cannot satisfy 2. In fact I’d say given the historical record, the more wild claim is that the CIA/NSA etc is incapable of satisfying #2.
If you are using unknown exploits not passed on to relevant software projects each discovery further risks said exploit being discovered then used against us individuals and enterprise.
It is a potentially very high cost for mediocre gain as criminals can turn to more secure methods leaving you with a lot of data on whose hiding piracy from their ISP but little of actual value.
Meanwhile you can direct attack targets any other ways when they are likely to have actual intelligence instead of hoping they log into nord VPN.
In brief speculation is incredibly likely to be based on bad logic and should probably attend more to actual know.
Eg most people aren't important enough to directly target. Uncle Sam probably knows the entire contents of your Gmail but not what you do via nord VPN. At such time as you become an international drug lord your privacy is likely to fall apart when Sam starts serving providers who do business with you.
Could you point out one example where CIA/NSA faced any real consequences after being caught doing something shady?
And I'm sorry, you aren't entitled to any of that information one way or another it's CLASSIFIED.
Isn't your own government keeping secrets from you grand?
A crime in Sweden perhaps. Who will Sweden charge? Do they even have names for individual employees?
It’s also a “crime” to sell false and compromised products to customers yet CryptoAG existed for decades.
> At such time as you become an international drug lord your privacy is likely to fall apart when Sam starts serving providers who do business with you.
Then you’re simply agreeing under point 2, I.e they have they ability to coerce cooperation when desired
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A
No door handle!
Room 641A is located in the SBC Communications building at 611 Folsom
Street, San Francisco, three floors of which were occupied by AT&T before
SBC purchased AT&T. The room was referred to in internal AT&T documents as
the SG3 [Study Group 3] Secure Room.
The room measures about 24 by 48 feet (7.3 by 14.6 m) and contains several
racks of equipment [...].
Your experience doesn't indicate the safety of the service against those other threats, and not only may they not be correlated but they may be anti-correlated. E.g. I bet both CIA and mob run VPN services are really good at saying no to the police.
The fundamental thought that drives my opinion on this subject is this:
We already know for a fact that some state actors do broad scale full take surveillance of the internet. VPN services are even more attractive to monitor because the users are somewhat self-selecting as people who have something to hide, more intel bang per megabit monitored. Without surveilling VPNs these entities would have a blindspot in their expensive internet monitoring machine, so its important just for completeness sake. The VPN provider game is also a much lower barrier to entry, smaller players that don't have the power to push around AT&T can get in on it. Russia, for example, isn't in that much of a position to engage in world wide telecom monitoring (except perhaps that one fiber that goes through sibera and has really low latency between europe and china)-- but they sure can stand up some VPNs and get the worlds traffic to come to them.
Plus, if you run a VPN service people will pay you to run their secret data through you. It's a profit center even before you get to the potential revenue streams from abusing your position. Perhaps it becomes so profitable that you'd prefer to protect it and so you minimize your abuse, but the optimal amount of abuse will pretty much never be zero.
So, If you're the head of a clandestine service or serious organized crime group and you haven't launched at least one VPN service you should be immediately fired for grave incompetence.
The best reason to not run one would just be that you've already infiltrated many existing ones through operatives and backdoored hardware.
And also the heat you take running these services is much easier to deal with if you have 'connections' either of the run-by-a-TLA sort or the we-have-blackmail-material-and-can-break-your-fingers sort. And corrupt VPNs have a whole extra potential revenue/benefit source so they can afford to under-price any honest competition.
Given that, we should expect that many VPNs are honeypots. Probably not all of them, but by their very nature it should be hard to impossible to tell which.
https://blog.getfoxyproxy.org/2017/11/04/secret-service-subp...
We'll figure it out in ten years or so after the eventual leaks happen
Though, that IP you are using is not shared with anyone else and BuyVM doesn't promess not to log.
That IP is directly correlated to you in BuyVM's books.
That is the very worst option.
Your ISP already tracks ingress and egress.
Team Cymru is one such buyer of bulk netflow metadata from ISP's (and their upstream providers) around the globe, who do all of the correlation work on their side, and then sell it, under product names like Pure Signal Recon (formerly Augury)... including to law enforcement agencies and the US military...
There are also no laws dictating that ISP's must disclose whether or not they are selling that information, and they have no commercial incentive to choose to honestly disclose that they do.
If your adversary is NSA/FBI/US Army, or any other deep-pocketed nation-state-level adversaries who Team Cymru is willing to sell to, the safest assumption is that there is absolutely nothing you can do to obscure the origin of your traffic with 100% certainty.
Let's say you are using an ISP to connect to a VPN provider.
That VPN provider does what most of them do and SNATs multiple customers connections to a single exit public IP.
How can they correlate the encrypted wireguard data from my ISP connection to the VPN provider and then from the VPN provider to the final endpoint (say, ProtonMail)?
There is a known overhead for encapsulating these requests in an OpenVPN or WireGuard tunnel.
So even without looking at the contents of the traffic at all, the metadata your ISP collects can easily reveal that you sent outbound traffic and received inbound traffic that had a high statistical correlation with the expected traffic flow of a request to Protonmail encapsulated within a Wireguard tunnel, to a known VPN node, and then a (known) number of milliseconds before that VPN's upstream provider also made a request that perfectly matched the expected packet flow of Protonmail. If you have visibility into the traffic netflow of both your ISP and the VPN's upstream provider, consider yourself confidently unmasked.
The initial fingerprinting laid firm groundwork for your adversary to suspect you went to protonmail, and then the network behavior of the first destination machine you connected to simply offered confirmation of that.
In case you're unfamiliar with the concept of website traffic metadata fingerprinting I've discussed above: https://www.ietf.org/archive/id/draft-irtf-pearg-website-fin...
Btw I2P provides imho decent amount of protection for timing and packet sniffing attacks.
So in theory, yes, route through enough ISP's, and you may eventually hit one along the way who isn't selling that data.
That said, to my knowledge, no ISPs are required to disclose whether or not they sell metadata, and as profit-oriented corporations, have no incentive to be honest about that if asked.
So it's something of a gamble to assume you can definitely find a path through n ISPs where at least one of them does not sell netflow metadata.
My secondary adversary are companies geoblocking content. VPNs are still perfect for that.
AirVPN let you forward several ports (up to 20, if I remember correctly) and you can pick the port numbers.
https://rdns.im https://prnt.li https://william.co.il https://whois.domaintools.com/basehost.eu
Also, you have just condemned entire nations of people, like those who lived under Soviet domination, where bribery became custom, because if you wanted to accomplish anything, you had to bribe the people involved. Just got married and want an apartment for your new family? You could submit a housing application, but it might bubble up to the top of the queue by the time you hit retirement. A bribe given to the woman in the office handling the paperwork can help grease the track. Have a totally curable disease that, without intervention, can kill you? Well, you could have your name added to a long wait list and have your treatment started next year, or you could "gift" your state-pensioned doctor a cognac, some luxury chocolates, and an envelop containing a "tip" to shorten the wait time. Need to travel abroad? Well, guess what. The passport stays with the government for "safe keeping". They might not be in a hurry to let you leave, just yet. However, with a few enticing arrangements and exchanges, you'll be on the next plane headed over the Iron Curtain.
In other words, I'm not convinced bribes are a categorically wrong thing for someone to offer. To receive, on the other hand...
The soviet system sounds pointlessly overloaded with middle men. Why not abandon the "official system with middle men bribes" and descend all the way into mafia families and protection rackets?
No matter the empathy I have for the suffering. What is the point of offering a bribe, to bully the system, in the same way the receiver intends to break the rules?
Just tell the truth and say the system sucks. You scratch my back and I'll scratch yours done en masse, hardens society for everyone and then you have to bribe, like the Soviets did.
Imagine your grandma needs urgent surgery and it is customary to give the doctor some money to 'ensure best results'. Will you refuse?
> descend all the way into mafia families and protection rackets?
You mean like some monopolized industries in the US have done?
> then you have to bribe, like the Soviets did.
Why Soviets, Bribing is the default way of society - Imperial Russia has no concept of bribery, if you wanted a government official to do their job, you had to pay them, and they set the price, thats just how the system worked.
Victorian britain was insanely corrupt too. Absence of corruption is unusual.
Not like a US corporation, the machine of machines, systems of systems. An actual mafia that breaks down the government and replaces official services with a protection racket around people's families and uses physical violence to enforce arbitrary mafia business norms.
The real criminal mafia does not answer to a doctor who takes the wrong bribes and that doctor may go home that evening to find his house/family/prized thing to be in jeopardy. The mafia built on family and religious connections that can't be bought out, and will balance out a non-working government when it fails.
The Soviet system props up the normal structure just enough to leech off it. That is a luxury of Russian culture that doesn't survive elsewhere, for very good reason.
Suffering isn't an excuse for corruption that hurts basic services for the middle/lower class.
Lie, bribe, cheat and steal for all the yacht money and control over steel mills, between upper class toffs, I don't care.
When your corruption stops society from working for the majority, or oppresses the majority, then you have become the problem.
I find this conclusion hilarious (if not untrue) - you can say absolutely the same for the USA system. So many things require a useless middleman that only takes their cut and adds friction - car dealerships, "value added" resellers, health insurance, etc.
The US tried to extradite me from Croatia in 2017, with not much more info than national security.
They lost their case as I am married to a local and cannot be extradited outside the EU.
So once again the "think of the children" motive is used to cover for intelligence interests.
> What do you do now?
>§I left Austria and now work for a German company in IT, and have a data center in Kosovo… hosting grey area things there. Warez primarily.
> Also, I do want to add that I have more backstory. The CP was not the only reason for the raid.
He goes on to mention someone using the exit node to try to hack a NATO facility.
That said, the "confiscate first, come up with a fitting crime later" approach countries take on a whim are deeply troubling.
It sounds like they have had their suspicions against this man for a while (not without reason, it seems) and saw the child porn report as a chance to pounce on him, but later found out they didn't have as strong a case as they might have wished.
Same reason why you saw organized crime figures convicted for tax evasion, that wasn’t really the big concern but it got the job done.
Nah. It's not like it was a legitimate homebrew forum or something and someone backdoored it to hack NATO -- it was a warez organization that might have had CP on it too.
It managed to stay under the radar until someone did something to get the attention of the authorities.
I asked him if he had ever run into Tor exits, he said no, but they did sometimes run into people with unsecured wireless that had been used by third parties and once it was clear that was what happened it was pretty much dropped. I'm sure they would have ways to deal with people leaving their WiFi open as a way of camouflaging their activities...
He also said that one thing they're usually do if there are multiple people in the house is sit them all down on the couch and say "We are here because someone has been downloading CP", and often everyone would turn and look at one person.
Could one have open Wifi "accidentally" (on purpose) as a defence mechanism against one's own actions to introduce reasonable doubt?
Bruce Schneier in 2008:
* https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2008/01/my_open_wirel...
Maybe in 2008 this was plausible, but it was also plausible to disguise one's self and walk to mcdonald's free wifi with a burner wifi card and/or Kali Linux. With the proliferation of surveillance devices everywhere it becomes an uphill battle
Slowly, like in sitcoms and cartoons?
Probably falsely assuming it's the 12 year old son instead of the 35 year old father.
Think again.
If there's someone in the house who downloads CP, do you think that person's kids don't know who it would be?
So the person everyone thinks would do it is pronounced guilty. I don't see any way that could go horribly wrong.
What he said sounded like they didn't go into a place without having evidence of CP already though, things like "This IP address has uploaded CP to these locations at these times" evidence.
Running a tor node is a thankless thing one can choose to do. Nevertheless I did for years. I don't do it anymore.
It's hard to determine tor's net-value to society, since it's such a double bladed sword. I'm not sure it's something deserving of thanks.
Most big sites use a chain of reputation like this:
1. To have an account on our site, you need a reputable email. Mailinator doesn't count. 2. To get a reputable email (GMail, Outlook, etc.) you need to sacrifice a phone number to receive texts to prove you aren't a bot. 3. There are no free VoIP services. Or they're blocked.
Reddit usually lets me create accounts without email, but I'm guessing they will cut this off soon.
I'm on a friendly Mastodon instance, but I had to offer a bogus email to register, which is technically dishonesty.
YouTube sometimes works.
I had a Discord account for a while. One of my ERP partners was willing to take the hit and set up a GMail account and Discord account for me (Discord wouldn't even let me in, I had to have him create the account and then give me the password.)
But I didn't log in to Discord for a while, and recently it said "Hey check for a confirmation email". I went to log in to GMail and it said, "Hey this is suspicious, please give us a phone number."
So there's no point re-joining, if I can only talk to people and have a "free" email address for as long as I can cyber-fuck someone into letting me borrow his phone. And I won't buy a burner phone because it's likely to have the same problems, plus all the PITA of real-life opsec.
The gratis web is fading to nothing. Everyone wants something. None of it is truly free. The fediverse instances will run as long as they get donations, but charities are subject to a tragedy of the commons. They will eventually close up registrations if enough humans join for the parasite bots to follow them.
People ask me why I bother. I must admit the payoff is not big.
I bother _on principle_. Anonymity is something that I _should_ have. I don't look at CP or anything. I do this because I like to learn, I like to practice, I like to know. You may as well write it off as religion and ask a Christian why they attend church or a Jain why they don't eat onions. I simply believe it is worth doing.
You blame "everyone wants something" but it's more clear in your last sentence: abuse by unverified users.
Lots of folks will provide services for free (actually free, no data collection etc.) but very few folks have the disposable income to _pay_ for someone to handle abuse.
So folks who provide popular services long-term have to find some way to pay for it. OMG, imagine that.
With the caveat that cryptocurrencies are usually rubbish, cryptocurrencies have allowed folks to anonymously pay for anonymous access to services. This won't work for most mainstream services (in large part because of government opposition), but it's an option. At some point which I hope to live to see, we'll go back to the old days of anonymously paying for anonymous access. (Cash was awesome.)
Though to be fair it's actually pretty hard to obtain Bitcoin anonymously. Monero would be better. And this doesn't really solve the phone number problem.
It was not my intent to assert any privilege, and it was my intent to acknowledge that scenario. If I may provide some clarification:
Marriam webster[0] defines 'double edged sword' to mean
> something that has or can have both favorable and unfavorable consequences
The use of Tor in the scenario you describe is one of the two blades (edges) I was referring to in my use of 'double bladed sword' -- the altruistic use case for which Tor absolutely should exist
The other side of the blade however, it's also used to facilitate terrible acts of abuse, notably to children (as demonstrated by the article) -- the destructive use case for which Tor absolutely should not exist.
It leaves Tor in a morally ambiguous place to me. It's not inherently bad or good. There are situations where it can be used for great good, and others when it can be used for great evil. Those situations would exist with or without Tor. I don't know if I should be thanking anyone maintaining it any more than I would thank an arms dealer.
[0] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/double-edged%20sw...
How do we know you are not hosting CP?
Seems like the only way to really be sure is to make random raids on everyone and confiscate their equipment for a while.
This is a good point. It’s hard to determine any tool’s net value to society. I’m not sure any tool ever made is deserving of thanks.
Why?
Why do people give thanks to their soldiers, who go kill people in other countries?
Or to cops, who kill people in their own country?
One might argue that’s the case with most activities on the internet, maintaining an open source projects for free? Helping others in forums and online discussions? Dedicating time to find good articles to submit to HN!? The only thing you will get is some brownie points online. I believe who does run an exit node usually aren’t motivated by thanks and upvotes, that being said, thanks for your time and efforts running that node!
It’s a damn shame how the original cyberpunk dream played out. We could’ve had a world where companies couldn’t do anything about people using their ideas. Instead we get one where you can’t even be anonymous without rubbing elbows with child predators.
It’s surprising how much anonymity and the subject at hand are correlated. In my 20s I liked to explore, as I’m sure many of you do too. I once met someone in the Whonix community who wanted to nix google maps entirely; he spent a lot of time downloading maps and trying to make a way to view them locally, which I think is going to be prescient one day. It already is in many parts of the world — you don’t have cell service, so you can’t just pull up google maps. Nowadays starlink solves that problem, but back then it wasn’t clear that we’d ever be able to have maps at our fingertips regardless of internet access. This was back in the era of that poor CNET reporter that got lost with his family in the mountains precisely because of no maps, and ended up dying to exposure when he went to get help. Never leave your car.
I found all of this fascinating. What a project! Make all of google maps accessible right from your phone, with no internet. I briefly fell in love with that community.
Ultimately what drove me away was the literal flood of child porn that was always right next to anything to do with tor, whonix, or anonymity in general. I have a pretty high tolerance for “operating in gray areas,” like this guy. But one of the tragedies of the cyberpunk dream is that the entire scene has been coopted by cp. In some sense cp is the ultimate test of anonymity, since you’ll be thrown in prison pretty much instantly if caught. So perhaps it’s no surprise that it’s the most common and pervasive result of anonymity, but it sure is a shame.
Corporate government is pretty much a staple of. all cyberpunk franchises though.
With diamonds, there is still a push to source “the real thing” kept alive by De Beers, and other cartels like that. But for a lot of poaching, we found replacements. I think that’s how plastic got started too btw!
Also PETA has approved fake lab-grown meat, perhaps it can reduce demand for torturing so many animals in factory farms.
PS: Japan has a culture of infantile hentai or something in its animation - which may alleviate a lot of demand for actual cp — how much cp is in Japan? (There seems to be a lot of unusual/unnatural sexual norms in Japan… from Hikkikomori to dating vending machines to total celibacy for a large proportion of the population.) https://amp.theguardian.com/world/2009/may/11/japan-child-po...
On a side note, there was a very good film about this last year called The Artifice Girl.
Think indie, very theatrical with only three settings and three very clear acts, but thought-provoking and with some unstated implications. I would recommend watching it without checking IMDB or any review site first.
Similar on how people got Starship Troopers wrong. Is not about cheering fascism, but to ridicule it.
Well - the film also had a disconnect with the book on the topic of fascism. The book was more on the pro-fascism side.
The same director did Robocop, and if you don't get the genius satire of that, then I can't help you.
The book isn't exactly fascist though. Verhoeven said he didn't read the book and does not plan to, so he is satirising somewhat superficially.
Heinlein did explore a lot of various political systems in his books, and I think Starship Troopers is focusing most on voter engagement - how people who vote should know something about what they vote on, and that is why only those who served (which includes military but also other "national service" like being a worker colonising planets or postman or whatever) get vote.
Is that fascist? I don't think so. Is it a good political system? I don't think so either but it is a good enough idea for a book.
I know what you mean. But at the same time society bans historical literature constantly.
* persons can choose whether or not to do government service
* Rico's parents are quite rich even though neither are citizens
* the Moral Philosophy class tries to _discourage_ individuals from government service
* the instructor for Moral Philosophy explicitly tries to get the students to think for themselves
In the book but not the film:
* the only benefit of government service is the right to vote
* only veterans (i.e. no active service members) can vote
All of these (and more) are contrary to fascism. The book is not fascist. Verhoeven never read the book and didn't satirize fascism -- he satirized a _caricature_ of fascism.
Also minor detail but in the book there's a few jobs that are reserved for veterans, like IIRC the police.
In those cases, for fictional CSAM to be legal, it has to be completely fictional such that any resemblances can be shown to be completely coincidence.
Illegal in Canada (even animated/cartoons):
* https://windsor.ctvnews.ca/man-facing-child-porn-charges-aft...
Edit: fictional material seems to be illegal in quite a lot of countries:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legality_of_child_pornography
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_status_of_fictional_porn...
It's not illegal to write a fanfic that you keep to yourself about all the weird ways that you want to torture and kill someone.
Just like the cases for decriminalizing prostitution and drugs: https://time.com/longform/portugal-drug-use-decriminalizatio...
And btw -- it's not just about thoughtcrime, it's a major double standard, seems to me. In the West it's perfectly normal for Hollywood to put out "Rated R" horror movies that feature gore and torture, ripping off limbs, mass murders, etc. Such as the movie "Hostel". I never understood why that is OK, why the music industry has pushed gangsta rap etc. for decades, but then something like Cuties out of France which actually critiques the hypersexualization of teenage girls that is taking place, causes an uproar, while the industries doing the hypersexualization are now an accepted part of our liberal "freedom of speech".
These guys did:
As for Netflix, how can the company possibly reconcile a “coming-of-age” film, and one that centers entirely on 11-year-old girls, with a TV-MA rating? This is not a random decision – it has become corporate practice.
We have frequently called on Netflix to stop hosting content that sexualizes children, such as Baby, Big Mouth, Sex Education, or that glamorizes rape and sexual assault such as 365 Days.
And Netflix habitually markets adult content to young audiences. Parents Television Council research of Netflix programming designated as “Teen” reveals that nearly half was rated either TV-MA (104 titles, or 40.8%) or R (23 titles, or 9.0%); and every single program that carried a TV-14 moniker included harsh profanities.
While we may not always see eye-to-eye with film critics, the criticism of the critics is telling. Cuties is not the first time Netflix has blatantly promoted programming that sexualizes children, but we’re calling on them for this to be the last.
False.
The final performance by the young girls was also discussed. You can find it if you want to watch something disgusting, but it was very sexual and OBVIOUSLY inappropriate for children.
That it's common to see children perform such sexual routines at dance competitions doesn't mean it's appropriate.
The idea that this was Only The Poster was a lie created by a media that thinks child exploitation is OK. Look at the media response to the film "Sound of Freedom", where it's "QAnon adjacent" to oppose child sex trafficking.
"Sexual" is relative so people will just be talking past each other in regards to that. There's no real discussion to be had there.
>The idea that this was Only The Poster was a lie created by a media that thinks child exploitation is OK
FWIW, I only heard about the poster and nothing about the full release. I'm sure some people still argued in the same way people argue about anything for months/years on end, but there was definitely a lot more controversy about the poster. Be it because it was the first look/awareness of the film, or because the film was simply nothing to write about can be left to people who actually watched the movie. I have no interest to.
> Such as the movie "Hostel". I never understood why that is OK, why the music industry has pushed gangsta rap etc. for decades, but then something like Cuties out of France which actually critiques the hypersexualization of teenage girls that is taking place, causes an uproar, while the industries doing the hypersexualization are now an accepted part of our liberal "freedom of speech".
AFAIK, everyone involved in the production of "Hostel" was a legal adult.
The girls who were the main characters in "Cuties" were not legal adults, nor anywhere close. I don't even think they were teenagers. From the clip I saw, it wasn't a _critique_ of hypersexualization so much as LITERAL HYPERSEXUALIZATION. There may have been an ironic plot around it saying "this is bad mmm'kay" but that doesn't excuse using children to engage in sexualized behavior.
There's an important conversation to be had about US culture and violence versus sex and language (South Park parodied this well), but "Cuties" is a horrible example because it used actual children to engage in actual sexual objectification.
Yet no one gave a shit. This is the new Satanic panic, a scapegoat to avoid focusing ourselves on important shit.
Paranoia sells, and it's the main fuel of the US style Capitalism, getting a full panic state almost monthly in order to be a mindless consumer.
OFC satanic panic was the same crap, in order to keep the children and teens away to non-consumit (read: TV and mainstream toys, music and movies) so the industry didn't collapse in a few years. And, yet, thanks to internet, years later, they did.
Guess what? between the show sections, (and shows themselves) they are trying to sell home alarms with lots of ads in the morning to the viewers. Bingo.
* https://digitalcommons.schulichlaw.dal.ca/djls/vol25/iss1/2/
And as my updated/edited comment mention, Canada is not unique in this regard:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legality_of_child_pornography
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_status_of_fictional_porn...
Going back to Canada, some cases:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_pornography_laws_in_Cana...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R_v_Sharpe
Perhaps the thinking is that it could create a positive feedback loop that may help the desires grow to the point 'actual' action is taken.
I understand that it can be illegal at the State level, and that its a grey area at the federal level. What I don't get is the disconnect between these rulings and whatever is available on the clearnet.
We're not talking onion sites. Reddit, Twitter, 4chan, pixv, tumblr, Patreon whatever sites that you can just go to that shows up the front page of Google. They all contain similar content and almost none of it is taken down for illegality, at most because someone thought it was too ick and Ad money, or posted in a non-r18 area.
Even fucking 4chan is incredibly strict about ban hammering/deleting anything that is close to CP
Genshin Impact and Blue Archive are not popular because they are good games.
Simple, the internet is huge and some currently contended US law means that (past illegal content) a web host isn't responsible for content users upload. Copyright means that corporations can DMCA certain content off, but otherwise, there's not much to do. Companies don't WANT to have to look through every single post on a site that big, so if they can automate or simply ignore it, they will.
The legality in Canada is questionable, but Canada isn't looking through Reddit with a fine tooth comb (P.S. it technically is against reddit TOS to upload lol manga stuff. But it's hard to enforce on small subreddits). Canada may not even know what Pixiv is, and Patreon is often behind paywalls. It would just take a good (well, bad) mainstream awareness to answer your question, and the answer would turn out to mostly be "because politicians didn't know until CNN/Fox News blasted it".
That much was obvious during the U.S. controversy on Rapelay, a Japanese 3d eroge simulator that was not even sold in the US (nor ever has been), simply mislabeled by Amazon and visible in American's store for a while.
>Genshin Impact and Blue Archive are not popular because they are good games.
well we're getting very off topic but this is still an odd angle. There's no one reason why these games are popular and talking about fan art vs. game quality is arguing a chicken vs. the egg. Let's just agree that fan engagement in this day and age can be a force multiplier in terms of advertising something and spreading the brand. But 10,000 x 0 is still zero. Just ask how F-Zero is doing.
pedantic, but it depends on many factors that can make that goal realistic. You probably wouldn't get flack about how you'd kill Trump or any public figure you're far away from, but some specific individual can be seen as a threat in some countries. Even the US isn't fully lenient on that.
>If no harm is being done, not even indirectly to anyone else, why is it a crime?
politics, mostly. For example, in Japan uncensored genetalia is still illegal, animated or otherwise. Despite some of the most explicit pornography hailing from it. These come from WW2 times where the US imposed a bunch of sanctions, but have long since been irrelevant. So why not just repeal that law?
Well, what politician wants to be the one to fall on that sword and get the buck rolling? It's political suicide to the voter base (mostly older people) even if most people wouldn't be strongly affected by it. That's one among many many other factors, of course.
And that's a relatively uncontroversial aspect of society. Can you imagine trying to go to bat about the above topic?
Why do you think so? Maybe you just haven't seen a good CP before.
I went to Grenada in 2014 and used offline maps to drive around the island. In 2015 the tablet suffered an accident and I powered it off to deal with it later. 5 years later I power it back on without internet connectivity. Turns out the maps expired. So much for many years
Google Maps also doesn't support offline contour lines / hillshading (what Google calls "terrain"), which is a big deal for hiking and other outdoor activities. Whereas with OsmAnd, you can literally have e.g. the entire North America in your pocket, with contour lines, offline navigation, and offline Wikipedia articles for every POI.
Isn't that, like, a map? lol we've had maps long before the internet
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electro_Gyrocator
https://www.pistonheads.com/news/ph-features/ph-origins-navi...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Streets_%26_Trips
https://winworldpc.com/product/softkey-key-master-maps/10
And then that's also completely ignoring the hundreds of portable GPS devices sold before Google Maps was a thing which had offline road databases.
I can navigate anonymously without cell signal easily. My car has a GPS in the dashboard which, at least for the maps and routing, doesn't go online at all.
I agree that this is indeed possible. The problem is with the propaganda that says that you should not agree to such a low standard of only being able to see the map and route your trip based on road connectivity and nothing else. Modern route planning takes into account inherently real-time information such as accidents and other roadblocks, which is only available online.
I'd note that while real time traffic updates are nice, they are just a convenience, not a necessity.
In fact, GPS (unless you're in a war zone and need to direct munitions or out in the middle of nowhere) is also a convenience and not a necessity. What's that? It is a necessity? Tell that to Ferdinand Magellan -- hell he didn't even have a paper map.
That's not to say GPS/online traffic updates and the like aren't useful. They absolutely are. But they aren't necessary and at least for me, if the choice is to use such tools and be tracked or use another method that doesn't track me, I'll choose the latter every. single. time.
Not because I have anything to hide, but because my business is my business and no one else's.
in mid 2000s very offline igo could pull traffic information via RDS-TMC and adjust route according to it. navigation systems in modern cars can use traffic information from satellite via sirius-xm
I'm in the UK, and you can walk into any Post Office, WHSmith, bookshop, most newsagents, etc., and pick up maps of the local area or country, usually Ordnance Survey[0] maps.
And (at least when I was in secondary school, about a decade ago) map reading was still taught as a valuable skill, using OS maps.
Routing doesn't really work offline, but that's a different/harder problem.
Google will probably work ok for the most popular trails, and I guess you can use it as a supercharged compass. But at least in Europe, if you actually plan a route in any mountains based on Google, you're in for an adventure :)
Bit focused on eastern Europe, but has a hiking mode with very good coverage of the official routes (not only in eastern Europe ;)). And everything is free, including offline maps. Terrific value for casual trips.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.bergfex.to...
This one is not free (there is a free tier though) but seems to have more details in some areas, so the pro tier may be worth it if you hike a lot.
No, economics predicts that _use_ will explode if the cost is zero, but that's not a comment on production.
Pocket cameras have reduced the cost to record sexual abuse, but that's dwarfed by the ability to reproduce/ distribute those copies.
I don't think that means sexual abuse is more common. On every other metric we have, it appears sexual abuse is _less_ common.
Child porn is just leverage to pry. We used to care as much about sending information about birth control through the mail. And with the modern movement to sexualize children as soon as possible, they might have to use another excuse in 20 years. "Terrorism" will always work, because it doesn't mean anything.
The loudness of their voices in "protecting the children" when politicians are introducing new communications surveillance measures, with no mention of local, boots-on-the-ground, child protection services funding increases, just screams to me that they care about surveillance a lot and about protecting children not at all.
As a teen around 2003 I hosted a freenet-node (freenetproject.org). It generated 1TByte/month which I believe was a lot for the time. I shot it down and never came back, because the only things that ever loaded was cp and Chechnya rape and torture videos. Its not a network for "dissidents"... I gave up on humanity.
I don't believe there is any evidence to back this up whatsoever. People are compelled to be "good" by society and laws, nothing more. Humanity is fundamentally bad, but reined in by a handful of powerful people and organizations.
Plus: There was a eDonkey like file sharing program that worked on top of freenet. (As well as a Usenet clone and a "Instant" Messenger.) You could share files without uploading them first. Like Gnutella it had passive search. (It shows you the files and search terms of other users going through your system.) So you could see what the demand was for. Edit: The demand was not for Hollywod movies.
I turned that sniffer off soon after, and never ever looked again. Even the (likely) legal things people were looking for were hard to unsee.
If the mainstream Internet banned "dissidents" I believe such things would have more uptake by other types of users.
Of course, there are some servers catering to 'dissidents' (e.g. Lemmygrad, Exploding Heads), but it's easy enough to avoid those communities.
Isn't it more, "This is why the original cyberpunk dream was always a naive and bad idea"?
Like, it appealed to me too when I was young, but then I learned more about humans and our history and ...
How is this appealing? It's a warning, not a cosy idea to aspire to!
The "punk" in the genre is the rebellion against or rejection of a corrupt and oppressive system that chews people up and spits them out as either defeated or criminals. If you're reading something else, it's not cyberpunk by definition.
Remember, it's hi-tech and low lives.
Solarpunk, I would guess. "The street finds uses for things" doesn't end up being hardscrabble against dystopia.
In the early days of the internet it kind of was. Corporations haven’t waken up to the full commercial potential of the internet. Governments/law enforcement hasn’t quite figured out how this new at-the-time Internet thing worked - “series of tubes” or something.
Then as he noted, there is a significant downside to such a refuge.
transhumanism is how technology will reshape what we think it is to be human, how we view life, death, love, family, success, fear, etc. Cyberpunk is how it won't.
</tinfoil-hat>
It’s a little puzzling to me still why this is. Physical attraction to almost-adults isn’t some big mystery, but most cp is something else entirely.
So, how much of the “chain of abuse” thing is just genetic confounding? I don’t know, which is vexing. As far as I can tell, very few of the chain-of-abuse theorists even think of genetics, even though it’s the elephant in the room, and many are hard-line blank slate believers. (I don’t have citations at the moment, but last time I looked at the relevant academic literature it was, broadly speaking, an absolute dumpster fire.)
Just like being attracted to women doesn't mean you're a rapist.
You can be, though.
Also consumption of any kind of distrubing porn doesn't mean you actually want to do things you see in it in the real life. This is about the same principle like when people are watching action movies (which is an accepted kind of often very disturbing cinematography), most don't want to go around and shoot/stab people.
Some very tiny percentage will, of course.
No, but it does mean you support the abuse necessary to produce it.
No. If I download old files through I2PSnark - this does not mean that CP will be produced in greater quantities.
Anyway, my point was that pedophilia being mostly caused by child abuse doesn't make much sense. Pedophilia is not child abuse by itself, and thus there's no cycle.
Cycle of abuse would just make you abuse someone in the similar way you were abused. (regardless of any attraction to the victim)
Because there's a power imbalance that predators are all-too-eager to exploit.
Sometimes in the literal definition in terms of raw strength, but just as much in terms of social manipulation and life experience that can take advantage of their often more naive victims. There's also a layer of assumed authority and deference at play.
IBM is moving to passwordless auth on their server access. Preferring biometrics. Their youtube channel tells you directly.
The "mainstream" culture has been pushing that idea for five years now, Philomena Cunk said we shouldn't follow the anonymous guy in 2018, golly gosh.
My iphone plainly face scans me and my shopping malls and sports stadiums do the same.
Frankly the last place left to BE anonymous is Tor and on soap-box websites like this where the admin can decipher my ID but you don't know who I am.
Obiwan has the realistic attitude. "The war's over. We lost."
It's impossible to completely eliminate secrets, but the liberty of the 1990s is deader than a dodo. Anonymity, the unknown citizen, staying off the map is basically reserved for martians now.
If a person watches the CP - this does not mean that he is a pedophile. If a person watches the CP - this does not mean that he is a child abuser.
Sharing CP != child abuse. Viewing CP != child abuse. Storing CP != child abuse.
I wasn't, but it would be reasonable to accuse you of being a pedophile based on this.
Please read the diagnostic criteria: https://icd.who.int/browse11/l-m/en#/http%3a%2f%2fid.who.int... -- there is no mention of CP.
If I have porn with men on my computer, it does not mean that I am gay or have raped men. Your reasoning is absurd.
... so what are you in the other scenario?
I would go further and argue a lot of adult produced porn is also abusive (often exploiting people in desperate situations) but we have to arbitrarily draw the line somewhere. This is a big reason why I've stopped viewing most live-action porn entirely and enjoy drawn/animated/written erotica instead.
Says the person posting under the name "sillysaurusx."
> Whonix community who wanted to nix google maps entirely; he spent a lot of time downloading maps and trying to make a way to view them locally, which I think is going to be prescient one day. It already is in many parts of the world — you don’t have cell service
Here's an idea, maybe he should print those maps out, bind them together into a larger map, and then find a really complicated way to fold them up so he can keep them handy when needed.
> In some sense cp is the ultimate test of anonymity, since you’ll be thrown in prison pretty much instantly if caught.
And yet.. it is still produced in the physical world where none of these constraints actually exist. It's only promulgated and marketed through anonymous means.
> Says the person posting under the name "sillysaurusx."
I'm not sure what this is supposed to mean. I recognize that username as someone who has been posting here for a long time. Not to encourage doxxing or making his identity the focus, but he has lots of contact details on his user profile. Tons of people are identifiable on here, even if the usernames are whimsical.
That was 2007. I had maps of the entire US loaded on my pocket pc circa 2005.
Edit: that was “Mapopolis” in my case. There were plenty more: https://wiki.geocaching.com.au/wiki/GPS_software_-_Pocket_PC
How much did that cost? How many folks had it? When did it stop getting updates?
Most folks (likely including GP) didn't have easy access to offline electronic maps in their pocket in 2007 and didn't know anyone who had offline electronic maps in their pocket.
Does that make them stupid?
$100 for the maps, available to anyone with a pocket pc and access to Google.
Handheld gps's with offline maps go back even further. I was using them from '03 to '08. Garmin made a bunch of ones that were no bigger than a early-gen blackberry. Back then it was relatively easy to get pirated updated maps for them.
it was always strange that google maps was accepted as some kind of magic while turn by turn navigation with voice directions was available from mid 2000s
nowdays i always have sygic installed on my phone. came handy when google maps decided to freak out while i was driving through death valley to gas station.
Did those turn by turn systems allow you to just drag the map onscreen anywhere to change location to anyplace on earth? To drop pins and send links to anyone in an email? To be updated instantly and for free when the data was refreshed?
as long as you had maps installed for this area - yes
>To drop pins and send links to anyone in an email?
yea. multi-point navigation with ability to search along the route/in the area/specific city/etc. all without breaking route. you could also save route iirc. i had 2 weeks road trip pre-planned.
there was some ability to share route/coordinates. don't remember details
> To be updated instantly and for free when the data was refreshed?
back than maps weren't updated that frequently. in general.
on the other side, it gave you ability to go anywhere without having a data connection. google offline maps are still very limited. igo was showing on screen next two maneuvers back than. google still didn't figure it out. or ability to show real 3D landscape and 3D landmarks/buildings. or ability to mark street as blocked so navigation will route around. getting traffic information from radio in case there is no internet.
There have been secretive child predators ever since statutory rape was invented. The reason that you didn't have to "rub elbows" with them is because our governments hadn't begun systematically closing off all avenues for anonymity other than the one that they built and maintain for their own spying. If there's only one way to be anonymous, you get to "rub elbows" with everyone who needs to be anonymous for any reason.
It has nothing to do with child porn or crypto. Neither were responsible for the size of the distributed files kept on each of us to grow in orders of magnitude.
Speaking of "maps at our fingertips," good luck finding one that doesn't result in a record of the lookup and any GPS data submitted with it being inserted into a half-dozen databases, all freely accessible by the government, or by anybody buying in bulk.
My handheld non-networked GPS unit with map tiles downloaded in bulk from OpenStreetMaps meets this criteria. Not very obscure.
Et voila! Maps at your fingertips[0] with no logging/tracking. It's amazing what those ancient (ca. 1995) humans could do. Perhaps they had help from aliens -- as we couldn't possibly do any of that stuff by ourselves. /s
[0] https://wwp.randmcnally.com/product/rand-mcnally-road-atlas
Sure, emphasis on secretive. I'd hope that 'secretive' on the internet would mean more secretive than mistyping a query on a popular site's search engine. Or simply wandering into a linked, public website. But alas.
Offline map databases were commom then; it wasn't uncommon for car navigation systems to come with them (expensive to update, though), as well as handheld devices
In fact, while they were not common before the 2000s, first-party navigation systems with offline digital maps for cars have been around at least since the 1980s, as have other forms of consumer offline digital maps. Online maps are newer than offline.
> This was back in the era of that poor CNET reporter that got lost with his family in the mountains precisely because of no maps
The last of many critical errors before the car got stuck might have been avoided by using a map, but they had and used a paper map shortly before, when choosing the alternate route that was, in fact, closed; it wasn't a problem caused by maps not being available (and there is a reason keeping paper road maps, especially of unfamiliar areas, when driving in them was a widespread practice until digital maps with automatic offline downloads tied to GPS became ubiquitous.
doesn't sound like the best idea depending on what industry we are talking about. medicine, yes. Art, no (we're kinda going through that right now actually).
>In some sense cp is the ultimate test of anonymity, since you’ll be thrown in prison pretty much instantly if caught. So perhaps it’s no surprise that it’s the most common and pervasive result of anonymity, but it sure is a shame.
This quote constantly rings in my head about topics like this:
>The moral of the story is: if you’re against witch-hunts, and you promise to found your own little utopian community where witch-hunts will never happen, your new society will end up consisting of approximately three principled civil libertarians and seven zillion witches. It will be a terrible place to live even if witch-hunts are genuinely wrong.
It's the real downside of apathy when you see complaints about those big sites out there and how they screw up. You advertising a new site means the most interested are going to mostly include the worst actors, who eventually put off the best actors. Or at least disproportionately include them.
As a simple example: say Twitter has 10 million users and 1000 nazis (utopic, I know). Now your new no BS alternative attracts 0.1% of users but 10% Nazis. Still far from a majority. But by the way these forums work, your site will be 1% nazis, and those nazis will be some of your loudest actors if left unchecked. 100x more concentrated and it will feel some 1000x more nazi.
I think we should allow heterodox beliefs in public forums since at least this reduces the effect of echo chambers. The other alternative is to ban certain ideas from the mainstream, but I think this leads to groups like Nazis just moving to dedicated sites where their ideas are reinforced.
Like I’d rather see a Nazi subreddit where those ideas are likely to see more challenges, than some random Nazi site where bad ideas metasticize in the shadows. Maybe the spooks prefer it this way since different sites makes it easier to categorise people.
If they somehow weren't able to control that, then I suspect they'd move to another platform organically, because why would they put up with a constant flow of opposing viewpoints that these groups believe, with absolute certainty, to be wrong?
They would stay there because there's a huge userbase to convert and they probably enjoy being challenged and justifying their horrible views because they want lurkers to read it.
If you ever meet an actual Nazi you should ask them if they want to discuss Jews with you. I'm willing to bet they won't shy away from accepting the invitation even if you were offering it because you wanted to challenge their views.
It takes a very special kind of person to openly be a Nazi and they don't think like your typical Joe.
Authority figures and scientists don't share the expensive info.
Statistically there is quite a large number of criminals in my city, and since I visit shops and other parts of the city, I am bound to unknowingly to me been rubbing elbows with those criminals. We are all anonymous to each other, and what can I really know about the person in front of me in the store. Go past a few hundred people and someone will be a person I would not associate myself with, and yet here I am living in the same city as them using the same infrastructure, and in some way enabling the activity by contributing taxes.
Not to say I don't understand the emotional reaction people have. I have relatives in the countryside that refuse to visit the city because of all the criminals that they hear about. It is also fairly common to hear people moving out of the city to the calmer suburbs in order to get out of all the shootings and crime. I also do know first hand that if you go and look for it, finding drug dealers and shady activity is not exactly a big secret. Go to specific streets or part of the city and it's operated in plain sight.
I've always seen the original cyberpunk dream as being analogous to a city, with all its benefits and drawbacks.
I should also reiterate that everyone knows what streets and part of the city that criminals visits regularly. People who decide to live or visits those places do make that choice. This lead naturally to city stratification.
Before smartphones this was common. Standalone gps units had maps locally stored. Some of the ones mounted in car dashboards stored them on an internal DVD. I used to have to drive a lot for work long before they were commonly built in to cars and I had an aftermarket one mounted on my dashboard, a little 2” monochrome display. Storage was tight, and I’d have to hook it up to my computer to swap out map sets if I was traveling further than usual.
The 6 to 10 years is the least of his worries. The guy will be labeled a chomo and probably killed as a result. All for running a Tor exit node. What a time to be alive.
The UK's Carry On films and other TV programs like the BBC Are you being served tv sitcom were heavily into innuendo, in as much a way as some jokes in Disney Pixar films fly over the head's of kids, but is understood by most adults perfectly well.
Not only is it a way to quantify peoples mental abilities by whether they laugh in a cinema watched by a secret camera and AI or whether documented on social media, or listened into by our phones and then adverts, its also an in plain site way for some people in society to identify people for exploitation and manipulation, just like teenagers are dedicated followers of fashion.
Its quite interesting really, just like the changes in slang language is a stealth form of working out the age of someone typing online, by the use of their vocabulary and interests. In some respects humans are just lemmings and very people actually come up with original content, not that the original content is necessarily any good.
But mainstream trends happen for a reason, in much the same way as you wont really see anything go viral like they used to on the internet in the early 00's.
Peoples reactions whether culturally or legally correct or not are also telling.
Its all psychological and biological mind games, because histidine and carnosine as two amino acids, which could get alot of males into trouble if they are not careful!
I found the recent ambulance strikes in the UK quite telling, they would attend cat 1 or level 1 people who basically had an over active immune system ie allergic reactions, but refused to attend to cat 2 or level 2 people who had an under active immune system which groups the elderly into that group automatically. In other words the recent UK ambulance strikes were a stealth form of eugenics on the elderly, but most of the british population wouldnt have known this.
And that is my point, there is alot more going on that meets the eye, but if Freud was right, what does that make many parents?
Always weird when you stumble into an encryption conversation
Not Observing Normal Community Exercise
> 1975. Unknown, derived from British criminal slang. Several origins have been proposed; possibly derived from dialectal nonce, nonse (“stupid, worthless individual”) (but this cannot be shown to predate nonce "child-molester" and is likely a toned-down usage of the same insult), or Nance, nance (“effeminate man, homosexual”), from nancy or nancyboy. The rhyme with ponce has also been noted.
> As prison slang also said to be an acronym for "Not On Normal Communal Exercise" (Stevens 2012), but this is likely a backronym.
I'll have to request a user name change I guess.
This is a violent fantasy. I'd estimate that 99.9% of child molesters who go to prison walk out alive and relatively uninjured.
Did they also charge the ISP's involved in transferring those network packets?
"What do you do now?
I left Austria and now work for a German company in IT, and have a data center in Kosovo… hosting grey area things there. Warez primarily.
Also, I do want to add that I have more backstory. The CP was not the only reason for the raid.
What do you mean?
Someone used the same exit to hack a NATO facility in Poland, which deals with chemical and biological weapons. Disarming, etc.
The US tried to extradite me from Croatia in 2017, with not much more info than national security.
They lost their case as I am married to a local and cannot be extradited outside the EU."
They took a bunch of IRC logs where I stated what I can and can’t host at a web hosting provider I owned. The logs do exist but are taken out of context.
The "reporting" here is at the level of a 90s scene mag.
COVID origin story confirmed! Joking, but that's like something from a movie. I think its really awesome that William was willing to stand for what he believed. TOR is so important for free speech and exit nodes are critical for scaling the system. It just sucks how much his life was disrupted from this.
By the way: there's some very interesting activity happening on Tor at the moment where it seems that overwhelmingly people have decided that they are going to police their own speech to remove CP. In the early days hidden wiki had dedicated pages for that shit. But it's not a thing any more. Furthermore, it seems like hacktivists are actively making sure that the Tor ecosystem stays healthy. Really fascinating because in theory they could just do whatever they liked.
So basically to protect yourself running an exit node, register a company, preferably offshore or not within X jurisdiction.
Protections for companies are greater, and create more hurdles for law enforcement, than protections for individuals.
https://web.archive.org/web/20141004142101/http://raided4tor...
The FBI method of fabricating criminal charges. Criminals sleep comfortably knowing their governments are more interested in playing whack a mole for political image than effectively doing their job. Notice how in Austria they aren't charging Google, or Facebook, or any other entities where such data passes through every day.
Well they can probably put illegal material in your apartment and then accuse you.
this usually last resort with hopes of eliciting self incriminatory statements.
i.e. [i didnt do the CP i was just snooping servers]
You can't use exit nodes to run "tor sites", because they only allow outbound connections. You can run hidden services, but they work entirely through relays (ie. not exit nodes). Given that hidden services are end to end encrypted (none of the relays in the middle can see the traffic), and to my knowledge relay operators have generally not been prosecuted, your specific scenario is unlikely to play out.
That said, if you're running a exit node and the FBI wants to frame you, they can still use your relay to conduct some illegal action (eg. uploading CSAM to some clearnet site), and pin it on you.
"Digital Millennium Copyright Act Safe Harbor
The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) offers four safe harbors to protect ISPs from copyright liability for the acts of their users, provided that certain requirements are met (17 U.S.C. § 512). Emerald Onion is a section 512(a) “conduit” provider."
If you want to read the section it is here: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/512 (it is generally about "Limitations on liability relating to material online" not just copyright)
Speaking of miners, it‘s not like they are at the same risk as tor node operators. Not. At. All…
https://gizmodo.com/child-pornography-that-researchers-found...
I did a video about "the dark web" a couple years ago where I talked about people on zeronet and freenet getting snagged because of potentially the contents of their cache store. It's made for a non technical audience
This man's plight is exactly the reason I won't.
This decision is not going to stop exit nodes (and the worst stuff on tor probably doesn't even use exit nodes but hidden services) but it keeps Austrian IPs off the map making them seem a country in control.
The same way companies go crazy mitigating ratings on bitsight but don't care about fixing real root problems because they're not visible anywhere.
Keeping your front yard clean is a big thing in IT. In our company our corporate network is not detected by bitsight but our guest wifi is. Meaning one bad apple in a handful of guests can give our entire multinational a bad rating.
So what did they do? Make sure bitsight actually shows our real endpoints and makes an accurate result? Doing some rudimentary checks on the guest portal to make sure outdated systems can't connect? Only allowing VPN access on the guest wifi?
Nope they just turned off the guest wifi so that contractors (who still need to do the work we pay them to do) plug in the corp network against policy, or use the coffee shop wifi next door.
Bitsight rating fixed, problem hidden but not actually solved and in fact worsened by people connecting unmanaged gear to the corp network as guest. All the while gloating in the A rating which is completely meaningless.
IMHO, this happening today would be more alarming, since Tor today is a bit more mainstream.
The first thought that came to mind when I saw the title is that perhaps there's some new push against Tor.
Assignments that predate the RIRs are called "legacy" assignments and are, theoretically, not subject to the RIR system because those who received those addresses only agreed to the terms as they existed at the time. Those terms were usually "you asked, here you go."
In practice, legacy assignments are left alone because no one wants to go to the trouble of arguing with big entities about it. (Most of the /8 assignments people gripe about as being wasteful are assigned to entities with lawyers, guns, or both.) People who have a handful of small legacy assignments get the protection of this because it's especially not worth the effort to say "well, if all you have is a /22 legacy, yours is now part of the RIR system, deal with it". Especially since the only recourse would be to allocate it to someone else and wouldn't that be fun.
But no IP address is actually "unrevokable." All you have to do is piss off a handful of the Tier 1s or a slightly larger number of Tier 2s and you'll quickly find your "bulletproof" addresses quite useless.
Why Host in Kosovo? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36837690 - July 2023 (61 comments)
Just your typical guy then.
Running TOR exits are a noble thing to do but people like this damage TOR's reputation.
And while there doesn't seem to be proof he intentionally got involved in CP, a smart pedophile probably would set up an exit node just for plausible deniability.
Seems like a few hundred micro satellites could circumvent sovereignty this way.
I agree it's a pipe dream. Launch costs are too high and nobody will approve this.
Yay. Fun.
I loved that scene by the way, where he disregards the changes of emotional state in his target and then just explains he's doing this in person because his shrink wants him to interact more with people.
A really super strong first 10 minutes of a truly excellent show. Well except season 2 IMO, that was too drawn out for me.
Amazing how there is a protected class of wealthy.
Hard working nice people
Hard working mean people
Local politicians
------------------------
Property criminals
Violent criminals
Government apparatchiks
MAPS
Federal politicians
He was found guilty, because running a Tor exit node is not sufficient defense against potential child porn violations. That's good. Because if not every child porn offender could do just that.
Luckily most pedos are not smart enough to do more than basic disk encryption.
Otherwise what could happen is that you run a Tor node and use it as an excuse for any crime you do.
Edit2: Jeez guys. I support Tor. I'm saying anyone who runs an exit node is also going to use Tor for anything that might get them in trouble, not do those thing in the clear and "use Tor as an excuse" as suggested above. That's a silly scenario and a poor justification for criminalizing Tor exit nodes.
If you were actually doing something nefarious and using tor for anonymity, running an exit from the same ip doesn't sound extremely smart.
Plausible reasons for:
(a) you greatly value privacy and the privacy of others such that you are willing to altruistically provide an exit node as a service; your country is a police state and you are sympathetic to those affected while also willing to accept the risk
(b) you greatly value your privacy and do not trust your ISP; you cannot access content sanctioned in your country; you are an internet engineer and need to test services which depend on privacy as a core feature
In any case, apparently that plus my use of the word "not" were ill-advised, since almost everyone here misread my comment to mean the opposite of what I actually meant. One person did read it as intended, and got another person to see it that way.
https://source.android.com/docs/core/connect/wifi-mac-random...
https://support.apple.com/en-ca/guide/security/secb9cb3140c/...
I like that it's the default though. Privacy first!
Would it be fair/sane/reasonable to convict such business owners if one of their customers commits a cybercrime?
Exactly!