Don't Use Thorium Browser – If Installed, Remove It | Hacker News Reader

Don't Use Thorium Browser – If Installed, Remove It

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30 pointsbrycewray21 comments

Too much misinformation, christ. After checking another thread, it appears the browser contains a softcore furry image, and the alleged CP is the anti-circumcision propaganda images the guy hosts on his public github.io page.

Furry easter egg removal commit is here:

https://github.com/Alex313031/thorium/commit/9947421f1480bd1...

And these are the alleged edits on the github.io page:

> the site for thorium at one point had a documentary about circumcision on it, alongside furry porn and other weird political stuff, when he was called out on it, it magically disappeared.

> https://github.com/Alex313031/Alex313031.github.io/commit/e4...

> https://github.com/Alex313031/Alex313031.github.io/commit/5c...

Well it's dangerous to even check if it's true. Because doing so would be illegal, it would require downloading the browser. So you cannot even prove that it's really in there or not - or you risk breaking the law. This is sheer, utter madness. It is pure insanity. These crazy laws belong in the Middle Ages, not the 21st Century.

Any images referred here are hosted publicly and unencrypted on github. The feds would have gotten him a long time if the stuff was illegal.

Apparently the dev embedded child porn in the browser itself, as an Easter egg? WTAF...

There could be so many places where this is happening, and it's going undetected, until law enforcement happens to seize some unfortunate individual's computer and child porn is found on it.

Distributing or creating such material (with real children) is rightfully illegal. Possession with intent to distribute, as well. But absolutely not simple possession.

These crazy laws need to go, it's a modern 21st Century form of morality policing[1]. Such morality policing is not much more that primally driven primitive behavior, akin to which our tribal ancestors carried out, and coming from a part of our brain that is thousands of years old. It does not belong in a modern technologically based society. And the internet, with its fundamental lack of privacy, has enabled such morality policing on a shocking scale.

Such material can be easily generated locally with AI with no risk of detection by law enforcement, and planted into people's web browser caches or other temporary storage so easily. The government is basically giving any sophisticated hacker or state actor (e.g. Russia) a push-button way of destroying any political opponent with ease.

If you live in a Western country and criticize a Russian political figure too much, well the FSB (the successor to the KGB) is going to put child porn on your computer. They've already been caught doing precisely that. [2] So it's especially important in this current geopolitical situation we're in.

1. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/135485652311936...

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kompromat#History

And I got flagged for speaking out against this ridiculous moral orthodoxy. Good.

I'll just take my speech to another site, before I get banned from this Hacker News completely.

Oof, and that's a crime with strict liability.

The worst thing would be if some kind of virus or malware infected millions of computers or smartphones with such material. What would law enforcement do then? They can't arrest everyone under such strict liability pretenses. And it's not impossible for a state actor such as Russia to do this....

there's 0 proof on this

It wasn't child porn that was on the browser, it was just an image of "yiff" or furry porn. The browser just had an suggestive bunny picture easter egg on that and had this thoughts about anti circumcision. Not too sure if the browser was update recently but I will say that thorium is a decently developed browser with chromium.

> The browser just had an suggestive bunny picture easter egg on that and had this thoughts about anti circumcision

If you visit the link posted in the comments above, you will see that it wasn't only thoughts about circumcision but also pictures.

https://github.com/Alex313031/Alex313031.github.io/tree/1648...

Here are the images removed from his repo. There is NO child porn anywhere

And I installed it on my work laptop.

What an idiot. I am.

So are you safe or are you going to be arrested for a thought crime? This stuff is straight out of dystopian fiction. What am I reading here, is it HN or Orwell's Nineteen Eight Four?

Nothing that bad is on thorium the browser just had an easter egg over yiff. Its still a safe browser. Your not going to get the fbi on you lmao.

Gdi. I had it installed for over 1 year as a backup browser. Even used it along with thorium winupdater since last few months, so probably had it updated multiple times too. Stick to Firefox folks.

So that’s why I was getting spammed by GitHub that one of my repos contained “adult content”

I had a fork of the Atom editor on my account and apparently it’s somehow tied to this individual…

That's absolutely so dangerous, so forking someone's repo on GitHub could potentially get you child porn charges? Insane. Fucking insane.

https://github.com/Alex313031/Alex313031.github.io/tree/1648...

here are the images. They are not sexual/erotic at all and have been hosted on github for more than a year

Well you can get arrested and charged for pretty much anything. Will those charges stick, and will you have to defend them is the real question.

As for CP, in the UK and the US there is the defence that you were not aware of the CP, you should be fine, but you may have to spend time/money convincing cops/prosecutors that.

As for the repo on my account that got spammed with reports today there are 2 things to highlight 1) the reports were nothing to do with CP, but “Sexually explicit content suited only for mature audiences.” 2) the repo was a fork of GitHub’s own (discontinued) Atom editor, it doesn’t even have the files in question included in the repo. The email I got (will paste below) talks about files in another repo that were updated ~9 months ago (couldn’t be arsed to look into the files history to see if they had existed before then and that date was just the last time they were updated). My fork was from 2022 when GH discontinued Atom (was still using it for a couple of projects, so took a fork just in case, but ended up never needing it).

So the atom repo fork got restricted (would need to be logged in to GH to access it) for content it for what I can tell never even contained any porn, lol. Guess because the user in question also had a fork or just a repo with a similar name “atom-ng” someone or group mass spammed reports on those repos, because I got 5 emails from GH all with 1 min about this one repo that had been untouched for over a year. Anyway enough rambling, what follows is that email. Note the yiff folder never appeared in my fork at any time, but it was still flagged by GH

Edit: looks like my fork was flagged mearly because another fork of the atom editor had porn in it at some point even though my fork never interacted with that fork nor ever had porn in it, guess it was more “mass reporting” by the people than something done by GitHub themselves. I just deleted my forked repo, because I no longer needed it anyway.

—————————————————————

Access to the /atom repository has been limited due to concerns from our community that the contents of the repository may include the following:

Sexually explicit content suited only for mature audiences.

Going forward, users must be logged in to a GitHub account to view the repository and will be presented with a notice related to its content giving them the option of viewing the repository or discovering other content on GitHub.

You may contact us for more information or to request a review of this decision:

Appeal and Reinstatement

Visibility and access to your repository has been restricted due to reports of sexually explicit content located in the following directory: https://github.com/Alex313031/atom-ng/tree/master/packages/y... For more information on the relevant policy see: - https://docs.github.com/en/site-policy/acceptable-use-polici... Please contact us as soon as possible if you wish to resolve this issue and remove the restrictions from the repository.

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