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No, we accept road traffic accidents as fact and do not shut down entire road intersections due to deaths that occur. The same thing applies to child pornography, and 0.5ppm is certainly a tolerable amount in an extremely large dataset.

There are something like ~42000 traffic fatalities in the United States every year, we do not adopt draconian measures in dealing with it, even though loss of life and severe life-altering injuries occur. And such traffic accidents are absolutely devastating for the victims and their families.

Unless the dataset is particularly severely contaminated, the known illegal images should be removed and the rest of it should be allowed to stay up.

Trouble is it's so difficult to know what your adversary is doing, it's better to switch to a different medium i.e. reduce dependence on the Internet (as I detailed in another post).

The fundamental nature of the Internet itself permits this behavior to go unchecked, there is no way for a user to know what is happening behind the scenes with certainty. We send out our private information (search queries, etc.) into this giant black box we have no control over. That's the crux of it.

That was not the case with radio or satellite TV, the ability to determine what people were listening to or watching on a mass scale was nearly impossible due to the laws of physics. As the system was completely receive-only.

Team Cymru claim to be able to trace through VPNs using widely collected flow records from Internet core routers. ISPs sell these flow records to third parties.

So the whole fabric of the Internet itself is one giant spy machine, in effect. That sounds like is like it's straight out of dystopian fiction, but no, it's for real.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/jg84yy/data-brokers-netflow-...

Try the I2P anonymous network where by default every user is also a router. You can chain the two together, set I2P to use an outproxy and set the Tor browser to connect through I2P.

I have no clue as to what security this provides nowadays. I predict the NSA or FBI have large scale packet timing correlation in operation now. Or the random number generator has been compromised, or there are a series of bugs in the Tor or I2P implementation itself? I also think there was a human compromise of the Tor Project itself 8-9 years ago as well, it has been significantly weakened.

Personally I tend to like one-way data broadcasting systems, that way the receivers cannot be traced if they are air-gapped, e.g. satellite or radio data broadcasting. However nobody operates any useful service nowadays. Twenty years ago you could receive the whole worldwide Usenet feed with a DVB-S PCI card, unencrypted in the clear from a service called Cidera[1]. It was just UDP multicast packets containing Usenet messages, split into fragments with sequence numbers, trivial to reverse engineer.

I had this at service home, we had dial-up and with a 55cm satellite dish in my bedroom window, I had a 45Mb/s data feed. I wrote my own software including a device driver for the DVB-S card running under FreeBSD (4.2-RELEASE I believe). Nearly 1000x faster than dial up, which was mind-blowing back then.

Also archiving Nostr text messages is interesting, you can get the entire worldwide feed of messages from the relays, and then search for whatever topic of interest you want in the messages. Nobody can tell what you are searching for, unless your computer is compromised. I'm thinking about broadcasting these by satellite somehow, but satellite bandwidth is very expensive. It's just a matter of getting the funds for it.

Reception should be possible using a RTL-SDR or AD9364+USB3.0 microcontroller[2], and a satellite TV dish. The AD9364 chip can be had from AliExpress[3] for $6 now.

1. https://web.archive.org/web/20020806064624/http://www.cidera...

2. https://www.crowdsupply.com/amungo-navigation/stixrf

3. https://www.aliexpress.com/i/33017832196.html

However so many sites are using CloudFlare and other DDoS prevention and CDN services. I'm sure the NSA has fiber taps (beam splitters) at the point where the data travels unencrypted on the internal datacenter network.

CloudFlare itself might not even be aware of the taps. Or maybe only a few select employees know about it.

I think the solution to these problems is to reduce dependence on the Internet. It's now possible to torrent an entire library worth of books and have it all on your personal computer at home. 20TB HDDs are readily available, and constantly getting cheaper. Also check out https://reddit.com/r/DataHoarder. And we have local AI models, again these do not need the Internet to function.

Yes, you can customize it, both the color scheme and the element spacing. And the font scaling (the internal resolution in the texture) can be fixed to make the fonts look nicer. Someone made a subpixel font rendering patch for ImGUI as well.

Beautiful interface design there, and it's fully customizable to your liking as well. It also supports keyboard shortcuts.

Absolutely, and we should do what's reasonably possible to reduce the number of images out there in circulation. But we can't do what is the equivalent of shutting down the whole Internet, in order to stop it.

Society and AI development have to keep going, otherwise progress will be disrupted. It's progress that has gotten us out of the barbaric Medieval period and the Dark Ages.

" Arcan will use the private funding to improve client compatibility, initially with a focus on the KVM / QEMU UI / audio driver integration and then working on to enhancing integration with X.Org, Qt, Imgui, SDL/GLFW, and the Chrome Ozone layer. NLNet funding will focus on improving and documenting Arcan's network transparency support and its A12 protocol. "

So much for the license terms, as it runs offline there's little they can do to enforce them for personal usage at least. Good.

Yes, I am, when it comes to imprisoning people for simple possession of data, where there is absolutely no intent to distribute.

I think nobody should be going to prison for looking at or storing any image on their computer. Or reading any book or text as well (some countries prosecute possession of certain written material). Such actions are part of the private sphere, which the state has no business policing, unless you commit some violent crime or are severely insane, for example.

Sending people to prison for that absolutely is a moral panic in my opinion. It is a modern day form of heresy or witch hunt.

No, that's the same "common sense" we used to justify discrimination and other abuses towards people who were different in some way, e.g. by race, or by sexual preference (e.g. homosexuality). And at the time in history the discrimination was happening, most people considered the discrimination normal.

Heck even we still have problems with society discriminating against young people, and especially teenagers, by the way. So I really care about young people's rights.

But I still think these draconian content laws are unacceptable, they are replacing one form of abuse (pedophilia), with another by the state (sending people to prison for possession of data).

I agree with your stance here so much. Possession data should not be illegal.

There are thousands of images of real murder[1] and other absolutely heinous acts committed against humans and animals out there. Millions and millions of murder fiction books purchased every year. So much violence in the media. And people with secret obsessive interests and fantasies of torture and homicide, who view large numbers of such images intentionally. And a large number of homicides each year.

We do not prosecute people for looking at images of murder on the Internet.

So comparatively little is done to stop that, instead we focus on sex-related moral panics, driven by what is likely a primitive primal human instinct.

1. War crimes, etc.

It is a problem, just as crime in general in society. But our efforts to stamp it out completely could cause more harm than good. The price of liberty, is unfortunately crime. Otherwise if we go too far in preventing crime, we will be living in a totalitarian state.

Well I would consider a 0.55ppm contamination rate very low indeed? Mistakes happen in the creation of such datasets, it's human nature?

Just as we can't police a society to the extent it's completely free of crime, otherwise we will not function as a society and/or we will find ourselves living in a totalitarian state?

These "illegal content" moral panics have ruined Internet freedom, they are now ruining AI as well. Such moral panics have been used as an excuse for absolutely heinous mass surveillance of the entire population.

That's just completely ridiculous, I can't believe what the world's come to nowadays over such moral panics.

There's likely images of animal and human torture and mutilation in there. And there are people that fantasize about doing such things all the time. Nothing done about that, though.

I think, over a dataset of nearly 6 billion images, it's just impossible to ensure that it contains no child pornography.

Like trying to ensure all my kitchen surfaces are 100% free of germs. Not possible, or the amount of effort and disruption caused by the cleaning will make it impossible to get on with my life. Nasty stuff exists out there. We don't want too much of it, though. That's my opinion about it.

This dataset contains over 5.8 billion images, so 3226 of them being child pornography is a contamination rate of 0.55ppm. It's likely you will find this material anywhere there are large collections of images.

I wonder if it's a trend towards collectivism in the West? That would explain a lot.

I feel the author's reactions are still in the range of behavior that shouldn't be considered abnormal. I feel that saying people have to go to therapy for expression negative emotions at such things, is unfairly pathologizing people. We are creating a homogenized "correct behavior" for everyone, removing any space for differences, that are a natural part of the human condition.

If we neutralized any "paranoia" over these dystopian cameras/posters/etc., then we would not have any resistance or protest in society, so things would get rapidly worse.

Many decades ago, having millions of CCTV cameras in London, together with posters encouraging people to rat on each other, would be considered absolutely dystopian, and there would be widespread protests and/riots if they were suddenly introduced. However, because it has crept up on the population so slowly, people became accustomed to it, and few now protest. Thus explaining the situation we are in now.

Very disturbing to read this, the author's article is in no way paranoid. That's what they did in the Soviet Union, if you went against the state ideology they would accuse you of having mental health problems [1]. It's the standard technique abusers use, whether it's a totalitarian government or an abusive parent or spouse.

In many cases psychiatry itself can and is a tool of the state, except for obvious things like psychosis and other severe disorders, the diagnostic criteria are often arbitrary and many of the behaviors can be explained by individuals having gone through extreme hardship, abuse or poverty instead.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sluggish_schizophrenia

Early stages of a police state or totalitarian regime. Consider the mass surveillance of all our communications, that's an absolute hallmark[1] of a police state. And getting people to rat each other out as well, that's shocking. Even worse is how people have accepted this as "normal" and necessary for their safety.

Well, if they will imprison you for the act of reading certain texts and/or web sites here in the UK, then what do you expect, that's a de facto police state, and if the public finds it acceptable or necessary, it shows how much the frog has slowly boiled over the decades.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_surveillance "It is the single most indicative distinguishing trait of totalitarian regimes."

The modern design trends, removal of color from the user interface, increasing the amount of white space everywhere. And the gradual dumbing down of everything. I think those are each a real step back, compared to the old versions. So it slowly kept getting worse, bit by bit, until we got to where we are now.

Many years ago I used to look forward to every new software release. That was when software got better with each version. Nowadays things just get worse with each release, when it comes to user-interfaces and desktop apps. Time to move on to something else.

It's Corporate Open-Source, with the same corporate politics behind it.

Fortunately I've managed to excise this mess of interconnected dependencies from my computer and run plain X11 with a very functional desktop environment.

No PulseAudio, Systemd, NetworkManager, PipeWire or even D-Bus. And a very low memory footprint and the system is extremely fast, despite it being old hardware.

All of this bloatware is coming out of Freedesktop.org, which is run by Red Hat / GNOME. And it's where most of the toxicity in open source is coming from.

I've also gotten rid of the "modern" user-interface design trends as well. I get a high contrast, high information density desktop with full colour icons. None of this depressing grey garbage we get nowadays. All of the keyboard shortcuts work - I don't even need to use the mouse.

If you showed someone from 20 years ago what a "modern" desktop interface looked like, they would be outraged and in disbelief. We have taken an enormous step back for some reason.

Mozilla will likely be one of the first to drop X11 support, forcing everyone to move to Wayland or use some emulation layer. They did the same with removal of ALSA audio support.