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It honestly breaks my heart to know that there is such massive demand for these videos, where thousands of people will pay millions. It means children will alwa

It honestly breaks my heart to know that there is such massive demand for these videos, where thousands of people will pay millions. It means children will always be exploited since there’s tons of money to be made.

toomuchtodo 7y ago
While we cannot drive suffering down to zero, we can still make efforts to drive it down as close to zero as possible.
- sysbin 7y ago
  It would be interesting to know if suffering has increased or decreased over the years and while the extra measures are being put in place. I agree with your opinion btw. I'm just skeptical if for all we know there is now more suffering than before because of the internet.
  - toomuchtodo 7y ago
    The world has been getting better objectively. https://www.vox.com/2014/11/24/7272929/global-poverty-health-crime-literacy-good-news https://www.vox.com/2014/11/24/7272929/global-poverty-health...
    - minblaster 7y ago
      Unfortunately, some relative comparisons don't matter as much as the absolute. A world where the number of slaves is objectively increasing (as it has now) is worse I'd say. The total amount of suffering is more, even if there are billions more happy people oblivious to your plight.
      - deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
- moomin 7y ago
  Indeed, it’s not like it’s invulnerable to economics. We need to make sure that the costs are too high. Like most crime, this is less about sentencing than it is about the probability of getting caught.
uirjrhbfhf 7y ago
Deep fake child porn is pretty much possible. It's another ethical quandary but certainly fake child porn is better for children then real child porn.
jandrese 7y ago
Massive demand in this case being 300 some users worldwide. The site had generated a million addresses, but it's clear that most of them were not being used. You should feel better that on a per-capita basis this is an extremely rare occurrence. Like around the same chances as being struck by lightning. It's horrible, but not widespread.
- tptacek 7y ago
  There were a quarter million unique videos on the site, almost half of which were previously unknown to law enforcement.
- zenography 7y ago
  Unless I am misreading the article, that was 300 users arrested, not 300 users total.
samcday 7y ago
Conundrums like this make my head spin when I try to consider my position on Internet freedoms. On the one hand I believe the Internet should be a truly personalized, private interface for humans all over the world to be able to communicate freely and privately - safe from censorship, mass-surveillance, profiling, and so on. On the other hand I also believe if the Internet was that way, then it would mean that these elements of society, the ones that seek to horrifically and tragically exploit the most vulnerable of us, would be able to do so relatively unimpeded.
- shadowgovt 7y ago
  Conundrums like this used to make my head spin. Then I realized that nothing about moving humans online made humans magically more virtuous than they are in meatspace, and the tools we've used to audit and intercept bad-behaving humans in the real world have merit online too. There's a reason so much motion online in the past two decades has been in the direction of "de-wild-Westing" it.
  - MiroF 7y ago
    It does make direct coercive power online (ie. violence) difficult. I agree with you, but I do think that the internet reduces the harm inflicted by human vices
- belorn 7y ago
  A helping thought is that those that commit assault of children don't generally consider the possibility of getting caught and will use their personal phone and tools rather than technology that are safe from censorship and mass-surveillance. Sexual assault is not part of rational thinking. The major problem is when someone want to earn money by becoming a distributor that sits between producer and consumer, like the one in the article, and those people usually do consider the risk of getting caught. There is however a silver lining in that those are quite few and tend to become major target for law enforcement and sooner or later the opsec will have a flaw. It is questionable if Internet can ever become so safe that a person can be one of a handful few that earn millions for years without giving out any clues to whom they are. So to me this resolve conundrum. Neither criminal is likely to operate unimpeded even when the Internet become safer from censorship and mass-surveillance.
johnpowell 7y ago
I used to work for Kodak doing "photofinishing" in college. We used to get all the rolls of film for overnight processing in Oregon, Idaho, and Washington. I was one of two people who worked in the digital room. My job was to spend all night scanning rolls of film and then it would get sent over to a computer where I would click on each photo so it was upright and then we would burn cds with the pictures. This was back in 2000 and digital cameras were rare, expensive, and not the best quality. So we were how a lot of people got their film onto the Internet. I had a special number for the police on speed dial. A few times a week I would have to call because of kiddie porn. Clearly sexual stuff and not just kids in the bathtub. It always struck me as odd that people used our service since you actually had to pick up the cds. Where the police would be waiting for you. We also had to process crime scene pictures for some smaller police stations. Lots of suicide pictures. I do not miss that job.
- RandomBacon 7y ago
  I'm sorry to hear. Thank you for helping catch those people and helping save those kids.
zzzcpan 7y ago
> It means children will always be exploited since there’s tons of money to be made. You can thank anti social capitalist system for that. In some countries some people are so desperate to make some money that they are willing to make porn with their own children and sell it to strangers.
- xenospn 7y ago
  I was about to ignore your comment but then remembered a story one of my ex-gf's told me. She said her mom, who was addicted to meth, literals tried to sell her to her meth dealer because she didn't have any money. She was 6.
- dang 7y ago
  "Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - zzzcpan 7y ago
    I'm pretty sure most people are unaware of the facts pointed out in the comment. They don't like it, but that's another story.
pmarreck 7y ago
I have struggled to understand how this proclivity can be evolutionarily possible and the only thing I can come up with is this unfortunate combination of elements: 1) the necessary sexual dimorphism that makes sexual reproduction possible, actually took an unfortunate shortcut: childlike features are retained in females (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoteny https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoteny), which ostensibly requires "less" DNA encoding, while males actually "develop" into more "adult" forms (body hair, musculature, height, deeper voice, etc.) 2) the reproductive window of women is far smaller than men, causing men of all ages to be drawn mainly to this small subselection of all women 3) consequently, men who were more likely to choose women in this younger reproductive window might have been selected for; 4) some portion of these men (due to natural variation), in being drawn to the paedomorphic features of women, actually are "steered too low" in preferential age genetically and are thus born having to deal with this unfortunate proclivity. Ethical question: If no children were harmed and 100% of the videos and images produced were synthetic, would simply consumption of the media still be a problem?
- api 7y ago
  I have a different and not mutually exclusive speculation: It's often assumed that only females have a "biological clock." Maybe that's not true. Maybe males start to crave offspring too, and some mistake these feelings for sexual attraction.
- matz1 7y ago
  >If no children were harmed and 100% of the videos and images produced were synthetic, would simply consumption of the media still be a problem? Then its not a problem.
  - pmarreck 7y ago
    So why wouldn't some rational person who isn't afraid of judgy people corner the market on that and just make legal pedo cartoons or CG renderings? Or is Japan already doing that? >..<
- outworlder 7y ago
matz1 7y ago
It breaks my heart too that there are some very unlucky person somewhere that born with this condition (pedophilia). Damned if you do, damned if you don't.

toomuchtodo 7y ago

While we cannot drive suffering down to zero, we can still make efforts to drive it down as close to zero as possible.

sysbin 7y ago
It would be interesting to know if suffering has increased or decreased over the years and while the extra measures are being put in place. I agree with your opinion btw. I'm just skeptical if for all we know there is now more suffering than before because of the internet.
- toomuchtodo 7y ago
  The world has been getting better objectively. https://www.vox.com/2014/11/24/7272929/global-poverty-health-crime-literacy-good-news https://www.vox.com/2014/11/24/7272929/global-poverty-health...
  - minblaster 7y ago
    Unfortunately, some relative comparisons don't matter as much as the absolute. A world where the number of slaves is objectively increasing (as it has now) is worse I'd say. The total amount of suffering is more, even if there are billions more happy people oblivious to your plight.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
moomin 7y ago
Indeed, it’s not like it’s invulnerable to economics. We need to make sure that the costs are too high. Like most crime, this is less about sentencing than it is about the probability of getting caught.

uirjrhbfhf 7y ago

Deep fake child porn is pretty much possible. It's another ethical quandary but certainly fake child porn is better for children then real child porn.

jandrese 7y ago

Massive demand in this case being 300 some users worldwide. The site had generated a million addresses, but it's clear that most of them were not being used. You should feel better that on a per-capita basis this is an extremely rare occurrence. Like around the same chances as being struck by lightning. It's horrible, but not widespread.

tptacek 7y ago
There were a quarter million unique videos on the site, almost half of which were previously unknown to law enforcement.
zenography 7y ago
Unless I am misreading the article, that was 300 users arrested, not 300 users total.

samcday 7y ago

Conundrums like this make my head spin when I try to consider my position on Internet freedoms. On the one hand I believe the Internet should be a truly personalized, private interface for humans all over the world to be able to communicate freely and privately - safe from censorship, mass-surveillance, profiling, and so on. On the other hand I also believe if the Internet was that way, then it would mean that these elements of society, the ones that seek to horrifically and tragically exploit the most vulnerable of us, would be able to do so relatively unimpeded.

shadowgovt 7y ago
Conundrums like this used to make my head spin. Then I realized that nothing about moving humans online made humans magically more virtuous than they are in meatspace, and the tools we've used to audit and intercept bad-behaving humans in the real world have merit online too. There's a reason so much motion online in the past two decades has been in the direction of "de-wild-Westing" it.
- MiroF 7y ago
  It does make direct coercive power online (ie. violence) difficult. I agree with you, but I do think that the internet reduces the harm inflicted by human vices
belorn 7y ago
A helping thought is that those that commit assault of children don't generally consider the possibility of getting caught and will use their personal phone and tools rather than technology that are safe from censorship and mass-surveillance. Sexual assault is not part of rational thinking. The major problem is when someone want to earn money by becoming a distributor that sits between producer and consumer, like the one in the article, and those people usually do consider the risk of getting caught. There is however a silver lining in that those are quite few and tend to become major target for law enforcement and sooner or later the opsec will have a flaw. It is questionable if Internet can ever become so safe that a person can be one of a handful few that earn millions for years without giving out any clues to whom they are. So to me this resolve conundrum. Neither criminal is likely to operate unimpeded even when the Internet become safer from censorship and mass-surveillance.

johnpowell 7y ago

I used to work for Kodak doing "photofinishing" in college. We used to get all the rolls of film for overnight processing in Oregon, Idaho, and Washington. I was one of two people who worked in the digital room. My job was to spend all night scanning rolls of film and then it would get sent over to a computer where I would click on each photo so it was upright and then we would burn cds with the pictures. This was back in 2000 and digital cameras were rare, expensive, and not the best quality. So we were how a lot of people got their film onto the Internet. I had a special number for the police on speed dial. A few times a week I would have to call because of kiddie porn. Clearly sexual stuff and not just kids in the bathtub. It always struck me as odd that people used our service since you actually had to pick up the cds. Where the police would be waiting for you. We also had to process crime scene pictures for some smaller police stations. Lots of suicide pictures. I do not miss that job.

RandomBacon 7y ago
I'm sorry to hear. Thank you for helping catch those people and helping save those kids.

zzzcpan 7y ago

> It means children will always be exploited since there’s tons of money to be made. You can thank anti social capitalist system for that. In some countries some people are so desperate to make some money that they are willing to make porn with their own children and sell it to strangers.

xenospn 7y ago
I was about to ignore your comment but then remembered a story one of my ex-gf's told me. She said her mom, who was addicted to meth, literals tried to sell her to her meth dealer because she didn't have any money. She was 6.
dang 7y ago
"Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- zzzcpan 7y ago
  I'm pretty sure most people are unaware of the facts pointed out in the comment. They don't like it, but that's another story.

pmarreck 7y ago

I have struggled to understand how this proclivity can be evolutionarily possible and the only thing I can come up with is this unfortunate combination of elements: 1) the necessary sexual dimorphism that makes sexual reproduction possible, actually took an unfortunate shortcut: childlike features are retained in females (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoteny https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoteny), which ostensibly requires "less" DNA encoding, while males actually "develop" into more "adult" forms (body hair, musculature, height, deeper voice, etc.) 2) the reproductive window of women is far smaller than men, causing men of all ages to be drawn mainly to this small subselection of all women 3) consequently, men who were more likely to choose women in this younger reproductive window might have been selected for; 4) some portion of these men (due to natural variation), in being drawn to the paedomorphic features of women, actually are "steered too low" in preferential age genetically and are thus born having to deal with this unfortunate proclivity. Ethical question: If no children were harmed and 100% of the videos and images produced were synthetic, would simply consumption of the media still be a problem?

api 7y ago
I have a different and not mutually exclusive speculation: It's often assumed that only females have a "biological clock." Maybe that's not true. Maybe males start to crave offspring too, and some mistake these feelings for sexual attraction.
matz1 7y ago
>If no children were harmed and 100% of the videos and images produced were synthetic, would simply consumption of the media still be a problem? Then its not a problem.
- pmarreck 7y ago
  So why wouldn't some rational person who isn't afraid of judgy people corner the market on that and just make legal pedo cartoons or CG renderings? Or is Japan already doing that? >..<
outworlder 7y ago

matz1 7y ago

It breaks my heart too that there are some very unlucky person somewhere that born with this condition (pedophilia). Damned if you do, damned if you don't.