7 ms·

I've spent two decades plus now browsing the web, including my share of porn, but have yet to come across an unambiguous child porn or child abuse image. I don'

I've spent two decades plus now browsing the web, including my share of porn, but have yet to come across an unambiguous child porn or child abuse image. I don't doubt that many of you have. But I do wonder if it's a significant enough problem to justify the level of surveillance that would be required to wipe it out. "Thousands of gigabytes" is consistent with a single cheap hard drive. If that's the threshold for alarm then the alarm is permanent.

api 5y ago
I've trawled around the dark web (.onion) before for quite a while and have never landed on any CP. I did see a link once to something that looked like it could have been CP but of course didn't follow it. Point is that even in onion-land it seems that one can't easily find CP unless one is actively attempting to search it out. It's not something you are likely to be ambushed by.
- Jenk 5y ago
  I explored on Tor about 15 years ago, by just finding indexers and what not from the regular net. I couldn't avoid links to CP everywhere. For every "innocent" link I saw, there must have been multiple links (claiming) to be of CP stashes. I'd say the only thing comparable was the number of "hitman; Pay half first, half after" links.
  - sokoloff 5y ago
    How many of those do you guess were planted snares by feds?
    - Jenk 5y ago
      No idea, I kept away from them as best I could, but I did see comments (on the indexers that, I guess, were there for "rating" the links) lauding most of them as such. Honestly, it reminded me a lot of the early 90s www - that is that anything and everything just couldn't be trusted unless you knew the source outside of the web, too. (Like you know the author's personally, or you have confirmation it is a university site, etc.) and that put me off quite a lot. I really didn't fancy the idea of even accidentally opening the wrong link and seeing these images so I basically stopped using Tor altogether and haven't been back since.
    - ravenstine 5y ago
      I think it's safe to assume that they were fed honeypots. And you know something, I don't know if I'm even opposed to that. The idea that the government must have a ton of CP stashed somewhere for such purposes feels about as disgusting as disgusting gets, but I'm not sure how many of those monsters you can catch without placing bait.
      - KarlKemp 5y ago
        I have no idea why you’d be opposed to the idea, yet I’m fairly certain they are not honeypots. I’m not even sure if that would be legal. Besides, if these sites had the ability to identify their users, we’d hear about the prosecutions. Or, if they were run by actual criminals, we’d hear of shakedowns of users of these sites?
        jjulius 5y ago
        > Or, if they were run by actual criminals, we’d hear of shakedowns of users of these sites? Why? If someone is using those sites, they are extremely unlikely to tell anyone they're being shaken down because doing so requires admitting that they have used those sites. I would imagine that that group of people is a lot more likely to stay quiet and pay up than many other people. That aside, I'm not entirely sure how people using those Tor sites would even be shaken down given Tor's anonymity. Unless, of course, they paid with a CC and not a form of digital currency.
        betterunix2 5y ago
        We do hear about prosecutions, and the sites are run by criminals (as operating such sites is a criminal act). The police are better resourced and better able to identify users than almost all the forum operators, and in any case I doubt the majority of forum operators are interested in shaking down their users.
      - betterunix2 5y ago
        1. Honeypots are controversial and practically invite an entrapment defense. Better to have police infiltrate forums, identify people, and give prosecutors unambiguous evidence. 2. Calling people who view these images "monsters" contributes to a stigma that makes people hesitant to seek help before their urges lead them to abuse children. 2.5. If they are "monsters" and someone you know and love is not a "monster," what do you do when you discover that your loved one is one of those people? We go around asking why people look the other way; the way we reflexively dehumanize pedophiles is one of the reasons. We need to recognize pedophiles as human beings who have serious and potentially dangerous mental health problems, and instead of calling them "monsters" we need to reoriented ourselves to say "let's get this person help before they do something monstrous." Obviously a person who is actively abusing children needs to be arrested, but let's not forget that we are talking about people who actively consume imagery of children being abused, many of whom are not necessarily abusing children (yet).
  - ravenstine 5y ago
    My experience was the same and I quickly gave up on Tor for that reason. I occasionally toyed with it as a clearnet proxy but hidden services made me really pessimistic about its mission. Fortunately it does seem like a lot of that has been expunged. I recently revisited hidden services, as well as the Hidden Wiki (which I'm almost certain had CP links a long time ago but my memory is cloudy), and it seems like that filth isn't tolerated anymore on most indexes I found.
- ge96 5y ago
  I could not tell what was real there. I'd find a wiki that had links but it's like is this a honeypot or is it real kind of thing. I don't know what I was looking for some like hidden secret, something cool.
- swiley 5y ago
  I've gotten emails from people asking for help hosting image albums. I'd be shocked if their end goal wasn't hosting CP. (I rejected it of course.)
Jenk 5y ago
For a while you could sit on 4chan.org/b/ hitting refresh every few seconds and you would inevitably see someone sharing abuse images inside of a not-very-long window. Typically it was just someone being a dickhead and think it's amusing to post it or something, but sometimes you'd see someone post a whole album, and I assume were using 4chan as a (temporary) distribution point. It's worth noting that the mods on 4chan have always been shit-hot at removing this content, but /b/ used to get just _so_ damn busy would take a while for it to be spotted. Like really busy. Multiple pages of new posts every second busy.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
yonaguska 5y ago
How about ambiguous cp? Seems like Twitter, Instagram, YouTube and other social media sites are filled with people sharing this stuff. And if you report it- often nothing gets done.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- ratww 5y ago
  What is ambiguous cp? Where the age of the person is ambiguous? Or where the nature of the picture is ambiguous? EDIT: Downvoters, I'm not doubting or implying it does or doesn't exist, I'm just asking what it is.
  - ravenstine 5y ago
    I'm guessing what they mean by that is certain kinds of hentai I shall not name here, as well as underage models. Those are things I inadvertently ran into over a decade ago, but these days that virtually never happens, especially in terms of the latter. And no, I didn't search for those things, so don't make jokes. The characterization that mainstream social media platforms are "filled" with such material seems disingenuous, unless I've been living on a completely different planet. I'm sure it exists but I believe that you'd have to actively seek it out.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - yonaguska 5y ago
      I'm talking about the underage models. It's a bit different from kids self posting content, that then attracts creeps vs the underage models that have an entire organization/staff of adults that are taking photos and selling them. I'm not on social media very much at all, but- my partner used to spend quite a bit of effort reporting Instagram accounts advertising this stuff. Reports were routinely rejected, and she eventually burned out on it. Meanwhile, misinformation is very actively and preemptively policed. Yes, you'd probably have to seek it out. But, what was troubling is how it's just routinely ignored, despite reporting.
GrumpyNl 5y ago
We used to run a dating site where people could exchange pics. We had to manually check every submission. Loads of cp, we had a direct link with the police to report them.
- jcun4128 5y ago
  I think nowadays you could find an explicit image scanner and ping someone for a near 100% match right? I wonder if today you still have to rely on reporting.
stevehawk 5y ago
4chan... /b/ or even /gif/ ..
- _7gt4 5y ago
  Being naive enough to have archived the board a decade ago for a short while: /v/ too. I’d strongly advise against using any part of that site.
vanusa 5y ago
The point is that they're pretty easily findable if you're looking for them. And stolen or extorted images of late teens, in particular, are all over "amateur" porn sites even if you're not looking for them. "Thousands of gigabytes" is consistent with a single cheap hard drive. If that's the threshold for alarm then the alarm is permanent. The concern ("alarm" if you will) is not based on the count in gigabytes (which is of course trivial), but in the harm caused to real, actual people. As explained in the article.
- betterunix2 5y ago
  "As explained in the article." Was it explained? I saw plenty of discussion of the harm done to children, and the lasting emotional problems carried into adulthood, on the part of the people who abuse children. Then there were a few words from one of those victims who said that it is upsetting to know that images of his abuse are still circulated and consumed. It seems like a stretch to say that the existence of those images causes harm; at most it would seem that the possibility that such images exist complicates things for victims, but that the actual harm was and has always been caused by the actual abuse that occurred. The fact is that nobody can ever know with certainty that child abuse imagery has been thoroughly deleted from ever storage medium on the planet; there are just too many computers in the world, too many ways for the imagery to be stored, transmitted, and shared. Victims will always have the possibility that someone out there is viewing such images hanging over there head no matter how many forums are taken down and no matter how many file sharing services remove files. It is one of the darker realities of the Internet age.
  - vanusa 5y ago
    It seems like a stretch to say that the existence of those images causes harm; Not a stretch at all; I'd recommend you so some reading into the stories of the many, many people whose lives have been permanently upended (or worse - there have been many suicides) after finding leaked images of their abuse (or simply revenge-dumped images of consensual relations) posted in easily searchable websites. As to the rest of what you're saying -- "There are too many, computers, we'll never really be able to completely stop this" -- look, it's a matter of degree and ease of access. Just because we can't bring the effective visibility of these archives down to zero -- doesn't mean we can't reduce it very substantially, down 90 percent or more from the current level.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
tyingq 5y ago
Perhaps where I visit, but yeah. I saw more questionable album covers[1] as a kid then anything I accidentally run into on the web as an adult. [1] Scorpions – Virgin Killer, Blind Faith – Blind Faith, etc.
dkarl 5y ago
In the early 2000s I was checking out various Gnutella clients as possible Napster replacements, and when I wanted to watch a movie, I would downloaded a bunch of files named <movie title>.mp4 or <movie title>.mpeg. I say "a bunch" because only a few would be a watchable version of the movie. A lot of them, especially for new, popular movies, were actually zip files full of porn. Usually these downloads functioned as ads for (presumably legitimate) porn sites, with an included text file telling you where to go to get more of the same, but a few had no attribution and contained things I would rather not have seen. Each time it happened I got a little bit more scared until I finally took a sledgehammer to the hard drive and never installed Gnutella or LimeWire again. Reading the article, I guess it's still common for such content to be made available online with no security other than a bland and misleading filename. Seems like low-hanging fruit for harm reduction, if it can be done in a way that respects civil liberties. When you say something as absolute as "wiping it out" of course that suggests draconian, intrusive measures, but it would be reasonable for a service provider like Dropbox to be able to detect unencrypted child porn shared openly to the public via their service. Even if the only result is to force predators to use encryption and basic access control, that could have a disproportionate effect on how widely individual images are distributed.
ThinkBeat 5y ago
There is either less of it, but more likely so much other stuff now. and the pedos have evolved to better hide it. There is a lot of really sick shit out there. In the simpler times of a much smaller web, pedos were not very cautious and you could come across it whilst just looking for regular pr0n. From what I read you can still find some with a tiny bit of work, but most of it exists in closed forums and other methods of private sharing. A somewhat similar quandary relates to a Norwegian black metal band (some say they started the whole thing, others not). They were a troubled bunch of men. There is a movie about them (Lords of Chaos). Anyways skipping over most of it, the singer in Mayhem, the first one, went by the nick Dead, his real name was Per Yngve Ohlin. (from Sweden). He blew his brains out quite literally with a shotgun. (1991) When band member Euronymous (Varg Vikernes, now Louis Cachet) discovered Dead, being quite dead with a big mess, he ran (or drove) to a nearby gas station and bought some disposable cameras. He then documented the scene with a series of pictures. (Allegedly he also collected skull fragments) These pictures are gruesome. The family of Per Yngve Ohlin (Dead) has attempted and struggled to have the images of their dead family member removed from the net. They have been unable to do so. It always pops back up. (One of the photos was used for a bootleg (I think) release as the album cover) This is such a small, limited event, but getting rid of them is near impossible. The scope of getting rid of all horrible photos on the net is vast and, I think, nearly impossible today. I imagine the laws and the infrastructure changes required to better be able to remove offensive / illegal / violent / gore material from the Internet would be so pervasive that it would destroy what we have today. (Plus whatever would move to some other platform)

api 5y ago

I've trawled around the dark web (.onion) before for quite a while and have never landed on any CP. I did see a link once to something that looked like it could have been CP but of course didn't follow it. Point is that even in onion-land it seems that one can't easily find CP unless one is actively attempting to search it out. It's not something you are likely to be ambushed by.

Jenk 5y ago
I explored on Tor about 15 years ago, by just finding indexers and what not from the regular net. I couldn't avoid links to CP everywhere. For every "innocent" link I saw, there must have been multiple links (claiming) to be of CP stashes. I'd say the only thing comparable was the number of "hitman; Pay half first, half after" links.
- sokoloff 5y ago
  How many of those do you guess were planted snares by feds?
  - Jenk 5y ago
    No idea, I kept away from them as best I could, but I did see comments (on the indexers that, I guess, were there for "rating" the links) lauding most of them as such. Honestly, it reminded me a lot of the early 90s www - that is that anything and everything just couldn't be trusted unless you knew the source outside of the web, too. (Like you know the author's personally, or you have confirmation it is a university site, etc.) and that put me off quite a lot. I really didn't fancy the idea of even accidentally opening the wrong link and seeing these images so I basically stopped using Tor altogether and haven't been back since.
  - ravenstine 5y ago
    I think it's safe to assume that they were fed honeypots. And you know something, I don't know if I'm even opposed to that. The idea that the government must have a ton of CP stashed somewhere for such purposes feels about as disgusting as disgusting gets, but I'm not sure how many of those monsters you can catch without placing bait.
    - KarlKemp 5y ago
      I have no idea why you’d be opposed to the idea, yet I’m fairly certain they are not honeypots. I’m not even sure if that would be legal. Besides, if these sites had the ability to identify their users, we’d hear about the prosecutions. Or, if they were run by actual criminals, we’d hear of shakedowns of users of these sites?
      - jjulius 5y ago
        > Or, if they were run by actual criminals, we’d hear of shakedowns of users of these sites? Why? If someone is using those sites, they are extremely unlikely to tell anyone they're being shaken down because doing so requires admitting that they have used those sites. I would imagine that that group of people is a lot more likely to stay quiet and pay up than many other people. That aside, I'm not entirely sure how people using those Tor sites would even be shaken down given Tor's anonymity. Unless, of course, they paid with a CC and not a form of digital currency.
      - betterunix2 5y ago
        We do hear about prosecutions, and the sites are run by criminals (as operating such sites is a criminal act). The police are better resourced and better able to identify users than almost all the forum operators, and in any case I doubt the majority of forum operators are interested in shaking down their users.
    - betterunix2 5y ago
      1. Honeypots are controversial and practically invite an entrapment defense. Better to have police infiltrate forums, identify people, and give prosecutors unambiguous evidence. 2. Calling people who view these images "monsters" contributes to a stigma that makes people hesitant to seek help before their urges lead them to abuse children. 2.5. If they are "monsters" and someone you know and love is not a "monster," what do you do when you discover that your loved one is one of those people? We go around asking why people look the other way; the way we reflexively dehumanize pedophiles is one of the reasons. We need to recognize pedophiles as human beings who have serious and potentially dangerous mental health problems, and instead of calling them "monsters" we need to reoriented ourselves to say "let's get this person help before they do something monstrous." Obviously a person who is actively abusing children needs to be arrested, but let's not forget that we are talking about people who actively consume imagery of children being abused, many of whom are not necessarily abusing children (yet).
- ravenstine 5y ago
  My experience was the same and I quickly gave up on Tor for that reason. I occasionally toyed with it as a clearnet proxy but hidden services made me really pessimistic about its mission. Fortunately it does seem like a lot of that has been expunged. I recently revisited hidden services, as well as the Hidden Wiki (which I'm almost certain had CP links a long time ago but my memory is cloudy), and it seems like that filth isn't tolerated anymore on most indexes I found.
ge96 5y ago
I could not tell what was real there. I'd find a wiki that had links but it's like is this a honeypot or is it real kind of thing. I don't know what I was looking for some like hidden secret, something cool.
swiley 5y ago
I've gotten emails from people asking for help hosting image albums. I'd be shocked if their end goal wasn't hosting CP. (I rejected it of course.)

Jenk 5y ago

For a while you could sit on 4chan.org/b/ hitting refresh every few seconds and you would inevitably see someone sharing abuse images inside of a not-very-long window. Typically it was just someone being a dickhead and think it's amusing to post it or something, but sometimes you'd see someone post a whole album, and I assume were using 4chan as a (temporary) distribution point. It's worth noting that the mods on 4chan have always been shit-hot at removing this content, but /b/ used to get just _so_ damn busy would take a while for it to be spotted. Like really busy. Multiple pages of new posts every second busy.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

yonaguska 5y ago

How about ambiguous cp? Seems like Twitter, Instagram, YouTube and other social media sites are filled with people sharing this stuff. And if you report it- often nothing gets done.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
ratww 5y ago
What is ambiguous cp? Where the age of the person is ambiguous? Or where the nature of the picture is ambiguous? EDIT: Downvoters, I'm not doubting or implying it does or doesn't exist, I'm just asking what it is.
- ravenstine 5y ago
  I'm guessing what they mean by that is certain kinds of hentai I shall not name here, as well as underage models. Those are things I inadvertently ran into over a decade ago, but these days that virtually never happens, especially in terms of the latter. And no, I didn't search for those things, so don't make jokes. The characterization that mainstream social media platforms are "filled" with such material seems disingenuous, unless I've been living on a completely different planet. I'm sure it exists but I believe that you'd have to actively seek it out.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - yonaguska 5y ago
    I'm talking about the underage models. It's a bit different from kids self posting content, that then attracts creeps vs the underage models that have an entire organization/staff of adults that are taking photos and selling them. I'm not on social media very much at all, but- my partner used to spend quite a bit of effort reporting Instagram accounts advertising this stuff. Reports were routinely rejected, and she eventually burned out on it. Meanwhile, misinformation is very actively and preemptively policed. Yes, you'd probably have to seek it out. But, what was troubling is how it's just routinely ignored, despite reporting.

GrumpyNl 5y ago

We used to run a dating site where people could exchange pics. We had to manually check every submission. Loads of cp, we had a direct link with the police to report them.

jcun4128 5y ago
I think nowadays you could find an explicit image scanner and ping someone for a near 100% match right? I wonder if today you still have to rely on reporting.

stevehawk 5y ago

4chan... /b/ or even /gif/ ..

_7gt4 5y ago
Being naive enough to have archived the board a decade ago for a short while: /v/ too. I’d strongly advise against using any part of that site.

vanusa 5y ago

The point is that they're pretty easily findable if you're looking for them. And stolen or extorted images of late teens, in particular, are all over "amateur" porn sites even if you're not looking for them. "Thousands of gigabytes" is consistent with a single cheap hard drive. If that's the threshold for alarm then the alarm is permanent. The concern ("alarm" if you will) is not based on the count in gigabytes (which is of course trivial), but in the harm caused to real, actual people. As explained in the article.

betterunix2 5y ago
"As explained in the article." Was it explained? I saw plenty of discussion of the harm done to children, and the lasting emotional problems carried into adulthood, on the part of the people who abuse children. Then there were a few words from one of those victims who said that it is upsetting to know that images of his abuse are still circulated and consumed. It seems like a stretch to say that the existence of those images causes harm; at most it would seem that the possibility that such images exist complicates things for victims, but that the actual harm was and has always been caused by the actual abuse that occurred. The fact is that nobody can ever know with certainty that child abuse imagery has been thoroughly deleted from ever storage medium on the planet; there are just too many computers in the world, too many ways for the imagery to be stored, transmitted, and shared. Victims will always have the possibility that someone out there is viewing such images hanging over there head no matter how many forums are taken down and no matter how many file sharing services remove files. It is one of the darker realities of the Internet age.
- vanusa 5y ago
  It seems like a stretch to say that the existence of those images causes harm; Not a stretch at all; I'd recommend you so some reading into the stories of the many, many people whose lives have been permanently upended (or worse - there have been many suicides) after finding leaked images of their abuse (or simply revenge-dumped images of consensual relations) posted in easily searchable websites. As to the rest of what you're saying -- "There are too many, computers, we'll never really be able to completely stop this" -- look, it's a matter of degree and ease of access. Just because we can't bring the effective visibility of these archives down to zero -- doesn't mean we can't reduce it very substantially, down 90 percent or more from the current level.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

tyingq 5y ago

Perhaps where I visit, but yeah. I saw more questionable album covers[1] as a kid then anything I accidentally run into on the web as an adult. [1] Scorpions – Virgin Killer, Blind Faith – Blind Faith, etc.

dkarl 5y ago

In the early 2000s I was checking out various Gnutella clients as possible Napster replacements, and when I wanted to watch a movie, I would downloaded a bunch of files named <movie title>.mp4 or <movie title>.mpeg. I say "a bunch" because only a few would be a watchable version of the movie. A lot of them, especially for new, popular movies, were actually zip files full of porn. Usually these downloads functioned as ads for (presumably legitimate) porn sites, with an included text file telling you where to go to get more of the same, but a few had no attribution and contained things I would rather not have seen. Each time it happened I got a little bit more scared until I finally took a sledgehammer to the hard drive and never installed Gnutella or LimeWire again. Reading the article, I guess it's still common for such content to be made available online with no security other than a bland and misleading filename. Seems like low-hanging fruit for harm reduction, if it can be done in a way that respects civil liberties. When you say something as absolute as "wiping it out" of course that suggests draconian, intrusive measures, but it would be reasonable for a service provider like Dropbox to be able to detect unencrypted child porn shared openly to the public via their service. Even if the only result is to force predators to use encryption and basic access control, that could have a disproportionate effect on how widely individual images are distributed.

ThinkBeat 5y ago

There is either less of it, but more likely so much other stuff now. and the pedos have evolved to better hide it. There is a lot of really sick shit out there. In the simpler times of a much smaller web, pedos were not very cautious and you could come across it whilst just looking for regular pr0n. From what I read you can still find some with a tiny bit of work, but most of it exists in closed forums and other methods of private sharing. A somewhat similar quandary relates to a Norwegian black metal band (some say they started the whole thing, others not). They were a troubled bunch of men. There is a movie about them (Lords of Chaos). Anyways skipping over most of it, the singer in Mayhem, the first one, went by the nick Dead, his real name was Per Yngve Ohlin. (from Sweden). He blew his brains out quite literally with a shotgun. (1991) When band member Euronymous (Varg Vikernes, now Louis Cachet) discovered Dead, being quite dead with a big mess, he ran (or drove) to a nearby gas station and bought some disposable cameras. He then documented the scene with a series of pictures. (Allegedly he also collected skull fragments) These pictures are gruesome. The family of Per Yngve Ohlin (Dead) has attempted and struggled to have the images of their dead family member removed from the net. They have been unable to do so. It always pops back up. (One of the photos was used for a bootleg (I think) release as the album cover) This is such a small, limited event, but getting rid of them is near impossible. The scope of getting rid of all horrible photos on the net is vast and, I think, nearly impossible today. I imagine the laws and the infrastructure changes required to better be able to remove offensive / illegal / violent / gore material from the Internet would be so pervasive that it would destroy what we have today. (Plus whatever would move to some other platform)