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Child abduction case: Tom and Jerry cartoons helped police identify suspects
- LaserDiscMan 3y agoReminds me of the Maury Travis case. Documented in the Forensic Files episode "X Marks the Spot". "Shear Luck" is another memorable episode about a suspect who cut up a floppy disk containing evidence. Edit: Just remembered the episodes "Ticker Tape" and "Hack Attack", which are of a similar theme.
- searealist 3y agoI just assume stories like this are parallel construction. edit: Indeed, they even admit this is not what they used to track them down.
- RajT88 3y agoIndeed, if I was in LE I would not give away my signature tells. The argument is our course: is public safety more important than data privacy? Nobody AFAICT is honestly running those numbers. Probably because it would require cross-agency number gathering and the end result is potentially that agencies lose some magic powers.
- notyofriend 3y agoIt was probably a pretty egregious privacy violation like infected all 130 with a worm and read all their text messages
- aitchnyu 3y agoThe "news" stories related to the incident are sensational. One claimed the Youtuber speaks perfect American English for a global audience but bribed an English exam center (necessary to migrate to a lucrative career in other countries) to pass. Damn exams dont capture her fluency which she demonstrates to a large global audience! Turns out she uses a computer generated voice.
- fnordpiglet 3y agoWhat surprised me the most was 26,000 people watched Tom and Jerry between 7:30pm and 6:30am on some website. That’s a lot more than I would have expected.
- albert_e 3y agoI am guessing there must be some multiplier .. like hits to a CDN in parallel / pre-fetch a few seconds of video for each of the 10-20 videos on a search page.
- caslon 3y agoIndia has a billion and a half people in it. In proportional American numbers, less than five thousand people watching the cartoon.
- dharmab 3y agoIt's been a couple of decades but when I spent time in India as a kid, Tom and Jerry was a popular cartoon on TV.
- profsummergig 3y agoTom and Jerry is very popular in India. Parents like it because there's no (less) subversive NSFW content (e.g. Bikini Bottom in Spongebob). Don't shoot me, I'm just the messenger.
- decremental 3y agoIt's sad that you feel like you have to preemptively defend yourself against criticism for implying children shouldn't be exposed to subversive or NSFW content.
- rokkitmensch 3y agoI support a healthy dose of subversion for my young 'uns. Animaniacs and Invader Zim at the top of the list. Suggestions? SpongeBob is surprisingly subversive and anticapitalist to boot...
- albert_e 3y agoI am trying to understand how it is possible to filter all IP activity for such a (broad) search term. As opposed to say superbowl livestream. They only looked at requests sent to YouTube? Doesn't YouTube use https by default? Did they do a simple YouTube search for 'Tom and Jerry' note down the full URLs for first two pages of search results... and look for those in the ISP logs? DNS lookups only show "www.youtube.com" but not the VideoID or full URL I presume. So ISPs must be logging all URLs being visited by all their users?
- Lvl999Noob 3y agoThey said they were able to identify the specific video that the child watched.
- dharmab 3y agoIndia's encryption laws require service providers to allow law enforcement to intercept, monitor and trace encrypted traffic. Encryption within India is limited by law to weak forms. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/07/indias-draconian-rules-internet-platforms-threaten-user-privacy-and-undermine https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/07/indias-draconian-rules...
- gruez 3y agoIs this actually implemented? Do all browsers in india use weakened TLS or something?
- shmoe 3y agoLikely a governmental man-in-the-middle attack.
- gruez 3y agoThat's non-trivial to pull off without massive noise being generated by users. Even if you're able to somehow able to backdoor all domestic computers to install the government's root certificate, there's going to be a steady stream of complaints from foreigners coming in with their non-backdoored devices.
- spacebacon 3y agoThe video surveillance caught the bad guys but a dragnet gets a pat on the back for 26,000 violations of privacy. This is one good story however it is presented with a narrative that seeds unquestionable support for warrantless surveillance. 702 is on the horizon, what will we choose? Privacy or security. There is no such thing as both. In this well painted narrative the answer is simple. Security. What about other narratives though?
- AniseAbyss 3y ago[dead]
- zizee 3y agoIs this just a "submarine" for the government to get the general public on board with online surveillance? http://paulgraham.com/submarine.html http://paulgraham.com/submarine.html
- albert_e 3y agoAnother aspect to the same kidnapping drama -- the perpetrator was a YouTuber and her parents, apparently looking for ways to make up for losing income streams due to demonetized YouTube channel ... https://indianexpress.com/article/india/kerala/kerala-kidnapping-couple-youtuber-daughter-arrested-9051566/ https://indianexpress.com/article/india/kerala/kerala-kidnap...
- oefrha 3y agoDamn, they asked Google to turn over IP addresses visiting specific URLs, Google refused, then they collected the data “from the Internet gateway” anyway? So TLS is just broken in India, and the “Internet gateway”, whichever hop that refers to, sees everything in clear text?
- iwontberude 3y agoAlmost like the story isn’t true. Occam’s razor makes this easy. There are no sources, no named officials, it’s all happenstance in text.
- hulahoof 3y agoYouTube search terms are query parameters in the url so wouldn’t need to break TLS
- afiori 3y agothe url should be covered by tls
- daymanstep 3y agoURL query parameters are encrypted by TLS. The domain is the part that isn’t encrypted.
- zht 3y agoWhat are you talking about
- ksaj 3y agoThis reminds me of the TOR service that tells you how unique your presence is on the network, based on a whole lot of things the browser reports. Sometimes it'll be a single font that gives a person away, even when so many other bits of information are essentially the same. It works pretty much exactly like how Akinator The Mind Reading Genie works. You narrow down by various yes and no answers, and get to the right answer, or a very close subset, surprisingly quickly.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- subins2000 3y agoThe news story is bogus. Internet service providers can't see what webpage their clients are seeing because everything is HTTPS and there is no MITM from government here as one suggested in the comments. The only technical censorship in India is SNI based HTTPS website blocking and the HTTPS website blocks.