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Unfortunately it will end up full of kidporn just like Freenet. This says a lot about the present state humanity, and what it says isn't good. Giordano Bruno an

by api 14y ago

Unfortunately it will end up full of kidporn just like Freenet. This says a lot about the present state humanity, and what it says isn't good. Giordano Bruno and the Renaissance alchemists would have killed for a system like this, but the most interesting thing we can think of to do with it is fill it full of pictures of child abuse so people can jack off to them. It's nasty stuff, too. This is not "merely offensive." Kids are abducted and murdered to make this stuff. In some cases, the act of making it causes bodily harm. (Think of the mechanics of an adult having sex with a six year old.) In parts of the world children are more or less raised for the purpose. It's horrific. Picture someone getting off on photos of war atrocities. This is up there with that, but worse... imagine that the war was held expressly for the purpose of producing the images. Edit: there is also, of course, rape porn depicting adults being abused horrifically. That isn't any better, and freenets are full of that sort of stuff too. I'm not saying the technology is bad. I'm saying that it says something very depressing about the users of said technology. It also makes me dubious about running nodes on such networks, since I know that a lot of the material I'll be storing and forwarding is abuse-porn.

kvnn 14y ago
I want to solve this problem.
- api 14y ago
  I've thought about solving this problem too. One idea I've had is a content-type-restricted network that permits only text. That would allow utterly un-censorable communications: chat, planning revolutions, whatever, but wouldn't be useful for CP. (Unless you like ASCII-art CP.) It could support ANSI. That would be neato. It would feel like the old BBS world. Wonder if anyone would still care if a name like ViSiON-X were stolen for it. :)
  - koalaman 14y ago
    couldn't you just encode the images into text?
    - hollerith 14y ago
      Yes, which is why you keep humans in the loop: you design a system in which the will of humans who want the system to be used only for text prevails and which is resistant to attack by humans with contradictory agendas.
    - api 14y ago
      Yeah. You'd have to be more clever than that. There's a lot of interesting work on meaning extraction and text analysis. I wonder if you could have some kind of information density threshold. It would be possible to encrypt text in such a way that things could be said about its information density but not about its meaning, too, though that would permit steganography to be used. But it would raise the technical bar for using the system for this purpose so high that it would probably drive away all the chickenboners. There's also a dumb way: length limits. That would force binary data to be divided up into a huge number of posts, making it an annoying medium for file trading. Plotting the Iranian revolution would not require >1mb posts to a forum.
    - tsiki 14y ago
      That's true. But, it's also completely possible to make a machine learning algorithms to separate "real text" (text meant for human to human communication) from text encoded images since they differ in significant ways. Granted, you could always try to make a text encoding format which resembles real text, but I'm fairly sure the machine learning algorithm could be constructed in such a way to make its usage unfeasible.
  - iand 14y ago
    Usenet was text only and it let to the widespread use of UUENCODED images and videos
  - kyberias 14y ago
    But couldn't one always use some binary-to-ascii encoding to circumvent this?
  - Negitivefrags 14y ago
    You can still encode any data as base64. Usenet shows this kind of thing in action. It's now used for the most part for illegal file trading.
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
  - rmc 14y ago
    This has 2 problems: * You can base64 encode any file, so it'll look like text. Limitations on message size might solve that. * Sometimes, photos and videos are important. Think of the Abu Ghraib torture pictures, the Tianamen Square Tank Man. Sometimes photos & videos are censored and should be shared with the world.
    - api 14y ago
      Yup, that's true. Maybe binary content propagates differently. Text that meets certain criteria is replicated indiscriminately, but binary content is only replicated when a user votes on it. Edit: you could apply game theory to this problem. Model the network as a graph and write an agent-based modeling rule set for... say... CP-propagators and non-CP-propagators. Run iterative simulations of different propagation rule sets and weightings/parameters. Now introduce bad actors in the form of, say, government agents trying to suppress political discourse. The difference is that average-joe will cooperate in pushing out CP but will "defect" in a game with the other kind of bad-actor. You're looking for rule-sets and parameters where the CP gets pushed to the margins of the network or excluded but where the other kind of bad-actor is also excluded.
      - DennisP 14y ago
        That sounds like an interesting idea. It might be helpful for spam-filtering too. Sybil attacks could be a potential problem.
        api 14y ago
        Now you've really got me thinking... Could Bayesian classification be implemented through a homomorphic cypher? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homomorphic_encryption http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homomorphic_encryption
    - fl3tch 14y ago
      Limitations of message size won't solve that because the messages will be broken into hundreds of pieces, just like they are on Usenet. In theory you could limit the total amount of content coming from an end point, but it's probably not feasible in an anonymous system.
  - ttt_ 14y ago
    How about a reddit-like ranking system as a portal do the darknet? It would easily categorize content in niches that would be curated socially. It could even help further ostracize the CP crowd to a marginalized role even in the darknet. It would enable anyone to flag out the abhorring niches and focus on the actual benefit of enjoying free exchange of information. It doesn't get rid of them, but that's something that we wouldn't really be able to do (they all existed prior to the internet), but it would make the darknet usable.
    - na85 14y ago
      A reddit-like ranking system would merely ensure that only mundane, low-brow and easily-digested content would be popular.
      - lmm 14y ago
        Which is exactly what we need to get this technology to become popular, which is critical to making this kind of mesh useful - there's a quite literal network effect.
  - zokier 14y ago
    If we are discussing potential solutions, maybe friend of a friend-network could somehow help thwart this issue. Even if CP etc was traded in the hypothetical foaf-network, it hopefully would remain in an isolated island of sorts. Anonymizing foaf-network could be bit of a challenge though.
  - snowwrestler 14y ago
    Seems to me the only possible solution is a network of trust. Start small and build outward over time. This was the approach Facebook took to solve the "real identity" problem on the Internet at scale.
- iand 14y ago
  I've thought about this many times. How can you create a system that preserves the anonymity of publishers in persecution situations but excludes the child pornographers? The difficulty comes down to the fact that there is no technical difference between the two classes of publisher, just a moral one. Suppose the persecuted wants to share pictures of children being abused by government forces? One idea I had was for the system to be semi-anonymous. Publishers would form public groups and the publication of content comes from the group as a collective. The members of each group are known, but the specific originator of the content within the group is not. This is the spartacus model of anonymity :)
- StavrosK 14y ago
  Oh wow. There's a discussion about an anonymity network being used for horrible stuff, and people say "I want to solve the problem and make a network that can't be used for horrible stuff"? I want to stop people from doing horrific shit to other people in the first place. Unfortunately, I have no idea where to start...
  - aasarava 14y ago
    With a sufficient technical background, you could work for the FBI helping to monitor, decrypt, and track these a-holes.
    - StavrosK 14y ago
      That... is actually a very good idea!
  - FuzzyDunlop 14y ago
    I think you could make an argument for a 'war on paedos' (for example) being as useful as the war on drugs, crime, terror, or whatever. The difference with this one is that you can conduct your 'business' entirely online, with almost complete anonymity. And what liberal solution is there that doesn't involve children or agitating the mob? Technology is definitely the wrong thing to look at, I agree. I think, historically, it would be like blaming speakeasies for allowing people to drink illegal booze.
    - StavrosK 14y ago
      I think it's pretty easy to argue that. Child molesters cause way more suffering than the rest (well, depending on stats, but still), so I think that's a much better way to spend your resources.
- david927 14y ago
  What if you only connect to those you know? If you don't trust someone, don't connect to them. It causes other problems, but those are much more solvable. *Edit: If Google can use reputation to solve search, why can't reputation be used to solve this?
- crusso 14y ago
  I think that all you can do is to have some system of classification and rating validated by a web of trust reputation system. As I evaluate content on the network, I classify it and rate it. My identity associated with those things is established though (possibly) anonymous. Over time, islands of trusts within the web will form that can be used to help filter large amounts of content. If I start a node, I can link to islands of trust to only allow verified content acceptable to my filters to pass through my resources. It's not perfect. Some will attempt to game the system by building up trust and then attempting to sneak content through. Some will attempt to hide illicit content in innocuous content.
- utnick 14y ago
  I think you would need to limit the scope from an entire decentralized , anonymous 'network' to just a decentralized anonymous website or discussion forum.. Something like an anonymous decentralized HN or reddit with mods that have the ability to ban posts, topics , & users. It wouldn't be as 'free' as tor or freenet, but with the right group of benevolent dictators it could be as free and useful for a certain niche topic like politics or news.
quadhome 14y ago
Probably not. The non-repudiable tracing of exchanges make it easy to trace consumers of a piece of data. See their note: In this regard the anonymity guarantees of the Cryptosphere are no different from a system like BitTorrent, aside from the plausible deniability defense that comes from the fact all content is encrpyted and peers automatically provide storage service to other peers.
user49598 14y ago
...everyone knows child porn is bad. It's existence though, does not negate the usefulness of a system. Not that cryptosphere is going to be the open government revolution, but your comment is a useless vomit of emotional blather.
- api 14y ago
  Okay, I'll re-state it technically: How do we design a system that is anonymous and un-censorable where users can opt out of being relays for certain types of data? Hard problem. Trying to solve it would be interesting. Not trying to solve it would make you identical to FreeNet and Tor and all the other efforts in this area, and thus less interesting. I agree that there is no 100% solution to this problem, since all data can be converted to any format. There is also no 100% solution to pollution in a city, for example, or public health, or usability of a GUI. But there are 90% solutions that could make the problem marginal rather than severe. BTW, on my "emotional vomit:" Tell me. If these networks are for real human beings to engage in open communication, what happens when one of these real human beings comes across... say... a picture of a little girl being cooked over an open fire like a pig. (I didn't see this, but I was discussing the Tor .onion network on Reddit and someone claimed they came across this. I believe them.) Do you really think that person is going to return to this network to discuss... say... politics or economics or their local election? It is a problem. To strip away the "emotional vomit," let's call it a usability problem. How do we make a freenet that is usable for non-psychopaths? Edit: what I'm really saying is this: Freenets have been done. It's a solved problem. Add some PK crypto and some hashing and some onion routing and shake. What isn't a solved problem is: make a darknet/freenet that your mom would feel comfortable using. Make one that your average person -- maybe one with kids and thus really turned off by CP -- would want to one-click install from the Mac app store and browse. THAT would make a serious political impact. Now you'd have hordes of average people using an utterly uncensorable chat system that was also hard to data-mine and tie to identity. Right now, most people are going to start browsing the offerings that already exist (Tor is pretty easy to set up) and see stuff like "world's largest archive of hard-core lolita!", close the app, delete it, and never return. That's why these networks are not very popular, and it severely limits their political impact.
debacle 14y ago
I've seen some terrible things on 4chan posted by trolls or spammers. Sparing my morbid curiosity, how much worse does it get? Are any lines drawn?
- api 14y ago
  Worse. Ask in Reddit /r/onions.
don_draper 14y ago
Why can't there be a text only system for people that don't want to look at images? You would think that would be possible.
- themstheones 14y ago
  What's to stop someone from storing a base 64 encoded image in a text field?
  - tjoff 14y ago
    Well, since the client won't interpret it as an image it will just look like spam garbage. Easily filtered spam garbage.
tomjen3 14y ago
CP will always exist. Especially if you group everybody under 18 into that category (a 17 year old is not a child, a six year old is) -- a 16 year old can't take nude pictures of herself without becoming one. That Freenet is currently filled with it is a good thing -- it indicates how much pressure society puts on the people who are into this stuff and that no other group, such as the KKK, gun rights activists, astronomers, has that much reason to fear going public with what they right. And any such group will quickly fill freenet up with other content, as it will be much bigger than the child abuse rings.
- waterlesscloud 14y ago
  That's an interesting line of thought, but then where's that other sort of content from more repressive societies, of which are are many?
  - pyre 14y ago
    Most groups that would be on such networks (other then child porn producers/consumers) would be mostly political in nature. As such their use of said network would mostly be to distribute textual material (forums/blogs/manifestos/howtos/newsfeeds/ebooks/etc). It would be material that takes up less space, but is actually more time-consuming to produce. For example, writing an ebook takes longer than rolling the video camera for a couple of hours, and produces a much smaller (space-wise) amount of content.
    - tomjen3 14y ago
      Not really. Astronomy generates nearly endless amounts of data (although they are no longer likely targets of haressment) and the other groups would be posting plenty of video (mostly recordings of police stops, howtos, etc). And while 16 year old sexting would be considered cp I highly doubt they would be uploading it to any such networ, if only because they don't want others to see them.
- kragen 14y ago
  Your comment about "quickly filling freenet up with other content" seems to assume that many more people are interested in astronomy, gun rights, or the KKK than are aroused by child pornography. Is that true? How would you know? Is there statistical information out there about what fraction of the population is aroused by child pornography? Given your statement about naked 16-year-olds sexting falling into that category, it seems implausible.
dogprez 14y ago
I've taken some time to consider this issue myself. As other posters have noted its impossible to stop in a system where data is transmitted. I prefer living in a world with free communication (with a channel for criminals) than living in a world with restricted communication. The true crime here is child abuse, not the sharing of data. We don't say people aren't allowed to associate in person without a government minder because they might be swapping photos of child abuse.
- SkyMarshal 14y ago
  >...they might be swapping photos of child abuse. But in this case we know they are swapping pictures of child abuse, we just don't know who they are. The problem is the inverse.
  - wnight 14y ago
    I know something - and that's how little you know. For one, if you did know, you'd be admitting to a crime. But more-over, even if you investigated Tor exit-node traffic you can't know if any porn you might see was actually being traded or merely continually transferred by repressive regimes to have an excuse to ban anonymity providing services. You suspect a lot, and have reached some conclusions, but you don't know what it is, let alone who if anyone is doing it.
- AnIrishDuck 14y ago
  I see these kind of services in a similar light to safe deposit boxes at banks - where you also have near-complete anonymous storage. I doubt any bank manager is losing sleep because child pornographers could be using his service. The biggest problem with this mindset is proportionality at the moment - bank safe deposit boxes have much more public awareness than these services, and have thus gained wider use (and acceptance).
  - api 14y ago
    What if you walked into the bank and there was a line of people with sticky pictures of dead kids in their hands waiting to enter the safe deposit box area. Would you come back? Here's a thought... Put on your foil hat for a second. Let's say you were a government and you wanted your citizens not to use systems like Tor and FreeNet. Wouldn't flooding them with extremely disturbing porn be a great way to make sure these systems weren't used by anyone except CP wankers? Wouldn't it be a great way to get people to go along with outlawing them? This is a technical problem. When you think about it like that, it becomes obvious that this is a vulnerability in the security/crypto sense. I'd state the problem this way: these networks are trivially vulnerable to a particularly devastating social engineering spam attack that renders the network virtually unusable by most people. Call it a social DOS attack. Edit: I believe I can state the problem succinctly: Design a darknet/freenet network that is anonymous, uncensorable, and yet is not trivially vulnerable to social engineering DOS attack. Hard problem. Hard equals interesting.
alanfang 14y ago
Couldn't this be solved by having such a decentralized system only be text based and not allow images/video etc?
- Tloewald 14y ago
  Cough. Usenet.
- _pferreir_ 14y ago
  So, since people can put kiddy porn on images, images shouldn't be allowed at all?
SkyMarshal 14y ago
You would probably have to have some kind of flagging system built into the network, so that people could flag bits and pieces as childporn or whatever categories you provide. The client could be configured to refuse any data with user-selected flags. Of course it would depend on the network not being taken over by a majority of childporn distributors and viewers, and the flagging system would need to be resistant to spoofing and manipulating. Tribler is heading that way with anonymous metadata, iirc their roadmap.
- wnight 14y ago
  What kind of anonymous and untraceable system do you imagine where the files are visible to be blocked by other nodes? I've spotted a small bug...
hippich 14y ago
This is wrong attitude. There should be nothing in place to censor anything. And you as a user should censor whatever you do not wish to see. I agree that certain things might be shocking in real free world, but this do not grant you right to block anything from anybody. Just from yourself.
- api 14y ago
  This is naive because it ignores the social dimension of technology. As I said in another reply: when most people see horrific hard-core CP or rape porn, they will close the program and delete it. End of story. They will also tell all their friends that darknets are only for pedophiles. Then, when the government wants to ban darknets, nobody objects because everyone knows darknets are only for pedophiles because what non-pedophile would want to be immersed in kidporn? This severely limits adoption and thus political impact. Average people are just not going to use it. Niche things do not change the world. Want to be really subversive? Build a darknet your mom would want to use.
  - hippich 14y ago
    My grandma find politics very disgusting and discussing it would mean the same as CP for you. She is from ex-USSR. Does this means we should ban politics in darknets too? And it is your approach is naive. You ignore technology. You can not technically limit information propagation in any kind of network. It will find a way. But if people will think that the only reason to go to any time of crypted network - is to fetch CP - here we go - society prepared for laws preventing cryptography (you can be imprisoned in UK for not giving crypto keys for a several years!) Again - we might want to work on technology recognizing nudity, or abuse or whatever and protect ourselves and our kids or our moms from this type of content, but this should be completely separated from technology used to share this data! Just like there are parts of big cities which are not safe for white/black/chinese/etc guys. It doesn't mean we have to put tall wall around this part of city. Instead whoever think it is not safe there - just do not go there.
    - api 14y ago
montecarl 14y ago
Maybe this speaks pretty highly of the current level of free speech? Perhaps everyone, for the most part, is already able to say what they want and the number one use for systems like this are these horrible things and not say a newspaper that speaks out against the local government. I don't mean to say that a system that provides perfect free anonymous speech wouldn't be useful, but for every person who has something to contribute to wikileaks theres millions more who just want to get off to sick stuff.
gst 14y ago
And now replace the "Freenet" in your sentence with "Internet". The sentence is still valid. But would this be a reason to shutdown the Internet or to not run any Internet backbone routers?
- kevindication 14y ago
  You raise a good point. There is a difference, however; the Internet is actively monitored and ISPs respond to/work with the police to reduce this kind of content. Can the same be possible on something like Freenet?
  - pera 14y ago
    What about PGP? and cryptography in general? you can't do an algorithm that don't encrypt CP.. There is no way to stop a particular kind of content, and yes: technology could be used for bad things! you should already know this. Even if every package were monitored&filtered and encrypted messages were illegal steganography could be used to circumvent the censure. So, it's impossible to stop the distribution of CP, we must accept this. The real problem here is child abuse, and people should focus on this. Sometimes I think that actually our society don't really care about the children: it's more like they just don't wanna know and that's why the common answer from the govt is "filter the Internet". IMO the best we can do is think how we can find the child being molested on certain pic, not trying to figure out some magical way to stop distribution, because if we keep trying this we're just wasting the(ir) time...
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
- api 14y ago
  I can browse the Internet for a long time before I see an archive full of hard-core pre-teen porn unless I go looking for it. It is difficult to browse the Tor .onion network without seeing at least links to this. Sometimes users land on it by mistake. Try it. Tor gives the impression of being a sea of kidporn with little islands of interesting stuff, especially when you factor in the cognitive fact that human beings give greater weight to negative stimuli.
mtgx 14y ago
Don't blame the tool. Never blame the tool. Knives can do horrific murders, but they are pretty useful for cooking as well. I'm surprised your comment is the top one here.
- api 14y ago
  I'm not blaming the tool. I'm pointing out its inadequacy. I am saying there is an interesting and very hard problem here that severely limits the adoption of these technologies, and that solving it would be both interesting and important. The darknet problem as defined by most techies is solved, yet almost nobody uses these systems. Why?
  - delluminatus 14y ago
    What inadequacy? To say that a tool designed to facilitate anonymous communication is inadequate because people are doing things on it that you don't like seems like a pretty strange position. The inadequacy of a darknet is its uncensorability?
    - api 14y ago
      Your network is trivially vulnerable to a social DOS attack that will instantly drive off 90% of its user-base.
    - zokier 14y ago
      In freenet at least there is one significant inadequacy that you must commit your resources to supply others with material you strongly disagree with. The difference between having a network which others can use for trading CP and having a network that want's your bandwidth and disk space to serve CP crosses the line for many people.
      - delluminatus 14y ago
        I see -- I can understand how that might be a concern. I'm not sure it's really a valid moral issue, but I can certainly imagine it bothering people.
learc83 14y ago
What about a system that establishes a series of trusted agents, who get the data first, and have to approve it to propagate it onto the the wider publicly available network. Anyone could become a trusted agent by publicly verifying their identity. Basically you need to find at least one other person who's identify is public to "sponsor" your information. If you are publishing information the Chinese government you find a U.S. sponsor and vice versa.
burke 14y ago
I think it actually says a lot more about how generally-free our society is. Giordano Bruno was imprisoned and executed for disagreeing with the church, so had much reason to hide his activities, even though they are what we could definitely consider "legitimate". Child pornography producers and consumers are similarly persecuted, though clearly with much more sound reasons. At least in western countries, there aren't a lot of instances of repressed communication that need to be conducted across a channel like this -- especially few legitimate ones. This is not to say that such a system isn't useful; just that I believe the fact they're so full of child pornography and the like is actually, in a roundabout way, an indicator of a healthy society.
endtime 14y ago
Your comment is about child porn, not about TFA. Please stay on topic.
- thruflo 14y ago
  Precisely -- I opened up the comments to see what people thought of the quality of the implementation. Does this guy know about cryptography and robust decentralisation? What are the trade offs in the architecture...?
_pferreir_ 14y ago
As others have said, guns don't kill people, other people (and Chuck Norris) do. Unfortunately, the right to privacy has this side-effect of allowing people to hide from others really nasty things. But it will always be like this: laws and rights protect both well and ill-behaving people. Giving those up would, however, harm all of us.
moondistance 14y ago
Couldn't it - or a similar algorithm - be used as a bittorrent alternative with superior anonymity? If yes, this might become a more common use case.
mgunes 14y ago
Accidentally downvoted you; I thought people on HN interested in autonomous, decentralized systems not acquainted with Giordano Bruno should become so: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giordano_Bruno http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giordano_Bruno http://warburg.sas.ac.uk/index.php?id=446 http://warburg.sas.ac.uk/index.php?id=446 "The Art Of Memory" by Frances Yates outlines the pathway of mnemonic and knowledge systems from alchemy to the Rennaissance, and is a comprehensive introduction to the life and work of Giordano Bruno, Ramon Llull and many other ancestors of our various technologies of memory. http://www.amazon.com/The-Art-Memory-Frances-Yates/dp/0226950018 http://www.amazon.com/The-Art-Memory-Frances-Yates/dp/022695...
spullara 14y ago
Couldn't you require N random contributors to approve of each upload before it is published? With that in place, either the system is just a group of bad actors or the good actors weed out the bad content.
grandalf 14y ago
Your argument is somewhat self-contradictory. We know that lots of child porn exists. If you create additional scarcity by preventing the exchange of old/existing child porn (probably mostly 20 year old pictures, etc.) then you increase the chances of new children being exploited. The legal adult industry has seen most of the profit evaporate b/c of the large amount of free content. The only people making money are those selling ads on top of existing content, which is often not even owned by the companies hosting it. The original owners lack the resources to enforce copyright law b/c they have no income stream to use to do so. So rather than relying upon the idealistic notion that all exploitation and exploitative pornography can actually be successfully eliminated, it might make more sense to take a more pragmatic view about the forces of supply and demand involved, with the goal of reducing additional harm.
- tobias3 14y ago
  Exactly. Anyonymous payment however would be bad. And currently, with e.g. bitcoin scramblers, we are getting there. I can see no harm in anonymous data exchange (except copyright infringement) on an open society. But if you can order whatever you want online anonymously -- that could result in some deplorable stuff. (That's why I think bitcoins will get shut down entirely by goverments at some point)
  - grandalf 14y ago
    What bad scenarios do you see occurring with anonymous online payments? I do agree that the US Government will shut down bitcoin fairly soon, for the same reasons it doesn't allow people to create any other kind of currency. I consider governments to essentially be criminal gangs that have achieved enough power to be able to buy legitimacy. Money laundering allows 3rd party gangs to start to claim legitimacy too, so it must be stopped. This is not to discount the good things governments (and gangs) accomplish, just to call attention to the good and bad done by both. Governments generally have elaborate propaganda and disinformation arms as well, and use money laundering laws to attack the funding channels used by competitors (described derogatorily as gangs).
    - 14y ago
lovenothate 14y ago
I am a guy in my 20s who is attracted to children and I use freenet to download illegal pictures of them. The most active forum on freenet for sharing these pictures is called "child-models-girls". Little girls pose for sets of pictures which are sold commercially and then shared for free on freenet/open-internet. Mostly they are wearing skimpy clothing or swimsuits, or sometimes they naked. 90% of the freenet store is probably pictures like this which are little different to what you used to see in clothing catalogues. There is real cp too of course - pics and videos of girls/boys doing sexual things with themselves or with adults. I have no doubt the average HN reader would be shocked. However. > It's nasty stuff, too. This is not "merely offensive." Kids are abducted and murdered to make this stuff. This is just not true. Only a tiny minority of people on freenet/similar-systems are looking for stuff where children are obviously being hurt. Most of us despise it. The truth is we like to see children happy because it makes us feel better about looking at these pictures. > Think of the mechanics of an adult having sex with a six year old The mechanics don't really work. Thats why 99% of pics/vids involve touching/licking/rubbing/etc only. > In parts of the world children are more or less raised for the purpose. It's horrific. This is wild conjecture.
- api 14y ago
  I'm probably somewhere close to Dr. Kinsey on such issues: very libertarian and open-minded. I have no problem with pornography. I also don't necessarily judge people for having feelings. I appreciate the logical and honest post. What I have to ask is whether the people in these photos, even the very "soft-core" ones, know that their pictures are being shared over the Internet and used like this. Did they give consent, and did they understand the full implications of that consent? Did they get paid? Did they sign a contract? I think I'm opposed to this kind of thing because I'm a libertarian. I see it as exploitation and deceit and privacy violations levied against people who are too young to understand or that cannot defend themselves. I've debated people on this topic once before, and it seems to me that there are a lot of cyber-libertarians that will go straight to the mat to defend privacy rights except here. Why don't eight year olds have privacy rights? What if your doctor photographed you, told you it was for medical purposes, and then posted the pics to a gay porn site? What if a TSA screener posted millimeter wave video of you (essentially naked) to YouTube? Isn't this a lot more invasive than Facebook selling your friend graph to a marketing company? Yet most people would find that very invasive and deceptive -- a violation of their rights -- if they hadn't given consent. And no, the dark stuff is not wild conjecture. I understand that the majority of pedophiles wouldn't be into it, but it certainly does exist. Over at Reddit /r/onions I read a while ago about a forum that exists on the Tor darknet called "Violent Desires." There were lots of "I cannot un-see" kinds of comments, and many warnings about "do not go there... you do not want to know." Child trafficking is quite real as well. The world is absolutely filled with unbelievably dark stuff (in other areas too) that normal people sometimes have a hard time believing: torture ("extraordinary rendition"), blatant fraud to the tune of billions of dollars, human trafficking, slavery, off-the-books unethical human experimentation, and so on... My experience in other areas of life suggests to me that the reality is probably worse than I care to imagine.
na85 14y ago
Sadly, that's the price you pay for free speech. The only way to ensure that the world's whistleblowers can publish what they want without fear of reprisal is to ensure that the world's child pornographers can also do so.
rhizome 14y ago
Consider the possibility that these networks are seeded with that content by those immune to prosecution for doing so, who also have an interest in that kind of freedom being curtailed. This is conspiratorial, and of course I have no evidence, but I simply don't think rapey kidporn is as popular as it's portrayed.
wnight 14y ago
Strange, how you say someone could wage a social denial-of-service attack against Freenet with a bit of kiddy-porn FUD... None of the links I follow into the onion (coding mostly) have ever led to porn, let alone CP. Even if it's everywhere you look (and maybe you should consider why that is) it's nowhere I and most other people look. Even if there were a non-insignificant amount of CP being distributed there are really just two options, 1) there's a super-secure, secret group of pedophiles who cooperate to abduct and molest children and they continue to get away with it, or 2) various law enforcement groups use the same few pictures over and over in stings and honeypots. No, it's a nigh-unto made-up problem, and to the tiny degree it may exist at all, it's exactly the same on the Internet as a whole, on Dropbox, via shortened URLs in twitter, etc. To combat the problem perception that Tor is for CP problem simply quit telling people about it constantly. And if you're told that's all Tor is, treat it exactly like you would someone who started at the sleaziest portal they could and complained the internet was full of porn. As for you knowing what Freenet is full of, that's impossible unless you're claiming to have seeded it.
rdl 14y ago
Maybe stick to a text-only format. Very little illegal text which isn't otherwise beneficial.

by api 14y ago

kvnn 14y ago

I want to solve this problem.

api 14y ago
I've thought about solving this problem too. One idea I've had is a content-type-restricted network that permits only text. That would allow utterly un-censorable communications: chat, planning revolutions, whatever, but wouldn't be useful for CP. (Unless you like ASCII-art CP.) It could support ANSI. That would be neato. It would feel like the old BBS world. Wonder if anyone would still care if a name like ViSiON-X were stolen for it. :)
- koalaman 14y ago
  couldn't you just encode the images into text?
  - hollerith 14y ago
    Yes, which is why you keep humans in the loop: you design a system in which the will of humans who want the system to be used only for text prevails and which is resistant to attack by humans with contradictory agendas.
  - api 14y ago
    Yeah. You'd have to be more clever than that. There's a lot of interesting work on meaning extraction and text analysis. I wonder if you could have some kind of information density threshold. It would be possible to encrypt text in such a way that things could be said about its information density but not about its meaning, too, though that would permit steganography to be used. But it would raise the technical bar for using the system for this purpose so high that it would probably drive away all the chickenboners. There's also a dumb way: length limits. That would force binary data to be divided up into a huge number of posts, making it an annoying medium for file trading. Plotting the Iranian revolution would not require >1mb posts to a forum.
  - tsiki 14y ago
    That's true. But, it's also completely possible to make a machine learning algorithms to separate "real text" (text meant for human to human communication) from text encoded images since they differ in significant ways. Granted, you could always try to make a text encoding format which resembles real text, but I'm fairly sure the machine learning algorithm could be constructed in such a way to make its usage unfeasible.
- iand 14y ago
  Usenet was text only and it let to the widespread use of UUENCODED images and videos
- kyberias 14y ago
  But couldn't one always use some binary-to-ascii encoding to circumvent this?
- Negitivefrags 14y ago
  You can still encode any data as base64. Usenet shows this kind of thing in action. It's now used for the most part for illegal file trading.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- rmc 14y ago
  This has 2 problems: * You can base64 encode any file, so it'll look like text. Limitations on message size might solve that. * Sometimes, photos and videos are important. Think of the Abu Ghraib torture pictures, the Tianamen Square Tank Man. Sometimes photos & videos are censored and should be shared with the world.
  - api 14y ago
    Yup, that's true. Maybe binary content propagates differently. Text that meets certain criteria is replicated indiscriminately, but binary content is only replicated when a user votes on it. Edit: you could apply game theory to this problem. Model the network as a graph and write an agent-based modeling rule set for... say... CP-propagators and non-CP-propagators. Run iterative simulations of different propagation rule sets and weightings/parameters. Now introduce bad actors in the form of, say, government agents trying to suppress political discourse. The difference is that average-joe will cooperate in pushing out CP but will "defect" in a game with the other kind of bad-actor. You're looking for rule-sets and parameters where the CP gets pushed to the margins of the network or excluded but where the other kind of bad-actor is also excluded.
    - DennisP 14y ago
      That sounds like an interesting idea. It might be helpful for spam-filtering too. Sybil attacks could be a potential problem.
      - api 14y ago
        Now you've really got me thinking... Could Bayesian classification be implemented through a homomorphic cypher? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homomorphic_encryption http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homomorphic_encryption
  - fl3tch 14y ago
    Limitations of message size won't solve that because the messages will be broken into hundreds of pieces, just like they are on Usenet. In theory you could limit the total amount of content coming from an end point, but it's probably not feasible in an anonymous system.
- ttt_ 14y ago
  How about a reddit-like ranking system as a portal do the darknet? It would easily categorize content in niches that would be curated socially. It could even help further ostracize the CP crowd to a marginalized role even in the darknet. It would enable anyone to flag out the abhorring niches and focus on the actual benefit of enjoying free exchange of information. It doesn't get rid of them, but that's something that we wouldn't really be able to do (they all existed prior to the internet), but it would make the darknet usable.
  - na85 14y ago
    A reddit-like ranking system would merely ensure that only mundane, low-brow and easily-digested content would be popular.
    - lmm 14y ago
      Which is exactly what we need to get this technology to become popular, which is critical to making this kind of mesh useful - there's a quite literal network effect.
- zokier 14y ago
  If we are discussing potential solutions, maybe friend of a friend-network could somehow help thwart this issue. Even if CP etc was traded in the hypothetical foaf-network, it hopefully would remain in an isolated island of sorts. Anonymizing foaf-network could be bit of a challenge though.
- snowwrestler 14y ago
  Seems to me the only possible solution is a network of trust. Start small and build outward over time. This was the approach Facebook took to solve the "real identity" problem on the Internet at scale.
iand 14y ago
I've thought about this many times. How can you create a system that preserves the anonymity of publishers in persecution situations but excludes the child pornographers? The difficulty comes down to the fact that there is no technical difference between the two classes of publisher, just a moral one. Suppose the persecuted wants to share pictures of children being abused by government forces? One idea I had was for the system to be semi-anonymous. Publishers would form public groups and the publication of content comes from the group as a collective. The members of each group are known, but the specific originator of the content within the group is not. This is the spartacus model of anonymity :)
StavrosK 14y ago
Oh wow. There's a discussion about an anonymity network being used for horrible stuff, and people say "I want to solve the problem and make a network that can't be used for horrible stuff"? I want to stop people from doing horrific shit to other people in the first place. Unfortunately, I have no idea where to start...
- aasarava 14y ago
  With a sufficient technical background, you could work for the FBI helping to monitor, decrypt, and track these a-holes.
  - StavrosK 14y ago
    That... is actually a very good idea!
- FuzzyDunlop 14y ago
  I think you could make an argument for a 'war on paedos' (for example) being as useful as the war on drugs, crime, terror, or whatever. The difference with this one is that you can conduct your 'business' entirely online, with almost complete anonymity. And what liberal solution is there that doesn't involve children or agitating the mob? Technology is definitely the wrong thing to look at, I agree. I think, historically, it would be like blaming speakeasies for allowing people to drink illegal booze.
  - StavrosK 14y ago
    I think it's pretty easy to argue that. Child molesters cause way more suffering than the rest (well, depending on stats, but still), so I think that's a much better way to spend your resources.
david927 14y ago
What if you only connect to those you know? If you don't trust someone, don't connect to them. It causes other problems, but those are much more solvable. *Edit: If Google can use reputation to solve search, why can't reputation be used to solve this?
crusso 14y ago
I think that all you can do is to have some system of classification and rating validated by a web of trust reputation system. As I evaluate content on the network, I classify it and rate it. My identity associated with those things is established though (possibly) anonymous. Over time, islands of trusts within the web will form that can be used to help filter large amounts of content. If I start a node, I can link to islands of trust to only allow verified content acceptable to my filters to pass through my resources. It's not perfect. Some will attempt to game the system by building up trust and then attempting to sneak content through. Some will attempt to hide illicit content in innocuous content.
utnick 14y ago
I think you would need to limit the scope from an entire decentralized , anonymous 'network' to just a decentralized anonymous website or discussion forum.. Something like an anonymous decentralized HN or reddit with mods that have the ability to ban posts, topics , & users. It wouldn't be as 'free' as tor or freenet, but with the right group of benevolent dictators it could be as free and useful for a certain niche topic like politics or news.

quadhome 14y ago

Probably not. The non-repudiable tracing of exchanges make it easy to trace consumers of a piece of data. See their note: In this regard the anonymity guarantees of the Cryptosphere are no different from a system like BitTorrent, aside from the plausible deniability defense that comes from the fact all content is encrpyted and peers automatically provide storage service to other peers.

user49598 14y ago

...everyone knows child porn is bad. It's existence though, does not negate the usefulness of a system. Not that cryptosphere is going to be the open government revolution, but your comment is a useless vomit of emotional blather.

api 14y ago
Okay, I'll re-state it technically: How do we design a system that is anonymous and un-censorable where users can opt out of being relays for certain types of data? Hard problem. Trying to solve it would be interesting. Not trying to solve it would make you identical to FreeNet and Tor and all the other efforts in this area, and thus less interesting. I agree that there is no 100% solution to this problem, since all data can be converted to any format. There is also no 100% solution to pollution in a city, for example, or public health, or usability of a GUI. But there are 90% solutions that could make the problem marginal rather than severe. BTW, on my "emotional vomit:" Tell me. If these networks are for real human beings to engage in open communication, what happens when one of these real human beings comes across... say... a picture of a little girl being cooked over an open fire like a pig. (I didn't see this, but I was discussing the Tor .onion network on Reddit and someone claimed they came across this. I believe them.) Do you really think that person is going to return to this network to discuss... say... politics or economics or their local election? It is a problem. To strip away the "emotional vomit," let's call it a usability problem. How do we make a freenet that is usable for non-psychopaths? Edit: what I'm really saying is this: Freenets have been done. It's a solved problem. Add some PK crypto and some hashing and some onion routing and shake. What isn't a solved problem is: make a darknet/freenet that your mom would feel comfortable using. Make one that your average person -- maybe one with kids and thus really turned off by CP -- would want to one-click install from the Mac app store and browse. THAT would make a serious political impact. Now you'd have hordes of average people using an utterly uncensorable chat system that was also hard to data-mine and tie to identity. Right now, most people are going to start browsing the offerings that already exist (Tor is pretty easy to set up) and see stuff like "world's largest archive of hard-core lolita!", close the app, delete it, and never return. That's why these networks are not very popular, and it severely limits their political impact.

debacle 14y ago

I've seen some terrible things on 4chan posted by trolls or spammers. Sparing my morbid curiosity, how much worse does it get? Are any lines drawn?

api 14y ago
Worse. Ask in Reddit /r/onions.

don_draper 14y ago

Why can't there be a text only system for people that don't want to look at images? You would think that would be possible.

themstheones 14y ago
What's to stop someone from storing a base 64 encoded image in a text field?
- tjoff 14y ago
  Well, since the client won't interpret it as an image it will just look like spam garbage. Easily filtered spam garbage.

tomjen3 14y ago

CP will always exist. Especially if you group everybody under 18 into that category (a 17 year old is not a child, a six year old is) -- a 16 year old can't take nude pictures of herself without becoming one. That Freenet is currently filled with it is a good thing -- it indicates how much pressure society puts on the people who are into this stuff and that no other group, such as the KKK, gun rights activists, astronomers, has that much reason to fear going public with what they right. And any such group will quickly fill freenet up with other content, as it will be much bigger than the child abuse rings.

waterlesscloud 14y ago
That's an interesting line of thought, but then where's that other sort of content from more repressive societies, of which are are many?
- pyre 14y ago
  Most groups that would be on such networks (other then child porn producers/consumers) would be mostly political in nature. As such their use of said network would mostly be to distribute textual material (forums/blogs/manifestos/howtos/newsfeeds/ebooks/etc). It would be material that takes up less space, but is actually more time-consuming to produce. For example, writing an ebook takes longer than rolling the video camera for a couple of hours, and produces a much smaller (space-wise) amount of content.
  - tomjen3 14y ago
    Not really. Astronomy generates nearly endless amounts of data (although they are no longer likely targets of haressment) and the other groups would be posting plenty of video (mostly recordings of police stops, howtos, etc). And while 16 year old sexting would be considered cp I highly doubt they would be uploading it to any such networ, if only because they don't want others to see them.
kragen 14y ago
Your comment about "quickly filling freenet up with other content" seems to assume that many more people are interested in astronomy, gun rights, or the KKK than are aroused by child pornography. Is that true? How would you know? Is there statistical information out there about what fraction of the population is aroused by child pornography? Given your statement about naked 16-year-olds sexting falling into that category, it seems implausible.

dogprez 14y ago

I've taken some time to consider this issue myself. As other posters have noted its impossible to stop in a system where data is transmitted. I prefer living in a world with free communication (with a channel for criminals) than living in a world with restricted communication. The true crime here is child abuse, not the sharing of data. We don't say people aren't allowed to associate in person without a government minder because they might be swapping photos of child abuse.

SkyMarshal 14y ago
>...they might be swapping photos of child abuse. But in this case we know they are swapping pictures of child abuse, we just don't know who they are. The problem is the inverse.
- wnight 14y ago
  I know something - and that's how little you know. For one, if you did know, you'd be admitting to a crime. But more-over, even if you investigated Tor exit-node traffic you can't know if any porn you might see was actually being traded or merely continually transferred by repressive regimes to have an excuse to ban anonymity providing services. You suspect a lot, and have reached some conclusions, but you don't know what it is, let alone who if anyone is doing it.
AnIrishDuck 14y ago
I see these kind of services in a similar light to safe deposit boxes at banks - where you also have near-complete anonymous storage. I doubt any bank manager is losing sleep because child pornographers could be using his service. The biggest problem with this mindset is proportionality at the moment - bank safe deposit boxes have much more public awareness than these services, and have thus gained wider use (and acceptance).
- api 14y ago
  What if you walked into the bank and there was a line of people with sticky pictures of dead kids in their hands waiting to enter the safe deposit box area. Would you come back? Here's a thought... Put on your foil hat for a second. Let's say you were a government and you wanted your citizens not to use systems like Tor and FreeNet. Wouldn't flooding them with extremely disturbing porn be a great way to make sure these systems weren't used by anyone except CP wankers? Wouldn't it be a great way to get people to go along with outlawing them? This is a technical problem. When you think about it like that, it becomes obvious that this is a vulnerability in the security/crypto sense. I'd state the problem this way: these networks are trivially vulnerable to a particularly devastating social engineering spam attack that renders the network virtually unusable by most people. Call it a social DOS attack. Edit: I believe I can state the problem succinctly: Design a darknet/freenet network that is anonymous, uncensorable, and yet is not trivially vulnerable to social engineering DOS attack. Hard problem. Hard equals interesting.

alanfang 14y ago

Couldn't this be solved by having such a decentralized system only be text based and not allow images/video etc?

Tloewald 14y ago
Cough. Usenet.
_pferreir_ 14y ago
So, since people can put kiddy porn on images, images shouldn't be allowed at all?

SkyMarshal 14y ago

You would probably have to have some kind of flagging system built into the network, so that people could flag bits and pieces as childporn or whatever categories you provide. The client could be configured to refuse any data with user-selected flags. Of course it would depend on the network not being taken over by a majority of childporn distributors and viewers, and the flagging system would need to be resistant to spoofing and manipulating. Tribler is heading that way with anonymous metadata, iirc their roadmap.

wnight 14y ago
What kind of anonymous and untraceable system do you imagine where the files are visible to be blocked by other nodes? I've spotted a small bug...

hippich 14y ago

This is wrong attitude. There should be nothing in place to censor anything. And you as a user should censor whatever you do not wish to see. I agree that certain things might be shocking in real free world, but this do not grant you right to block anything from anybody. Just from yourself.

api 14y ago
This is naive because it ignores the social dimension of technology. As I said in another reply: when most people see horrific hard-core CP or rape porn, they will close the program and delete it. End of story. They will also tell all their friends that darknets are only for pedophiles. Then, when the government wants to ban darknets, nobody objects because everyone knows darknets are only for pedophiles because what non-pedophile would want to be immersed in kidporn? This severely limits adoption and thus political impact. Average people are just not going to use it. Niche things do not change the world. Want to be really subversive? Build a darknet your mom would want to use.
- hippich 14y ago
  My grandma find politics very disgusting and discussing it would mean the same as CP for you. She is from ex-USSR. Does this means we should ban politics in darknets too? And it is your approach is naive. You ignore technology. You can not technically limit information propagation in any kind of network. It will find a way. But if people will think that the only reason to go to any time of crypted network - is to fetch CP - here we go - society prepared for laws preventing cryptography (you can be imprisoned in UK for not giving crypto keys for a several years!) Again - we might want to work on technology recognizing nudity, or abuse or whatever and protect ourselves and our kids or our moms from this type of content, but this should be completely separated from technology used to share this data! Just like there are parts of big cities which are not safe for white/black/chinese/etc guys. It doesn't mean we have to put tall wall around this part of city. Instead whoever think it is not safe there - just do not go there.
  - api 14y ago

montecarl 14y ago

Maybe this speaks pretty highly of the current level of free speech? Perhaps everyone, for the most part, is already able to say what they want and the number one use for systems like this are these horrible things and not say a newspaper that speaks out against the local government. I don't mean to say that a system that provides perfect free anonymous speech wouldn't be useful, but for every person who has something to contribute to wikileaks theres millions more who just want to get off to sick stuff.

gst 14y ago

And now replace the "Freenet" in your sentence with "Internet". The sentence is still valid. But would this be a reason to shutdown the Internet or to not run any Internet backbone routers?

kevindication 14y ago
You raise a good point. There is a difference, however; the Internet is actively monitored and ISPs respond to/work with the police to reduce this kind of content. Can the same be possible on something like Freenet?
- pera 14y ago
  What about PGP? and cryptography in general? you can't do an algorithm that don't encrypt CP.. There is no way to stop a particular kind of content, and yes: technology could be used for bad things! you should already know this. Even if every package were monitored&filtered and encrypted messages were illegal steganography could be used to circumvent the censure. So, it's impossible to stop the distribution of CP, we must accept this. The real problem here is child abuse, and people should focus on this. Sometimes I think that actually our society don't really care about the children: it's more like they just don't wanna know and that's why the common answer from the govt is "filter the Internet". IMO the best we can do is think how we can find the child being molested on certain pic, not trying to figure out some magical way to stop distribution, because if we keep trying this we're just wasting the(ir) time...
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
api 14y ago
I can browse the Internet for a long time before I see an archive full of hard-core pre-teen porn unless I go looking for it. It is difficult to browse the Tor .onion network without seeing at least links to this. Sometimes users land on it by mistake. Try it. Tor gives the impression of being a sea of kidporn with little islands of interesting stuff, especially when you factor in the cognitive fact that human beings give greater weight to negative stimuli.

mtgx 14y ago

Don't blame the tool. Never blame the tool. Knives can do horrific murders, but they are pretty useful for cooking as well. I'm surprised your comment is the top one here.

api 14y ago
I'm not blaming the tool. I'm pointing out its inadequacy. I am saying there is an interesting and very hard problem here that severely limits the adoption of these technologies, and that solving it would be both interesting and important. The darknet problem as defined by most techies is solved, yet almost nobody uses these systems. Why?
- delluminatus 14y ago
  What inadequacy? To say that a tool designed to facilitate anonymous communication is inadequate because people are doing things on it that you don't like seems like a pretty strange position. The inadequacy of a darknet is its uncensorability?
  - api 14y ago
    Your network is trivially vulnerable to a social DOS attack that will instantly drive off 90% of its user-base.
  - zokier 14y ago
    In freenet at least there is one significant inadequacy that you must commit your resources to supply others with material you strongly disagree with. The difference between having a network which others can use for trading CP and having a network that want's your bandwidth and disk space to serve CP crosses the line for many people.
    - delluminatus 14y ago
      I see -- I can understand how that might be a concern. I'm not sure it's really a valid moral issue, but I can certainly imagine it bothering people.

learc83 14y ago

What about a system that establishes a series of trusted agents, who get the data first, and have to approve it to propagate it onto the the wider publicly available network. Anyone could become a trusted agent by publicly verifying their identity. Basically you need to find at least one other person who's identify is public to "sponsor" your information. If you are publishing information the Chinese government you find a U.S. sponsor and vice versa.

burke 14y ago

I think it actually says a lot more about how generally-free our society is. Giordano Bruno was imprisoned and executed for disagreeing with the church, so had much reason to hide his activities, even though they are what we could definitely consider "legitimate". Child pornography producers and consumers are similarly persecuted, though clearly with much more sound reasons. At least in western countries, there aren't a lot of instances of repressed communication that need to be conducted across a channel like this -- especially few legitimate ones. This is not to say that such a system isn't useful; just that I believe the fact they're so full of child pornography and the like is actually, in a roundabout way, an indicator of a healthy society.

endtime 14y ago

Your comment is about child porn, not about TFA. Please stay on topic.

thruflo 14y ago
Precisely -- I opened up the comments to see what people thought of the quality of the implementation. Does this guy know about cryptography and robust decentralisation? What are the trade offs in the architecture...?

_pferreir_ 14y ago

As others have said, guns don't kill people, other people (and Chuck Norris) do. Unfortunately, the right to privacy has this side-effect of allowing people to hide from others really nasty things. But it will always be like this: laws and rights protect both well and ill-behaving people. Giving those up would, however, harm all of us.

moondistance 14y ago

Couldn't it - or a similar algorithm - be used as a bittorrent alternative with superior anonymity? If yes, this might become a more common use case.

mgunes 14y ago

Accidentally downvoted you; I thought people on HN interested in autonomous, decentralized systems not acquainted with Giordano Bruno should become so: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giordano_Bruno http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giordano_Bruno http://warburg.sas.ac.uk/index.php?id=446 http://warburg.sas.ac.uk/index.php?id=446 "The Art Of Memory" by Frances Yates outlines the pathway of mnemonic and knowledge systems from alchemy to the Rennaissance, and is a comprehensive introduction to the life and work of Giordano Bruno, Ramon Llull and many other ancestors of our various technologies of memory. http://www.amazon.com/The-Art-Memory-Frances-Yates/dp/0226950018 http://www.amazon.com/The-Art-Memory-Frances-Yates/dp/022695...

spullara 14y ago

Couldn't you require N random contributors to approve of each upload before it is published? With that in place, either the system is just a group of bad actors or the good actors weed out the bad content.

grandalf 14y ago

Your argument is somewhat self-contradictory. We know that lots of child porn exists. If you create additional scarcity by preventing the exchange of old/existing child porn (probably mostly 20 year old pictures, etc.) then you increase the chances of new children being exploited. The legal adult industry has seen most of the profit evaporate b/c of the large amount of free content. The only people making money are those selling ads on top of existing content, which is often not even owned by the companies hosting it. The original owners lack the resources to enforce copyright law b/c they have no income stream to use to do so. So rather than relying upon the idealistic notion that all exploitation and exploitative pornography can actually be successfully eliminated, it might make more sense to take a more pragmatic view about the forces of supply and demand involved, with the goal of reducing additional harm.

tobias3 14y ago
Exactly. Anyonymous payment however would be bad. And currently, with e.g. bitcoin scramblers, we are getting there. I can see no harm in anonymous data exchange (except copyright infringement) on an open society. But if you can order whatever you want online anonymously -- that could result in some deplorable stuff. (That's why I think bitcoins will get shut down entirely by goverments at some point)
- grandalf 14y ago
  What bad scenarios do you see occurring with anonymous online payments? I do agree that the US Government will shut down bitcoin fairly soon, for the same reasons it doesn't allow people to create any other kind of currency. I consider governments to essentially be criminal gangs that have achieved enough power to be able to buy legitimacy. Money laundering allows 3rd party gangs to start to claim legitimacy too, so it must be stopped. This is not to discount the good things governments (and gangs) accomplish, just to call attention to the good and bad done by both. Governments generally have elaborate propaganda and disinformation arms as well, and use money laundering laws to attack the funding channels used by competitors (described derogatorily as gangs).
  - 14y ago

lovenothate 14y ago

I am a guy in my 20s who is attracted to children and I use freenet to download illegal pictures of them. The most active forum on freenet for sharing these pictures is called "child-models-girls". Little girls pose for sets of pictures which are sold commercially and then shared for free on freenet/open-internet. Mostly they are wearing skimpy clothing or swimsuits, or sometimes they naked. 90% of the freenet store is probably pictures like this which are little different to what you used to see in clothing catalogues. There is real cp too of course - pics and videos of girls/boys doing sexual things with themselves or with adults. I have no doubt the average HN reader would be shocked. However. > It's nasty stuff, too. This is not "merely offensive." Kids are abducted and murdered to make this stuff. This is just not true. Only a tiny minority of people on freenet/similar-systems are looking for stuff where children are obviously being hurt. Most of us despise it. The truth is we like to see children happy because it makes us feel better about looking at these pictures. > Think of the mechanics of an adult having sex with a six year old The mechanics don't really work. Thats why 99% of pics/vids involve touching/licking/rubbing/etc only. > In parts of the world children are more or less raised for the purpose. It's horrific. This is wild conjecture.

api 14y ago
I'm probably somewhere close to Dr. Kinsey on such issues: very libertarian and open-minded. I have no problem with pornography. I also don't necessarily judge people for having feelings. I appreciate the logical and honest post. What I have to ask is whether the people in these photos, even the very "soft-core" ones, know that their pictures are being shared over the Internet and used like this. Did they give consent, and did they understand the full implications of that consent? Did they get paid? Did they sign a contract? I think I'm opposed to this kind of thing because I'm a libertarian. I see it as exploitation and deceit and privacy violations levied against people who are too young to understand or that cannot defend themselves. I've debated people on this topic once before, and it seems to me that there are a lot of cyber-libertarians that will go straight to the mat to defend privacy rights except here. Why don't eight year olds have privacy rights? What if your doctor photographed you, told you it was for medical purposes, and then posted the pics to a gay porn site? What if a TSA screener posted millimeter wave video of you (essentially naked) to YouTube? Isn't this a lot more invasive than Facebook selling your friend graph to a marketing company? Yet most people would find that very invasive and deceptive -- a violation of their rights -- if they hadn't given consent. And no, the dark stuff is not wild conjecture. I understand that the majority of pedophiles wouldn't be into it, but it certainly does exist. Over at Reddit /r/onions I read a while ago about a forum that exists on the Tor darknet called "Violent Desires." There were lots of "I cannot un-see" kinds of comments, and many warnings about "do not go there... you do not want to know." Child trafficking is quite real as well. The world is absolutely filled with unbelievably dark stuff (in other areas too) that normal people sometimes have a hard time believing: torture ("extraordinary rendition"), blatant fraud to the tune of billions of dollars, human trafficking, slavery, off-the-books unethical human experimentation, and so on... My experience in other areas of life suggests to me that the reality is probably worse than I care to imagine.

na85 14y ago

Sadly, that's the price you pay for free speech. The only way to ensure that the world's whistleblowers can publish what they want without fear of reprisal is to ensure that the world's child pornographers can also do so.

rhizome 14y ago

Consider the possibility that these networks are seeded with that content by those immune to prosecution for doing so, who also have an interest in that kind of freedom being curtailed. This is conspiratorial, and of course I have no evidence, but I simply don't think rapey kidporn is as popular as it's portrayed.

wnight 14y ago

Strange, how you say someone could wage a social denial-of-service attack against Freenet with a bit of kiddy-porn FUD... None of the links I follow into the onion (coding mostly) have ever led to porn, let alone CP. Even if it's everywhere you look (and maybe you should consider why that is) it's nowhere I and most other people look. Even if there were a non-insignificant amount of CP being distributed there are really just two options, 1) there's a super-secure, secret group of pedophiles who cooperate to abduct and molest children and they continue to get away with it, or 2) various law enforcement groups use the same few pictures over and over in stings and honeypots. No, it's a nigh-unto made-up problem, and to the tiny degree it may exist at all, it's exactly the same on the Internet as a whole, on Dropbox, via shortened URLs in twitter, etc. To combat the problem perception that Tor is for CP problem simply quit telling people about it constantly. And if you're told that's all Tor is, treat it exactly like you would someone who started at the sleaziest portal they could and complained the internet was full of porn. As for you knowing what Freenet is full of, that's impossible unless you're claiming to have seeded it.

rdl 14y ago

Maybe stick to a text-only format. Very little illegal text which isn't otherwise beneficial.