Hard Light Productions Forums
Off-Topic Discussion => General Discussion => Topic started by: Kosh on March 21, 2008, 02:19:08 am
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http://yro.slashdot.org/yro/08/03/20/2323247.shtml
Why is the FBI getting into this again?
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Appearently they are confiscating the stuff
to jerk off to it theirself to remove the pedophile plague.
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And a new variant of rickrolling is born!
Hell if I'd included the link as a hyperlink in this post I bet I could have got at least a few people investigated by the FBI.
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All the more reason to never follow tinyurls ever again.
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Oh ****. Well, looks like my porn days are over.
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Only if you were downloading child porn or something else illegal.
For now.
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Wow, i'm totally torn by this. I mean, on one hand you've got some scumbags doing something really, really wrong, and on the other you've got a bunch of pedophiles up to their usual shenanigans and getting just the right punishment. Is one evil battling a slightly darker shade of evil.
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Wow, i'm totally torn by this. I mean, on one hand you've got some scumbags doing something really, really wrong, and on the other you've got a bunch of pedophiles up to their usual shenanigans and getting just the right punishment. Is one evil battling a slightly darker shade of evil.
And you actually think this is going to have some effect on actual pedo rings? They have their closed newsgroups where they do their thing, no one gifted with independent thought should think for a second that even a percent of all the kiddie porn is distributed via normal web pages that have links to them from anywhere. There's been some discussion going on in Finland recently about the use of Internet censorship to prevent access to foreign child porn pages, and it's pretty interesting how the "would someone think of children" argument seems to be valid in driving through any inane law proposal in our parliament. As the end result, there are now several hundreds of web pages on the secret list of Finnish Central Crime Police (which isn't very secret at all because they distribute it to ISP's that can - for now - choose to block those pages or not), of which by estimation 99.96% are false positives.
Incidentally, the list was published in the pages of an Internet activist, and as the end result, that page was put onto the censorship list. Isn't it fascinating that even though the originally stated purpose of the list was to prevent access to foreign kiddie porn sites, a Finnish blog/opinion site ended up on the list...
At any rate, this... method... raises an interesting question. Because the FBI fake links can't contain illegal material, where's any proof that the cliker attempted to access illegal material anyway?
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Not only that, if the crime of attempting to download child porn is supposedly enforceable in that manner, then under the same mode of thinking, isn't the FBI guilty of attempting to supply child porn, considering the court is saying that the actual existence of the file is not required?
I'm pretty much with Mefustae here, I can understand the intention, but not happy with the reliability of the method used.
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Not only that, if the crime of attempting to download child porn is supposedly enforceable in that manner, then under the same mode of thinking, isn't the FBI guilty of attempting to supply child porn, considering the court is saying that the actual existence of the file is not required?
I'm pretty much with Mefustae here, I can understand the intention, but not happy with the reliability of the method used.
Well when you think about it, it's not all that different from police posing as whores and arresting anyone who attempts to sample their wares. It's the same sort of thing we're seeing here, it's just the FBI is being a hell of a lot more insidious about it, not to mention the inherent reliability problems an entirely online-based initiative is sure to kick up.
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Not only that, if the crime of attempting to download child porn is supposedly enforceable in that manner, then under the same mode of thinking, isn't the FBI guilty of attempting to supply child porn, considering the court is saying that the actual existence of the file is not required?
I'm pretty much with Mefustae here, I can understand the intention, but not happy with the reliability of the method used.
Well when you think about it, it's not all that different from police posing as whores and arresting anyone who attempts to sample their wares. It's the same sort of thing we're seeing here, it's just the FBI is being a hell of a lot more insidious about it, not to mention the inherent reliability problems an entirely online-based initiative is sure to kick up.
40 year old police officers are the same as children? No, not the same.
Sometimes it takes a little wisdom to know when being insidious is a good thing.
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40 year old police officers are the same as children? No, not the same.
The general strategy is identical: Use a lure to draw out and capture scumbags. The idea being that it's pretty hard to deny it when you're caught red handed. Different media, different crime, but the same idea at heart.
Sometimes it takes a little wisdom to know when being insidious is a good thing.
Yes, I think we can all agree that child pronography/pedophelia is bad. Thanks for pointing that out. But how about we don't fall into the "think of the children!" mindset and blindly allow groups to get away with bloody murder because they protect kids. I'm not saying the FBI is blatantly crossing the line here, but the way they're headed has the definite potential to get real worrying real soon.
There have already been multiple recorded cases of persons of authority misusing government-allowed wiretapping for their own nefarious and corrupt ends, so it's not a stretch to think that a strategy as nebulous as what the FBI is trying here could be abused in a similar fashion.
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i'm with mefustae on this one...
and while sure, by far the majority of child pornography is probably deep underground, as it were, if they can find pictures posted by afghanistan terrorist groups that somehow leaked out, and trace those back, then i'm sure they can do the same thing here.
i think it's a good thing.
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The general strategy is identical: Use a lure to draw out and capture scumbags. The idea being that it's pretty hard to deny it when you're caught red handed. Different media, different crime, but the same idea at heart.
So your problem is with the strategy? Think about what they are doing again, they are not getting away with murder (although they may sometimes, I don't know). I'm all for not letting the government control every aspect of my life and a little rebellious as-well, but just because the government is not being "politically correct" in their methods doesn't mean we should forget the bigger moral issue.
What your defending is a completely different narrow mindset. We should "think of the children" regardless of which lens you put it through, honestly.
I agree that they will always find a way to make some kind of underground child porn AS-WELL as underground government policies. I don't think we should be critical over such a method of dishonesty, there is much at stake.
There is always going to be dishonesty - worry about protecting you, your family, and being happy. Only when this is compromised (and to a degree "only this") should we be up in arms.
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As several people pointed out what is to stop someone simply posting the link elsewhere disguised as a link to something else?
Suppose that in the above posing as hookers example the police arrested anyone who stopped their car near their operative before they actually asked for sex. Sure you'd get a lot of people who hire prostitutes, but you'd also get people whose cars broke down at the wrong time and people on the way to shops or residences nearby.
To say someone wanted to commit a crime you need to prove intent and simply clicking on a link isn't really a high enough standard of proof for my liking.
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By the way, what does the US law (federal or defined on state-by-state basis?) say about incitement (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incitement) to crime?
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"Indeed. We're all ignoring the real issue here - does generating a search warrant in response to clicking a link violate the Amazon One Click Order patent..?"
:lol:
Some really great comments are out there.
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Hmmm. Given that the FBI will remove large amounts of stuff from your house in the process of a search you could thereby call them a one click removal service. So possibly. :D
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Couple things:
While many child porn rings are very careful about their access and sharing, there are many people out there whom we can classify as "The dumb ones." These are the people the FBI is catching... the ones who aren't terribly smart about it, haven't been doing it long, and aren't the actual creators or perpetrators. That said, they are still downloading and viewing child porn which is illegal and abhorrent. So, I have no sympathy.
Second, while Slashdot and other news sources are great for posting brief summaries of law enforcement initiatives, they rarely (if ever) get a complete picture. In my experience, there is usually a lot more to enforcement and intelligence activity than what gets reported in the media. I would venture a guess that this is such a situation. Most online "stings" conducted by the FBI and similar authorities have been reasonably complex and well-targeted affairs. While checks and balances are undoubtably necessary, the number of false positives their operation will generate is likely quite low - this isn't going to be a matter of posting fake links in the wide public spaces of the internet; they will target online communities and known pornography sites with material that hovers on the fringe of legality in the first place.
It's a fairly safe bet that when they go through the effort of pulling ISP information and a search warrant, it's not going to be done lightly.
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/deletes History
/deletes Cookies
/encrypts folders
Welp, that takes care of that.
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/deletes History
/deletes Cookies
/encrypts folders
Welp, that takes care of that.
Thats not enough. You need to find a file ANNIHILATION program that actually wipes the data by writing a solid block of pure 0 or 1 bits over the files to be deleted. Throwing stuff in the trash folder just categorizes it as "deleted" and therefore overwritable; it doesn't ACTUALLY get rid of the data.
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I would tell you to encrypt your file system, but apparently it's pretty easy to hack one with some canned air and liquid nitrogen.
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/deletes History
/deletes Cookies
/encrypts folders
Welp, that takes care of that.
Thats not enough. You need to find a file ANNIHILATION program that actually wipes the data by writing a solid block of pure 0 or 1 bits over the files to be deleted. Throwing stuff in the trash folder just categorizes it as "deleted" and therefore overwritable; it doesn't ACTUALLY get rid of the data.
%SystemRoot%\System32\dfrg.msc
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Till you get caught by having a thumbs.db file that is.
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rm ./
UNIX ftw.
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don't kid yourself... the NSA has machines that read magnetic residue on drives.
you could format, and install the OS from scratch, and they could still see 95% of the data you had before the format.
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don't kid yourself... the NSA has machines that read magnetic residue on drives.
you could format, and install the OS from scratch, and they could still see 95% of the data you had before the format. [citation needed]
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Magnet.
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It's pretty easy to make data really hard to read; it's pretty hard to be 100% sure of eliminating the data however. It's just like every other piece of evidence. It's pretty easy to make it tough to tell forensically what happened, it's pretty damn hard to make it impossible.
Honestly unless your a practicing pedophile, an international terrorist, or a hacker working for a foreign power against the Chinese or US government. (or doing anything at all on the internet in China) The NSA probably doesn't give a rats ass about you.
That's not to say that there isn't horrible invasion of privacy, but right now it's only that. No one is going to arrest average Joe-down-the-street for being into feet YET and these sorts of measures are completely unnessesary.
It'd be like wearing a hat, coveralls, and rubber gloves before jaywalking.
<EDIT>
Couldn't think of a better example than jaywalking, yes porn is legal, but you get the idea.
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Thought porn was legal.
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Thought porn was legal.
It helps to read the thread before you post.
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don't kid yourself... the NSA has machines that read magnetic residue on drives.
you could format, and install the OS from scratch, and they could still see 95% of the data you had before the format. [citation needed]
Source: Myself. I've done extensive work for the NSA, and continue to do so.
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just kidding... i wish i could work for the NSA.
actually i don't know where i got that from, but i've formatted hard drives before, personally, then gone back and retrieved 85% of the data. If i can do it, with freeware software, 4 or 5 years ago, then i'm betting they can... and they do. i've read about such machines :)
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I've seen a program where they were able to do this with other magnetic media like video and backup tapes. They can ignore the information that is on there now and pick up the data that was on there before. Might have seen it on the Discovery or Science channel.
On a side note anyone remember something like PCtools version 6 that came with a hard drive utility program that would wipe the drive to military standards? Now that took awhile to run.
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People... it's called a low-level format.
Hard disks store data magnetically, using a binary switch (1 or a 0). When you delete data on a hard disk normally all it does is erase the file entry in the OS's file tables. In order to actually erase the data, you need to re-write to the region to eliminate all trace of the previous information. This is accomplished by either re-writing new data over the old (which doesn't get rid of everything), or writing zeroes to the drive. Commerical-grade software also exists that constantly writes nonsense-data to sectors containing deleted information to ensure any deleted files cannot be recovered.
Magnets "erase" hard disks because they physically reset the information on the drive to its base-state... providing of course you take the time to do a complete sweep of the data device. Magnets can also muck up the internal mechanisms of the HD so it dies anyway but leaves the data intact.
At any rate, a complete low-level format of a hard disk will make any and all data on it completely unrecoverable, even to military-grade sweeper software (as it happens, I tried it once).
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One program I've seen (Active@ Killdisk) can do 35-pass random character writes to the disk. I think that's sufficient protection.
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Deducting from the amount of text discussing how to really delete stuff from hard drives in this thread, one could make some interesting conclusions about the perversions of the HLP forumites...
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lol... :lol:
:nervous:
I hope not.
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It's pretty easy to make data really hard to read; it's pretty hard to be 100% sure of eliminating the data however. It's just like every other piece of evidence. It's pretty easy to make it tough to tell forensically what happened, it's pretty damn hard to make it impossible.
Honestly unless your a practicing pedophile, an international terrorist, or a hacker working for a foreign power against the Chinese or US government. (or doing anything at all on the internet in China) The NSA probably doesn't give a rats ass about you.
That's not to say that there isn't horrible invasion of privacy, but right now it's only that. No one is going to arrest average Joe-down-the-street for being into feet YET and these sorts of measures are completely unnessesary.
It'd be like wearing a hat, coveralls, and rubber gloves before jaywalking.
<EDIT>
Couldn't think of a better example than jaywalking, yes porn is legal, but you get the idea.
Why would they arrest you for downloading foot fetish porn ever? They would have no reason to care about anything except child porn, rape porn, and snuff films. It's not 1910 anymore. Just take the "yet" off of that statement because banning porn is not going to happen. Even pedophile crap is legal if it has no real children in it.
And if you do download child porn...**** you. Really. How can you have sympathy for people who sexually explot kids?
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Six Steps:
1. Encrypt all your Hard Drive with a 1024 Bit Encryption.
2. Delete it all securely (overwriting it completely with 1 or 0).
3. Reformat Hard Drive.
4. Put near a extremely strong magnet, preferably the magnetic field of a Nuclear Power Generator.
5. Burn it.
6. Throw all ashes into a lake/river.
Eat this, NSA.
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Why would they arrest you for downloading foot fetish porn ever? They would have no reason to care about anything except child porn, rape porn, and snuff films. It's not 1910 anymore. Just take the "yet" off of that statement because banning porn is not going to happen. Even pedophile crap is legal if it has no real children in it.
And if you do download child porn...**** you. Really. How can you have sympathy for people who sexually explot kids?
If you read it, that's my point. They might start arresting people for porn if for example, the government was run by the Christian right.
I'm not having sympathy for pedophiles, terrorist or hackers, I'm just saying you have little to worry about unless you are one.
Don't be so quick to put words in my mouth.
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Thought porn was legal.
It helps to read the thread before you post.
Its a big thread, and i read a bit of it. Just not all. Dam FBI.
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Wow, this may transcend Rick Rolling as the internet-ownage device.
"Rick Roll'd" -> "FBI'd, *****!"
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Why would they arrest you for downloading foot fetish porn ever? They would have no reason to care about anything except child porn, rape porn, and snuff films. It's not 1910 anymore. Just take the "yet" off of that statement because banning porn is not going to happen. Even pedophile crap is legal if it has no real children in it.
And if you do download child porn...**** you. Really. How can you have sympathy for people who sexually explot kids?
If you read it, that's my point. They might start arresting people for porn if for example, the government was run by the Christian right.
I'm not having sympathy for pedophiles, terrorist or hackers, I'm just saying you have little to worry about unless you are one.
Don't be so quick to put words in my mouth.
I didn't say you did have sympathy, that question was rhetorical.
At any rate, I do not believe a right-wing government would dare to arrest people for porn. We spent several years under a right-wing government and even more years with a right-wing president, and that didn't happen. The constitution, the modern culture, the businesses that produce pornography, and the general public nowadays are all working against tightening sexual mores and working towards sexual liberalization. Banning porn won't happen in the United States, ever. Those days are long, long behind us.
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Just coat your hard drive case with magnesium and install an ignitor to turn your child porno adventures into lava. You might burn down your house in the process, as magnesium fires are hard to put out, but if you have porno in the physical dominion, this takes care of that too!
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Just coat your hard drive case with magnesium and install an ignitor to turn your child porno adventures into lava. You might burn down your house in the process, as magnesium fires are hard to put out, but if you have porno in the physical dominion, this takes care of that too!
Why not just install a pipebomb inside your tower, and have it wired to go off upon the depression of a certain combination of keys. Just make sure to keep your ****ing cat off the keyboard.
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Cause then the FBI simply switch to calling you a terrorist and stick you in jail anyway.
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This really is a question of 'do the ends justify the means'?. A great number of bad things have been done throughout history because someone believed that to be true. History generally wasn't so kind to them.
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I did have a comment about this matter, but the amount of crap and misinformation about magnetic storage made me sick to my stomach. Now you can't have it.
Well done.
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I did have a comment about this matter, but the amount of crap and misinformation about magnetic storage made me sick to my stomach. Now you can't have it.
Well done.
Aww, but now we all really want to know!
C'mon mister Scuddie, don't be mean! :(