Wow, the website of his hosting company[1] is, eh, extremly honest:
> Further, as Kosovo is an extremely corrupt country, we are able to bribe both executive and judicative as well as getting information about court orders and raids before execution, enabling us to move servers out of the affected location, protecting our clients in any situation. Our excellent Serbian connections enable us to also move servers cross-border and play "ping pong" between both countries, essentially keeping content online forever.
Not necessarily. Making that statement, setting up in a country that has enough issues to make it plausible, and then not paying the bribe would also make a lot of sense. See also: no log VPNs that actually were logging.
Worst case scenario they shut down, collaborate fully with the police and keep all the profits up til then. Better case scenario they make a deal with the police and keep operating and making profits while covertly providing assistance. Best case scenario the issue never comes up and they make all the profits without having to spend those expenses.
My impression is that in this kind of shady web hosting the companies never last that long so you wouldn't want to invest a lot in bribes and multiple data centers and so on when you could lie and make short term profit.
Note also that corruption isn't a boolean flag. First off the cop make take the exact same strategy: take your money, do nothing else, and hope their boss never gets interested in you while planning not to protect you if anything comes up. Furthermore there are all sorts of anticorruption efforts in that area linked to US aid. That doesn't mean there isn't corruption, it does mean that if a major US corp works with the FBI in a major investigation the local police may rather piss you off than lose critical aid funding.
Which vpn was no-log-but-logging? I was shopping around for an alternative after mullvad blocked port forwarding, but it seems like no one else is as trustworthy. Not that I need it for my “attempt to port forward smash ultimate from within crummy hospital internet” purposes, but hey, principle of the thing and all that.
I am all-but-certain that NordVPN doesn't. I am in possession of records from a recent police investigation in which law enforcement subpoenaed NordVPN and the company replied, essentially, that they had no information connecting a particular IP address, at a specific date and time, to any specific user.
(I am a reporter who covers law enforcement and crime.)
Exact examples are hard to find in the press. One that comes to mind is from a Belgian Telco company that was internally hacked by an employee hiding behind NordVPN. Nord when approached by the telco responded with the usual no logs, but after the telco involved the Interpol, logs were given and the attacker doxxed.
This article (edited multiple times!) is not evidence of anything, let alone Nord co-operating with law enforcement to log customer data.
> Exact examples are hard to find in the press.
You said there are countless examples of Nord logging user data, why are you backtracking now?
> One that comes to mind is from a Belgian Telco company that was internally hacked by an employee hiding behind NordVPN. Nord when approached by the telco responded with the usual no logs, but after the telco involved the Interpol, logs were given and the attacker doxxed.
>This article (edited multiple times!) is not evidence of anything, let alone Nord co-operating with law enforcement to log customer data.
Not sure what is not clear from this:
“We will comply with lawful requests as long as they are delivered according to all the laws and regulations," NordVPN says. "We are a company that protects the security and privacy of our customers, but we operate according to laws and regulations.”
Why you don't find articles googling is that Nord puts a lot of effort in removing or burring it (google their dispute with TorGuard). Same what they tried to do with the breach in 2018, they half-ass disclosed at least 6 months later after being known to them. (at a point in time the breach already leaked)
Example I gave was a talk in a hacker conference, with no recording (common request for hacker conference talks).
> Not sure what is not clear from this: “We will comply with lawful requests as long as they are delivered according to all the laws and regulations," NordVPN says. "We are a company that protects the security and privacy of our customers, but we operate according to laws and regulations.”
This is obviously true for every VPN company that intends to keep operating. And in itself is not evidence of anything.
If all the links were taken down, how come no one saved a copy on wayback machine because the burden of proof is on you to provide these backups every time you make such allegations. Otherwise I'll just assume you are just being disingenuous.
Then that is a service then which might be safe for people who's opponents are the police. But some people also worry about threats from the obscenely rich, from their own intelligence agencies, from foreign intelligence agencies, from organized crime, and/or from popular mob outrage.
Your experience doesn't indicate the safety of the service against those other threats, and not only may they not be correlated but they may be anti-correlated. E.g. I bet both CIA and mob run VPN services are really good at saying no to the police.
The fundamental thought that drives my opinion on this subject is this:
We already know for a fact that some state actors do broad scale full take surveillance of the internet. VPN services are even more attractive to monitor because the users are somewhat self-selecting as people who have something to hide, more intel bang per megabit monitored. Without surveilling VPNs these entities would have a blindspot in their expensive internet monitoring machine, so its important just for completeness sake. The VPN provider game is also a much lower barrier to entry, smaller players that don't have the power to push around AT&T can get in on it. Russia, for example, isn't in that much of a position to engage in world wide telecom monitoring (except perhaps that one fiber that goes through sibera and has really low latency between europe and china)-- but they sure can stand up some VPNs and get the worlds traffic to come to them.
Plus, if you run a VPN service people will pay you to run their secret data through you. It's a profit center even before you get to the potential revenue streams from abusing your position. Perhaps it becomes so profitable that you'd prefer to protect it and so you minimize your abuse, but the optimal amount of abuse will pretty much never be zero.
So, If you're the head of a clandestine service or serious organized crime group and you haven't launched at least one VPN service you should be immediately fired for grave incompetence.
The best reason to not run one would just be that you've already infiltrated many existing ones through operatives and backdoored hardware.
And also the heat you take running these services is much easier to deal with if you have 'connections' either of the run-by-a-TLA sort or the we-have-blackmail-material-and-can-break-your-fingers sort. And corrupt VPNs have a whole extra potential revenue/benefit source so they can afford to under-price any honest competition.
Given that, we should expect that many VPNs are honeypots. Probably not all of them, but by their very nature it should be hard to impossible to tell which.
This sounds somewhat hard to believe. If the description of events is accurate, this would be superb marketing for the VPN provider. Why would they not talk about it publicly?
It's obviously an unsubstantiated statement, but given all the concrete information on the MOs of alphabet agencies, it seems like a reasonable bet. If they haven't done one of those things, they probably just haven't gotten around to it yet.
Room 641A is located in the SBC Communications building at 611 Folsom
Street, San Francisco, three floors of which were occupied by AT&T before
SBC purchased AT&T. The room was referred to in internal AT&T documents as
the SG3 [Study Group 3] Secure Room.
The room measures about 24 by 48 feet (7.3 by 14.6 m) and contains several
racks of equipment [...].
The oddly detailed description along with the badly lit photo makes this read like an SCP entry.
Is it that wild? There are a few questions we have to ask
1. Do these agencies have the motivation to do the above? I think the answer here is an obvious yes to everyone
2. Do these agencies have the technical ability to hack the VPNs, the finances to pay them for access, or some other reasonable measure to coerce compliance?
If 1 and 2 are both true, then the OP claim is also certainly true.
Given that 1 is true, I don’t think it’s “wild” to claim that these agencies cannot satisfy 2. In fact I’d say given the historical record, the more wild claim is that the CIA/NSA etc is incapable of satisfying #2.
It's a crime. Maintaining continual access to every major vpn provider increases the probability of getting caught breaking the law towards one while continually risking the methods required to acquire such access each time your implant is discovered.
If you are using unknown exploits not passed on to relevant software projects each discovery further risks said exploit being discovered then used against us individuals and enterprise.
It is a potentially very high cost for mediocre gain as criminals can turn to more secure methods leaving you with a lot of data on whose hiding piracy from their ISP but little of actual value.
Meanwhile you can direct attack targets any other ways when they are likely to have actual intelligence instead of hoping they log into nord VPN.
In brief speculation is incredibly likely to be based on bad logic and should probably attend more to actual know.
Eg most people aren't important enough to directly target. Uncle Sam probably knows the entire contents of your Gmail but not what you do via nord VPN. At such time as you become an international drug lord your privacy is likely to fall apart when Sam starts serving providers who do business with you.
The Interpol literally took over a darknet market (Dream) using stolen admin credentials and continued to run the site for months to gather intelligence on vendors and buyers. Not the same thing but if LE is willing to operate a major illegal drug trafficking operation then surely hacking a few VPN companies doesn't seem impossible.
Great example however unlike constantly hacking all VPN providers this is potentially deemed legal kind of like under cover cops doing controlled buys to trace drug networks. Also unlike hacking all the VPNS. It's also pretty high benefit for a very finite and controllable risk.
What crime is it for the NSA/CIA, who are explicitly tasked by the government with gathering intelligence on foreign agencies, to hack say Mullwad, a Swedish entity? That’s like saying it’s a murder for the police to shoot someone who has hostages. I mean yes it’s the same action, but when it’s been deemed justified by the government, it’s not really a crime in the same way.
A crime in Sweden perhaps. Who will Sweden charge? Do they even have names for individual employees?
It’s also a “crime” to sell false and compromised products to customers yet CryptoAG existed for decades.
> At such time as you become an international drug lord your privacy is likely to fall apart when Sam starts serving providers who do business with you.
Then you’re simply agreeing under point 2, I.e they have they ability to coerce cooperation when desired
This is really the unfortunate truth. >90% of global ISP's not only collect but also sell netflow metadata commercially. Nanosecond timestamps, packet sizes, source IPs, destination IP's. Doesn't matter what VPN provider you use, whether you're using Tor, how many residential proxies you're routing through via a complex proxychains config... commercial entities can correlate virtually all of it.
Team Cymru is one such buyer of bulk netflow metadata from ISP's (and their upstream providers) around the globe, who do all of the correlation work on their side, and then sell it, under product names like Pure Signal Recon (formerly Augury)... including to law enforcement agencies and the US military...
There are also no laws dictating that ISP's must disclose whether or not they are selling that information, and they have no commercial incentive to choose to honestly disclose that they do.
If your adversary is NSA/FBI/US Army, or any other deep-pocketed nation-state-level adversaries who Team Cymru is willing to sell to, the safest assumption is that there is absolutely nothing you can do to obscure the origin of your traffic with 100% certainty.
Let's say you are using an ISP to connect to a VPN provider.
That VPN provider does what most of them do and SNATs multiple customers connections to a single exit public IP.
How can they correlate the encrypted wireguard data from my ISP connection to the VPN provider and then from the VPN provider to the final endpoint (say, ProtonMail)?
There is a known traffic pattern for a GET request to Protonmail - size of the initial request, # of subsequent requests (for subresources, like CSS, JS, images, etc), and size of those requests, as well as size of those responses.
There is a known overhead for encapsulating these requests in an OpenVPN or WireGuard tunnel.
So even without looking at the contents of the traffic at all, the metadata your ISP collects can easily reveal that you sent outbound traffic and received inbound traffic that had a high statistical correlation with the expected traffic flow of a request to Protonmail encapsulated within a Wireguard tunnel, to a known VPN node, and then a (known) number of milliseconds before that VPN's upstream provider also made a request that perfectly matched the expected packet flow of Protonmail. If you have visibility into the traffic netflow of both your ISP and the VPN's upstream provider, consider yourself confidently unmasked.
The initial fingerprinting laid firm groundwork for your adversary to suspect you went to protonmail, and then the network behavior of the first destination machine you connected to simply offered confirmation of that.
Hell. Is that amount of global correlation even possible? What if I route through 7 countries? Surely the data of every single ISP on earth cannot be collected in the hands of a single entity?
Btw I2P provides imho decent amount of protection for timing and packet sniffing attacks.
You are correct that not every single ISP sells this data, but for reference, back when Team Cymru's 'Pure Signal Recon' product was advertised under the name 'Augury', Team Cymru claimed that data sources included "90% of global ISPs". They currently claim to be ingesting and processing neflow metadata from over 200 billion (with a b) connections per DAY.
So in theory, yes, route through enough ISP's, and you may eventually hit one along the way who isn't selling that data.
That said, to my knowledge, no ISPs are required to disclose whether or not they sell metadata, and as profit-oriented corporations, have no incentive to be honest about that if asked.
So it's something of a gamble to assume you can definitely find a path through n ISPs where at least one of them does not sell netflow metadata.
Which VPNs do you find effective for the second purpose? My small experience of using VPNs is that you just end up suffering from the poor reputation of your exit IPs, which rarely stay secret for long. So you end up blocked or at least frequently CAPTCHA'd on sites that wouldn't have blocked your own IP, and I imagine those that are doing geoblocking have a big blacklist of VPN IPs (I know BBC iPlayer does)
I rarely have the need, I use mullvad, and it works for those occasions. But I don’t need to circumvent any serious blocks, most of the time it’s just something being US-only or "not EU", and neither of those sites care much if you circumvent it.
> Further, as Kosovo is an extremely corrupt country, we are able to bribe both executive and judicative as well as getting information about court orders and raids before execution.
What happens if someone else is willing to pay a higher bribe than you are...?
Competent corrupt officials can do the math, and understand ongoing 1X bribes are far better than poisoning their money tree by stupidly accepting a one-time 10X bribe.
“There's probably no one so easily bribed, but he lacks even the fundamental honesty of honorable corruption. He doesn't stay bribed; not for any sum.”
-Discussion of a rather sinister court official in Isaac Asimov's 'Foundation And Empire'
I’ve seen it in the business world, but trust is everything and if you break it once even accidentally good luck. When crime enters the picture you probably won’t ever get more than a single chance, or worse, be in physical danger if you do.
I dunno. The one thing I took away from reading both memoirs of people involved in crime (yes it exists) and reports about their court cases is that there is no honor among chiefs.
And there is very little trust too. They lie and defraud each other constantly. They do kill each other too, but most often because someone knows too much or has something want.
Sure, but if there's enforcement officials that will take a periodic 1X bribe to protect illegal activity, there's likely someone else in society (possibly, other enforcement officials taking a bribe, or possibly other groups that have simply bribed the right people to protect their own activities) that will take a 10X payment to suppress that activity from some party with conflicting interests, perhaps by means such as putting a gun to the head of the official taking the periodic 1X stream and giving them a choice of betraying the payer or having their office redecorated with the contents of their skull.
Corrupt systems rather notoriously do not tend to feature unity of action or interest throughout what is notionally the government, or even what are nominally single agencies within the government.
Also, a 10X carrot directly to the bribed official receiving the periodic 1X stream can also be combined with a stick.
You don't think the plata o plomo choice only applies to actors not already on someone else’s corrupt (beside the official government’s overt) payroll, do you?
In countries with systemic corruption, those people collecting periodic 1X bribes share a significant part of them with their superiors, who share it with their superiors etc all the way to the top. There may not be unity of government or any formal organization, but the cliques are very strong, and they do form along institutional lines. This isn't to say that there is no bribe large enough to break the system, but 10x is way too low for most bureaucrats to risk their neck trying to do so.
It's more complicated than that. After all, these bribes aren't exactly public and transparent. A competent corrupt official can always pocket the 10x and pretend that the 1x target didn't pay in time, or that some other official did it, or some other excuse.
In a volatile place covering for illegal thing that can bite you in the ass - you'll take the payout, gain political points by cooperating with some agency and spin yourself as a hero in the case.
Also, just because you are offering a simple cash bribe doesn’t mean the party trying to subvert the person you are bribing is doing that and not, e.g., putting a gun to their head as a stick while also offering a cash bribe as a carrot.
Or just bribing someone else in a position to withdraw the authority that the person you bribed is using to protect you.
Wouldn't full disclosure make them, in some sense, honest?
Also, you have just condemned entire nations of people, like those who lived under Soviet domination, where bribery became custom, because if you wanted to accomplish anything, you had to bribe the people involved. Just got married and want an apartment for your new family? You could submit a housing application, but it might bubble up to the top of the queue by the time you hit retirement. A bribe given to the woman in the office handling the paperwork can help grease the track. Have a totally curable disease that, without intervention, can kill you? Well, you could have your name added to a long wait list and have your treatment started next year, or you could "gift" your state-pensioned doctor a cognac, some luxury chocolates, and an envelop containing a "tip" to shorten the wait time. Need to travel abroad? Well, guess what. The passport stays with the government for "safe keeping". They might not be in a hurry to let you leave, just yet. However, with a few enticing arrangements and exchanges, you'll be on the next plane headed over the Iron Curtain.
In other words, I'm not convinced bribes are a categorically wrong thing for someone to offer. To receive, on the other hand...
The soviet system sounds pointlessly overloaded with middle men. Why not abandon the "official system with middle men bribes" and descend all the way into mafia families and protection rackets?
No matter the empathy I have for the suffering. What is the point of offering a bribe, to bully the system, in the same way the receiver intends to break the rules?
Just tell the truth and say the system sucks. You scratch my back and I'll scratch yours done en masse, hardens society for everyone and then you have to bribe, like the Soviets did.
> What is the point of offering a bribe, to bully the system
Imagine your grandma needs urgent surgery and it is customary to give the doctor some money to 'ensure best results'. Will you refuse?
> descend all the way into mafia families and protection rackets?
You mean like some monopolized industries in the US have done?
> then you have to bribe, like the Soviets did.
Why Soviets, Bribing is the default way of society - Imperial Russia has no concept of bribery, if you wanted a government official to do their job, you had to pay them, and they set the price, thats just how the system worked.
Victorian britain was insanely corrupt too. Absence of corruption is unusual.
It is not a binary choice. My grandma can get the care via a bribe and the next day I can go join the local mafia.
Not like a US corporation, the machine of machines, systems of systems. An actual mafia that breaks down the government and replaces official services with a protection racket around people's families and uses physical violence to enforce arbitrary mafia business norms.
The real criminal mafia does not answer to a doctor who takes the wrong bribes and that doctor may go home that evening to find his house/family/prized thing to be in jeopardy. The mafia built on family and religious connections that can't be bought out, and will balance out a non-working government when it fails.
The Soviet system props up the normal structure just enough to leech off it. That is a luxury of Russian culture that doesn't survive elsewhere, for very good reason.
Suffering isn't an excuse for corruption that hurts basic services for the middle/lower class.
Lie, bribe, cheat and steal for all the yacht money and control over steel mills, between upper class toffs, I don't care.
When your corruption stops society from working for the majority, or oppresses the majority, then you have become the problem.
> The soviet system sounds pointlessly overloaded with middle men
I find this conclusion hilarious (if not untrue) - you can say absolutely the same for the USA system. So many things require a useless middleman that only takes their cut and adds friction - car dealerships, "value added" resellers, health insurance, etc.
> I like living in countries where corruption is accessible for everybody.
The emphasis here was on everybody because this followed a rant about how Western societies are corrupt where the rich gets to ignore the laws and he wanted to do the same. He said this in 2022 so whether he really did move in 2017 for this reason is impossible to say.
Tate is also arrested currently, so looks like this kind of "honesty" has a price. And in general I'm pretty sure that bribery even when done abroad would get you in trouble in your own country, so I'm quite surprised by such statements put like that in the open.
> The supposed human trafficking charges against him appear to be completely bogus and Kafka-esque, and therefore violate his rights against arbitrary arrest and detention.
I don't know enough details on the 'kafka-esque' nature of the charges, so I won't comment on them, but he has more than one credible rape accusations him against in his home country, and he talks openly about using women as sex workers and taking their income from it.
According to NYT (https://archive.md/4tSmc) prosecutors haven't made the key details of the charges public, and the media reports sharply contradict Tate's own characterization of the charges in recent interviews. This is roughly the premise of Kafka's "The Trial".
It's hard to judge what is true or not, especially if it's about a public figure and especially when said public figure seems to be making the most idiotic choices ever.
There are plenty of women pretending to be cool, even doing rape role play and then using recorder material to blackmail men.
He was obviously into BDSM stuff (he was being grilled for a video in which he was hitting a woman with a belt - the woman went on video to record it was consensual), so it would be incredibly easy to trap and blackmail.
Similar situation with human trafficking: the girls were always free to leave but they were getting paid for sex work. He was for sure a digital pimp (not sure if that's a crime).
Overall, I don't think Tate is an actual abuser: it would be incredibly stupid to go public with such a past; I'd bet he is just a self centered narcissist who likes to get into risky and dumb situations and thinks nothing bad will happen to him because he's God.
These two things are not mutually exclusive. In fact, one would think that a narcissist who has gotten away with it all his life would think he was invulnerable. It certainly tracks that he would be open about it.
And really, if it walks like a rapist, and it talks like a rapist, and it acts like a rapist... it is probably a rapist.
I don't think anyone is saying he should be in jail because he's saying misogynistic stuff. The context of his bragging about corrupt officials was on why his illegal casinos and sex trafficking operations didn't have any problems (while he himself never directly admitted to it, some of his associates tweeted about beating a "girlfriend" who wanted to stop doing webcame shows, and he heavily implies it at time when talking about how he "keeps women under control").
That's why he deserves a fair trial, and as a result, probably jail time. It's possible he didn't actually do anything wrong, but that's very improbable.
> I don't think anyone is saying he should be in jail because he's saying misogynistic stuff.
For what it's worth, I do. The shit he and others of his ilk teach to young, vulnerable men is inspiring a lot of real-world violations of women, some even get drawn to outright terrorism and murder.
In Germany, we call such persons "geistige Brandstifter" for a reason. They may not light a fire on their own - in general they keep their hands very clean and shiny to be able to spread their message far and wide - but they sure as hell have no issues when others do the dirty work for them. And of course when someone follows the stochastic terrorism strategy, the preachers disavow them.
> In Germany, we call such persons "geistige Brandstifter" for a reason.
The "there's a world for that in German" thing is probably a good (but obviously imperfect) inoculation against extremist propaganda.
I'm often frustrated that we don't have pithy little phrases specific to all kinds of bad behavior in English. It is easier to talk about things if they're given specific names.
Yes, which we've done, but if I go around talking to people in Seattle about "Geistige Brandstifter" I have exactly one friend who is going to know what I'm talking about because they're German.
Language doesn't really work unless there's broad social buy-in, otherwise you're just talking to yourself.
It's nice to have specific terms for special generic concepts. However, use of the German language doesn't stop there, and creates an association between some terms and use in a specific political context, removing these expressions from politically correct usability even outside of the political context that claimed them. And those are a lot more subtle and difficult to identify than e.g., allow/deny-lists.
That is how fascism started, increasing the verbal threat, a string of political assassinations and subsequently not giving a f* because your hands are clean, but shouldn't ideas be challenged not suppressed?
If people cannot be trusted and should rather be cocooned from the true range of human thought, doesn't this go against every assumption we use to justify our freedoms?
> If people cannot be trusted and should rather be cocooned from the true range of human thought, doesn't this go against every assumption we use to justify our freedoms?
Well, we've seen in 1933-1945 where that sort of orthodox interpretations of "free speech" leads. And we've seen in the Covid era that some people are able to politicize wearing masks... or to put it differently: the intersection between the dumbest humans and the smartest bears and crows is so large that we cannot design actually bear/crow proof trash cans because enough people wouldn't be able to open them.
With politics it is just the same: there are more than enough dumb fucks on this planet that someone like Donald Trump was able to lead them to storm Congress, leading to multiple people getting killed, and more severely injured. Society needs some sort of defense mechanism against those ruthless enough to use moronically dumb people as a weapon and, like Trump did, discard them aside when they outlived their usefulness. People got sentenced to many years worth of prison time for following Trump's suggestion - and yet, to my knowledge, he didn't pay a single one's legal bills, assist their families or grant a pardon. Even the goddamn mafia takes better care for those actually risking prison time and their families!
I know this unpopular and naive but I wish political self segregation was an option.
I want to live somewhere with liberal values, universal suffrage, same sex marriage, the right to change your gender, tax-funded healthcare and capitalist neo-liberal means of production but I cannot deny someone else's dream of a white nationalist state or socialist dictatorship or black ethnostate or Shariah theocracy.
I'd hope if people actually lived in a society that had those values and endured all the limitations it brings they'd change their minds about the rules they want to structure society, given the only rule would be for everyone to be free to choose where they want to live.
Yes I do think people should be free to ruin their own lives as much as possible if it doesn't infringe on others.
Tate is an incel? "a member of an online community of young men who consider themselves unable to attract women sexually"
I think Tate is going to be super surprised to learn that. Dude is many things, an incel is not one of them.
Perhaps you have been caught up in the hysteria and are attributing things to him that he is not responsible for? I'm not a Tate fan and think he is probably not a good person but there has very much been a witch hunt / circus atmosphere around those who are anti him. Dude advocates for traditional male roles in relationships and for people to think for themselves and try to be the best version of themselves. Alot of it is very much a money making scheme. He is no worse than a lot of other people and far better than others. He has his good and bad aspects like everyone else. If its found he is guilty of the crimes he was charged with then I hope he goes to prison. If not then he has a right to speak.
He's not an incel, but he specifically targets incels and the incel movement. Men who don't have any problems finding women they want to date aren't a suitable target for this kind of rhetoric.
Does he encourage them to remain incels or to better themselves and become something else? Seens like incels are pretty bad and we should encourage them to not be incels anymore.
I do realize he doesn't do this out of the kindness of his heart and there is a monetary aspect.
As far as people that are not incels not being a target for his rhetoric, I somewhat disagree. He preaches a lot about discipline, and personal responsibility. Something I can relate to. I am not an incel, I am happily married with kids, financially successful, and decent looking. I say this not to brag, there are many people on this site multiples more successful than I am but just to illustrate that very few people are 100% bad and worthy of silencing. There can be good in most messaging. The OP I replied to advocated for silencing Tate, I personally don't think anyone should be silenced, we are all responsible for our own actions and reactions to stimuli.
The few truly evil people on this earth live on in history books, everyone else is shades of grey.
Oh he's not an Incel by any means, but he's regarded as the ultimate role model, the person to become, by a hell of a lot of them. And that is the true danger behind Tate: there are a lot of people able and willing to commit an awful lot of criminal or offensive things just to get to the point he is.
Would you not prefer that incels, including the list of those you provided that committed violent crimes instead change who they are, gain confidence in themselves, establish a relationship and live a normal life? The list you provided was a group of people that committed "an awful lot of criminal or offensive things" without him. Seems like them gaining some self confidence and accepting responsibility for their own place in the world would be a good thing. Something he advocates for
The only incel forum I've seen is incels.is and searching for Andrew Tate I see just as much if not more negative opinion of him as there is positive. Even the positive ones are "yeah he's a grifter, but he annoys people I don't like" which is hardly thinking of him as a role model.
As a commenter just proved, "nobody is saying" is always false. It may only be a few nutters, but often it's lots and lots of nutters (even prominent members of government).
Despite the name, most folks in Western Liberal Democracies who call themselves "liberal" or similar aren't actually interested in liberalism and only want democracy when they win (so they can oppress those who disagree with them).
If I understood you correctly, it would be something like (as rhetorical example) liberals wanting the government to take action in ensuring same sex marriage even if that goes against the cultural beliefs of the majority?
My rebuttal ,if I understood you, would be to point at the difference between a democracy and a dictatorship of the masses.
You hopefully can't legalize lynching in a liberal democracy even going by their original intent, which includes human rights and civil liberties.
According to NYT (https://archive.md/4tSmc) the key details of the charges are kept confidential by the prosecutors. Media has implied that Tate running a webcam business is ipso-facto illegal, but it is not--roughly 400,000 women and 5,000 companies do webcams in Romania.
In various recent interviews (Tucker Carlson, Patrick Bet David, both on YouTube), Tate has claimed he is not charged with any sex/violent crimes including rape (contrary to NYT and other reports) nor is he charged with anything in connection to his webcam studio. Tate claims the only charges against him are seducing women (so-called "Loverboy method" of trafficking) to make Tiktok videos for which he did not receive financial compensation. If this is true, I would file it under the "bogus"/"arbitrary" category. (And without victim blaming, I would also observe that any woman who believes Tate's promise of a serious relationship has clearly not done her research.)
Again because the full details of the charges are kept confidential ("Kafka-esque") none of us know, but I would think that Tate (with nudging from his lawyers) would be smart enough not to misrepresent the charges against him in interviews. He will have his day in court, and we will see then.
Not to hijack his comment but I am open to betting my HN account that those charges on him will be cleared. There is no evidence on what he is accused of, and he has since appeared in podcasts with people who have done a lot of great interviews in the past.
You’d have to be a complete idiot to associate with a trafficker unless your gut made it clear as day that there isn’t much meat to these potatoes.
—-
Oh no… the “i downvote but don’t comment” brigade has arrived.
This is a good point. An entirely unrelated person was accused of a completely different crime in a different country once. This is proof that human trafficking doesn’t exist.
Even if you believe that, Andrew Tate isn't a dissident, nor does he have any claims to journalistic protections. At best he's a deep-fried Tom Leykis and at worst he's a human trafficker.
I don't find that comment objectionable because it is in favour of freedom of speech, I find it objectionable because it pretends someone with multiple credible allegations of rape and associates who admit to using violence to incite women into sex crimes, who admitted to running illegal casinos and who says he moved to Romania because he doesn't have to follow the law is only in legal trouble because people disagree with his ideas and has done nothing illegal that would warrant charges.
That could not be further from the truth. There’s plenty of offensive speech that isn’t suppressed (personal insults, porn/other things that used to be considered “obscene”) and there’s plenty of inoffensive speech that is (spam, sometimes defamation).
No speech is suppressed where free speech is valued as a right, probably your case.
You would find that porn and personal insults are not legal in many parts of the world. The Chinese government has adopted a zero-tolerance policy toward so-called sexual content.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pornography_in_China
You can defame a corporation, in which case there’s no one to take offense. As for spam: look up the long list of rules in the CAN-SPAM act, for example.
How am I missing the point? There is no point. We can choose as humans how we deal with speech we find offensive.
Free speech as a right was thought of by people that deemed offensive speech to have inherent protection. Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
There being no immediate repercussions doesn't mean there aren't going to be any long term when you basically give governments a loaded gun aimed at your own head. Eventually someone might decide to use it even if the reason for it has nothing to do with the gun.
This is a person who, by their own statement, had out of context IRC logs used by the government to convict him of a different crime.
Romania has high levels of corruption, but when we entered the EU we had high levels of overt corruption.
I'll never forget during the presidential elections of early 2010s (or around that time) (we joined EU in 2007) when a member of the loosing party (which would then become our prime minister), Victor Ponta, stated frankly, in an interview, that they lost because his party stole fewer votes (bribing the poor with meager amounts of household products to vote for them, which is a favorite campaign activity around here).
However to combat this prolific corruption (in part because of EU mandate), around the same time, our winning president instated the National Anticorruption Directorate (DNA in Romanian) which is a "taskforce" of judges and lawyers investigating these highly profilic cases.
It became moderately successful (there's always room for improvement). The EU took note, and brought in members of the directorate to instate a similar structure centrally as an EU institution (for cross border corruption cases), and afaik the process has been set in motion to instate the same directorare in Bulgaria (under the guide of a certain prosecution attorney that lead this directorare in Romania, Laura Codruta Kovesi).
Whenever foreigners bring corruption in Romania, I try to emphasize that while it exists, it is no longer very visible unless you are in fairly high-level business and politics. There was a time when everyone on the bus had to contribute 5€ when crossing the border, so that the customs officials wouldn’t go through everyone’s luggage. A time when you couldn’t register a sole proprietorship without at least offering the clerk some chocolate or whatever as a token bribe. But that all disappeared about 2006 and life in Romania is little different from Western EU states.
Corruption is also common practice within the EU (see: Eva Kaili), most of the upper EU just hides it better while pointing fingers at "unaligned" states, inside and outside of the EU.
If Von der Leyen wasn’t corrupt, I’m sure she wouldn’t have any problem handing over her texts.
> wouldn’t have any problem handing over her texts
This is the same non-reason as is being brought up with cameras filming you 24/7 etc.
'You dont have to worry if you have nothing to hide' ... It's an invasion of privacy, and it is worth fighting against that.
> It's an invasion of privacy, and it is worth fighting against that
VdL should have a private phone and a work phone, just like everyone else.
If these work messages are from her work phone, she should hand them over. If they are work messages on her private phone, she should also hand them over. She simply cannot claim to have been having non-work conversations with anyone at Pfizer.
I have non-work conversations with staff and coworkers at work all the time, and also work related conversations on private channels from time to time. The world is not as black-and-white as you think it is.
Was she acting as a private individual or as a government official?
Government has ZERO right to privacy; government agents in their capacity have ZERO right to privacy.
If a government agent uses a private account to do government business, then a) they should be fired/ removed and charged for trying to hide that business and b) those accounts should be turned over to the government, redacted of anything not related to the government business, and everything else made public.
A private individual has a right to privacy. Government, including anyone acting as its agent, do not.
> If Von der Leyen wasn’t corrupt, I’m sure she wouldn’t have any problem handing over her texts.
Haven’t found much on this. Frankly there is no need to allege corruption against this particular EU politician when there are better examples like those involved with the Qatar scandal.
I don’t know the specifics of his case but it is my understanding that EU isn’t as easily bought as South America or Southeast Asia for example.
The latter has a system that doesn’t “include” foreigners, whereas someplace like Romania is a lot more Westernized and offering a bribe carries a lot more risk.
Well, money will only buy you freedom in such places until you annoy someone with deeper pockets than you have sufficiently so that they want you to wind up behind bars.
Sure, but that’s in extreme cases. For small stuff like papers, permits and such - talking to the right people will get you anywhere you want to go.
I still remember handing over my passport to a guy on a sports bike in Singapore to get an extended stamp for Indonesia, and only a few years later did it occur to me how sketchy the whole situation was.
Seems this hosting company is a scam. Kosovo might be corrupted but it is the country with the highest approval of U.S. government. The FBI can investigate and arrest you in Kosovo just as easily as they can arrest you in Maine. Probably even easier because in Kosovo you don't have same judicial guarantees as in the U.S.A.
Looks like there's more going on than what the title implies about the Tor exit node:
> What do you do now?
>§I left Austria and now work for a German company in IT, and have a data center in Kosovo… hosting grey area things there. Warez primarily.
> Also, I do want to add that I have more backstory. The CP was not the only reason for the raid.
He goes on to mention someone using the exit node to try to hack a NATO facility.
That said, the "confiscate first, come up with a fitting crime later" approach countries take on a whim are deeply troubling.
It sounds like they have had their suspicions against this man for a while (not without reason, it seems) and saw the child porn report as a chance to pounce on him, but later found out they didn't have as strong a case as they might have wished.
> That said, the "confiscate first, come up with a fitting crime later" approach countries take on a whim are deeply troubling.
Nah. It's not like it was a legitimate homebrew forum or something and someone backdoored it to hack NATO -- it was a warez organization that might have had CP on it too.
It managed to stay under the radar until someone did something to get the attention of the authorities.
My BIL used to work CP with the DHS, a tech going in heavy with the first wave to secure devices.
I asked him if he had ever run into Tor exits, he said no, but they did sometimes run into people with unsecured wireless that had been used by third parties and once it was clear that was what happened it was pretty much dropped. I'm sure they would have ways to deal with people leaving their WiFi open as a way of camouflaging their activities...
He also said that one thing they're usually do if there are multiple people in the house is sit them all down on the couch and say "We are here because someone has been downloading CP", and often everyone would turn and look at one person.
I don’t know how you think the courts work but your roommates looking at you does not end up convicting anybody. Used as perhaps part of justifying probable cause or convincing people to say enough to do a more thorough search, sure.
A jury trial of your peers is a rare thing these days. This is how it would go down:
The investigator says "who's been downloading CP?" and everyone looks at you. Probably because you're the weirdo internet geek among the family/roommates. They now have a suspect, and nothing you say then will convince them otherwise. They interview everyone separately leading the conversation to get statements about circumstantial things that out of context don't make you look good.
It's enough to get a search & data warrant. They take your phone, your PC, all your hard drives, and pull every website you've ever accessed and every email you've ever received or sent. They trawl through this for anything out of place, or which can be construed out of context to be something they can pin on you. This is no longer about CP--they "know" you are guilty, but the fact that they can't find any CP on your computer just means your smart enough to know how to hide it. Now they're just trying to find something to stick to put you away. The Al Capone nail-him-on-tax-evasion-or-whatever-sticks strategy.
You don't hear anything for a while so you think this whole thing is behind you, and you're just pissed you can't get your PC and phone back. Then they show up and arrest you. Your lawyer explains there are five felony charges against you, including the CP thing, and you're looking at 30 years to life where the survival time of a CP convict in the general population is about 3 days. The evidence is flimsy and you can fight these charges in court, but it'll cost you hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees and your success at winning all counts is really up to the whims of the judge and/or jury. The DA offers a plea deal: 3 years house arrest, community service, and registration on the sex offenders list, but critically: no prison. The weekend is coming and you're going to be shipped out from the local police lockbox to county jail. The DA is dragging his feet on getting you into protective custody. You sign the plea deal and walk out alive, but fucked for life.
Welcome to the modern criminal justice system.
[This more or less happened to a college roommate of mine (not CP though), and a Tor developer I knew through work.]
This is exactly how the legal system works. You are railroaded from the start and effectively coerced into a plea. Truth does not matter. Justice is exceptionally rare. It is terrifying.
That sounds incredibly dysfunctional and rather scary. However, if I'm to be a bit sceptical, of the five felonies the cops found evidence for on your roommates computer, how many had he actually committed?
Maybe he was just guilty but told you he's innocent. That's what most people do, what I'd do.
My roommate was only guilty of a misdemeanor afaik. At least two of the felony counts he was provably (to me) innocent of, as I knew he wasn’t where they claimed he was, but someone with more reputation than The Defendant’s College Roommate was willing to perjure themself, and it was their word against mine. Ironically the things he definitely wasn’t guilty of were the only parts of the plea deal. He pled guilty to things he didn’t do, just to put a max threshold on how bad the nightmare could get.
The other case was during the TLA infiltration of senior Tor leadership 5-ish years ago. It was very clearly driven by spy agency needs and I don’t feel comfortable sharing details online.
[Aside: you should consider Tor compromised. Use it as a VPN if you want, but don’t entrust your own safety or the safety of others to it.]
It's exactly this attitude of desperately wanting to believe the police that ensures minimal accountability so it continues. I want to as well but is it really possible as soon as you start looking a bit harder at the situation?
J. Edgar Hoover is still venerated by having his name on the HQ building in Washington. There's no doubt left about exactly what he was.
The roommate, yes. The Tor thing was in Europe. My hypothetical was based on the terrible US legal system though which Europe mostly doesn’t share. A big reason the Tor folks relocated to places like Germany was exactly because there is a legal system there that actually respects the spirit and letter of the law.
> I asked him if he had ever run into Tor exits, he said no, but they did sometimes run into people with unsecured wireless that had been used by third parties and once it was clear that was what happened it was pretty much dropped.
Could one have open Wifi "accidentally" (on purpose) as a defence mechanism against one's own actions to introduce reasonable doubt?
Yes, but it is a very weak defense that can be smashed e.g. your device is seen communicating with the BSSID of the closed wifi, or your mac address (open wifi) is seen communicating with surveilled target.
Maybe in 2008 this was plausible, but it was also plausible to disguise one's self and walk to mcdonald's free wifi with a burner wifi card and/or Kali Linux. With the proliferation of surveillance devices everywhere it becomes an uphill battle
In college I used this excuse when my apartment buildings self managed wifi cut off my internet for torrenting. I just went into the office and was like “a torrent? Idk what that is…”. But it wasn’t anything more official than a guy in my apartment’s office’s ability to turn my internet back on. I didn’t even have to prove I had an open Wi-Fi network.
This sounds far more like a roommate situation than a semi-nuclear family. Still applies, albeit less so. Not like looks are real evidence, but it points them the right direction.
I struggle to imagine the cops bringing a family together in a living room to accuse them collectively of downloading CP. Any halfway competent parent is going to utter the words "I want a lawyer and you do not have permission to talk to my children" way before the cops sit anyone down.
I have no firm data on it, but he did mention some cases where there was CP but it wasn't clear where it was coming from (open wireless situation I mentioned), and it sounded like they didn't pursue it once it was obviously not the resident.
What he said sounded like they didn't go into a place without having evidence of CP already though, things like "This IP address has uploaded CP to these locations at these times" evidence.
I stopped running a Tor non-exit node from home a few years back, because a lot of websites and platforms blacklist any IP associated with Tor. I couldn't actually watch anything on Hulu for years (though they were still happy to take my money, which I refused to give them) because of this.
Running a tor node is a thankless thing one can choose to do. Nevertheless I did for years. I don't do it anymore.
>Running a tor node is a thankless thing one can choose to do.
One might argue that’s the case with most activities on the internet, maintaining an open source projects for free? Helping others in forums and online discussions? Dedicating time to find good articles to submit to HN!? The only thing you will get is some brownie points online. I believe who does run an exit node usually aren’t motivated by thanks and upvotes, that being said, thanks for your time and efforts running that node!
I still do it, and have been for over a decade, and I'm rarely bothered by it. I think I get a few more captchas because of it, and I can't load https://www.investopedia.com, which I would frequently like to, but that's it.
I'm a Tor user. It's also hard to determine because so much of the web is read-only or downright inaccessible via Tor.
Most big sites use a chain of reputation like this:
1. To have an account on our site, you need a reputable email. Mailinator doesn't count.
2. To get a reputable email (GMail, Outlook, etc.) you need to sacrifice a phone number to receive texts to prove you aren't a bot.
3. There are no free VoIP services. Or they're blocked.
Reddit usually lets me create accounts without email, but I'm guessing they will cut this off soon.
I'm on a friendly Mastodon instance, but I had to offer a bogus email to register, which is technically dishonesty.
YouTube sometimes works.
I had a Discord account for a while. One of my ERP partners was willing to take the hit and set up a GMail account and Discord account for me (Discord wouldn't even let me in, I had to have him create the account and then give me the password.)
But I didn't log in to Discord for a while, and recently it said "Hey check for a confirmation email". I went to log in to GMail and it said, "Hey this is suspicious, please give us a phone number."
So there's no point re-joining, if I can only talk to people and have a "free" email address for as long as I can cyber-fuck someone into letting me borrow his phone. And I won't buy a burner phone because it's likely to have the same problems, plus all the PITA of real-life opsec.
The gratis web is fading to nothing. Everyone wants something. None of it is truly free. The fediverse instances will run as long as they get donations, but charities are subject to a tragedy of the commons. They will eventually close up registrations if enough humans join for the parasite bots to follow them.
People ask me why I bother. I must admit the payoff is not big.
I bother _on principle_. Anonymity is something that I _should_ have. I don't look at CP or anything. I do this because I like to learn, I like to practice, I like to know. You may as well write it off as religion and ask a Christian why they attend church or a Jain why they don't eat onions. I simply believe it is worth doing.
> The gratis web is fading to nothing. Everyone wants something. None of it is truly free. The fediverse instances will run as long as they get donations, but charities are subject to a tragedy of the commons. They will eventually close up registrations if enough humans join for the parasite bots to follow them.
You blame "everyone wants something" but it's more clear in your last sentence: abuse by unverified users.
Lots of folks will provide services for free (actually free, no data collection etc.) but very few folks have the disposable income to _pay_ for someone to handle abuse.
So folks who provide popular services long-term have to find some way to pay for it. OMG, imagine that.
With the caveat that cryptocurrencies are usually rubbish, cryptocurrencies have allowed folks to anonymously pay for anonymous access to services. This won't work for most mainstream services (in large part because of government opposition), but it's an option. At some point which I hope to live to see, we'll go back to the old days of anonymously paying for anonymous access. (Cash was awesome.)
And to make that a bit more concrete, ProtonMail accepts Bitcoin and will let you create a truly anonymous account if you pay for their premium plan via that method.
Though to be fair it's actually pretty hard to obtain Bitcoin anonymously. Monero would be better. And this doesn't really solve the phone number problem.
You can make as many accounts on protonmail.com as you'd like and I've never had a problem with it being accepted by websites I'm making an account on. If or how long this continues to be the case, I don't know, but for now at least you can stock up on accounts.
This is the point where you need to check your privilege. I used tor when living in a dictatorship to find out things which would destroy the moral fabric of society, such as information about lgbtqia+ issues, what condoms are, pop music and news that the government didn't want to spread.
I'm sorry you had to live through that, and I'm glad you had tools to subvert that oppression. I'm relieved that it sounds like you've escaped from that situation.
It was not my intent to assert any privilege, and it was my intent to acknowledge that scenario. If I may provide some clarification:
Marriam webster[0] defines 'double edged sword' to mean
> something that has or can have both favorable and unfavorable consequences
The use of Tor in the scenario you describe is one of the two blades (edges) I was referring to in my use of 'double bladed sword' -- the altruistic use case for which Tor absolutely should exist
The other side of the blade however, it's also used to facilitate terrible acts of abuse, notably to children (as demonstrated by the article) -- the destructive use case for which Tor absolutely should not exist.
It leaves Tor in a morally ambiguous place to me. It's not inherently bad or good. There are situations where it can be used for great good, and others when it can be used for great evil. Those situations would exist with or without Tor. I don't know if I should be thanking anyone maintaining it any more than I would thank an arms dealer.
Hey, you have no contact method in your profile. can you email me at my contact email in my profile? I have a question from a previous discussion we had.
I tried, after 2 months my VPS provider basically said "either you close it down or we close you down" as they were getting requests to take it down (IIRC DMCA or other bullshit like that)
At various times, I have run a Tor relay node on a spare VPS. I think I stopped in the end because my available bandwidth was pretty below par, and I suspected I wasn't helping the network very much.
The eternal struggle. Information wants to be free, and then people use those freedoms to do the most screwed up things imaginable, and people like this pay the price.
It’s a damn shame how the original cyberpunk dream played out. We could’ve had a world where companies couldn’t do anything about people using their ideas. Instead we get one where you can’t even be anonymous without rubbing elbows with child predators.
It’s surprising how much anonymity and the subject at hand are correlated. In my 20s I liked to explore, as I’m sure many of you do too. I once met someone in the Whonix community who wanted to nix google maps entirely; he spent a lot of time downloading maps and trying to make a way to view them locally, which I think is going to be prescient one day. It already is in many parts of the world — you don’t have cell service, so you can’t just pull up google maps. Nowadays starlink solves that problem, but back then it wasn’t clear that we’d ever be able to have maps at our fingertips regardless of internet access. This was back in the era of that poor CNET reporter that got lost with his family in the mountains precisely because of no maps, and ended up dying to exposure when he went to get help. Never leave your car.
I found all of this fascinating. What a project! Make all of google maps accessible right from your phone, with no internet. I briefly fell in love with that community.
Ultimately what drove me away was the literal flood of child porn that was always right next to anything to do with tor, whonix, or anonymity in general. I have a pretty high tolerance for “operating in gray areas,” like this guy. But one of the tragedies of the cyberpunk dream is that the entire scene has been coopted by cp. In some sense cp is the ultimate test of anonymity, since you’ll be thrown in prison pretty much instantly if caught. So perhaps it’s no surprise that it’s the most common and pervasive result of anonymity, but it sure is a shame.
> Ultimately what drove me away was the literal flood of cp that was always right next to anything to do with tor, whonix, or anonymity in general.
As a teen around 2003 I hosted a freenet-node (freenetproject.org). It generated 1TByte/month which I believe was a lot for the time. I shot it down and never came back, because the only things that ever loaded was cp and Chechnya rape and torture videos. Its not a network for "dissidents"... I gave up on humanity.
How do you know what was uploaded, let alone that those were the only things uploaded? If I remember Freenet’s model correctly, files were distributed across the network as encrypted fragments and no one knew what exactly was being shared on his own node.
(I was a curious teenager and followed links I shouldn't have.) It had a ~1998 web feel. So you would mostly discover things by surfing around. Normal content would take ages to load or didn't load at all. (Bad distribution, because no-one had interest in it.) While the other stuff would load faster than AmpLand. (Very good distribution, because lots of demand.)
Plus: There was a eDonkey like file sharing program that worked on top of freenet. (As well as a Usenet clone and a "Instant" Messenger.) You could share files without uploading them first. Like Gnutella it had passive search. (It shows you the files and search terms of other users going through your system.) So you could see what the demand was for. Edit: The demand was not for Hollywod movies.
There is no such thing as running a relay in freenet. Every user is the same as every other. The size and traffic of your node is literally a setting on the gui. All traffic and data are encrypted so you have no idea what's living on your node and what's coming in and out. That's the whole point of freenet.
I don’t think he is claiming he ran a relay and could see the traffic passing through it. Just that he had a good idea what moved about on the network from following random links as he explored it - popular stuff would load fast, non-popular would be slow. He found out what was popular.
People definitely search for awful stuff, but that doesn’t mean that such stuff is the only thing shared on DC++. It is films and music that draws so many people to DC++.
20 years ago, DC++ was the best place to get full anime seasons with fan subs. Nowadays, nearly everything is on Hulu, or crunchyroll, or illegitimate streaming sites.
Even without the CP. Three decades ago, on the campus network when I was studying for my undergraduate degree, I fired up etherman (or something like it, it's been a loooong time). It helpfully parsed out the HTTP URLs for me, and I clicked on a few out of curiousity.
I turned that sniffer off soon after, and never ever looked again. Even the (likely) legal things people were looking for were hard to unsee.
Humanity is mostly good, it just isn't universally good. Providing services that rely on "universally good" to avoid being dominated by the tiny but horrible minority is always a disaster.
I don't believe there is any evidence to back this up whatsoever. People are compelled to be "good" by society and laws, nothing more. Humanity is fundamentally bad, but reined in by a handful of powerful people and organizations.
Society is an important part of humanity. And if humans were "fundamentally bad", it would be unlikely, statistically, for there to be a handful of powerful people compelled to rein in those bad impulses, rather than amplify them.
It's the same thing with the old reddit alternatives. Very few people are actually going to bother purely for the sake of principles, so the alternatives end up flooded with the ones that are forced to alternatives for good reasons.
If the mainstream Internet banned "dissidents" I believe such things would have more uptake by other types of users.
There are many, many pedophiles out there. I'm also convinced of a conspiracy theory that a lot of dark web traffic and hosts are created/operated by secret parts of the gov to de-legitimize the need for anonymity. I believe this because it would be too easy with the access to that material and no oversight. Just muddy the waters so nothing in there looks worth protecting.
You literally don't need a tinfoil conspiracy for that idea.
IBM is moving to passwordless auth on their server access. Preferring biometrics. Their youtube channel tells you directly.
The "mainstream" culture has been pushing that idea for five years now, Philomena Cunk said we shouldn't follow the anonymous guy in 2018, golly gosh.
My iphone plainly face scans me and my shopping malls and sports stadiums do the same.
Frankly the last place left to BE anonymous is Tor and on soap-box websites like this where the admin can decipher my ID but you don't know who I am.
Obiwan has the realistic attitude. "The war's over. We lost."
It's impossible to completely eliminate secrets, but the liberty of the 1990s is deader than a dodo. Anonymity, the unknown citizen, staying off the map is basically reserved for martians now.
Use nncp-go over sneakernet. Also, nntp can be user over i2pd just fine, lots of people using for the ethical opposite of CP; that's it, hugely ethical reasons, such as Ukrainian and Russian folks politely talking together and being fed up of the war.
Doesn't seem that much tinfoil hat to me. The Snowden leaks taught us that a bit of tinfoil hatting is reasonable. Before we had access to so many cop video footage, the ideas that they were the bad guys and did stuff like actually being the guys who attack and break stuff during protests were considered crazy. Etc, etc.
Because there's a power imbalance that predators are all-too-eager to exploit.
Sometimes in the literal definition in terms of raw strength, but just as much in terms of social manipulation and life experience that can take advantage of their often more naive victims. There's also a layer of assumed authority and deference at play.
Just like being attracted to women doesn't mean you're a rapist.
You can be, though.
Also consumption of any kind of distrubing porn doesn't mean you actually want to do things you see in it in the real life. This is about the same principle like when people are watching action movies (which is an accepted kind of often very disturbing cinematography), most don't want to go around and shoot/stab people.
Not all porn is produced by abusing someone. Not even all CP. So your statement can't be generally true.
Anyway, my point was that pedophilia being mostly caused by child abuse doesn't make much sense. Pedophilia is not child abuse by itself, and thus there's no cycle.
Cycle of abuse would just make you abuse someone in the similar way you were abused. (regardless of any attraction to the victim)
Just about every personality trait with a name has a high degree of genetic heritability. We know this from e.g. studies of identical versus fraternal twins. And people abused as children tend to be closely related to their parents; we know this because we know where babies come from.
So, how much of the “chain of abuse” thing is just genetic confounding? I don’t know, which is vexing. As far as I can tell, very few of the chain-of-abuse theorists even think of genetics, even though it’s the elephant in the room, and many are hard-line blank slate believers. (I don’t have citations at the moment, but last time I looked at the relevant academic literature it was, broadly speaking, an absolute dumpster fire.)
>it does not exist in any particular way as an obvious evolutionary benefit except for adult-adult-heterosexual.
it's not unique to nature. You're in heat, you want to mate with anything that looks attractive. What's attractive will vary immensely based on societal and personal experience, for reasons we still cannot fully understand as the human mind is still a huge secret to unlock. It's not perfect in the same way that few parts of nature are perfectly optimized. Remants of old patterns or general heuristics on "what is good enough" will remain and they can persist for very long times.
The only unique-ish thing about humans is that we have no "mating period". We are continuously in heat compared to most of nature, so that urge remains around consistently. Virtually every form of society has evolved some sort of culture to control these urges (as well as ways to control sexual conflict, which is another topic entirely) in order to advance as a civilization otherwise it'd be non-stop mating
> What's attractive will vary immensely based on societal and personal experience, for reasons we still cannot fully understand as the human mind is still a huge secret to unlock. It's not perfect in the same way that few parts of nature are perfectly optimized. Remants of old patterns or general heuristics on "what is good enough" will remain and they can persist for very long times.
Is it generally accepted that someone may not be born either straight or gay?
I honestly don't know and that's yet another can of worms to open.
I can somewhat sidestep that issue and say that societal factors can make you think you are exclusively heterosexual, even if we agreed that sexuality is an
internal factor and you were infact born bi/homosexual. Similar to how you can force a left handed person to become right handed.
I think that there's a fairly standard distinction, that doesn't require any consideration of psychological mechanisms. Homosexuality can be practised consensually and nobody else needs to care, because nobody is harmed. Paedophilia can't be practised consensually because children are below the age of consent, and can be harmed.
Hence, paedophilia is classified as a mental illness, but homosexuality no longer is (in most Western countries, at least, I believe).
It's not equivocation, it's a categorization of heteronormative and not-heteronormative.
Personally I suspect the issue here is that incest is the only form of sexual activity that we have a natural proclivity against, probably because of evolutionary pressure (as in, hard-wired into our DNA) against fucking blood relatives. Because a consistently-inbred population will breed itself into oblivion. People who fuck kids can still successfully reproduce and society trundles on.
I think your starting point is still kinda skewed, because "heteronormative" is a made-up thing by society rather than an actual thing someone can be.
There's a traditional view of sexuality that men are only sexually attracted to women, and vice versa, and that's normal and everything else is not normal (kinky). The more we learn about sex (and gender) the more we learn that there are very few completely "normal" people out there, and a lot of people who are a bit kinky in one respect or another. I think it's now accepted that the hetero-homo thing is a spectrum rather than a binary state, and the primary reason people of the same sex don't have sex with each other is societal pressure rather than biological attraction. e.g. women tend to experiment more with this because society has a more lenient view of "girl-on-girl" than male homosexual sex.
My personal opinion is that evolution "wants" everything to fuck everything as much as possible, just to see what happens. The best reproducers are the ones who did the most fucking, after all. But we're getting into Oglaf territory here.
> I think your starting point is still kinda skewed, because "heteronormative" is a made-up thing by society rather than an actual thing someone can be.
It's a term rooted in the conditions that make sex a reproductive act and not just something that feels good
Which is getting back to the religious crap of "sex is only for reproduction, between a married couple". Yes sex can result in reproduction, but I think making that its primary purpose misses the point. We experience a desire to fuck, separate from our desire to reproduce. They're two different things that are only related in a tiny minority of circumstances. Classifying someone's sexuality by its possible reproductive outcome is like classifying their tongues by the ability to curl into a tube: kinda valid, but not that useful.
A huge chunk of the GP’s post was disclaimers (“I think child molesters are despicable”, etc.) precisely to avoid their point being misunderstood in this way, which apparently didn’t work.
> Do you agree that 'adult-adult-hetersexual' is the only orientation that has obvious evolutionary benefit?
This shows a profound misunderstanding of evolution and natural selection on your part. "Evolutionary benefit" is impossible to divorce from circumstances. It doesn't exist as some right/wrong answer, or something you can divine through logic.
For instance, same-sex attraction could absolutely be advantageous to a species that is nearing the peak of sustainable population numbers. All species (who can fuck) wanna fuck, and will do so no matter their surrounding circumstances. The difference between one species keeping sustainable numbers, versus another species seeing runaway population numbers causing food source exhaustion and population collapse, could come down to lower procreation rates, in which circumstance strict heterosexuality may not be advantageous.
Point being, stop trying to use bad, dime-store "science" to justify your bad opinions about homosexuality.
I like this question because you explicitly ask me to agree with your premise that pedophiles and gay people are equivalent within your framing of this discussion and then follow it up with “my contention is something other than what I’ve clearly explained”
Edit:
For clarity, the post this is responding to originally started with “Do you agree that 'adult-adult-hetersexual' is the only orientation that has obvious evolutionary benefit?” It has since been edited to a generic copy-pasted response.
It is abuse no matter how it was obtained or shared, because it is an affront to the basic dignity of that child.
I would go further and argue a lot of adult produced porn is also abusive (often exploiting people in desperate situations) but we have to arbitrarily draw the line somewhere. This is a big reason why I've stopped viewing most live-action porn entirely and enjoy drawn/animated/written erotica instead.
I wrote these explanations because many people do not even see the difference between the things mentioned above, although there is definitely a difference. Not noticing the difference leads people to false conclusions.
You here means anyone watching it, but interesting to see you get so defensive. The idea that you think "watching CP != abuse" is suspicious to begin with.
I wasn't, but it would be reasonable to accuse you of being a pedophile based on this.
Since when was cyberpunk a dream to be pursued? It's the opposite of a naive dream. It's a nightmare full of high tech and people living on scraps, constantly trying to keep up with the tech fallout from big corporations. One of the most iconic places in cyberpunk was literally described as being "like a deranged experiment in social Darwinism, designed by a bored researcher who kept the thumb permantently on the fast-forward button."
How is this appealing? It's a warning, not a cosy idea to aspire to!
I think the phrase people are looking for is cypherpunk, idk why the whole thread is referencing cyberpunk which has little to do with the subject matter and ideals being discussed, which are related to the cypherpunk movement.
I think what he meant by the “cyberpunk dream” is actually the “solution” to the cyberpunk dystopia - i.e. “the net” was supposed to be a refuge from corporate/government monitoring and control.
In the early days of the internet it kind of was. Corporations haven’t waken up to the full commercial potential of the internet. Governments/law enforcement hasn’t quite figured out how this new at-the-time Internet thing worked - “series of tubes” or something.
Then as he noted, there is a significant downside to such a refuge.
I think this is the difference between cyberpunk as a fiction genre and the views of the people calling themselves cyberpunks back in the day (or reading the Wired articles about them).
really depends on your literature. Star Trek's interpretation of the future is very different from Dune's. Much of cyberpunk tends to be cynical but there are some more utopic interpretations out there as well.
What is a utopian view of cyberpunk fiction? I don't know any.
The "punk" in the genre is the rebellion against or rejection of a corrupt and oppressive system that chews people up and spits them out as either defeated or criminals. If you're reading something else, it's not cyberpunk by definition.
transhumanism is how technology will reshape what we think it is to be human, how we view life, death, love, family, success, fear, etc. Cyberpunk is how it won't.
Cyberpunk was not about a dream. It was more of a warning to all those people who thought that technology will bring utopia. “High tech, low life” is the guiding principle of cyberpunk — technology will not solve societal problems all the cool tech brings issues that were not foreseen. With corrupt government and corporations not going anywhere just because the computations and communications got faster.
> Instead we get one where you can’t even be anonymous without rubbing elbows with child predators.
There have been secretive child predators ever since statutory rape was invented. The reason that you didn't have to "rub elbows" with them is because our governments hadn't begun systematically closing off all avenues for anonymity other than the one that they built and maintain for their own spying. If there's only one way to be anonymous, you get to "rub elbows" with everyone who needs to be anonymous for any reason.
It has nothing to do with child porn or crypto. Neither were responsible for the size of the distributed files kept on each of us to grow in orders of magnitude.
Speaking of "maps at our fingertips," good luck finding one that doesn't result in a record of the lookup and any GPS data submitted with it being inserted into a half-dozen databases, all freely accessible by the government, or by anybody buying in bulk.
>There have been secretive child predators ever since statutory rape was invented.
Sure, emphasis on secretive. I'd hope that 'secretive' on the internet would mean more secretive than mistyping a query on a popular site's search engine. Or simply wandering into a linked, public website. But alas.
>Speaking of "maps at our fingertips," good luck finding one that doesn't result in a record of the lookup and any GPS data submitted with it being inserted into a half-dozen databases, all freely accessible by the government, or by anybody buying in bulk.
Et voila! Maps at your fingertips[0] with no logging/tracking. It's amazing what those ancient (ca. 1995) humans could do. Perhaps they had help from aliens -- as we couldn't possibly do any of that stuff by ourselves. /s
> you can’t even be anonymous without rubbing elbows with child predators.
Statistically there is quite a large number of criminals in my city, and since I visit shops and other parts of the city, I am bound to unknowingly to me been rubbing elbows with those criminals. We are all anonymous to each other, and what can I really know about the person in front of me in the store. Go past a few hundred people and someone will be a person I would not associate myself with, and yet here I am living in the same city as them using the same infrastructure, and in some way enabling the activity by contributing taxes.
Not to say I don't understand the emotional reaction people have. I have relatives in the countryside that refuse to visit the city because of all the criminals that they hear about. It is also fairly common to hear people moving out of the city to the calmer suburbs in order to get out of all the shootings and crime. I also do know first hand that if you go and look for it, finding drug dealers and shady activity is not exactly a big secret. Go to specific streets or part of the city and it's operated in plain sight.
I've always seen the original cyberpunk dream as being analogous to a city, with all its benefits and drawbacks.
It would be more analogous to having all the pedos in the city use one coffee shop and everyone knows that pedos use that coffee shop and you decide to go there because you prefer their coffee.
It seems a great overestimate to think that 19 out of 20 people who use tor do so to download CP. I am pretty sure that will be false, and more likely something like one in a few hundred. One in a few hundred is the city. 19 out of 20 is the coffee shop.
I should also reiterate that everyone knows what streets and part of the city that criminals visits regularly. People who decide to live or visits those places do make that choice. This lead naturally to city stratification.
> It’s a damn shame how the original cyberpunk dream played out. We could’ve had a world where companies couldn’t do anything about people using their ideas. Instead we get one where you can’t even be anonymous without rubbing elbows with child predators.
Corporate government is pretty much a staple of. all cyberpunk franchises though.
Yeah Cyberpunk wasn't so much a dream as a dystopian reaction to modern life; instead of exploring space, people do crimes to scrape by. I certainly wouldn't want to live in Snow Crash or Neuromancer...
Maybe open source generative AI can help solve cp. Cater to all these pedophile fetishes, and no need to exploit children? Remember how we phased out ivory for piano keys, and other poaching?
With diamonds, there is still a push to source “the real thing” kept alive by De Beers, and other cartels like that. But for a lot of poaching, we found replacements. I think that’s how plastic got started too btw!
Also PETA has approved fake lab-grown meat, perhaps it can reduce demand for torturing so many animals in factory farms.
PS: Japan has a culture of infantile hentai or something in its animation - which may alleviate a lot of demand for actual cp — how much cp is in Japan? (There seems to be a lot of unusual/unnatural sexual norms in Japan… from Hikkikomori to dating vending machines to total celibacy for a large proportion of the population.) https://amp.theguardian.com/world/2009/may/11/japan-child-po...
CP is disgusting and everything, but I'm kinda weirded out about thought crime. If no harm is being done, not even indirectly to anyone else, why is it a crime?
It's not illegal to write a fanfic that you keep to yourself about all the weird ways that you want to torture and kill someone.
Well, if actual harm to people and children is what we want to reduce, then perhaps decriminalizing an innocuous (as in no victims) form of it may actually reduce the harm to actual people.
And btw -- it's not just about thoughtcrime, it's a major double standard, seems to me. In the West it's perfectly normal for Hollywood to put out "Rated R" horror movies that feature gore and torture, ripping off limbs, mass murders, etc. Such as the movie "Hostel". I never understood why that is OK, why the music industry has pushed gangsta rap etc. for decades, but then something like Cuties out of France which actually critiques the hypersexualization of teenage girls that is taking place, causes an uproar, while the industries doing the hypersexualization are now an accepted part of our liberal "freedom of speech".
Legalized drug sales and prostitution among adults have _fewer_ victims but that doesn't mean no victims. Legalization is better but it isn't a panacea.
> Such as the movie "Hostel". I never understood why that is OK, why the music industry has pushed gangsta rap etc. for decades, but then something like Cuties out of France which actually critiques the hypersexualization of teenage girls that is taking place, causes an uproar, while the industries doing the hypersexualization are now an accepted part of our liberal "freedom of speech".
AFAIK, everyone involved in the production of "Hostel" was a legal adult.
The girls who were the main characters in "Cuties" were not legal adults, nor anywhere close. I don't even think they were teenagers. From the clip I saw, it wasn't a _critique_ of hypersexualization so much as LITERAL HYPERSEXUALIZATION. There may have been an ironic plot around it saying "this is bad mmm'kay" but that doesn't excuse using children to engage in sexualized behavior.
There's an important conversation to be had about US culture and violence versus sex and language (South Park parodied this well), but "Cuties" is a horrible example because it used actual children to engage in actual sexual objectification.
Another similar case on shameless promotion due to fear it's the Spanish media depicting squatters as the worst evil ever, specially in morning TV talk shows targeted to middle aged women (housewifes/mothers with children).
Guess what? between the show sections, (and shows themselves) they are trying to sell home alarms with lots of ads in the morning to the viewers. Bingo.
That existed in the late 90's with the Spice Girls and preteen/early teen girls doing girl bands mimicking the dances in every school in Europe.
Yet no one gave a shit. This is the new Satanic panic, a scapegoat to avoid focusing ourselves on important shit.
Paranoia sells, and it's the main fuel of the US style Capitalism, getting a full panic state almost monthly in order to be a mindless consumer.
OFC satanic panic was the same crap, in order to keep the children and teens away to non-consumit (read: TV and mainstream toys, music and movies) so the industry didn't collapse in a few years. And, yet, thanks to internet, years later, they did.
Cuties controversy was only about some versions of the poster, and no one involved saw the movie. No one who watched the movie thought it was super controversial I think.
As for Netflix, how can the company possibly reconcile a “coming-of-age” film, and one that centers entirely on 11-year-old girls, with a TV-MA rating? This is not a random decision – it has become corporate practice.
We have frequently called on Netflix to stop hosting content that sexualizes children, such as Baby, Big Mouth, Sex Education, or that glamorizes rape and sexual assault such as 365 Days.
And Netflix habitually markets adult content to young audiences. Parents Television Council research of Netflix programming designated as “Teen” reveals that nearly half was rated either TV-MA (104 titles, or 40.8%) or R (23 titles, or 9.0%); and every single program that carried a TV-14 moniker included harsh profanities.
While we may not always see eye-to-eye with film critics, the criticism of the critics is telling. Cuties is not the first time Netflix has blatantly promoted programming that sexualizes children, but we’re calling on them for this to be the last.
> Cuties controversy was only about some versions of the poster,
False.
The final performance by the young girls was also discussed. You can find it if you want to watch something disgusting, but it was very sexual and OBVIOUSLY inappropriate for children.
That it's common to see children perform such sexual routines at dance competitions doesn't mean it's appropriate.
The idea that this was Only The Poster was a lie created by a media that thinks child exploitation is OK. Look at the media response to the film "Sound of Freedom", where it's "QAnon adjacent" to oppose child sex trafficking.
>That it's common to see children perform such sexual routines at dance competitions doesn't mean it's appropriate.
"Sexual" is relative so people will just be talking past each other in regards to that. There's no real discussion to be had there.
>The idea that this was Only The Poster was a lie created by a media that thinks child exploitation is OK
FWIW, I only heard about the poster and nothing about the full release. I'm sure some people still argued in the same way people argue about anything for months/years on end, but there was definitely a lot more controversy about the poster. Be it because it was the first look/awareness of the film, or because the film was simply nothing to write about can be left to people who actually watched the movie. I have no interest to.
The issue has become so emotionalized that if you say anything that even remotely looks like supporting pedophilia, people will tell you to go kill yourself.
It seems there's nothing worse than a moderate these days. One extreme thinks I must be a Satanist for not believing in the massive conspiracy to harvest adrenochrome from tortured children, while the other extreme thinks I must be a Nazi for not believing in a trans genocide.
I'm sort of confused by these rulings. So people got convicted for possessing loli manga/similar stuff that has no relation to real life at all.
I understand that it can be illegal at the State level, and that its a grey area at the federal level. What I don't get is the disconnect between these rulings and whatever is available on the clearnet.
We're not talking onion sites. Reddit, Twitter, 4chan, pixv, tumblr, Patreon whatever sites that you can just go to that shows up the front page of Google. They all contain similar content and almost none of it is taken down for illegality, at most because someone thought it was too ick and Ad money, or posted in a non-r18 area.
Even fucking 4chan is incredibly strict about ban hammering/deleting anything that is close to CP
Genshin Impact and Blue Archive are not popular because they are good games.
>They all contain similar content and almost none of it is taken down for illegality, at most because someone thought it was too ick and Ad money, or posted in a non-r18 area.
Simple, the internet is huge and some currently contended US law means that (past illegal content) a web host isn't responsible for content users upload. Copyright means that corporations can DMCA certain content off, but otherwise, there's not much to do. Companies don't WANT to have to look through every single post on a site that big, so if they can automate or simply ignore it, they will.
The legality in Canada is questionable, but Canada isn't looking through Reddit with a fine tooth comb (P.S. it technically is against reddit TOS to upload lol manga stuff. But it's hard to enforce on small subreddits). Canada may not even know what Pixiv is, and Patreon is often behind paywalls. It would just take a good (well, bad) mainstream awareness to answer your question, and the answer would turn out to mostly be "because politicians didn't know until CNN/Fox News blasted it".
That much was obvious during the U.S. controversy on Rapelay, a Japanese 3d eroge simulator that was not even sold in the US (nor ever has been), simply mislabeled by Amazon and visible in American's store for a while.
>Genshin Impact and Blue Archive are not popular because they are good games.
well we're getting very off topic but this is still an odd angle. There's no one reason why these games are popular and talking about fan art vs. game quality is arguing a chicken vs. the egg. Let's just agree that fan engagement in this day and age can be a force multiplier in terms of advertising something and spreading the brand. But 10,000 x 0 is still zero. Just ask how F-Zero is doing.
>It's not illegal to write a fanfic that you keep to yourself about all the weird ways that you want to torture and kill someone.
pedantic, but it depends on many factors that can make that goal realistic. You probably wouldn't get flack about how you'd kill Trump or any public figure you're far away from, but some specific individual can be seen as a threat in some countries. Even the US isn't fully lenient on that.
>If no harm is being done, not even indirectly to anyone else, why is it a crime?
politics, mostly. For example, in Japan uncensored genetalia is still illegal, animated or otherwise. Despite some of the most explicit pornography hailing from it. These come from WW2 times where the US imposed a bunch of sanctions, but have long since been irrelevant. So why not just repeal that law?
Well, what politician wants to be the one to fall on that sword and get the buck rolling? It's political suicide to the voter base (mostly older people) even if most people wouldn't be strongly affected by it. That's one among many many other factors, of course.
And that's a relatively uncontroversial aspect of society. Can you imagine trying to go to bat about the above topic?
On a side note, there was a very good film about this last year called The Artifice Girl.
Think indie, very theatrical with only three settings and three very clear acts, but thought-provoking and with some unstated implications. I would recommend watching it without checking IMDB or any review site first.
Generated CSAM is equally illegal as "real" CSAM in many countries, such as Norway. Here, even fictional descriptions of such material in written form is illegal.
this is possibly because generated CSAM may look like no real human child nor resemble any human child in particular today. give it 5 years and physical distinction from real children and even a specific child is likely to happen. so a photo perfect likeness of your kid ends up in some disgusting video and the creators get off the hook because it's 'not real' by say a narrow color gradiation or kinematic similarity standard undetectable to human eyes? no thanks.
That isn't really much of an issue, some places count material intended to resemble a real child or derived from CSAM (etc a drawing referenced from real CSAM) as still being illegal. That would handily cover the situation you've mentioned.
In those cases, for fictional CSAM to be legal, it has to be completely fictional such that any resemblances can be shown to be completely coincidence.
Even Lolita from Nabokov? Because that book depicted that as joking about the reader and on male society in general, as there was no actual erotism on anything but the narrator's "mind"/protagonist.
Similar on how people got Starship Troopers wrong. Is not about cheering fascism, but to ridicule it.
The film is a satire of fascists propaganda, and as good satire often it, it is also an good example of fascist propaganda, just like Snow Crash is satire of Cyberpunk while being a good Cyberpunk.
The book isn't exactly fascist though. Verhoeven said he didn't read the book and does not plan to, so he is satirising somewhat superficially.
Heinlein did explore a lot of various political systems in his books, and I think Starship Troopers is focusing most on voter engagement - how people who vote should know something about what they vote on, and that is why only those who served (which includes military but also other "national service" like being a worker colonising planets or postman or whatever) get vote.
Is that fascist? I don't think so. Is it a good political system? I don't think so either but it is a good enough idea for a book.
* persons can choose whether or not to do government service
* Rico's parents are quite rich even though neither are citizens
* the Moral Philosophy class tries to _discourage_ individuals from government service
* the instructor for Moral Philosophy explicitly tries to get the students to think for themselves
In the book but not the film:
* the only benefit of government service is the right to vote
* only veterans (i.e. no active service members) can vote
All of these (and more) are contrary to fascism. The book is not fascist. Verhoeven never read the book and didn't satirize fascism -- he satirized a _caricature_ of fascism.
Fascism is ill defined so people call the Terran Federation fascist due to being jingoistic and undemocratic, despite it being quite different from historical fascism as you say.
Also minor detail but in the book there's a few jobs that are reserved for veterans, like IIRC the police.
>back then it wasn’t clear that we’d ever be able to have maps at our fingertips regardless of internet access. This was back in the era of that poor CNET reporter that got lost with his family in the mountains precisely because of no maps
That was 2007. I had maps of the entire US loaded on my pocket pc circa 2005.
i traveled across europe in car at same time frame with pocket pc (asus mypal) and igo maps loaded on it (still have it in my drawer). those days you can get igo offline maps on android. also sygic.
it was always strange that google maps was accepted as some kind of magic while turn by turn navigation with voice directions was available from mid 2000s
nowdays i always have sygic installed on my phone. came handy when google maps decided to freak out while i was driving through death valley to gas station.
> turn by turn navigation with voice directions was available from mid 2000s
Did those turn by turn systems allow you to just drag the map onscreen anywhere to change location to anyplace on earth? To drop pins and send links to anyone in an email? To be updated instantly and for free when the data was refreshed?
>Did those turn by turn systems allow you to just drag the map onscreen anywhere to change location to anyplace on earth?
as long as you had maps installed for this area - yes
>To drop pins and send links to anyone in an email?
yea. multi-point navigation with ability to search along the route/in the area/specific city/etc. all without breaking route. you could also save route iirc. i had 2 weeks road trip pre-planned.
there was some ability to share route/coordinates. don't remember details
> To be updated instantly and for free when the data was refreshed?
back than maps weren't updated that frequently. in general.
on the other side, it gave you ability to go anywhere without having a data connection. google offline maps are still very limited. igo was showing on screen next two maneuvers back than. google still didn't figure it out. or ability to show real 3D landscape and 3D landmarks/buildings. or ability to mark street as blocked so navigation will route around. getting traffic information from radio in case there is no internet.
> I had maps of the entire US loaded on my pocket pc circa 2005.
How much did that cost? How many folks had it? When did it stop getting updates?
Most folks (likely including GP) didn't have easy access to offline electronic maps in their pocket in 2007 and didn't know anyone who had offline electronic maps in their pocket.
2008 I had a totally offline map of all of North America in my car's aftermarket radio (7" touch screen, AM/FM, DVD player, GPS, analog TV, SD slot, all running a version of WindowsCE that was already outdatted). System cost me about $400. Bought it so I could do backroads road trips/exploring by car, as it didn't need (or even have) a way to connect to the 'net to do it. I can still get updated maps for it, but I don't bother.
Handheld gps's with offline maps go back even further. I was using them from '03 to '08. Garmin made a bunch of ones that were no bigger than a early-gen blackberry. Back then it was relatively easy to get pirated updated maps for them.
Do jurisdictions really care about child porn before internet? I always feel like it is just a convenient excuse for them to get away with their bullshit, for a largely non-existent problem.
No, they didn't. They still don't. Not having a victim on the other side of the case (possession of child porn, not production of child porn) gives judges an easy excuse (and no opposition) to sympathizing with the accused and suspending the sentence.
Child porn is just leverage to pry. We used to care as much about sending information about birth control through the mail. And with the modern movement to sexualize children as soon as possible, they might have to use another excuse in 20 years. "Terrorism" will always work, because it doesn't mean anything.
I believe this is the case, as unfortunate as it is.
The loudness of their voices in "protecting the children" when politicians are introducing new communications surveillance measures, with no mention of local, boots-on-the-ground, child protection services funding increases, just screams to me that they care about surveillance a lot and about protecting children not at all.
In that way the government represents the people. For every 9 people you meet screeching about how much they want to hunt a pedo and torture them, there's 1 person talking about actually helping children experiencing abuse (which is not always sexual, to the former group's disappointment)
They did, but it only existed on small scales then. The Internet drove the cost of production and distribution down to basically zero, so, as classical economics predicts, the amount of production exploded.
> The Internet drove the cost of production and distribution down to basically zero, so, as classical economics predicts, the amount of production exploded.
No, economics predicts that _use_ will explode if the cost is zero, but that's not a comment on production.
Pocket cameras have reduced the cost to record sexual abuse, but that's dwarfed by the ability to reproduce/ distribute those copies.
I don't think that means sexual abuse is more common. On every other metric we have, it appears sexual abuse is _less_ common.
Just regarding your overall concern around maps and cellular service, Google Maps lets you download maps within very custom sized tiles for offline use. I'm partial to using them when hiking, so I can orient myself in areas where the actual trail markers become questionable.
Routing doesn't really work offline, but that's a different/harder problem.
No disrespect, I use offline Google maps almost daily, but there are far far better offline hiking apps out there.
Google will probably work ok for the most popular trails, and I guess you can use it as a supercharged compass. But at least in Europe, if you actually plan a route in any mountains based on Google, you're in for an adventure :)
Bit focused on eastern Europe, but has a hiking mode with very good coverage of the official routes (not only in eastern Europe ;)). And everything is free, including offline maps. Terrific value for casual trips.
Tangential to your much larger lament - OpenStreetMap, and specifically OSMAnd which is libre and free on F-droid, works great for offline maps that are downloaded ahead of time. (I think the version on Google Play limits the number of regions you can download unless you make a small donation).
Organic Maps on F-Droid, is a literal godsend in offline raster maps. I used OSMand a lot on my old phone, buy since I downgraded it just could not load the vectors fast enough
The problem with Google Maps is that they only let you download rectangular chunks of the map one by one (that aren't large enough to e.g. just download a whole state), and then those chunks must be kept regularly updated or they eventually "expire" without you having any say in the matter.
Google Maps also doesn't support offline contour lines / hillshading (what Google calls "terrain"), which is a big deal for hiking and other outdoor activities. Whereas with OsmAnd, you can literally have e.g. the entire North America in your pocket, with contour lines, offline navigation, and offline Wikipedia articles for every POI.
You definitely get a warning. But also there's an auto-update feature so you can set it an forget it so long as your device connects to the internet once every x months.
Pointing out more options for people to evaluate is great and all. But at least for me, "offline maps" implies not needing the permission of a surveillance company to use it, and without phoning home to that company when the app regains connectivity. And I'd say that's an appropriate definition in the context of the top level comment about privacy.
I went to Grenada in 2014 and used offline maps to drive around the island. In 2015 the tablet suffered an accident and I powered it off to deal with it later. 5 years later I power it back on without internet connectivity. Turns out the maps expired. So much for many years
While I agree this is potentially an issue, most people with most devices won't be away from the internet for years. If you want it to be apocalypse proof for when the internet goes down you should probably get a paper map.
That is the antithesis of many years and why google maps is not sufficient. You know what’s still around many years later? My paper printouts from Mapquest
And then that's also completely ignoring the hundreds of portable GPS devices sold before Google Maps was a thing which had offline road databases.
I can navigate anonymously without cell signal easily. My car has a GPS in the dashboard which, at least for the maps and routing, doesn't go online at all.
> I can navigate anonymously without cell signal easily. My car has a GPS in the dashboard which, at least for the maps and routing, doesn't go online at all.
I agree that this is indeed possible. The problem is with the propaganda that says that you should not agree to such a low standard of only being able to see the map and route your trip based on road connectivity and nothing else. Modern route planning takes into account inherently real-time information such as accidents and other roadblocks, which is only available online.
>I agree that this is indeed possible. The problem is with the propaganda that says that you should not agree to such a low standard of only being able to see the map and route your trip based on road connectivity and nothing else. Modern route planning takes into account inherently real-time information such as accidents and other roadblocks, which is only available online.
I'd note that while real time traffic updates are nice, they are just a convenience, not a necessity.
In fact, GPS (unless you're in a war zone and need to direct munitions or out in the middle of nowhere) is also a convenience and not a necessity. What's that? It is a necessity? Tell that to Ferdinand Magellan -- hell he didn't even have a paper map.
That's not to say GPS/online traffic updates and the like aren't useful. They absolutely are. But they aren't necessary and at least for me, if the choice is to use such tools and be tracked or use another method that doesn't track me, I'll choose the latter every. single. time.
Not because I have anything to hide, but because my business is my business and no one else's.
> Modern route planning takes into account inherently real-time information such as accidents and other roadblocks, which is only available online.
in mid 2000s very offline igo could pull traffic information via RDS-TMC and adjust route according to it. navigation systems in modern cars can use traffic information from satellite via sirius-xm
Yeah, I'm disappointed more cars/GPS units don't have this functionality. It's really not even that complicated of a data stream and it's already right there in most US metro areas waiting to be used.
i think the only time recently that i saw TMC used, it's in my wife's mini countryman. but it worked only in last few months of leasing after they updated firmware or maybe plugged some cable during service
Where are you that it's "next to impossible"? That really surprises me.
I'm in the UK, and you can walk into any Post Office, WHSmith, bookshop, most newsagents, etc., and pick up maps of the local area or country, usually Ordnance Survey[0] maps.
And (at least when I was in secondary school, about a decade ago) map reading was still taught as a valuable skill, using OS maps.
>We could’ve had a world where companies couldn’t do anything about people using their ideas
doesn't sound like the best idea depending on what industry we are talking about. medicine, yes. Art, no (we're kinda going through that right now actually).
>In some sense cp is the ultimate test of anonymity, since you’ll be thrown in prison pretty much instantly if caught. So perhaps it’s no surprise that it’s the most common and pervasive result of anonymity, but it sure is a shame.
This quote constantly rings in my head about topics like this:
>The moral of the story is: if you’re against witch-hunts, and you promise to found your own little utopian community where witch-hunts will never happen, your new society will end up consisting of approximately three principled civil libertarians and seven zillion witches. It will be a terrible place to live even if witch-hunts are genuinely wrong.
It's the real downside of apathy when you see complaints about those big sites out there and how they screw up. You advertising a new site means the most interested are going to mostly include the worst actors, who eventually put off the best actors. Or at least disproportionately include them.
As a simple example: say Twitter has 10 million users and 1000 nazis (utopic, I know). Now your new no BS alternative attracts 0.1% of users but 10% Nazis. Still far from a majority. But by the way these forums work, your site will be 1% nazis, and those nazis will be some of your loudest actors if left unchecked. 100x more concentrated and it will feel some 1000x more nazi.
I’m fascinated by the Nazi question (what to do with them).
I think we should allow heterodox beliefs in public forums since at least this reduces the effect of echo chambers. The other alternative is to ban certain ideas from the mainstream, but I think this leads to groups like Nazis just moving to dedicated sites where their ideas are reinforced.
Like I’d rather see a Nazi subreddit where those ideas are likely to see more challenges, than some random Nazi site where bad ideas metasticize in the shadows. Maybe the spooks prefer it this way since different sites makes it easier to categorise people.
Why would Nazis (or flat-earthers or QAnon or any other group likely to receive _substantial_ challenges to their world-view) stay somewhere where they'd be challenged, though? On a Reddit-like platform they'd downvote and/or ban to ensure it's almost entirely an echo-chamber, like every other part of Reddit.
If they somehow weren't able to control that, then I suspect they'd move to another platform organically, because why would they put up with a constant flow of opposing viewpoints that these groups believe, with absolute certainty, to be wrong?
They would stay there because there's a huge userbase to convert and they probably enjoy being challenged and justifying their horrible views because they want lurkers to read it.
If you ever meet an actual Nazi you should ask them if they want to discuss Jews with you. I'm willing to bet they won't shy away from accepting the invitation even if you were offering it because you wanted to challenge their views.
It takes a very special kind of person to openly be a Nazi and they don't think like your typical Joe.
> back then it wasn’t clear that we’d ever be able to have maps at our fingertips regardless of internet access.
Offline map databases were commom then; it wasn't uncommon for car navigation systems to come with them (expensive to update, though), as well as handheld devices
In fact, while they were not common before the 2000s, first-party navigation systems with offline digital maps for cars have been around at least since the 1980s, as have other forms of consumer offline digital maps. Online maps are newer than offline.
> This was back in the era of that poor CNET reporter that got lost with his family in the mountains precisely because of no maps
The last of many critical errors before the car got stuck might have been avoided by using a map, but they had and used a paper map shortly before, when choosing the alternate route that was, in fact, closed; it wasn't a problem caused by maps not being available (and there is a reason keeping paper road maps, especially of unfamiliar areas, when driving in them was a widespread practice until digital maps with automatic offline downloads tied to GPS became ubiquitous.
>downloading maps and trying to make a way to view them locally
Before smartphones this was common. Standalone gps units had maps locally stored. Some of the ones mounted in car dashboards stored them on an internal DVD. I used to have to drive a lot for work long before they were commonly built in to cars and I had an aftermarket one mounted on my dashboard, a little 2” monochrome display. Storage was tight, and I’d have to hook it up to my computer to swap out map sets if I was traveling further than usual.
I haven't run across any Cyberpunk fiction that didn't feature exploitation of other people with the aid of technology. That depressing aspect of it is sort of backed in. If it's utopian, it's not cyberpunk, almost by definition.
> Instead we get one where you can’t even be anonymous without rubbing elbows with child predators.
Says the person posting under the name "sillysaurusx."
> Whonix community who wanted to nix google maps entirely; he spent a lot of time downloading maps and trying to make a way to view them locally, which I think is going to be prescient one day. It already is in many parts of the world — you don’t have cell service
Here's an idea, maybe he should print those maps out, bind them together into a larger map, and then find a really complicated way to fold them up so he can keep them handy when needed.
> In some sense cp is the ultimate test of anonymity, since you’ll be thrown in prison pretty much instantly if caught.
And yet.. it is still produced in the physical world where none of these constraints actually exist. It's only promulgated and marketed through anonymous means.
> Says the person posting under the name "sillysaurusx."
I'm not sure what this is supposed to mean. I recognize that username as someone who has been posting here for a long time. Not to encourage doxxing or making his identity the focus, but he has lots of contact details on his user profile. Tons of people are identifiable on here, even if the usernames are whimsical.
> If convicted, this could land me in jail for 6 to 10 years.
The 6 to 10 years is the least of his worries. The guy will be labeled a chomo and probably killed as a result. All for running a Tor exit node. What a time to be alive.
This case was in Austria, not the US, and was quite some time ago (early 2010s). He was charged under a law criminalizing "support of general distribution", not possession. He was sentenced to probation, and left the country.
I’ve never seen the term chomo before and I’m curious about its origin. Is it “homo” but with ‘c’ for child tacked on the front, or is it Spanish? Or something else, like a portmanteau of child molester?
It stands for child molester. The other term you hear all the time inside is “weird” or “weirdo.” There are others, diaper sniper, skinner (“skin bief”). You generally won’t get killed though. People like to say that but in fed low, where all the cp stuff goes, they’re all protected and they’ll ship you out if you get caught hurting them. And they WILL tell.
> 1975. Unknown, derived from British criminal slang. Several origins have been proposed; possibly derived from dialectal nonce, nonse (“stupid, worthless individual”) (but this cannot be shown to predate nonce "child-molester" and is likely a toned-down usage of the same insult), or Nance, nance (“effeminate man, homosexual”), from nancy or nancyboy. The rhyme with ponce has also been noted.
> As prison slang also said to be an acronym for "Not On Normal Communal Exercise" (Stevens 2012), but this is likely a backronym.
That was an incredible read. thank you for that. "Oll Korrect", Old kinderhook(!) , oke okeh, Ohne Korrectur. Etymology is awesome. I really overestimated how much we know about our own language I guess!
Only ever saw a chomo ex-cop get close to being killed because he didn’t check in. Gang members on the other hand, saw quite a few get killed. Two for being in a gay relationship. That’s the US prison system for you. No clue what state is like.
And innuendo and deniability is just as common a past time.
The UK's Carry On films and other TV programs like the BBC Are you being served tv sitcom were heavily into innuendo, in as much a way as some jokes in Disney Pixar films fly over the head's of kids, but is understood by most adults perfectly well.
Not only is it a way to quantify peoples mental abilities by whether they laugh in a cinema watched by a secret camera and AI or whether documented on social media, or listened into by our phones and then adverts, its also an in plain site way for some people in society to identify people for exploitation and manipulation, just like teenagers are dedicated followers of fashion.
Its quite interesting really, just like the changes in slang language is a stealth form of working out the age of someone typing online, by the use of their vocabulary and interests. In some respects humans are just lemmings and very people actually come up with original content, not that the original content is necessarily any good.
But mainstream trends happen for a reason, in much the same way as you wont really see anything go viral like they used to on the internet in the early 00's.
Peoples reactions whether culturally or legally correct or not are also telling.
Its all psychological and biological mind games, because histidine and carnosine as two amino acids, which could get alot of males into trouble if they are not careful!
I found the recent ambulance strikes in the UK quite telling, they would attend cat 1 or level 1 people who basically had an over active immune system ie allergic reactions, but refused to attend to cat 2 or level 2 people who had an under active immune system which groups the elderly into that group automatically. In other words the recent UK ambulance strikes were a stealth form of eugenics on the elderly, but most of the british population wouldnt have known this.
And that is my point, there is alot more going on that meets the eye, but if Freud was right, what does that make many parents?
It wasn’t in the US, and it was for him either 3 months jail or probation for some years, he was also able to leave Europe completely, most likely because they know he had nothing to do with it but per the article there was no plea.
> I was charged and convicted with the support, not the ownership. There is ownership, sale, distribution for no monetary gain, and support of general distribution. The last is what I got and the lowest of all.
Did they also charge the ISP's involved in transferring those network packets?
I noticed they mentioned “logs” of you talking about hosting CP, can you elaborate?
They took a bunch of IRC logs where I stated what I can and can’t host at a web hosting provider I owned. The logs do exist but are taken out of context.
The "reporting" here is at the level of a 90s scene mag.
>Someone used the same exit to hack a NATO facility in Poland, which deals with chemical and biological weapons. Disarming, etc.
COVID origin story confirmed! Joking, but that's like something from a movie. I think its really awesome that William was willing to stand for what he believed. TOR is so important for free speech and exit nodes are critical for scaling the system. It just sucks how much his life was disrupted from this.
By the way: there's some very interesting activity happening on Tor at the moment where it seems that overwhelmingly people have decided that they are going to police their own speech to remove CP. In the early days hidden wiki had dedicated pages for that shit. But it's not a thing any more. Furthermore, it seems like hacktivists are actively making sure that the Tor ecosystem stays healthy. Really fascinating because in theory they could just do whatever they liked.
Common knowledge from when Tor just started was to limit your exit traffic to countries which cannot extradite you. And definitely block your own country.
"I rented a server in Poland and someone uploaded CP to an Austrian image hoster. They reported it to the Austrian police, which contacted the ISP, which gave them my WHMCS login IP and then subpoenaed UPC Austria for my address, then queried the weapons registry."
The FBI method of fabricating criminal charges. Criminals sleep comfortably knowing their governments are more interested in playing whack a mole for political image than effectively doing their job. Notice how in Austria they aren't charging Google, or Facebook, or any other entities where such data passes through every day.
Yup, had the same experience, also got raided, but unlike him, I got exonerated :)
No conviction whatsoever. I had obviously nothing like files nor logs nor whatsoever, and like him the raid was not really related to that, but instead a fight against the government against e-voting.
It was certainly quite a ride...
I'd avoid hosting a tor exit node at all costs, considering that they are a lot of bad actors on tor. Even some 3 letter agents can host cp on your tor sites and then accuse you.
>Even some 3 letter agents can host cp on your tor sites and then accuse you.
You can't use exit nodes to run "tor sites", because they only allow outbound connections. You can run hidden services, but they work entirely through relays (ie. not exit nodes). Given that hidden services are end to end encrypted (none of the relays in the middle can see the traffic), and to my knowledge relay operators have generally not been prosecuted, your specific scenario is unlikely to play out.
That said, if you're running a exit node and the FBI wants to frame you, they can still use your relay to conduct some illegal action (eg. uploading CSAM to some clearnet site), and pin it on you.
If you become an ISP (with your AS) then it is less of a concern (in the US) since ISP have some protections. Emerald Onion [0] is an example of doing this. Actually in their faq [1], they state:
"Digital Millennium Copyright Act Safe Harbor
The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) offers four safe harbors to protect ISPs from copyright liability for the acts of their users, provided that certain requirements are met (17 U.S.C. § 512). Emerald Onion is a section 512(a) “conduit” provider."
If you want to read the section it is here: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/512 (it is generally about "Limitations on liability relating to material online" not just copyright)
I‘m still amazed how the security agencies pulled it off, to have the ultimate honeypot, a digitized crime scene masquerading as a market place auto-incriminating endless amounts of people. A Kompromat-Miner.
Speaking of miners, it‘s not like they are at the same risk as tor node operators. Not. At. All…
This kind of stuff has happened many times before.
I did a video about "the dark web" a couple years ago where I talked about people on zeronet and freenet getting snagged because of potentially the contents of their cache store. It's made for a non technical audience
Yep I'm sure setting an example contributed a lot here.
This decision is not going to stop exit nodes (and the worst stuff on tor probably doesn't even use exit nodes but hidden services) but it keeps Austrian IPs off the map making them seem a country in control.
The same way companies go crazy mitigating ratings on bitsight but don't care about fixing real root problems because they're not visible anywhere.
Keeping your front yard clean is a big thing in IT. In our company our corporate network is not detected by bitsight but our guest wifi is. Meaning one bad apple in a handful of guests can give our entire multinational a bad rating.
So what did they do? Make sure bitsight actually shows our real endpoints and makes an accurate result? Doing some rudimentary checks on the guest portal to make sure outdated systems can't connect? Only allowing VPN access on the guest wifi?
Nope they just turned off the guest wifi so that contractors (who still need to do the work we pay them to do) plug in the corp network against policy, or use the coffee shop wifi next door.
Bitsight rating fixed, problem hidden but not actually solved and in fact worsened by people connecting unmanaged gear to the corp network as guest. All the while gloating in the A rating which is completely meaningless.
Before the current regional Internet registry system (ARIN, RIPE, LACNIC, AfriNIC, APNIC) began, organizations (and some individuals) were "given" IP addresses by emailing IANA or Jon Postel directly.
Assignments that predate the RIRs are called "legacy" assignments and are, theoretically, not subject to the RIR system because those who received those addresses only agreed to the terms as they existed at the time. Those terms were usually "you asked, here you go."
In practice, legacy assignments are left alone because no one wants to go to the trouble of arguing with big entities about it. (Most of the /8 assignments people gripe about as being wasteful are assigned to entities with lawyers, guns, or both.) People who have a handful of small legacy assignments get the protection of this because it's especially not worth the effort to say "well, if all you have is a /22 legacy, yours is now part of the RIR system, deal with it". Especially since the only recourse would be to allocate it to someone else and wouldn't that be fun.
But no IP address is actually "unrevokable." All you have to do is piss off a handful of the Tier 1s or a slightly larger number of Tier 2s and you'll quickly find your "bulletproof" addresses quite useless.
Ok, so if one is guilty of transmitting or carrying illegal content merely through providing the medium of transmission, wouldn't that mean the ISPs involved, and the owners of the telephone cables, are just as guilty? Wouldn't any postman, and for example the USPS, be guilty if a private individual posted something illegal?
So he as guns in his bedroom and 3 more guns in his safe along with a machete (all apparently legal). Not in Mollenbeek or northeastern Paris, but near Graz.
Just your typical guy then.
Running TOR exits are a noble thing to do but people like this damage TOR's reputation.
And while there doesn't seem to be proof he intentionally got involved in CP, a smart pedophile probably would set up an exit node just for plausible deniability.
One of the concerning problems with the current judicative system is that most judges have no idea about modern technology because of their age. My father asked me today if I'm also working on "AI"... I told him that artificial intelligence doesn't exist and that it's a hype about software that's really good at imitating intelligence.
You still need downlinks with this. You could have some base stations run by amateurs, but that paints a target on their backs in a similar way running a Tor node already does.
As with Sealand/HavenCo and international waters/micronations more broadly. Even if no country with guns chooses to take direct action, it takes very little--if they care enough--to cut off supplies and any meaningful communications.
Only 11-year-old Libertarians think this way. "Circumventing sovereignty" is the surest way to destruction. Anyone who stands outside the protection of a legitimate sovereign power will be immediately destroyed by a real country. If you fly your shit out in space and declare your satellites to be independent of any flag, I am sure that they will all promptly disappear due to mysterious causes. Likewise, if you believe that you will simply move to a remote floating platform where you declare independence, you will soon discover what the U.S. Navy is for.
Far from just 11-year old libertarians - virtually all Americans don't understand (or acknowledge the existence of) our empire. They think Epstein's private island really was private.
What are the aforementioned "taken out of context" IRC logs? Very curious to see if they were painting the bullseye around the arrow here, or if he actually said he'd host CP.
My company blocks all known Tor IP addresses. We simply don't have the capacity (or patience) to deal with the 99% burpsuite spam and abuse that originates from these servers.
Not really. That person in the show didn't run an exit node but an entire commercial content network. The person in this case has no involvement in creating or hosting content, he's just involved in transporting traffic (any kind) because he believes in anonimity. His only motive is a principle, not money and he certainly doesn't agree with the content.
I loved that scene by the way, where he disregards the changes of emotional state in his target and then just explains he's doing this in person because his shrink wants him to interact more with people.
A really super strong first 10 minutes of a truly excellent show. Well except season 2 IMO, that was too drawn out for me.
He was found guilty, because running a Tor exit node is not sufficient defense against potential child porn violations. That's good. Because if not every child porn offender could do just that.
That actually sounds like a pretty smart plan for pedos. They'll just need to make sure not to keep any of their trash on their own computers, which means they'd need to remember some pretty long onion addresses, but it would probably work as well.
Luckily most pedos are not smart enough to do more than basic disk encryption.
Quite logical, same in France and likely many countries; if you run a Tor exit node (or any type of open proxy), you get visited by the police if someone does something wrong on your exit node.
Otherwise what could happen is that you run a Tor node and use it as an excuse for any crime you do.
A more politically controversial example would be social media/'platforms', IMO. Google and Facebook are allowed to be in possession of CSAM, as long as someone else put it there.
Of course. But "someone sit there for an hour downloading torrents" is not something they'd bother to chase vs "this guy seems to be downloading 854 torrents in last 24 hours"
Your coffee shop could turn over MAC addresses if the police showed up with a warrant - especially all of the 3rd party managed solutions with logging.
When you actually connect to the wifi network the mac addresses stay consistent and stable on macOS / iOS at least over multiple sessions. If they didn't do that, then a bunch of stuff would probably break.
There’s this silly HN conceit of these super sophisticated adversaries when the reality is most people don’t know the first thing about technology or network topology and wouldn’t know why they should obfuscate their MAC in the first place. It wouldn’t catch the 1% of sophisticated black hats but that describes a small fraction of actual people doing stuff online.
MAC addresses are useless to track, you can change it, randomize it (I think even Microsoft windows has that feature built in too), or simply just throw away that wireless adapter used. It would be useful if for example these MAC addresses are tied to your identity, say when you buy a laptop/phone, you have to go in the process of adding these MAC addresses to be linked to you of some sort.
I'm trying to imagine a plausible reason to (a) run a Tor exit node, but also (b) not actually use Tor for online nefariousness, and I'm coming up blank. I don't think running a Tor node as an excuse is a real scenario. (edit: emphasis)
Edit2: Jeez guys. I support Tor. I'm saying anyone who runs an exit node is also going to use Tor for anything that might get them in trouble, not do those thing in the clear and "use Tor as an excuse" as suggested above. That's a silly scenario and a poor justification for criminalizing Tor exit nodes.
You're misunderstanding the comment you're replying to. They're not saying you need an exit node to do bad stuff over Tor, they're saying that anybody with the technical ability and knowledge to run a tor exit mode would also choose to use Tor for any bad stuff, and that therefore it seems unlikely anyone who runs a tor exit node would also do bad stuff directly traceable to their own IP.
Based on your wording, it sounds like you're conflating the two things together... running an exit node and using tor are orthogonal to one another both in value provided to the user as well as effort involved.
Plausible reasons for:
(a) you greatly value privacy and the privacy of others such that you are willing to altruistically provide an exit node as a service; your country is a police state and you are sympathetic to those affected while also willing to accept the risk
(b) you greatly value your privacy and do not trust your ISP; you cannot access content sanctioned in your country; you are an internet engineer and need to test services which depend on privacy as a core feature
Also, I assume it wasn't intentional, but consider against arguing from the position of "I can't think of anything". You are betraying yourself by implying that you know all there is to know...which no one does.
Maybe if I'd said "I can't imagine X therefore Y must be true," but what I said was "I can't imagine X so I think Y" which doesn't imply I know everything at all. Quite the opposite imho. It implies I could change my opinion on Y if you showed me an example of X.
In any case, apparently that plus my use of the word "not" were ill-advised, since almost everyone here misread my comment to mean the opposite of what I actually meant. One person did read it as intended, and got another person to see it that way.
As someone else helpfully clarified for me, my point is that anyone with the technical skill to run a Tor exit node is also going to use Tor to hide any illegal activities they do online.
Yes because every one is living in a free country with no invasion of privacy rights and ISP to MITM every thing about you, US including btw with patriot Act.. and before you say “yeah but I am not doing anything illegal!?”, yet, laws change all the time, not to mention you don’t have to do anything illegal, you just don’t like spooks/ISP/etc. looking into your business, after all, it should be the case as a free citizen.
Any privacy advocate would do (a). There's lots of reasons to do (b) if you don't trust the government of the country you're in, which seems quite reasonable in a lot of countries around the world.
I strongly support Tor. I'm saying that anyone who runs an exit node is also going to use Tor for anything that might get them in trouble. Hence, it's nonsense to say that Tor exit nodes should be illegal on the grounds that they can be "used as an excuse," as the comment above suggested.
If running Tor protected you from any responsibility of traffic coming from you then it would be a real scenario. But there is an expectation that you should be at least somewhat responsible of traffic you generate. That is why running Tor exit node is often linked with meeting law enforcement officials.
> Further, as Kosovo is an extremely corrupt country, we are able to bribe both executive and judicative as well as getting information about court orders and raids before execution, enabling us to move servers out of the affected location, protecting our clients in any situation. Our excellent Serbian connections enable us to also move servers cross-border and play "ping pong" between both countries, essentially keeping content online forever.
[1] https://basehost.eu/