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Man found guilty of child porn because he ran a Tor exit node

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Re: Man found guilty of child porn because he ran a Tor exit node

#111

Post by sgjohnson »

npsomaratna wrote: post #16
schroeding wrote: post #8

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…

This isn't a parody, right? I mean, surely no-one would (seriously) say this in public in real life? Right?

I know the guy. No, it’s not a parody.

Re: Man found guilty of child porn because he ran a Tor exit node

#112

Post by linsomniac »

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.

Re: Man found guilty of child porn because he ran a Tor exit node

#113

Post by mhitza »

CSMastermind wrote: post #84
zgluck wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. That is also why we need to keep Kosovo out of the EU until this has been fixed - which I'm pretty sure won't happen any time soon :(.

I've heard similar things about Romania and Bulgaria which are both EU countries.

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).

Re: Man found guilty of child porn because he ran a Tor exit node

#114

Post by vel0city »

jmkni wrote: post #90
sillysaurusx wrote: post #34

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…

> he spent a lot of time downloading maps and trying to make a way to view them locally Isn't that, like, a map? lol we've had maps long before the internet

Even then there were lots of apps out there which provided maps offline before Google maps was even an idea.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Streets_%26_Trips

https://winworldpc.com/product/softkey-key-master-maps/10

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.

Re: Man found guilty of child porn because he ran a Tor exit node

#115

Post by momentoftop »

jaylittle wrote: post #11

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.

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.

Re: Man found guilty of child porn because he ran a Tor exit node

#116

Post by iudqnolq »

schroeding wrote: post #8

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…

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.

Re: Man found guilty of child porn because he ran a Tor exit node

#117

Post by bigbillheck »

gmiller123456 wrote: post #85
zer8k wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The way I learned it is that it is a portmanteau of child molester. The extra "o" in the middle is used because "chmo" is hard to pronounce.

"Chimo" would make more sense in that case, so that's probably not the origin of it.

Maybe English does have a little bit of vowel harmony after all.

Re: Man found guilty of child porn because he ran a Tor exit node

#118

Post by tamimio »

zer8k wrote: post #4
teddyh wrote: post #2

“ The law was changed a few weeks later to include private persons and sole traders as protected lsps, not just companies, but they had to convict me. ”

> 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.

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.

Re: Man found guilty of child porn because he ran a Tor exit node

#119

Post by itronitron »

andybak wrote: post #98
jmkni wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> he spent a lot of time downloading maps and trying to make a way to view them locally Isn't that, like, a map? lol we've had maps long before the internet

Paper gets heavy real quick and personal microfiche readers never caught on.

I imagine it's really hard to drive a car and use a microfiche reader at the same time.

Re: Man found guilty of child porn because he ran a Tor exit node

#120

Post by bell-cot »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #47
schroeding wrote: post #8

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…

> 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.
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