Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

lowendbox.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

531–540 of 588 posts

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

#531

Post by Semaphor »

didntcheck wrote: post #530
Semaphor wrote: post #456

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My main adversary is my own ISP. VPNs are perfect for that. My secondary adversary are companies geoblocking content. VPNs are still perfect for that.

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.

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

#532

Post by didntcheck »

geysersam wrote: post #490
adastra22 wrote: post #443

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

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.

Or maybe he was innocent and said he was innocent. That's what innocent people would do

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

#533

Post by P_I_Staker »

hakavlad wrote: post #522
throwaway914 wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>There are many, many pedophiles If a person watches the CP - this does not mean that he is a pedophile. If a person watches the CP - this does not mean that he is a child abuser. Sharing CP != child abuse. Viewing CP != child abuse. Storing CP != child abuse.

Gross. You’re abusing the child any time you watch it.

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

#534

Post by kuhewa »

hakavlad wrote: post #522
throwaway914 wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>There are many, many pedophiles If a person watches the CP - this does not mean that he is a pedophile. If a person watches the CP - this does not mean that he is a child abuser. Sharing CP != child abuse. Viewing CP != child abuse. Storing CP != child abuse.

What an.. interesting set of clarifications you felt the need to attempt

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

#535

Post by delecti »

mptest wrote: post #524
delecti wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems it's unclear https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/nonce#Etymology_2 > 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…

Wow, "backronym". Cool word. Interesting something can be widely accepted among a nation and have little to no surety about etymology

Just wait until you hear about "okay". It's widely used in languages around the world, and there are dozens of competing etymologies. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_proposed_etymologies_o...

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

#536

Post by didntcheck »

BLKNSLVR wrote: post #321
pessimizer wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ch…

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)

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

#537

Post by anonym29 »

LeBit wrote: post #527
anonym29 wrote: post #445

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 suc…

Let's keep this simple. 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.

In case you're unfamiliar with the concept of website traffic metadata fingerprinting I've discussed above: https://www.ietf.org/archive/id/draft-irtf-pearg-website-fin...

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

#538

Post by hakavlad »

kuhewa wrote: post #534
hakavlad wrote: post #522

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>There are many, many pedophiles If a person watches the CP - this does not mean that he is a pedophile. If a person watches the CP - this does not mean that he is a child abuser. Sharing CP != child abuse. Viewing CP != child abuse. Storing CP != child abuse.

What an.. interesting set of clarifications you felt the need to attempt

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.

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

#539

Post by hakavlad »

P_I_Staker wrote: post #533
hakavlad wrote: post #522

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>There are many, many pedophiles If a person watches the CP - this does not mean that he is a pedophile. If a person watches the CP - this does not mean that he is a child abuser. Sharing CP != child abuse. Viewing CP != child abuse. Storing CP != child abuse.

Gross. You’re abusing the child any time you watch it.

I don't abuse kids whether or not I watch CP. Please provide evidence if you are making serious accusations.

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

#540

Post by red-iron-pine »

someweirdperson wrote: post #245
purple_elephant wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But you don't say these things out loud. Swiss bank ads don't look like this: "Genocidal dictators, we will help you hide your money!"

You are just not part of the right target group, so facebook won't show them to you.

no facebook or phones at all, just handshakes and backrooms in upscale bars
Post reply on HN