Running a Dark Web pedophile honeypot • Hacker News Board

Re: Running a Dark Web pedophile honeypot

#161

Post by nightpool » Wed, Jul 08, 2015, 4:32 PM UTC

utuxia wrote: post #82

I don't think he understands how Tor works. Everything you visit on tor gets your exit node IP address. That's how it works.

Technically, because of how hidden services work in the tor architecture (both the service AND the user are hidden from each other) there's no "exit ip" when connecting to a hidden service, it just happens somewhere in the intermediary hops. (with the hidden service pretending that its just getting a response from somewhere up the chain)

so what the author of this article was actually doing was just leaking his own IP. lol

Re: Running a Dark Web pedophile honeypot

#162

Post by logfromblammo » Wed, Jul 08, 2015, 4:42 PM UTC

jules wrote: post #130

majc2 wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having done a small amount of volunteer work with children, I've had some exposure to child protection issues. Often, its a spiral downwards (IIRC its typically called the spiral of abuse), where the person in question erodes mental barriers so that they see the behaviour as normal. I don't accept the "just watching" argument - it is child abuse. What you must understand is that it normalises the behaviour in that pe…

Is there any actual evidence for this? By the same token you could say that watching Game of Thrones will make you a murderer. I could easily see it being the opposite: relieving sexual pressure could make people less likely to actually harm a child.

~No, no, no. That's not what ancestor post was saying at all.~

~Watching Game of Thrones leads to playing Grand Theft Auto, and doing that will make you a murderer. When you're sliding down the slippery slope, you have to hit every rock on the way down.~

The theory reverses the arrow of causality.

If the Army uses simulation and gaming as part of its psychological conditioning program to not only get its soldiers to fire their weapons, but also aim at and kill the enemy, that does not imply that those games or simulations, used in isolation, will necessarily result in desensitization to violence.

I seriously want to design a contagion that imparts to individuals an intuitive understanding of conditional probabilities, and how to reverse one.

If you know that 99% of child abusers viewed images of child abuse prior to engaging in that activity themselves, you only know P(A|B), where A is viewing photos, and B is taking action. You do not know P(B|A), which is the likelihood that someone that someone who has viewed photos has done abuse, unless you also know the unconditional probabilities for P(A) and P(B). You can probably infer those two from crime statistics and investigative activities like those described in the article. But given the existing legal prohibitions and resultant secretive behaviors, I doubt you could determine either with a great deal of precision.

If (hypothetically) P(A|B)=1.0, P(A)=0.001 and P(B)=0.0001, then P(B|A)=0.1 . That means that even if you know that everyone who did A also did B, you can't assume that everyone who has done B has necessarily done A.

We could more easily calculate for the Game of Thrones and murder hypothesis.

Let's say A is "committed murder in 2014" and B is "watched GoT in 2014". From crime statistics, I estimate that P(A)=0.000045 . From ratings estimates, P(B)=0.063 . Now, I'm not entirely certain how many new murderers in 2014 had watched GoT, but I'll guess that P(B|A) = 0.063 . That makes P(A|B)=0.000045 . Huh. It looks like I assumed they were independent events....

If you went and did an actual survey of 2014's murderers, and discovered that P(B|A) was actually 0.12, that's a great find, but it still only means that P(A|B)=0.000086 . That's not a convincing argument that watching GoT causes actual murder. It just means that 0.0086% of GoT watchers committed murder. That might be explained by GoT inducing violent behavior in its viewers, but from the numbers, it's not bloody likely.

Re: Running a Dark Web pedophile honeypot

#163

Post by scott_karana » Wed, Jul 08, 2015, 4:49 PM UTC

jrcii wrote: post #10

sarahj wrote: post #7

Some of the technical points of this article are simply wrong... > The exit node IP address of the user was easily obtained using the two different methods discussed briefly above. This is really not a vulnerability but simply how tor, and the internet at large, works - hidden services by design protect the service not the user (the user is protected by tor by default) - what the author actually did here was "leak" t…

The author appears to believe that "Tor is the devil" because "4,000-5,000 hidden services are running at any given time. Secondly, the content served by these sites is almost universally illegal or immoral (by my definition anyway). A conservative estimate would be maybe 1 out of 200 or so hidden service websites contain content I would deem worthy of the protection an anonymous network provides. Sites featuring fre…

The author, from his comment section:

geekslop says: July 7, 2015 at 9:59 pm

Appreciate the comment RedditorThrowaway. My parenthetical headline that “tor is the devil” was facetious and apparently a failed attempt at dry humor.

Re: Running a Dark Web pedophile honeypot

#164

Post by jarek-foksa » Wed, Jul 08, 2015, 4:52 PM UTC

argumentum wrote: post #64

tdy721 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am normally a pretty level dude, but in this case I really do believe we are dealing with something supernaturally evil. This isn't snooping on randoms, it's exposing demons for what they are. (Atheist, but science just doesn't have the words for this.)

A a fellow atheist, I agree that evil is a real thing, but I still don't see the need to call it "supernatural". Evil is the opposite of good, so if we agree that actions to promote life, liberty and happiness are good, then actions that promote death, slavery and misery are evil. Simple as that. So there's plenty of evil in nature.

Evil and good are not real things, those are abstract, subjective and high level concepts that exist only in our brains. You can easily reprogram a human ("teach" or "brainwash" using the subjective terms) to classify death, slavery and misery as either good or evil.

All that matters in nature is whether something works or does not work, not whether it's good or evil.

Re: Running a Dark Web pedophile honeypot

#165

Post by gwern » Wed, Jul 08, 2015, 4:55 PM UTC

AdeptusAquinas wrote: post #4

imrehg wrote: post #2

Is it just me, or the rhetorical question in the title ("why I now think Tor is the devil") never got answered? Also not clear whether the Dark Web spider project was just to later seed the honeypot sites to appear legit, or was it a project on its own? The quote "The reports are published nightly on a hacker-related Dark Web site that I am involved with" hints at the latter, and then I'd double don't understand why…

I think the implication is its the devil because mostly Tor is used for pedophilic reasons - drugs, counterfeiting or political protest (I'd assume) are almost insignificant in comparison to pedophile traffic.

To expand ontokenizerrr's point, I read this as a big victory:

> First, the pedo site saw magnitudes more traffic than the counterfeiting or drugs websites – in the order of 100 times more traffic than the other two combined.

When someone wants to use the DNMs, they start at http://deepdotweb.com/ , http://thehub7gqe43miyc.onion/ , http://darknetmarkets.reddit.com/ or http://www.gwern.net/Black-market%20survival ; these are curated community lists, which people use to avoid falling for phishing links and scams.

Just look at the traffic stats for the one subreddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/DarkNetMarkets/about/traffic/ !

DNM users do not start at a random .onion because that is a recipe for being the latest victim of 'Drug Market' and other longstanding onion scams.

OP appears to have made no effort to get his honeypot into any of the standard sources of DNM info, and accordingly, he got no traffic. This is exactly as one would hope, and says more about how badly he bungled the drugs honeypot (and conversely, how pathetic the security of the pedo community is) than about any ratio of pedos to drug buyers.

(This is a similar problem as the paper which counts .onions and argues that pedophiles are 99% or whatever of hidden-service traffic; the differing communities using hidden-services simply don't work the way that OP or that paper assumed for ease of making wild claims. Counting onion addresses does not work because the pedo sites tend to change onions constantly while the huge blackmarkets like Agora stick at a single onion like agorahooawayyfoe.onion for months or years; counting visits to a lame honeypot like OP's does not work because with no advertising, vetting, or sellers, no one would bother with his honeypot when they could use Agora, Nucleus, Abraxas, or other established markets with broad offerings.)

Re: Running a Dark Web pedophile honeypot

#166

Post by juliangregorian » Wed, Jul 08, 2015, 5:33 PM UTC

craigmccaskill wrote: post #58

zxcvcxz wrote: post #13

"pedophiles use encryption, so encryption is the devil." seems to be where this is going. That's a slippery slope and a bit unethical to use pedophiles to push an authoritarian political agenda. I bet it's fun to call all his critics pedophile sympathizers and sit upon a moral high-horse of self-righteousness while pushing his authoritarian ideology under the guise of social justice.. That's the thing about these peo…

Sadly this is where the UK government seems to be going [1]. They want all encryption to have a backdoor or be outlawed. [1] http://www.businessinsider.com/david-cameron-encryption-back...

How do governments come up with this stuff? Don't they have state secrets to keep?

Re: Running a Dark Web pedophile honeypot

#167

Post by logfromblammo » Wed, Jul 08, 2015, 5:40 PM UTC

imaginenore wrote: post #116

TheDong wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're watching game of thrones, you are watching people kill each other. You are committing a crime. See how that's silly? There are people who watch animated child porn and they are ruled as criminals even though no actual child was directly harmed. There are people who watch snuff films, where people actually are killed, and the viewers are not breaking the law in most states. Perhaps you would argue that snuff…

> If you're watching game of thrones, you are watching people kill each other No, you're watching fictional people pretend to kill each other. You would have an argument if you used snuff films as an example. And yes, if watching a child being raped is illegal, than watching a real murder should be.

You are assuming that just because the prefrontal cortex sometimes knows the difference between reality and fiction, the rest of the brain must as well.

If the argument is that seeing murders causes someone to become a murderer, I'm not certain you can exempt fiction. If you outlaw depictions of murder on the presumption that it would lower the actual murder rate, you have to go whole hog.

   _O  \O/  ...meaning this ASCII art of
  ' |\+-@-  one guy stabbing another guy
   / \ /|   with a sword would be illegal.

Believing in such suggests that Ludovico's Technique from Clockwork Orange is real, it works, and that humans can be effectively reprogrammed by presenting the appropriate images to the visual cortex and somehow zapping the limbic system, in exactly the same manner that Pavlov's dog was reprogrammed to salivate at the sound of a bell.

So where are the televisions that shoot tiny darts of cocaine into its viewers whenever someone is killed on-screen? At least a violent video game provides some virtual reward for virtual murders, such as glowing green stacks of cash, or mission advancement, or some stupid little thing that produces a squirt of dopamine.

That part of our brains does not know the difference between reality, dreams, and Hollywood trickery. Certain mirror neurons in the brain will fire whether you are actually doing yoga, thinking about doing yoga, or watching a yoga instructor do yoga. Your reward center doesn't really care if the image is a product of good photography or good GPU rendering. It doesn't even care that it is a 2D image rather than 3D reality.

Fortunately, there appears to be no causal link provable flowing from watching something done to doing the depicted act yourself. Instead, it appears that those who are predisposed to do something, or have already decided to do it, will very often model, simulate, and practice that action--using whatever means they have at their disposal--before going on to do it. If any one tool or strategy becomes unavailable, another would be substituted.

Re: Running a Dark Web pedophile honeypot

#168

Post by jules » Wed, Jul 08, 2015, 5:43 PM UTC

majc2 wrote: post #153

jules wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there any actual evidence for this? By the same token you could say that watching Game of Thrones will make you a murderer. I could easily see it being the opposite: relieving sexual pressure could make people less likely to actually harm a child.

As I understand it yes, that the theory is suggested by academics with appropriate experience. See: http://mentorforensics.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/Dr-Joe... for more info.

I don't see any evidence there.

Re: Running a Dark Web pedophile honeypot

#169

Post by CityUtopian » Wed, Jul 08, 2015, 5:45 PM UTC

ikeboy wrote: post #66

api wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree, and I think the problem is the framing. Call it rape porn, because it is. What would you think of someone trading files like "REAL video of ISIS soldiers gang raping and beheading girl!" Child porn, especially the "hard core" sort alluded to here, is in the same category. I do dislike the OP's guilt by association and vigilantism though. There's a reason we have a proper justice system. Imagine if someone…

The obvious counterpoint is that beheading videos are legal to watch. The last time this came up on HN that I remember, someone linked to these posts by Rick Falkvinge: https://falkvinge.net/2012/09/07/three-reasons-child-porn-mu... https://falkvinge.net/2012/09/11/child-porn-laws-arent-as-ba...

Another obvious counterpoint is that a child can upload - of their own free will - a sexually explicit video of themselves. Has the child raped themselves?

Re: Running a Dark Web pedophile honeypot

#170

Post by dragonwriter » Wed, Jul 08, 2015, 5:51 PM UTC

logfromblammo wrote: post #167

imaginenore wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you're watching game of thrones, you are watching people kill each other No, you're watching fictional people pretend to kill each other. You would have an argument if you used snuff films as an example. And yes, if watching a child being raped is illegal, than watching a real murder should be.

You are assuming that just because the prefrontal cortex sometimes knows the difference between reality and fiction, the rest of the brain must as well. If the argument is that seeing murders causes someone to become a murderer, I'm not certain you can exempt fiction. If you outlaw depictions of murder on the presumption that it would lower the actual murder rate, you have to go whole hog. _O \O/ ...meaning this ASCI…

> So where are the televisions that shoot tiny darts of cocaine into its viewers whenever someone is killed on-screen?

Rather than direct chemical triggers that stimulate the brains reward system ("tiny darts of cocaine"), they typically use other triggers to the reward system, like music. Same effect, less additional machinery.