141–150 of 162 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Only by using your own stock of illegal data.
that's not true: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steganography
So the obvious bit here is that an adversarial actor can poison the blockchain with bits that make downloading, storing and processing the blockchain a highly illegal act. This may have a chilling effect on participating in the network, thus reducing the number of nodes, and undermining the trust on the blockchain and in the coin because the reduced requirement of computing power needed to mutate the blockchain. Acco…
The data embedded in the blockchain can only be extracted using custom tools. Custom tools can be used to extract any data from almost any other kind of other data, using steganography. You can extract illegal data from innocuous looking tweets, using the right tools.
That's the problem with the blockchain: there is no mechanism for deleting data (well, there's pruning, but that's meant to save storage space after processing all the data).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I see a lot of confusion around this topic - sharing porn images without the person's consent should always remain illegal. But just the fact that you have some images on your hard drive? That shouldn't be a crime in itself. If you have naked images of your ex-partner, they don't magically become revenge porn until the moment you share them without permission(at which point it's a crime and it's already punishable by…
I don't see the confusion. The claim upthread was that because "in computers" everything is "a number", nothing should be illegal. Sharing MP3s? It's just a number. Sending death threats? Just a number. Directing relatives to the money drop so they may get their loved one back? Just a number.
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That isn't as much of an issue. Once a secret is out, it is out. Something like child porn would be permanently illegal and permanently stored in the chain. Imagine hiding it there, letting a year or two of transactions build upon it before letting people know it was there. You can't remove it. The blockchain is now technically illegal. I was just thinking about this a lot this week, actually. The really crazy thing…
I think child porn laws are too one-size-fits-all. It's supposed to be to be a disincentive to abusing children to produce the images for profit. Once it's well and truly public so the profit motive is gone, it should become legal. Or at least at the same status as revenge porn if the subjects are identifiable. Unfortunately, most people are too puritanical to even dare to think about the topic, let alone opens debat…
The law is there to protect children, profit doesn't feature in the calculations.
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In the UK (and, I believe, the USA) child pornography is a "strict liability" issue — intent is irrelevant, mere possession is itself illegal. This is how teens get nailed for receiving unasked-for sexts from their under-age-of-consent SO. As with illegal drugs and, in the UK, unlicensed firearms, this means the prosecution doesn't need to prove intent. (Mandatory — usually harsh — sentence terms are usually part of…
I don't know enough about UK laws or laws in general, but it should be easy to discredit such law. It only takes one rebel tech savvy teen to send his nude sext to whatever celebrity/politician email/phone he can guess while alarming the police - and the press to stir as much shit as possible. Actually, pardon me for a minute, I have sci-fi short to write :).
> The defence is made out if the defendant proves that the photograph in question was sent to him without any prior request by him or on his behalf and that he did not keep it for an unreasonable time.
https://www.cps.gov.uk/legal-guidance/indecent-images-childr...
Isn't intent generally a big deal in law? If I argued that your innocent MS Word doc was illegal because it decoded to child abuse images under a special encoding scheme I just made up, I'd be laughed out of court, and rightly so. It's technically true, but irrelevant. No crime was committed. Doesn't the same principle apply here?
In the UK (and, I believe, the USA) child pornography is a "strict liability" issue — intent is irrelevant, mere possession is itself illegal. This is how teens get nailed for receiving unasked-for sexts from their under-age-of-consent SO. As with illegal drugs and, in the UK, unlicensed firearms, this means the prosecution doesn't need to prove intent. (Mandatory — usually harsh — sentence terms are usually part of…
> Section 160(1) creates an offence for a person to have any indecent photograph or pseudo-photograph of a child in his possession. [...] "Possession" involves both a physical and mental element. [...] The mental element is knowledge. A defendant must knowingly have custody and control of the photographs found on the device in question.
Downloading the blockchain, should it contain such images, would constitute "making", but it subject to similar mental requirements:
> The act of making or taking the indecent photograph or pseudo-photograph must be a deliberate and intentional act, done with the knowledge that the image made is, or is likely to be, an indecent photograph or pseudo-photograph of a child.
I suspect that not knowing that the blockchain does contain such images, not having knowledge of which transactions do, and that it requires specialised decoding rather than just being embedded per se/a default/intended usage would be enough to raise a defence.
https://www.cps.gov.uk/legal-guidance/indecent-images-childr...
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> What will a country do if someone embeds child pornography or a picture of Mohammed or something in the blockchain? In the US at least, I'd hope that we probably wouldn't criminalize 1M people for the actions of 1. Hopefully in other countries they wouldn't do that either.
Well it depends. If blockchain stored on disk directly contains knows know illegal content it will be picked up by some scanners used by law enforcement. Just like pirated software it won't be enough on it's own but might be a good leverage in the original case that caused computer hardware seizure.
In this case, you have an idea that child porn is illegal, but you had no idea it was coming through your blockchain.
Those are very different cases.
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> What will a country do if someone embeds child pornography or a picture of Mohammed or something in the blockchain? In the US at least, I'd hope that we probably wouldn't criminalize 1M people for the actions of 1. Hopefully in other countries they wouldn't do that either.
There is a possibility of a technical solution: - You create a special rule for a block known to contain illegal data. - The illegal data in the block gets NULLed. The other transactions are left untouched. - The checksum for the next block is no longer calculated, instead it is hardcoded. This means there is no way of verifying the transactions in that block. Perhaps you add a new signature for the block with the NU…
2. The problem is a technical one as a result of a blockchain allowing content other than financial transactions to be a part of the record.