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

A Tor of the Dark Web

slifty.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 212 posts

Re: A Tor of the Dark Web

#51

Post by zalew »

klearvue wrote: post #14

A word of advice for those living under truly oppressive governments - do not connect to Tor directly (nor to a Tor bridge, to be on the safe side). Get a cheap VPS/EC2 abroad and use SSH tunnel to connect to that and from then onwards - to a Tor bridge. The reason is that, if connecting to Tor directly, security services will be able to figure out you are using Tor (although not what you are using it for) and may ta…

How governments have tried to block Tor [28C3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GwMr8Xl7JMQ

Re: A Tor of the Dark Web

#52

Post by Wohlf »

telecuda wrote: post #41

I wish there were a simple way to communicate how large and widespread CP is, and how much law enforcement could use your smarts to go after these guys. There are more households sharing CP in your community than there are bus stops. (We can roughly map IPs of known CP files advertised over torrent networks.) There are too few innovators in this space because specifics on CP networks are privy to law enforcement, and…

> There are more households sharing CP in your community than there are bus stops.

Sorry if I'm wrong, but I find that hard to believe. Any amount of CP is a problem IMO, but I don't think it's that bad. In my metropolitan area there's around 1,671,683 people, and I'd be surprised to learn there's 1000 honest-to-god pedos.

Re: A Tor of the Dark Web

#53

Post by pvarangot »

jchrisa wrote: post #44
runn1ng wrote: post #27

Yes, I know I shouldn't say it out loud, but here I am saying it (take me, Police) - out of curiosity, I went to Hard Candy section of The Hidden Wiki. (Yes, it is exactly what you would think it is.) GOD. There are seriously forums full of pedofiles sharing pictures and - maybe worse? - their stories and wisdoms. Maybe out of utter fascination, I spend about few hours on there and I felt like I want to murder all hu…

I didn't click through the links described (or even have time to install Tor), but it occurs to me that one may be able to find these guys via statistical analysis of writing style. Spider the web and then correlate less-anonymous writings with the stuff the ringleaders are saying on the Darknet.

A while ago Anonymous hacked one of those forums and published the usernames and hashes. Apparently a lot of them where using the same usernames and passwords in another porn-related forums in the "lit" web.

Don't know if it resulted in someone being caught by the police or not, but definitely subtler methods such as statistical analysis of writing style are not the only way to get a lead from those forums.

Re: A Tor of the Dark Web

#54

Post by slifty »

tptacek wrote: post #21

Tor was not "designed by the Navy" to protect dignitaries in cars or ships or whatever it is this article is alluding to. It was an academic research project for the NRL's CHACS group (NRL : CHACS :: MIT : Lincoln Lab). If you look at the project's publication history, it was almost from the jump (and continues to be today) a project intended to frustrate online censorship. The DOD, via both DARPA and the NRL, contin…

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onion_routing -- search "Navy"

And don't you try to tell me that the Navy doesn't try to protect its king.

Re: A Tor of the Dark Web

#56

Post by telecuda »

Wohlf wrote: post #52
telecuda wrote: post #41

I wish there were a simple way to communicate how large and widespread CP is, and how much law enforcement could use your smarts to go after these guys. There are more households sharing CP in your community than there are bus stops. (We can roughly map IPs of known CP files advertised over torrent networks.) There are too few innovators in this space because specifics on CP networks are privy to law enforcement, and…

> There are more households sharing CP in your community than there are bus stops. Sorry if I'm wrong, but I find that hard to believe. Any amount of CP is a problem IMO, but I don't think it's that bad. In my metropolitan area there's around 1,671,683 people, and I'd be surprised to learn there's 1000 honest-to-god pedos.

I live in a metropolitan area of around 500,000 and there are close to 200 markers indicating an IP address that's advertising CP availability.

We have methods of rating each marker (e.g. how many CP files, how many are teen, child, nudity vs. intercourse, etc). Of those 200, there are a handful of the worst offenders that law enforcement will use resources to pursue, a group in the middle that have downloaded a large number where victims are 12-18, and then those who have just a few random files from the known list.

Does that help?

Re: A Tor of the Dark Web

#57

Post by debacle »

jetti wrote: post #48
debacle wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://blog.torproject.org/running-exit-node

Thanks for the link. It is only in the circumstances of running an exit node. If you aren't running one, then you don't need to worry (as stated by several others already).

If you're not running an exit node, you don't have much to worry about.

Re: A Tor of the Dark Web

#58

Post by nowarninglabel »

fatbird wrote: post #49
noonespecial wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the proof that its working. As you say, when the child molesters are really and truly safe to speak their minds, everyone is. These people would exist anyway. Sometimes humanity sucks. Interesting though, TOR allowed you to study them in a way you would never have been able to otherwise. It merely disgusted you, but it could be a valuable resource to someone who studies how people break and thinks about what m…

Whether or not they exist anyway, it seems obvious to me that a supportive peer group is going to increase their effectiveness at predation. Perhaps they talk about it so much that they don't get around to doing it--studies on violent pornography and child pornography sometimes find that viewers use them as a safe outlet to actually doing it themselves. But that's a huge gamble. At present, TOR is simply enabling chi…

Although, logically, it doesn't allow for infiltrators (e.g., police) to enter the forums and attempt to build enough cred to initiate convincing these predators into doing something stupid, for instance dangling financial rewards in front of them for real world meetup for exchange of goods, etc.

This is how law enforcement has been working on carding forums. And while I don't think the enforcement is effective for that, since the financial incentive is always there, I do think there is a finite supply of people willing to prey on children for money and that there's a possibility of capturing the vast majority of them.

Re: A Tor of the Dark Web

#59

Post by [deleted] »

Wohlf wrote: post #52
telecuda wrote: post #41

I wish there were a simple way to communicate how large and widespread CP is, and how much law enforcement could use your smarts to go after these guys. There are more households sharing CP in your community than there are bus stops. (We can roughly map IPs of known CP files advertised over torrent networks.) There are too few innovators in this space because specifics on CP networks are privy to law enforcement, and…

> There are more households sharing CP in your community than there are bus stops. Sorry if I'm wrong, but I find that hard to believe. Any amount of CP is a problem IMO, but I don't think it's that bad. In my metropolitan area there's around 1,671,683 people, and I'd be surprised to learn there's 1000 honest-to-god pedos.

[deleted]

Re: A Tor of the Dark Web

#60

Post by mobweb »

jchrisa wrote: post #44
runn1ng wrote: post #27

Yes, I know I shouldn't say it out loud, but here I am saying it (take me, Police) - out of curiosity, I went to Hard Candy section of The Hidden Wiki. (Yes, it is exactly what you would think it is.) GOD. There are seriously forums full of pedofiles sharing pictures and - maybe worse? - their stories and wisdoms. Maybe out of utter fascination, I spend about few hours on there and I felt like I want to murder all hu…

I didn't click through the links described (or even have time to install Tor), but it occurs to me that one may be able to find these guys via statistical analysis of writing style. Spider the web and then correlate less-anonymous writings with the stuff the ringleaders are saying on the Darknet.

Perhaps that would work, but taking that idea one step further: I doubt that there's anything you could do to them legally, because the evidence of a similar writing style most likely wouldn't hold up in court. IANAL but I think the least you need to prosecute someone for their actions on the internet is an IP and a statement from the ISP that the IP was assigned to this users account at that very moment.

And then again I am unsure if simply visiting and contributing to such a forum could get you in any trouble, legally.

Post reply on HN