What is Digg?129 Comments
- OBKenobi, on 10/12/2007, -4/+129This is why the newsmedia likes to trump up the "child pornography" hysteria. This is the one excuse that repeatedly works to justify these questionable raids.
Just mention child porn and the gullible public will let the police get away with anything. Who would defend the rights of a pedo any more than they would a terrorist? But in the process, we continue to lose our rights, and the grip of the governments tightens around our necks ever tighter. - moore, on 10/12/2007, -1/+68You know what other nefarious invention is used by paedophiles every day? That's right, it's lurking right outside your house, and it's how paedophiles everywhere roam the suburb stalking their prey, hunting them down. I speak, of course, of none other than the disgusting device known as THE ROAD. Without THE ROAD paedophile minivans (a.k.a. "molestation-mobiles") would be stuck in garages across the country, powerless to hunt down at abduct children at the command of their sick child-raping masters.
And what of little Jenny, kidnapped from a neighbourhood park in Maine last week? She'd be safe at home with her parents and family if not for THE ROAD, which generously provided convenient and speedy transportation for her abductor both to and away from the scene of the crime. What will you tell little Jenny's parents? How will you justify the continued survival of THE ROAD? - bug20k1, on 10/12/2007, -4/+66http://tor.eff.org/
It's sad to see one of the most secure ways of browsing the internet(s) be taken down by Germany. Maybe it'll be just like the Pirates bay, and another couple hundred servers will pop up in some other country. - positron, on 10/12/2007, -4/+61First they came for the TOR servers
But I did not run a TOR server
So I did not speak out
... - Crackshot, on 10/12/2007, -21/+73What's even more sad is knowing that there are scumbags out there using the anonymity and safety of a network of peers for ***** like kiddie porn.
- L0t3k, on 10/12/2007, -20/+66"das SS Gestapo!"
I don't like what's going on, but I still think that's a bogus analogy. - t3hX, on 10/12/2007, -1/+46Or just not use any German exit nodes.
- simpleblob, on 10/12/2007, -2/+43In Thailand, when you browse to Tor's website (tor.eff.org),
You will see this http://www.mict.go.th/ci/iiijjjIllllllllllllllI.html
(Meaning: Unsuitable site for viewing)
The Thai government blocked every proxy and pornography sites
for the sake of protecting children from "Hackers" and "porn."
Sadly, if these trends go on under Taksin's ruling, Thailand might become like China.... - newAccount, on 10/12/2007, -3/+43"Ok I'm gonna have to have you bend over for the search. We need to check to see if you have any of that kiddie porn stuff in your anus."
Interestingly enough, with todays flash drives you can fit quite a bit of kiddy porn up your ass. - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -5/+45you could still use portable firefox, just not portable TOR
- int2str, on 10/12/2007, -1/+40I've been running a Tor exit-node for a while.
In the process I've gotten police inquiries for log files. Simple truth was, I had nothing. Tor doesn't log connections and I didn't log TCP connections (of course). The police investigation moved on without me...
The only reason I'm not running a Tor node anymore is bandwidth. - feedmecereal, on 10/12/2007, -1/+34Tor is a toolset for a wide range of organizations and people that want to improve their safety and security on the Internet. Using Tor can help you anonymize web browsing and publishing, instant messaging, IRC, SSH, and other applications that use the TCP protocol. Tor also provides a platform on which software developers can build new applications with built-in anonymity, safety, and privacy features.
Tor aims to defend against traffic analysis, a form of network surveillance that threatens personal anonymity and privacy, confidential business activities and relationships, and state security. Communications are bounced around a distributed network of servers called onion routers, protecting you from websites that build profiles of your interests, local eavesdroppers that read your data or learn what sites you visit, and even the onion routers themselves.
Tor's security is improved as its user base grows and as more people volunteer to run servers. Please consider volunteering your time or volunteering your bandwidth. And remember that this is development code—it's not a good idea to rely on the current Tor network if you really need strong anonymity.
http://tor.eff.org/ - econoar, on 10/12/2007, -2/+34why/how is this illegal?
- ZxieuS, on 10/12/2007, -2/+28although i know very little about the TOR technology surely something designed for privacy would not keep log files. if i were to create a tool for this purpose i definitely would not keep logs
- ZeonZumDeikun, on 10/12/2007, -3/+28Doesn't look like they shut the TOR down, just went snooping for logfiles.
Hopefully I read that right. - chrono13, on 10/12/2007, -1/+25"Do we give up our freedom in order to help track down criminals?"
No.
"or do we keep our freedom but potentially let criminals have an extra layer of anonymity."
Yes.
In a world where everyone is treated like a criminal to prevent crime, there is no reason to not be a criminal. - Snakedal337, on 10/12/2007, -2/+23Then they came for the music; I wasn't a pira....
Wait. ***** they got me there. - flaire, on 10/12/2007, -46/+66das SS Gestapo!
- burke, on 10/12/2007, -0/+19It's damn near impossible. They'll never find anything of value on TOR servers. They don't keep logs, your path changes, as you said, and you're routed through three of them (by default). Only your computer and the exit node have the original data; the other two just relay an encrypted stream. The exit node doesn't log data, and even if it did, there's no solid proof as to where the data originated, because all it knows is the location of the 2nd node and the target server (neither of which is logged)
- tuna1, on 10/12/2007, -1/+20I really don't think they'll find too much in these servers. About every 1 minute, Tor changes your server path, meaning you only use a paticular server only a few times before the path is changed. So if they're looking for evidence against specific people who used the Tor technology, I can't see a few random TCP connections being used as 'hard' evidence.
Also, I was under the impression that Tor made it difficult to track the specific locations of Tor servers, but I can't find a passage that confirms this. - MrObjectional, on 10/12/2007, -1/+19Good call, positron. Makes me wanna set one up...
- boyter, on 10/12/2007, -0/+18No problem for the moment.
http://anonymouse.org is still going. Although it also is in Germany I think so it could be a future concern.
This is annoying however. Since I am currently living in China, I use these programs to get a real internet connection. - RichPowers, on 10/12/2007, -0/+17Maybe I don't understand TOR enough, but shouldn't this not make a difference to people who use it? Doesn't data bounce through multiple servers so that even if one server is confiscated, they still can't tell where the user *really* originated from?
- diggduggjoe, on 10/12/2007, -5/+22The sad thing about kiddie porn is, that like the illegal drug trade, the fact it is illegal will make it far too profitable to ignore by criminals and will actually increase the production of it.
If, kiddie porn was legal to possess, but not to have a copyright on, the profit for it would drop to zero. With photos available, those of the public who would like to track the scum who made them could ID the child (very important to any investigation) and possibly the perp by tattoos, furnishings, etc. The fact is child porn is evidence of a crime, not the crime itself. Instead of that evidence being in a police locker or in the hands of like minded creeps, we could have it in the open where the power of the Internet could shine brightly and catch those who endanger our kids.
100% synthetic PC generated kiddie porn has not harmed any child, but it is expensive to do. So, it is better to kidnap a kid, rape them and kill them, since the punishment would be the same for fake kiddie porn. As a father, that scares me more than the weirdos out there. You can teach your kids to stay away from strangers, but aggressive kidnappers/pornographers will be hard for them to protect themselves from.
In no way do I find the raping of children to be acceptable, but I think that the effects of a black market are often overlooked by the do gooders. Just look at drugs, we won that war didn't we. Plus the elimination of civil rights sucks, too. I hear that England wishes to punish people who do not offer up their encryption keys. So, the government now can insinuate that you are a criminal and force you to offer up your keys. As an IT person, I backup tons of data for customers and could easily be caught for their *****. I now encrypt those backups for that very reason. The worst case, I can have time to get a lawyer and explain the files are my clients and not mine before I unlock them. That is a right I feel that we must have.
Sometimes in our efforts to stop a behavior, we actually add the incentive of profit to it by banning it. We keep making that mistake. - zetsurin, on 10/12/2007, -2/+17At some point in time the TOR server must expose an IP to the 'bad sites' in question. Due to the way TOR works (correct me if I am wrong anyone) the IP address exposed to the 'bad site' won't be of the person at the other end of the TOR network requesting the illicit materials, but that of the server providing the TOR service to that individual. This is why the door was kicked down of the peope possessing the servers and not the queers requesting the content.
- foolonthehill, on 10/12/2007, -3/+17That's kind of twisting the point of the poem. I genuinely have no problem with 'them' coming for the terrorists or the paedophiles. The original was concerned with groups defined by political beliefs, and most variants of it are concerned with groups definied by religious beliefs. Groups that the speaker is not part of, but that are not inherently bad either.
I still think using the pursuit of terrorists or paedophiles as an excuse to attack Tor servers is wrong, but that's a crucially different statement. - Jugalator, on 10/12/2007, -1/+14TOR is a distributed network, and I'd think it would still work just fine? Can you not use it now, or what?
- fmaxwell, on 10/12/2007, -3/+16I am not even going to ask how you know that...
- snapya, on 10/12/2007, -7/+19Sorry to ask but what is TOR?
- zetsurin, on 10/12/2007, -4/+16Damn, my home IP was banned by digg for some reason, so the only way I could participate was via TOR!!
- vibez, on 10/12/2007, -4/+15This is bad news indeed. But I can imagine why they raided the servers. TOR provides anonymity for the good and the bad people out their. It a tough decision we face with such services. Do we give up our freedom in order to help track down criminals? or do we keep our freedom but potentially let criminals have an extra layer of anonymity.
- r0Ot3d, on 10/12/2007, -0/+11Nice link boyter :)
I'd hate to see TOR go totaly, I use TOR more for Irc then for WWW.
I just feel a little better not having my ip out there with all the wanna be 1337 h4x0rz on Irc. - jonesin, on 10/12/2007, -1/+12"In a world where everyone is treated like a criminal to prevent crime, there is no reason to not be a criminal."
You should make t-shirts with that on it, that would be awesome - zoxed, on 10/12/2007, -1/+11AFAIK running a TOR server is not illegal: they where seized by police following a line of evidence of something else that *is* illegal.
If TOR works as advertised the police will analysis the machines and the trail will be a dead end i.e. the users have been successfully anomalysed. - FlaNative, on 10/12/2007, -6/+16First they came for the terrorists; I wasn't a terrorist
Next, they came for the pedophiles; I wasn't a pedophile
I am waiting on the next line; What is that knock on the door? - Wasyu, on 10/12/2007, -1/+10I'll forgo adding yet another Nazi joke here and leave that for someone else.
Yes they could not tell who that data belonged to on those TOR servers everything is purposefully encrypted and not logged etc it would be nearly impossible to get anything from them.
I guess they do not fully understand how TOR works.
As for being out of line yes it is out of line and they deserve every bit of bad PR and possible lawsuits this is going to cause them.
On giving up freedom for security Ben Franklin answered that very question with the words "Those who give up liberty for temporary security will end up with and deserve neither." - Junman, on 10/12/2007, -0/+9You dont really need an alternative yet, the good thing about Tor as someone mentioned is that its distributed for the very exact thing that happened.. So when the circuit is made now on, it'll internally choose the servers from among the other online Tor servers ... u can get back to wat u were doing :)
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -1/+9"Umm, sorry but I don't think this article is a particularly good place to start evangelising the virtues of running your own TOR server."
Sure it is, because you can set up a "middle man" server where your IP is NOT an exit node, just a relay node... you're still helping the network immensely.
People like the freedom but don't wanna work or risk anything to get it ;)
In any case, it is 100% pefectly safe and acceptable to run an exit node provided your house/apartment/whatever is free from warez or any questionable material. *IF* the cops have a warrant to search your machine, they will see you are simply running TOR, won't find any evidence whatsoever of the supposed request, and will move on. - dbr_onix, on 10/12/2007, -0/+8I think people are overreacting a bit. This is only removing a few exit nodes in germany, all the others are still working fine.. As has been said, tor is decenteralized, unless someone takes down every tor exit node, and somehow stops others springing up, it's not going anywhere (I'm really not sure how tor locates exit nodes, so don't know if it could be used to disable TOR, but I doubt it)
Still, TOR exit nodes getting legal trouble isn't a new thing, the tor.eff.org site even has prewritten letters designed to be sent to ISP's etc who complain about it, although this is the first time I've heard of one being shutdown.. Also, wasn't TOR originally used by the goverment or millatry? If so, I assume it's still used to some degree today by them, which lessens the chances of it being shutdown..
- Ben - spengy, on 10/12/2007, -3/+11when you decreasing the number of exit nodes, the network gets slower. Hopefully some new nodes will pop up to replace the ones that have been taken down. Hopefully those that were taken down will only be gone temporarily, too.
Shameless Tor plug: Everyone out there on Digg, if you have spare bandwidth and care about anonymity, set up a Tor server. Tor is awesome. Here is the official howto: http://tor.eff.org/docs/tor-doc-server.html.en - foolonthehill, on 10/12/2007, -2/+10I thought 'paedophiles' in the context of this article (and its responses) was referring to those who share or seek out child pornography over the internet. This is illegal in most countries.
- boyter, on 10/12/2007, -1/+8http://anonymouse.org
I use it in China and works a treat. Otherwise, just plug into a proxy server somewhere else and you should be fine. I use a combination of the two with good effect in China. - Junman, on 10/12/2007, -0/+7I think richpowers is right in the fact that unless all the servers on your path are from among the 7 that they confiscated, this should not be much of a threat... but I think what most are fearing is the direction this is taking.. If governments could sieze these servers at will,
1) people are gonna be thinking twice before volunteering their node as a server,
2) different governments collaborating to uncover information is a possibility, so the whole idea of using exit nodes in different administrative domains may not work so well...
Now once they have the information, we should be able to trust that they dont use it to undermine our privacy... but i dont think we do.... n actually i think most are sick of the kiddy porn lame line really... - williamdyer, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6MAKING kiddie porn is, by definition, rape, because the child cannot consent.
Looking at kiddie porn is sick, but pursuing it is a waste of resources that should be spent on finding the child-rapists that created it.
Making fake kiddie porn is sick, too, but it isn't rape. Some Japanese comics are "kiddie porn" under laws that forbid fake kiddie porn. - MrObjectional, on 10/12/2007, -1/+7Welcome to Republican United States.
You know they're doing it. - noddyxoi, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5Governments can use this motives for hunting those that have information that can be used against them(governments). And also inflicting fear/terror on those who have anything to say...
Wellcome to doublethink. - diggduggjoe, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5I do not believe that everyone on the Internet is prowling for kiddie porn. You do, that is frightening. More likely, those who are not paedos would be willing to find it just to know that they can (forbidden fruit) or that kiddie porn, in fact, exists. Someone tells the world there is a boogie man out there, which they intend to remove all civil rights to find and I figure some may wish to confirm that the boogie man is real.
If, kiddie porn possession was legal, only true pedophiles would be hording files for as mentioned above normal people would know that they exist and are easy to find, so they would hold zero interest in them. Police websites could legally post files (with hard core stuff removed) to help ID the victim and the perp. Today, even a picture with the genitals covered are considered porn for someone may imagine them uncovered and wank over them. It is completely stupid. Ideas are not crimes. Real rape is. I have seen books of nude children in the photography section of national bookstores in recent times (now, not often). Are nudes art or porn? How about "The Blue Lagoon? Kiddie porn? I assume porn for a person was busted at an amusement park for filming young girls fully clothed. Somehow, even though every person stuck behind the girls in line must have looked at their behinds many times while waiting for a ride, the guy gets a butt on video and it is kiddie porn. The only difference between the butt on tape and the 60,000 people walking behind the girls throughout the day is in the mind of the pervert. Yes, he is a pervert, but how can the fully clothed girl can be decent enough to walk around a theme park, but pure unadulterated kiddie porn when on a video tape? This is witch hunting at its best! Some guys wank to fat chicks, which I think is as diseased as kiddie porn, that is their right. When they rape fat chicks, then they have committed a crime and we must punish them. Would photographing fully clothed fat women be equivalent to raping them, even if a weirdo is wanking over the pics?
In fact, I do research on pedophilia using TOR. I am not seeking content, but an understanding how such a anti-procreative desire can arise. That and the effects on our liberties when thought crimes are introduced. If, thinking of sex acts are a crime, how about thinking terrorists may have a reason to bomb us? Obviously, thinking about a just reason to act out against us is equivalent to aid and comfort to the enemy. Why should the fact the ideas never left your body be a reason not to try you for treason? Why should you not deserve death for thinking wrong? Or, at least, different from the majority? In a Christian country like the US, are Jews wrong to pray to their god? Should that be a crime, too? When we accept that thought crimes should be punished, then civilization as we know is done. We will have 1984 in its purest interpretations. - noddyxoi, on 10/12/2007, -1/+6Oakes your comment reveals a great lack of faith in the nature of human being ...
People who watch child porn (have boners with it) must have deep child trauma also...
Punishment and borning in a sick society was what made them that way... Don't make this world even worst with that kind of attitude.
Understanding is harder than throwing rocks... in some countries in Africa people still get comdemned to public throwing of rocks until death. - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -1/+6To all the people pussing out of running a TOR middle-man or exit node:
(From the freenet FAQ)
The true test of someone who claims to believe in Freedom of Speech is whether they tolerate speech which they disagree with, or even find disgusting. If this is not acceptable to you, you should not run a Freenet (in this case, TOR) node.
While most people wish that child pornography and terrorism did not exist, humanity should not be deprived of their freedom to communicate just because of how a very small number of people might use that freedom.
So help out, donate some bandwidth and fight this *****. Even if you don't want to run an exit node, which would make your computer execute the request and send the data back through the circuit, simply run a middle-man node. This will simply relay the encrypted data from the previous node before you to the next one. Nothing leaves your machine.
In any case, people should really get the courage to run an exit node. There's a lot of people demanding freedom of speech who aren't willing to put up risks for doing so. *IF* anyone downloads "illegal" data and the police search your computer, obviously they won't find anything since you're not the one downloading it. *NOTHING WILL HAPPEN TO YOU*
Fight the paranoia. - Mambo, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5Hey, maybe something good will come out of this.
Who knows, maybe the German police will use their money and find a hole in TOR, everyone else gets better privacy due to said hole being fixed, and the child-pornographer gets caught due to said hole.
It can happen. -
Show 51 - 100 of 129 discussions
The Digg Toolbar for Firefox lets you Digg, submit content, and keep track of Digg even when you're not on the Digg site. Download the official 
© Digg Inc. 2009
— Content created and posted by Digg users is