AfterDawn: Tech news

P2P networks to work against child porn

Written by Petteri Pyyny @ 06 May 2004 2:11 User comments (20)

P2P networks to work against child porn Virtually all major P2P networks, including Kazaa and the P2P United (a political lobby organization of several P2P networks, including Morpheus and Bearshare), have announced that they will or already are working together with FBI and other law enforcement organizations in order to bust people who use P2P networks to distribute child pornography online.
The discussion about child pornography in P2P networks was launched by five U.S. senators who have urged FTC to investigate P2P networks to see whether those are used as means to distribute child pornography online. P2P companies have been quick to respond to allegations and Kazaa has said that it already works together with FBI to track down people who distribute child porn online. But P2P United's director also said that "We are happy to do more than our fair share, but to call this a P2P-induced problem is dishonest."

Source: TechNewsWorld

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20 user comments

16.5.2004 17:11

Ok, let me point out some facts! 1. Child Porn is disgusting Thats a fact BUT why are they on about it just for P2P now? It's also a FACT that most of the child porn content on the internet is in fact on webpages! Yes a browser would find more than KaZaa would according to studies! So why dont the FBI also go after those? Well, here's why! They are going after them but wont publicise it, they just want P2P to have a bad name thats all! So thats why they highlight P2P in the fight but guess what, with every invention there are bad things like that, camera = kiddie porn pictures, motion video = kiddie porn video, internet = possible resource for kiddie porn etc etc so dont just point out P2P, name the whole fucken list and be fair about it, fucken FBI scum!

26.5.2004 20:16

I think differently Dela. And I suppose we ARE a community of people who value other people's opinions.... I hope anyway :D Well.... What I think is, it's that none of those child pornography pages every show up on Google, not that I've looked... uhm... Anyway, they do show up on Kazaa searches a lot, and I agree Child Porn is disgusting (and outright inhuman in my opinion), but I don't think that they're trying to give P2P a bad name, I just think it's easier to find Child Porn AND it's another alternative to stop child porn. I'm sure the FBI are going after the websites as well...

37.5.2004 01:36
Amiga1200
Inactive

I agree I dont believe the FBI is trying to give the p2p a bad name. The p2p been highlight cause how easy it is to pass childporn around without it being traced. I think after big case of the child porn site that got busted about a year ago in the uk its scared many here in the UK police are still going though the list that was handed over to them by the FBI. Police , doctors, teachers have all been arrested cause of this.

47.5.2004 02:07
brian100
Inactive

Any action possible to clamp down & stop this vile child porn & the sick individuals that view it is welcomed by me!!

57.5.2004 09:58

Oh im not saying its bad what they are doing, im delighted they are cracking down on it, its just that all over the news u see it about p2p and child porn! The RIAA were the first to say it, and I mean what the fuck do the recording industry association of america have to do with child porn? That was a name blackening attempt by them! They need to show P2P as the MAIN supply of child porn on the net but studies showed its not! Web sites and newsgroups are the worst for it. Most newsgroup services are completely anonymous so u can subscribe to whatever group you want and no1 would ever know so thats how most of it is traded. Now they do crack down on that too but u dont see it as publicised as p2p do you? be honest!

67.5.2004 10:20

Yup Got to agree with that one, most usenet servers i have seen pride themselves on being completely anonymous,and as for the RIAA using it as a way to further blacken the name of p2p, lets face it it's a cynical attempt to further there own cause

77.5.2004 11:12

Exactly, thats my point :-)

88.5.2004 09:54
Amiga1200
Inactive

i maybe wrong about this, i suppose with websites is harder to close or let alone trace. I mean you can view a website thats half away around the world in another counrty. Where something like a p2p its more closer to home...comments?

98.5.2004 09:58
Amiga1200
Inactive

Dela does have a point, you just can't blame one source. We all remember the school kids that want on a rampage and DOOM was blamed for that. when something very bad happens or is going on we look for something or someone to blame, instead of looking at the big picture. If DOOM really made them kids go shoot their friends then we all be doing it....

108.5.2004 20:07

I think it maybe that P2P networks have a greater chance of tracing the predators that are out there. After all, most people don't let anyone get into their computers, but P2P is the big exception. Obviously you can't just go snooping around people's hardrives, but if a keyword is brought up and the network can be alerted then hopefully it can also be traced. With some luck the P2P networks will be doing the monitoring and then alert officials, so they can concentrate on the predators, not the regular sharers. People on P2P networks have a level of trust in the networks, so it seems like it might be a good idea to exploit that trust in the case of people who would exploit innocent children. Those kind of people don't deserve any kind of trust and I would be willing to bet many feel the same and would work with the P2P to lure them out by "supplying" the material (lets hope they are jpgs of flowers or something) on their computers with key word and then report when those files were being downloaded. Of course it is ridiculous to even suggest that P2P causes this problem, anymore than suggestive clothing causes rape.

119.5.2004 03:39
DELTA_9
Inactive

p2p is only one way to distribute illegal material.. this kiddy porn thing! it is just a social accepted way to get an in...to evently stop p2p... coz lets face it all most every thing on thease networks is distributed illegaly...shit i dont have the coppyright to all the shit i share do you? maby you shoud think about that? coz it will come in steps what thay monitor, people downloading kiddy porn first ... once there in next comes music... next hollywood movies...before you know it thay will have charge you for d-loading the matrix or some news story from CNN so be warned we will all be seen as crims in the eyes of authoritys...so i say fuck em off and dont give them an in p.s anythig illegal just goes on a black market they will never stop that shit.there is 10 weard sickos born every seconnd

129.5.2004 05:02

Quote:
Those kind of people don't deserve any kind of trust and I would be willing to bet many feel the same and would work with the P2P to lure them out by "supplying" the material (lets hope they are jpgs of flowers or something) on their computers with key word and then report when those files were being downloaded.
If you read the news story again its the distributers that are to be hit! Now there are complications to this. The method you chose above would NOT be legal! If the FBI distributed child porn to find people who downloaded it, they could be charged with distributing it themselves! As for if the pics were flowers, it isnt illegal to download a picture of flowers so the user would be Ok then. It wouldn't even go to court because they wudnt get warrants for arrest and raids etc etc if that was their tactic! What they will do is search for child porn on p2p networks and download it, if its child porn, they have the IP Addresses of the people who sent it to them. I believe hopwever that P2P networks will not hand over logs of activity from the networks because the FBI might decide to go after distributers of music and stuff aswell. Another complication that has hit many aD users on the forum in the past is mislabelled files. A guy downloads what he's told is a normal, adult, legal pornography image and it turns out to be completely the opposite, a child porn image. This is one thing the FBI should be aware of, that not all the same keywords will find the files, that some people may be trying to hide their kiddy porn and trade it secretly wioth others. In the case of P2P Child Porn, its like music, what if someone didnt knopw he was sharing it? As far as he knows he added a load of legal porn pics to his download list and left the computer. Some of the pics turn out to be kiddy porn and he ends up as a distributer? And yes that could happen because every file on a P2P network has a HASH ID or SIG ID. With the HASH ID, regardless of the name changes in the files you could find every single file that is the same! So a guy who has it in his share as kiddy porn has the same file as the guy who accidently got the renamed file but if the first guy is busy uploading, then kazaa might upload from the second user instead, the hash link is the same, so its the same file to kazaa. So the only thing im worried about is people getting locked up for accidents that shouldnt have happened, as for the major distributers on P2P networks, fuck em, shoot them dead! lol
Quote:
i maybe wrong about this, i suppose with websites is harder to close or let alone trace. I mean you can view a website thats half away around the world in another counrty. Where something like a p2p its more closer to home...comments?
There are complications yes! For example, in some countrys child porn is legal to a degree. For example, here in a ireland, naked pictures of kids just standing around doing nothing sexually related may be concidered as child porn, but in some other countries in Europe it may be considered as art or nudism. And there are some people who do attent nudist resorts on a regular basis and have tonnes of pic's from their holiday that might contain some kids but those pictures wouldn't be illegal as they aren't taken with malicious intent (hopefully!!) Most nudism resorts are very well protected anyways! But the thing is, some sites now have sprung up that advertise nudism lifestyles and have links to other nudist resorts and activitys but also gallerys full of pictures. You can see the complication there. Laws differ in countries when it comes to nudism too. So ye youy are roight in a way that its harder to track down sites than P2P users and then twice as hard to figure out which has the malicious intent and which doesn't!
Quote:
Dela does have a point, you just can't blame one source. We all remember the school kids that want on a rampage and DOOM was blamed for that. when something very bad happens or is going on we look for something or someone to blame, instead of looking at the big picture. If DOOM really made them kids go shoot their friends then we all be doing it....
Ye you share the same mentality as me I think. Don't blame what they were using, blame them! I mean marilyn manson never told Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold to shoot up Columbine High School but the media made it look that way!
Quote:
before you know it thay will have charge you for d-loading the matrix or some news story from CNN so be warned we will all be seen as crims in the eyes of authoritys...so i say fuck em off and dont give them an in
Well you see that would be extremely ignorant of P2P networks to go that far and I'll explain why! TV-RIPS, DVD-Rips, Telesyncs, MP3 etc etc, about 95% of it on P2P networks, got there from release groups that operate underground on the Internet. So even if P2P networks decide to charge, then they should be charged with selling pirated material because all those releases are made with no money intent at all!! Not one release group is out to make money off their actions, just out to make a difference. P2P my friend is not where all these movies, music, software etc etc is coming from!

139.5.2004 12:58
Ashen_Viz
Inactive

Hrrmmm... There is a lot of food for thought here, and so many articulate writers! I feel a little outclassed here. Well, here are my two cents: I think that the whole situation is just beyound unfortunate. Inernational police organizations and responsible indiviuals and vigilante groups are always playing a constant game of catch-up with those who cannot get along with normal society (I use this "normal" loosely, we all have differing opinions, however I would assume that we all have the same basic values, right? Reguardless of political or religeos orientation, ie, don't screw with the helpless, right?) And in the grand scheme of things, child pornography is pretty messed up, right? That's taking advantage of someone's reduced ability to defend themselves. Not to mention, from my own standpoint, down right annoying. For instance, as a P2P-er, I'm trying to look up, say X-Girl, an all female punk band. You know what I get?? Man, it sucks! I do hae one possible solution to that though... give me a client with a boolean search option... I'm not a programer, so I can't help myself with this, but it'd be a great option to be able to use. Now on with the rest of me somewhat confusing tirade. The game of catch up... here's the problem. The online environment does not actually cause the condition. The condition is pre-existing, and, as of yet, modern psychology doesn't *really* know what cause syndromes like pedophilia as of yet. So, you can bust people, and your can scare them (assuming that they are rational enough to respond to fear, that is) But there will never be an end, unless we find a way to repair the factor in our societies that is causing this, assuming once again that the condition is a result of external stimuli in the first place. So what can be done? We can continue to bust people, but it's no real cure, and mind you, in the meantime, their actions is just making the rest of our online community look bad, or, we can find a way to filter and otherwise excise their content from our sight. That would be nice. But keep in mind, for the safe gaurds we make for ourselves, we are also creating walls. I'd hate to see people close-up, the highest value I personally have in the net is the communicatiion it allows, internationally, as if the boarders did not exist. I dunno...people doing stupid $h!+ really annoys and dismays me. What can we do?

149.5.2004 13:16

What can we do not a lot i fear, this disgusting trade will always be around whether it be on the web, p2p,or usenet those types of people will always find a way unfortunately.It is high time the law dealt with this sort of thing in a much tougher manner than it presently does, in my local newspaper recently there was one person convicted of possesing indecent images of children and distrubuting them, sentence was 6 months prison suspended for 1 year and ordered to sign the sex offenders register for 10 years. in the same paper the same judge handed down a sentence of 2 years to a man convicted of copying dvds and selling them on for profit, i mean wtf where is the sense or right in that,. It seems that the law is more concerned with protecting the might and wealth of big business than taking care of our most vulnerable members of society in some respects, it seems to me that the lunatics have taken over the asylum

1510.5.2004 14:02

Ashen_Viz, the very best thing for people who don't want this content to do, is filter it. For example, I dont use Kazaa now, but when I did, I often make search strings that brough bad bad results. I noted down keywords that were used in these files, most notably preteen and incest, then i went into the kazaa lite options and added all the words that were on these files to my filter list. It actually shocks me to see that some versions of KaZaa did not have this dont by default! That's what they should do and have such a filter standard. Now Kazaa also have the power to block IP Addresses and users from their network, I dont understand why they haven't blocked people who distribute child porn yet. Now they might have done it already, I'm not saying they didn't but I haven't read anywhere that they have, so there's an idea for you if you want to use it. Just filter out as much as you can. A local internet cafe in town asked me to help filter it because kids were getting bad results down there when searching for music and I did the same thing for them as I had done myself, and considering the situation, I didn't even charge them. Doofy, dude that seriously sucks about the guy who got more time for copyright infringement but I have to point out one thing you might have passed over. Some people are believed to become attracted to children following abuse in their childhood. Sadly this means that a lot of people who view this sort of material may not be able to help actually doing it. Some need professional help, as if they were taking drugs and got hooked on them. In this case, this individual may have suffered abuse as a child which led him to this unfortunate need, wheras the guy who was jailed for copyright infringement has nothing to back up his actions of selling copyrighted material. Now I'm not saying that its right, but I'm just asking you to be a little bit more open minded about it for a second and see if you can understand my point :-)

1610.5.2004 14:11

Yup dude i can totally see your point, i hadn't thought of it that way before, definitely food for thought there. a very good point put over very well if i may say so.

1710.5.2004 14:50

Still even with that point, it does not justify the distribution or possesion of this material! I mean, a drug addict is not allow sell or possess crack!

1822.5.2004 16:07
Ashen_Viz
Inactive

Wow. Actually, I had no idea Kazaa had a filter... now, if only the others did to. but then again, perhaps I'm just being ignorant. I need to look into that. On the psych note, I agree, it is sad, and yes, I have met people in that position. It's up to them to realize they've got a problam though, and get help, if not, well, one day they will be caught, and nailed fairly thoughly. Well, then again, it depends on the prosecutor, right? Some people just don't care. Hmm. I don't know what else to say about this. I am glad, however, that there are some caring individuals out there. Thanks folks. There are too many jerks on the net these days, I need my faith in humanity reaffirmed, now and again.

1924.5.2004 06:51
JosePablo
Inactive

I think that it is being very shortsighted to want to stop 'only' national childrens abuse. This should be stopped worldwide and inmediately. Also here the should be applied the bible text:"Eye for an eye and tooth for a tooth!"to these buggers. But this has nothing to do with P2P filesharing.

207.12.2005 17:34
akspud93
Inactive

I also have to say here that IRC networks have also been a probelm and no help to this situation. It is not just a P2P probelm!!

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