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European police say KidFlix, "one of the largest pedophile platforms in the world," busted in joint operation. (www.europol.europa.eu)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] 92 points 1 year ago (3 children)

1.8m users, how the hell did they ran that website for 3 years?

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  • [–] 28 points 1 year ago (6 children)

    That’s unfortunately (not really sure) probably the fault of Germanys approach to that. It is usually not taking these websites down but try to find the guys behind it and seize them. The argument is: they will just use a backup and start a “KidFlix 2” or sth like that. Some investigations show, that this is not the case and deleting is very effective. Also the German approach completely ignores the victim side. They have to deal with old men masturbating to them getting raped online. Very disturbing…

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  • [–] 25 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

    I think you are mixing here two different aspects of this and of similar past cases. I the past there was often a problem with takedowns of such sites, because german prosecutors did not regard themselves as being in charge of takedowns, if the servers were somewhere overseas. Their main focus was to get the admins and users of those sites and to get them into jail.

    In this specific case they were observing this platform (together with prosecutors from other countries in an orchestrated operation) to gather as much data as possible about the structure, the payment flows, the admins and the users of this before moving into action and getting them arrested. The site was taken down meanwhile.

    If you blow up and delete)such a darknet service immediately upon discovery, you may get rid of it (temporarily) but you might not catch many of the people behind it.

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  • [–] 8 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    Honestly, if the existing victims have to deal with a few more people masturbating to the existing video material and in exchange it leads to fewer future victims it might be worth the trade-off but it is certainly not an easy choice to make.

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  • [–] 7 points 1 year ago* (1 child)

    It doesn't though.

    The most effective way to shut these forums down is to register bot accounts scraping links to the clearnet direct-download sites hosting the material and then reporting every single one.

    If everything posted to these forums is deleted within a couple of days, their popularity would falter. And victims much prefer having their footage deleted than letting it stay up for years to catch a handful of site admins.

    Frankly, I couldn't care less about punishing the people hosting these sites. It's an endless game of cat and mouse and will never be fast enough to meaningfully slow down the spread of CSAM.

    Also, these sites don't produce CSAM themselves. They just spread it - most of the CSAM exists already and isn't made specifically for distribution.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (1 child)

    Who said anything about punishing the people hosting the sites. I was talking about punishing the people uploading and producing the content. The ones doing the part that is orders of magnitude worse than anything else about this.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    I'd be surprised if many "producers" are caught. From what I have heard, most uploads on those sites are reuploads because it's magnitudes easier.

    Of the 1400 people caught, I'd say maybe 10 were site administors and the rest passive "consumers" who didn't use Tor. I wouldn't put my hopes up too much that anyone who was caught ever committed child abuse themselves.

    I mean, 1400 identified out of 1.8 million really isn't a whole lot to begin with.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    If most are reuploads anyway that kills the whole argument that deleting things works though.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago

    Not quite. Reuploading is at the very least an annoying process.

    Uploading anything over Tor is a gruelling process. Downloading takes much time already, uploading even more so. Most consumer internet plans aren't symmetrically either with significantly lower upload than download speeds. Plus, you need to find a direct-download provider which doesn't block Tor exit nodes and where uploading/downloading is free.

    Taking something down is quick. A script scraping these forums which automatically reports the download links (any direct-download site quickly removes reports of CSAM by the way - no one wants to host this legal nightmare) can take down thousands of uploads per day.

    Making the experience horrible leads to a slow death of those sites. Imagine if 95% of videos on [generic legal porn site] lead to a "Sorry! This content has been taken down." message. How much traffic would the site lose? I'd argue quite a lot.

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  • [+] 3 points 1 year ago* (4 children)
    [deleted]
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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    that is still cp, and distributing CP still harms childrens, eventually they want to move on to the real thing, as porn is not satisfying them anymore.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (1 child)

    Understand you’re not advocating for it, but I do take issue with the idea that AI CSAM will prevent children from being harmed. While it might satisfy some of them (at first, until the high from that wears off and they need progressively harder stuff), a lot of pedophiles are just straight up sadistic fucks and a real child being hurt is what gets them off. I think it’ll just make the “real” stuff even more valuable in their eyes.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (1 child)

    I feel the same way. I've seen the argument that it's analogous to violence in videogames, but it's pretty disingenuous since people typically play videogames to have fun and for escapism, whereas with CSAM the person seeking it out is doing so in bad faith. A more apt comparison would be people who go out of their way to hurt animals.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago*

    A more apt comparison would be people who go out of their way to hurt animals.

    Is it? That person is going out of their way to do actual violence. It feels like arguing someone watching a slasher movie is more likely to make them go commit murder is a much closer analogy to someone watching a cartoon of a child engaged in sexual activity or w/e being more likely to make them molest a real kid.

    We could make it a video game about molesting kids and Postal or Hatred as our points of comparison if it would help. I'm sure someone somewhere has made such a game, and I'm absolutely sure you'd consider COD for "fun and escapism" and someone playing that sort of game is doing so "in bad faith" despite both playing a simulation of something that is definitely illegal and the core of the argument being that one causes the person to want to the illegal thing more and the other does not.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago

    That would be acceptable, but that’s unfortunately not what’s happening. Like I said: due to the majority of the files being hosted on file sharing platforms of the normal web, it’s way more effective to let them be deleted by those platforms. Some investigative journalist tried this, and documented the frustration among the users of child porn websites, to reload all the GBs/TBs of material, so that they rather quitted and shut down their sites, than going the extra mile

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  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    I used to work in netsec and unfortunately government still sucks at hiring security experts everywhere.

    That being said hiring here is extremely hard - you need to find someone with below market salary expectation working on such ugly subject. Very few people can do that. I do believe money fixes this though. Just pay people more and I'm sure every European citizen wouldn't mind 0.1% tax increase for a more effective investigation force.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago

    Most cases of "we can't find anyone good for this job" can be solved with better pay. Make your opening more attractive, then you'll get more applicants and can afford to be picky.

    Getting the money is a different question, unless you're willing to touch the sacred corporate profits....

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  • [–] 0 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    they probably make double/triple in the private sector, i doubt govt can match that salary. fb EVEN probalby paid more, before they starte dusing AI to sniff out cp.

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  • [–] 0 points 1 year ago

    I'm a senior dev and tbh I'd take a lower salary given the right cause tho having to work with this sort of material is probably the main bottle neck here. I can't imagine how people working this can even fall asleep.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago

    They have to deal with old men masturbating to them getting raped online.

    The moment it was posted to wherever they were going to have to deal with that forever. It's not like they can ever know for certain that every copy of it ever made has been deleted.

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  • [–] 8 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    it says "this hidden site", meaning it was a site on the dark web. It probably took them awhile to figure out were the site was located so they could shut it down.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago

    it says “this hidden site”, meaning it was a site on the dark web.

    Not just on the dark web (which technically is anything not indexed by search engines) but hidden sites are specifically a TOR thing (though Freenet/Hyphanet has something similar but it's called something else). Usually a TOR hidden site has a URL that ends in .onion and the TOR protocol has a structure for routing .onion addresses.

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