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.
Lightsong@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
1.8m users, how the hell did they ran that website for 3 years?
_cryptagion@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 weeks ago
Schadrach@lemmy.sdf.org 3 weeks 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.
Geetnerd@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Bribes, most likely. Until the wrong people (the Right People) became aware of it.
danny161@discuss.tchncs.de 3 weeks ago
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…
TheProtagonist@lemmy.world 3 weeks 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 immediately upon discovery, you may get rid of it (temporarily) but you might not catch many of the people behind it.
recall519@lemm.ee 3 weeks ago
This feels like one of those things where couch critics aren’t qualified. There’s a pretty strong history of three letter agencies using this strategy successfully in other organized crime industries.
Geetnerd@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Like I stated earlier, someone was caught red-handed, and snitched to get a lesser sentence.
taladar@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
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.
yetAnotherUser@discuss.tchncs.de 3 weeks ago
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.
taladar@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
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.
Geetnerd@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Well, some pedophiles have argued that AI generated child porn should be allowed, so real humans are not harmed, and exploited.
I’m conflicted on that. Naturally, I’m disgusted, and repulsed.
But if no real child is harmed…
I don’t want to think about it, anymore.
ZILtoid1991@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Issue is, AI is often trained on real children, sometimes even real CSAM(allegedly), which makes the “no real children were harmed” part not necessarily 100% true.
Also since AI can generate photorealistic imagery, it also muddies the water for the real thing.
Ledericas@lemm.ee 3 weeks ago
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.
quack@lemmy.zip 3 weeks ago
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.
misteloct@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Somehow I doubt allowing it actually meaningfully helps the situation. It sounds like an alcoholic arguing that a glass of wine actually helps them not drink.
danny161@discuss.tchncs.de 3 weeks 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
drmoose@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
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.
Geetnerd@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Discovery of this kind of thing is as old as civilization.
Someone runs their mouth, or you catch someone with incrimination evidence on them. Then you lean on them to tell you where to go.
lennivelkant@discuss.tchncs.de 3 weeks 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…
Ledericas@lemm.ee 3 weeks ago
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.
drmoose@lemmy.world 3 weeks 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.
Maeve@midwest.social 3 weeks ago
And yet there are cases like Kim Dotcom, Snowden, Manning, Assange…
Schadrach@lemmy.sdf.org 3 weeks ago
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.