Wow, the website of his hosting company[1] is, eh, extremly honest:
> Further, as Kosovo is an extremely corrupt country, we are able to bribe both executive and judicative as well as getting information about court orders and raids before execution, enabling us to move servers out of the affected location, protecting our clients in any situation. Our excellent Serbian connections enable us to also move servers cross-border and play "ping pong" between both countries, essentially keeping content online forever.
Not necessarily. Making that statement, setting up in a country that has enough issues to make it plausible, and then not paying the bribe would also make a lot of sense. See also: no log VPNs that actually were logging.
Worst case scenario they shut down, collaborate fully with the police and keep all the profits up til then. Better case scenario they make a deal with the police and keep operating and making profits while covertly providing assistance. Best case scenario the issue never comes up and they make all the profits without having to spend those expenses.
My impression is that in this kind of shady web hosting the companies never last that long so you wouldn't want to invest a lot in bribes and multiple data centers and so on when you could lie and make short term profit.
Note also that corruption isn't a boolean flag. First off the cop make take the exact same strategy: take your money, do nothing else, and hope their boss never gets interested in you while planning not to protect you if anything comes up. Furthermore there are all sorts of anticorruption efforts in that area linked to US aid. That doesn't mean there isn't corruption, it does mean that if a major US corp works with the FBI in a major investigation the local police may rather piss you off than lose critical aid funding.
> Further, as Kosovo is an extremely corrupt country, we are able to bribe both executive and judicative as well as getting information about court orders and raids before execution.
What happens if someone else is willing to pay a higher bribe than you are...?
Wouldn't full disclosure make them, in some sense, honest?
Also, you have just condemned entire nations of people, like those who lived under Soviet domination, where bribery became custom, because if you wanted to accomplish anything, you had to bribe the people involved. Just got married and want an apartment for your new family? You could submit a housing application, but it might bubble up to the top of the queue by the time you hit retirement. A bribe given to the woman in the office handling the paperwork can help grease the track. Have a totally curable disease that, without intervention, can kill you? Well, you could have your name added to a long wait list and have your treatment started next year, or you could "gift" your state-pensioned doctor a cognac, some luxury chocolates, and an envelop containing a "tip" to shorten the wait time. Need to travel abroad? Well, guess what. The passport stays with the government for "safe keeping". They might not be in a hurry to let you leave, just yet. However, with a few enticing arrangements and exchanges, you'll be on the next plane headed over the Iron Curtain.
In other words, I'm not convinced bribes are a categorically wrong thing for someone to offer. To receive, on the other hand...
Seems this hosting company is a scam. Kosovo might be corrupted but it is the country with the highest approval of U.S. government. The FBI can investigate and arrest you in Kosovo just as easily as they can arrest you in Maine. Probably even easier because in Kosovo you don't have same judicial guarantees as in the U.S.A.
Looks like there's more going on than what the title implies about the Tor exit node:
> What do you do now?
>§I left Austria and now work for a German company in IT, and have a data center in Kosovo… hosting grey area things there. Warez primarily.
> Also, I do want to add that I have more backstory. The CP was not the only reason for the raid.
He goes on to mention someone using the exit node to try to hack a NATO facility.
That said, the "confiscate first, come up with a fitting crime later" approach countries take on a whim are deeply troubling.
It sounds like they have had their suspicions against this man for a while (not without reason, it seems) and saw the child porn report as a chance to pounce on him, but later found out they didn't have as strong a case as they might have wished.
> That said, the "confiscate first, come up with a fitting crime later" approach countries take on a whim are deeply troubling.
Nah. It's not like it was a legitimate homebrew forum or something and someone backdoored it to hack NATO -- it was a warez organization that might have had CP on it too.
It managed to stay under the radar until someone did something to get the attention of the authorities.
My BIL used to work CP with the DHS, a tech going in heavy with the first wave to secure devices.
I asked him if he had ever run into Tor exits, he said no, but they did sometimes run into people with unsecured wireless that had been used by third parties and once it was clear that was what happened it was pretty much dropped. I'm sure they would have ways to deal with people leaving their WiFi open as a way of camouflaging their activities...
He also said that one thing they're usually do if there are multiple people in the house is sit them all down on the couch and say "We are here because someone has been downloading CP", and often everyone would turn and look at one person.
I stopped running a Tor non-exit node from home a few years back, because a lot of websites and platforms blacklist any IP associated with Tor. I couldn't actually watch anything on Hulu for years (though they were still happy to take my money, which I refused to give them) because of this.
Running a tor node is a thankless thing one can choose to do. Nevertheless I did for years. I don't do it anymore.
The eternal struggle. Information wants to be free, and then people use those freedoms to do the most screwed up things imaginable, and people like this pay the price.
It’s a damn shame how the original cyberpunk dream played out. We could’ve had a world where companies couldn’t do anything about people using their ideas. Instead we get one where you can’t even be anonymous without rubbing elbows with child predators.
It’s surprising how much anonymity and the subject at hand are correlated. In my 20s I liked to explore, as I’m sure many of you do too. I once met someone in the Whonix community who wanted to nix google maps entirely; he spent a lot of time downloading maps and trying to make a way to view them locally, which I think is going to be prescient one day. It already is in many parts of the world — you don’t have cell service, so you can’t just pull up google maps. Nowadays starlink solves that problem, but back then it wasn’t clear that we’d ever be able to have maps at our fingertips regardless of internet access. This was back in the era of that poor CNET reporter that got lost with his family in the mountains precisely because of no maps, and ended up dying to exposure when he went to get help. Never leave your car.
I found all of this fascinating. What a project! Make all of google maps accessible right from your phone, with no internet. I briefly fell in love with that community.
Ultimately what drove me away was the literal flood of child porn that was always right next to anything to do with tor, whonix, or anonymity in general. I have a pretty high tolerance for “operating in gray areas,” like this guy. But one of the tragedies of the cyberpunk dream is that the entire scene has been coopted by cp. In some sense cp is the ultimate test of anonymity, since you’ll be thrown in prison pretty much instantly if caught. So perhaps it’s no surprise that it’s the most common and pervasive result of anonymity, but it sure is a shame.
> Ultimately what drove me away was the literal flood of cp that was always right next to anything to do with tor, whonix, or anonymity in general.
As a teen around 2003 I hosted a freenet-node (freenetproject.org). It generated 1TByte/month which I believe was a lot for the time. I shot it down and never came back, because the only things that ever loaded was cp and Chechnya rape and torture videos. Its not a network for "dissidents"... I gave up on humanity.
There are many, many pedophiles out there. I'm also convinced of a conspiracy theory that a lot of dark web traffic and hosts are created/operated by secret parts of the gov to de-legitimize the need for anonymity. I believe this because it would be too easy with the access to that material and no oversight. Just muddy the waters so nothing in there looks worth protecting.
Cyberpunk was not about a dream. It was more of a warning to all those people who thought that technology will bring utopia. “High tech, low life” is the guiding principle of cyberpunk — technology will not solve societal problems all the cool tech brings issues that were not foreseen. With corrupt government and corporations not going anywhere just because the computations and communications got faster.
> Instead we get one where you can’t even be anonymous without rubbing elbows with child predators.
There have been secretive child predators ever since statutory rape was invented. The reason that you didn't have to "rub elbows" with them is because our governments hadn't begun systematically closing off all avenues for anonymity other than the one that they built and maintain for their own spying. If there's only one way to be anonymous, you get to "rub elbows" with everyone who needs to be anonymous for any reason.
It has nothing to do with child porn or crypto. Neither were responsible for the size of the distributed files kept on each of us to grow in orders of magnitude.
Speaking of "maps at our fingertips," good luck finding one that doesn't result in a record of the lookup and any GPS data submitted with it being inserted into a half-dozen databases, all freely accessible by the government, or by anybody buying in bulk.
> you can’t even be anonymous without rubbing elbows with child predators.
Statistically there is quite a large number of criminals in my city, and since I visit shops and other parts of the city, I am bound to unknowingly to me been rubbing elbows with those criminals. We are all anonymous to each other, and what can I really know about the person in front of me in the store. Go past a few hundred people and someone will be a person I would not associate myself with, and yet here I am living in the same city as them using the same infrastructure, and in some way enabling the activity by contributing taxes.
Not to say I don't understand the emotional reaction people have. I have relatives in the countryside that refuse to visit the city because of all the criminals that they hear about. It is also fairly common to hear people moving out of the city to the calmer suburbs in order to get out of all the shootings and crime. I also do know first hand that if you go and look for it, finding drug dealers and shady activity is not exactly a big secret. Go to specific streets or part of the city and it's operated in plain sight.
I've always seen the original cyberpunk dream as being analogous to a city, with all its benefits and drawbacks.
> It’s a damn shame how the original cyberpunk dream played out. We could’ve had a world where companies couldn’t do anything about people using their ideas. Instead we get one where you can’t even be anonymous without rubbing elbows with child predators.
Corporate government is pretty much a staple of. all cyberpunk franchises though.
>back then it wasn’t clear that we’d ever be able to have maps at our fingertips regardless of internet access. This was back in the era of that poor CNET reporter that got lost with his family in the mountains precisely because of no maps
That was 2007. I had maps of the entire US loaded on my pocket pc circa 2005.
Do jurisdictions really care about child porn before internet? I always feel like it is just a convenient excuse for them to get away with their bullshit, for a largely non-existent problem.
Just regarding your overall concern around maps and cellular service, Google Maps lets you download maps within very custom sized tiles for offline use. I'm partial to using them when hiking, so I can orient myself in areas where the actual trail markers become questionable.
Routing doesn't really work offline, but that's a different/harder problem.
Tangential to your much larger lament - OpenStreetMap, and specifically OSMAnd which is libre and free on F-droid, works great for offline maps that are downloaded ahead of time. (I think the version on Google Play limits the number of regions you can download unless you make a small donation).
>We could’ve had a world where companies couldn’t do anything about people using their ideas
doesn't sound like the best idea depending on what industry we are talking about. medicine, yes. Art, no (we're kinda going through that right now actually).
>In some sense cp is the ultimate test of anonymity, since you’ll be thrown in prison pretty much instantly if caught. So perhaps it’s no surprise that it’s the most common and pervasive result of anonymity, but it sure is a shame.
This quote constantly rings in my head about topics like this:
>The moral of the story is: if you’re against witch-hunts, and you promise to found your own little utopian community where witch-hunts will never happen, your new society will end up consisting of approximately three principled civil libertarians and seven zillion witches. It will be a terrible place to live even if witch-hunts are genuinely wrong.
It's the real downside of apathy when you see complaints about those big sites out there and how they screw up. You advertising a new site means the most interested are going to mostly include the worst actors, who eventually put off the best actors. Or at least disproportionately include them.
As a simple example: say Twitter has 10 million users and 1000 nazis (utopic, I know). Now your new no BS alternative attracts 0.1% of users but 10% Nazis. Still far from a majority. But by the way these forums work, your site will be 1% nazis, and those nazis will be some of your loudest actors if left unchecked. 100x more concentrated and it will feel some 1000x more nazi.
> back then it wasn’t clear that we’d ever be able to have maps at our fingertips regardless of internet access.
Offline map databases were commom then; it wasn't uncommon for car navigation systems to come with them (expensive to update, though), as well as handheld devices
In fact, while they were not common before the 2000s, first-party navigation systems with offline digital maps for cars have been around at least since the 1980s, as have other forms of consumer offline digital maps. Online maps are newer than offline.
> This was back in the era of that poor CNET reporter that got lost with his family in the mountains precisely because of no maps
The last of many critical errors before the car got stuck might have been avoided by using a map, but they had and used a paper map shortly before, when choosing the alternate route that was, in fact, closed; it wasn't a problem caused by maps not being available (and there is a reason keeping paper road maps, especially of unfamiliar areas, when driving in them was a widespread practice until digital maps with automatic offline downloads tied to GPS became ubiquitous.
> I was charged and convicted with the support, not the ownership. There is ownership, sale, distribution for no monetary gain, and support of general distribution. The last is what I got and the lowest of all.
Did they also charge the ISP's involved in transferring those network packets?
I noticed they mentioned “logs” of you talking about hosting CP, can you elaborate?
They took a bunch of IRC logs where I stated what I can and can’t host at a web hosting provider I owned. The logs do exist but are taken out of context.
The "reporting" here is at the level of a 90s scene mag.
>Someone used the same exit to hack a NATO facility in Poland, which deals with chemical and biological weapons. Disarming, etc.
COVID origin story confirmed! Joking, but that's like something from a movie. I think its really awesome that William was willing to stand for what he believed. TOR is so important for free speech and exit nodes are critical for scaling the system. It just sucks how much his life was disrupted from this.
By the way: there's some very interesting activity happening on Tor at the moment where it seems that overwhelmingly people have decided that they are going to police their own speech to remove CP. In the early days hidden wiki had dedicated pages for that shit. But it's not a thing any more. Furthermore, it seems like hacktivists are actively making sure that the Tor ecosystem stays healthy. Really fascinating because in theory they could just do whatever they liked.
Common knowledge from when Tor just started was to limit your exit traffic to countries which cannot extradite you. And definitely block your own country.
"I rented a server in Poland and someone uploaded CP to an Austrian image hoster. They reported it to the Austrian police, which contacted the ISP, which gave them my WHMCS login IP and then subpoenaed UPC Austria for my address, then queried the weapons registry."
The FBI method of fabricating criminal charges. Criminals sleep comfortably knowing their governments are more interested in playing whack a mole for political image than effectively doing their job. Notice how in Austria they aren't charging Google, or Facebook, or any other entities where such data passes through every day.
Yup, had the same experience, also got raided, but unlike him, I got exonerated :)
No conviction whatsoever. I had obviously nothing like files nor logs nor whatsoever, and like him the raid was not really related to that, but instead a fight against the government against e-voting.
It was certainly quite a ride...
I'd avoid hosting a tor exit node at all costs, considering that they are a lot of bad actors on tor. Even some 3 letter agents can host cp on your tor sites and then accuse you.
I‘m still amazed how the security agencies pulled it off, to have the ultimate honeypot, a digitized crime scene masquerading as a market place auto-incriminating endless amounts of people. A Kompromat-Miner.
Speaking of miners, it‘s not like they are at the same risk as tor node operators. Not. At. All…
This kind of stuff has happened many times before.
I did a video about "the dark web" a couple years ago where I talked about people on zeronet and freenet getting snagged because of potentially the contents of their cache store. It's made for a non technical audience
Yep I'm sure setting an example contributed a lot here.
This decision is not going to stop exit nodes (and the worst stuff on tor probably doesn't even use exit nodes but hidden services) but it keeps Austrian IPs off the map making them seem a country in control.
The same way companies go crazy mitigating ratings on bitsight but don't care about fixing real root problems because they're not visible anywhere.
Keeping your front yard clean is a big thing in IT. In our company our corporate network is not detected by bitsight but our guest wifi is. Meaning one bad apple in a handful of guests can give our entire multinational a bad rating.
So what did they do? Make sure bitsight actually shows our real endpoints and makes an accurate result? Doing some rudimentary checks on the guest portal to make sure outdated systems can't connect? Only allowing VPN access on the guest wifi?
Nope they just turned off the guest wifi so that contractors (who still need to do the work we pay them to do) plug in the corp network against policy, or use the coffee shop wifi next door.
Bitsight rating fixed, problem hidden but not actually solved and in fact worsened by people connecting unmanaged gear to the corp network as guest. All the while gloating in the A rating which is completely meaningless.
[+] [-] schroeding|2 years ago|reply
> Further, as Kosovo is an extremely corrupt country, we are able to bribe both executive and judicative as well as getting information about court orders and raids before execution, enabling us to move servers out of the affected location, protecting our clients in any situation. Our excellent Serbian connections enable us to also move servers cross-border and play "ping pong" between both countries, essentially keeping content online forever.
[1] https://basehost.eu/
[+] [-] iudqnolq|2 years ago|reply
Worst case scenario they shut down, collaborate fully with the police and keep all the profits up til then. Better case scenario they make a deal with the police and keep operating and making profits while covertly providing assistance. Best case scenario the issue never comes up and they make all the profits without having to spend those expenses.
My impression is that in this kind of shady web hosting the companies never last that long so you wouldn't want to invest a lot in bribes and multiple data centers and so on when you could lie and make short term profit.
Note also that corruption isn't a boolean flag. First off the cop make take the exact same strategy: take your money, do nothing else, and hope their boss never gets interested in you while planning not to protect you if anything comes up. Furthermore there are all sorts of anticorruption efforts in that area linked to US aid. That doesn't mean there isn't corruption, it does mean that if a major US corp works with the FBI in a major investigation the local police may rather piss you off than lose critical aid funding.
[+] [-] Wowfunhappy|2 years ago|reply
What happens if someone else is willing to pay a higher bribe than you are...?
[+] [-] lo_zamoyski|2 years ago|reply
Also, you have just condemned entire nations of people, like those who lived under Soviet domination, where bribery became custom, because if you wanted to accomplish anything, you had to bribe the people involved. Just got married and want an apartment for your new family? You could submit a housing application, but it might bubble up to the top of the queue by the time you hit retirement. A bribe given to the woman in the office handling the paperwork can help grease the track. Have a totally curable disease that, without intervention, can kill you? Well, you could have your name added to a long wait list and have your treatment started next year, or you could "gift" your state-pensioned doctor a cognac, some luxury chocolates, and an envelop containing a "tip" to shorten the wait time. Need to travel abroad? Well, guess what. The passport stays with the government for "safe keeping". They might not be in a hurry to let you leave, just yet. However, with a few enticing arrangements and exchanges, you'll be on the next plane headed over the Iron Curtain.
In other words, I'm not convinced bribes are a categorically wrong thing for someone to offer. To receive, on the other hand...
[+] [-] npsomaratna|2 years ago|reply
Right?
[+] [-] andreareina|2 years ago|reply
[1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=647959
[+] [-] unknown|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] dtx1|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] abwizz|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] catsarebetter|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] decremental|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] asimeqi|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nullbyte808|2 years ago|reply
https://rdns.im https://prnt.li https://william.co.il https://whois.domaintools.com/basehost.eu
[+] [-] onetimeusename|2 years ago|reply
The US tried to extradite me from Croatia in 2017, with not much more info than national security.
They lost their case as I am married to a local and cannot be extradited outside the EU.
So once again the "think of the children" motive is used to cover for intelligence interests.
[+] [-] BLKNSLVR|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jeroenhd|2 years ago|reply
> What do you do now?
>§I left Austria and now work for a German company in IT, and have a data center in Kosovo… hosting grey area things there. Warez primarily.
> Also, I do want to add that I have more backstory. The CP was not the only reason for the raid.
He goes on to mention someone using the exit node to try to hack a NATO facility.
That said, the "confiscate first, come up with a fitting crime later" approach countries take on a whim are deeply troubling.
It sounds like they have had their suspicions against this man for a while (not without reason, it seems) and saw the child porn report as a chance to pounce on him, but later found out they didn't have as strong a case as they might have wished.
[+] [-] colechristensen|2 years ago|reply
Same reason why you saw organized crime figures convicted for tax evasion, that wasn’t really the big concern but it got the job done.
[+] [-] red-iron-pine|2 years ago|reply
Nah. It's not like it was a legitimate homebrew forum or something and someone backdoored it to hack NATO -- it was a warez organization that might have had CP on it too.
It managed to stay under the radar until someone did something to get the attention of the authorities.
[+] [-] linsomniac|2 years ago|reply
I asked him if he had ever run into Tor exits, he said no, but they did sometimes run into people with unsecured wireless that had been used by third parties and once it was clear that was what happened it was pretty much dropped. I'm sure they would have ways to deal with people leaving their WiFi open as a way of camouflaging their activities...
He also said that one thing they're usually do if there are multiple people in the house is sit them all down on the couch and say "We are here because someone has been downloading CP", and often everyone would turn and look at one person.
[+] [-] jaylittle|2 years ago|reply
Running a tor node is a thankless thing one can choose to do. Nevertheless I did for years. I don't do it anymore.
[+] [-] sillysaurusx|2 years ago|reply
It’s a damn shame how the original cyberpunk dream played out. We could’ve had a world where companies couldn’t do anything about people using their ideas. Instead we get one where you can’t even be anonymous without rubbing elbows with child predators.
It’s surprising how much anonymity and the subject at hand are correlated. In my 20s I liked to explore, as I’m sure many of you do too. I once met someone in the Whonix community who wanted to nix google maps entirely; he spent a lot of time downloading maps and trying to make a way to view them locally, which I think is going to be prescient one day. It already is in many parts of the world — you don’t have cell service, so you can’t just pull up google maps. Nowadays starlink solves that problem, but back then it wasn’t clear that we’d ever be able to have maps at our fingertips regardless of internet access. This was back in the era of that poor CNET reporter that got lost with his family in the mountains precisely because of no maps, and ended up dying to exposure when he went to get help. Never leave your car.
I found all of this fascinating. What a project! Make all of google maps accessible right from your phone, with no internet. I briefly fell in love with that community.
Ultimately what drove me away was the literal flood of child porn that was always right next to anything to do with tor, whonix, or anonymity in general. I have a pretty high tolerance for “operating in gray areas,” like this guy. But one of the tragedies of the cyberpunk dream is that the entire scene has been coopted by cp. In some sense cp is the ultimate test of anonymity, since you’ll be thrown in prison pretty much instantly if caught. So perhaps it’s no surprise that it’s the most common and pervasive result of anonymity, but it sure is a shame.
[+] [-] noAnswer|2 years ago|reply
As a teen around 2003 I hosted a freenet-node (freenetproject.org). It generated 1TByte/month which I believe was a lot for the time. I shot it down and never came back, because the only things that ever loaded was cp and Chechnya rape and torture videos. Its not a network for "dissidents"... I gave up on humanity.
[+] [-] throwaway914|2 years ago|reply
</tinfoil-hat>
[+] [-] sanderjd|2 years ago|reply
Isn't it more, "This is why the original cyberpunk dream was always a naive and bad idea"?
Like, it appealed to me too when I was young, but then I learned more about humans and our history and ...
[+] [-] failuser|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pessimizer|2 years ago|reply
There have been secretive child predators ever since statutory rape was invented. The reason that you didn't have to "rub elbows" with them is because our governments hadn't begun systematically closing off all avenues for anonymity other than the one that they built and maintain for their own spying. If there's only one way to be anonymous, you get to "rub elbows" with everyone who needs to be anonymous for any reason.
It has nothing to do with child porn or crypto. Neither were responsible for the size of the distributed files kept on each of us to grow in orders of magnitude.
Speaking of "maps at our fingertips," good luck finding one that doesn't result in a record of the lookup and any GPS data submitted with it being inserted into a half-dozen databases, all freely accessible by the government, or by anybody buying in bulk.
[+] [-] belorn|2 years ago|reply
Statistically there is quite a large number of criminals in my city, and since I visit shops and other parts of the city, I am bound to unknowingly to me been rubbing elbows with those criminals. We are all anonymous to each other, and what can I really know about the person in front of me in the store. Go past a few hundred people and someone will be a person I would not associate myself with, and yet here I am living in the same city as them using the same infrastructure, and in some way enabling the activity by contributing taxes.
Not to say I don't understand the emotional reaction people have. I have relatives in the countryside that refuse to visit the city because of all the criminals that they hear about. It is also fairly common to hear people moving out of the city to the calmer suburbs in order to get out of all the shootings and crime. I also do know first hand that if you go and look for it, finding drug dealers and shady activity is not exactly a big secret. Go to specific streets or part of the city and it's operated in plain sight.
I've always seen the original cyberpunk dream as being analogous to a city, with all its benefits and drawbacks.
[+] [-] wkat4242|2 years ago|reply
Corporate government is pretty much a staple of. all cyberpunk franchises though.
[+] [-] DenisM|2 years ago|reply
That was 2007. I had maps of the entire US loaded on my pocket pc circa 2005.
Edit: that was “Mapopolis” in my case. There were plenty more: https://wiki.geocaching.com.au/wiki/GPS_software_-_Pocket_PC
[+] [-] charlieyu1|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kedean|2 years ago|reply
Routing doesn't really work offline, but that's a different/harder problem.
[+] [-] mindslight|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jmkni|2 years ago|reply
Isn't that, like, a map? lol we've had maps long before the internet
[+] [-] johnnyanmac|2 years ago|reply
doesn't sound like the best idea depending on what industry we are talking about. medicine, yes. Art, no (we're kinda going through that right now actually).
>In some sense cp is the ultimate test of anonymity, since you’ll be thrown in prison pretty much instantly if caught. So perhaps it’s no surprise that it’s the most common and pervasive result of anonymity, but it sure is a shame.
This quote constantly rings in my head about topics like this:
>The moral of the story is: if you’re against witch-hunts, and you promise to found your own little utopian community where witch-hunts will never happen, your new society will end up consisting of approximately three principled civil libertarians and seven zillion witches. It will be a terrible place to live even if witch-hunts are genuinely wrong.
It's the real downside of apathy when you see complaints about those big sites out there and how they screw up. You advertising a new site means the most interested are going to mostly include the worst actors, who eventually put off the best actors. Or at least disproportionately include them.
As a simple example: say Twitter has 10 million users and 1000 nazis (utopic, I know). Now your new no BS alternative attracts 0.1% of users but 10% Nazis. Still far from a majority. But by the way these forums work, your site will be 1% nazis, and those nazis will be some of your loudest actors if left unchecked. 100x more concentrated and it will feel some 1000x more nazi.
[+] [-] dragonwriter|2 years ago|reply
Offline map databases were commom then; it wasn't uncommon for car navigation systems to come with them (expensive to update, though), as well as handheld devices
In fact, while they were not common before the 2000s, first-party navigation systems with offline digital maps for cars have been around at least since the 1980s, as have other forms of consumer offline digital maps. Online maps are newer than offline.
> This was back in the era of that poor CNET reporter that got lost with his family in the mountains precisely because of no maps
The last of many critical errors before the car got stuck might have been avoided by using a map, but they had and used a paper map shortly before, when choosing the alternate route that was, in fact, closed; it wasn't a problem caused by maps not being available (and there is a reason keeping paper road maps, especially of unfamiliar areas, when driving in them was a widespread practice until digital maps with automatic offline downloads tied to GPS became ubiquitous.
[+] [-] teddyh|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sedatk|2 years ago|reply
Did they also charge the ISP's involved in transferring those network packets?
[+] [-] rolph|2 years ago|reply
"What do you do now?
I left Austria and now work for a German company in IT, and have a data center in Kosovo… hosting grey area things there. Warez primarily.
Also, I do want to add that I have more backstory. The CP was not the only reason for the raid.
What do you mean?
Someone used the same exit to hack a NATO facility in Poland, which deals with chemical and biological weapons. Disarming, etc.
The US tried to extradite me from Croatia in 2017, with not much more info than national security.
They lost their case as I am married to a local and cannot be extradited outside the EU."
[+] [-] zgluck|2 years ago|reply
They took a bunch of IRC logs where I stated what I can and can’t host at a web hosting provider I owned. The logs do exist but are taken out of context.
The "reporting" here is at the level of a 90s scene mag.
[+] [-] Uptrenda|2 years ago|reply
COVID origin story confirmed! Joking, but that's like something from a movie. I think its really awesome that William was willing to stand for what he believed. TOR is so important for free speech and exit nodes are critical for scaling the system. It just sucks how much his life was disrupted from this.
By the way: there's some very interesting activity happening on Tor at the moment where it seems that overwhelmingly people have decided that they are going to police their own speech to remove CP. In the early days hidden wiki had dedicated pages for that shit. But it's not a thing any more. Furthermore, it seems like hacktivists are actively making sure that the Tor ecosystem stays healthy. Really fascinating because in theory they could just do whatever they liked.
[+] [-] praptak|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tamimio|2 years ago|reply
So basically to protect yourself running an exit node, register a company, preferably offshore or not within X jurisdiction.
[+] [-] cf100clunk|2 years ago|reply
https://web.archive.org/web/20141004142101/http://raided4tor...
[+] [-] devwastaken|2 years ago|reply
The FBI method of fabricating criminal charges. Criminals sleep comfortably knowing their governments are more interested in playing whack a mole for political image than effectively doing their job. Notice how in Austria they aren't charging Google, or Facebook, or any other entities where such data passes through every day.
[+] [-] hackan|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chad1n|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] woodpanel|2 years ago|reply
Speaking of miners, it‘s not like they are at the same risk as tor node operators. Not. At. All…
https://gizmodo.com/child-pornography-that-researchers-found...
[+] [-] kristopolous|2 years ago|reply
I did a video about "the dark web" a couple years ago where I talked about people on zeronet and freenet getting snagged because of potentially the contents of their cache store. It's made for a non technical audience
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=3gMJlQU9TDQ
[+] [-] pstuart|2 years ago|reply
This man's plight is exactly the reason I won't.
[+] [-] wkat4242|2 years ago|reply
This decision is not going to stop exit nodes (and the worst stuff on tor probably doesn't even use exit nodes but hidden services) but it keeps Austrian IPs off the map making them seem a country in control.
The same way companies go crazy mitigating ratings on bitsight but don't care about fixing real root problems because they're not visible anywhere.
Keeping your front yard clean is a big thing in IT. In our company our corporate network is not detected by bitsight but our guest wifi is. Meaning one bad apple in a handful of guests can give our entire multinational a bad rating.
So what did they do? Make sure bitsight actually shows our real endpoints and makes an accurate result? Doing some rudimentary checks on the guest portal to make sure outdated systems can't connect? Only allowing VPN access on the guest wifi?
Nope they just turned off the guest wifi so that contractors (who still need to do the work we pay them to do) plug in the corp network against policy, or use the coffee shop wifi next door.
Bitsight rating fixed, problem hidden but not actually solved and in fact worsened by people connecting unmanaged gear to the corp network as guest. All the while gloating in the A rating which is completely meaningless.