Anonymous Hackers Take Down Child Porn Websites 481
chrb writes "According to Security News Daily, Anonymous has taken down more than 40 darknet-based child porn websites over the last week. Details of some of the hacks have been released via pastebin #OpDarknet, including personal details of some users of a site named 'Lolita City,' and DDoS tools that target Hidden Wiki and Freedom Hosting — alleged to be two of the biggest darknet sites hosting child porn."
And no chance of mistaken identity... (Score:2, Insightful)
I mean, who wouldn't use false credentials if they were into that sorta thing? Someone is gonna get wrapped up in a lynching who doesn't have the foggiest idea as to why, watch. It's a PR stunt to try to make Anon look like more than a group of petty thugs, as if their ideals deserved attention or merit. Frankly, they can all DIAF.
Re:Vigilances (Score:4, Insightful)
when the cops abuse their authority with impunity in front of everyone and there's no repercusions
when the rich and powerful get more rich and more powerful by trampling on others in complicity with self serving politicians
when the judges consider smoking pot and stealing food way worse than ruining the economy of a nation in the name of profits
yes, vigilance must come
Re:Brain explode (Score:5, Insightful)
It's easier to think about them as an unguided mass that will attack targets at random. Sometimes the targets are assholes and people will cheer for them, but that doesn't make them freedom fighters. They reverted back to trolls some time ago.
Verification? (Score:5, Insightful)
How are we even going to know whether or not this is true? Nobody in their right mind would try to verify whether those sites were taken down or not, and even if they did, they sure wouldn't talk about it publicly, what with the risk of the cops showing up just for visiting those sites. Anonymous can pretty much say whatever they want about this with impunity.
Re:Covering up (Score:3, Insightful)
Well, so they took down those "porn" websites, but one has to ask, why the authorities have done nothing, preferring to sit on their backsides? Politicians or police using such sites and they want to cover it up?
My guess would be a matter of jurisdiction - can't take down sites outside their country.
Great PR tactic (Score:2, Insightful)
This tactic could work if it they relentlessly keep doing it and gets it publicized. Fighting pedophiles is tried and true way to win support for almost anything.
Next time some politician attack Anonymous:
- Oh you are attacking Anonymous?
- How come you, they are protecting our CHILDREN!
Re:All of your are disgusting and immoral (Score:1, Insightful)
You know the vast majority of pedophiles were also abused as children, right?
That does not, and will never, excuse them doing the same, or taking delight or being aroused at it happening to others. Now go fuck yourself with barbed wire.
Re:Covering up (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Why are people surprised? (Score:5, Insightful)
If they're targeting The Hidden Wiki, how is that "having a conscience"? The Hidden Wiki is not a porn site, it's a wiki site which has links to other hidden sites. It's like DDoSing Google because they are a "child porn website"...
Re:Covering up (Score:5, Insightful)
Sigh. Quality of Slashdot readership is steadily going down.
These were TOR [torproject.org] sites. That means that the hosting servers are near impossible to track because the TOR network is meant to allow for anonymous hosting.
Subsequently, unless you manage to globally packet-inspect the entire Internet (which is the very thing that the child-porn crusaders advocate, along with introducing a totalitarian global police state to "protect the children") or somehow crack in and identify the location of these servers from whatever data is within, you cannot even tell what country they are in.
Freedom Hosting is an extreme libertarian host service, with 0% censorship rules, which is meant to host sites of political dissidents and other web contents that is likely to get you killed by a mob of raving religious lunatics for breaking whatever taboo in whatever nut-infested country you happen to live.
So Anonymous cracked into some sites hosted on Freedom Hosting and defaced them, stole some meaningless login ids (like those of people logging in with the names of their least-liked politicians or neighbours) and did not even get the IP addresses of the servers or the users because on the TOR network they would be meaningless.
End result: upgraded and hardened CP sites on TOR.
This action defines the very concepts of "pointless", "futile" and "counterproductive". Which not very surprising since it is usually the fate of all vigilante witch-hunts in the long run ...
Re:Vigilances (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Covering up (Score:2, Insightful)
End result: upgraded and hardened CP sites on TOR.
If no one was going to do anything about them anyway, then this is not a negative, as you seem to imply.
This action defines the very concepts of "pointless", "futile" and "counterproductive". Which not very surprising since it is usually the fate of all vigilante witch-hunts in the long run ...
Kind of like the reasoning that "it is pointless to go after a thief, because other people will commit thefts anyway." I disagree. If Anonymous' actions make committing this crime less appealing, that is a good result. This is one of the few times I actually appreciate something Anonymous is doing.
Re:Covering up (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Ah to have such a simple mind (Score:5, Insightful)
For fucks sake.
Anon didn't just take down CP sites. They are attacking Freedom Hosting, which hosts many other sites, because they refuse to comply with Anon's orders.
And this is why vigilantism is dangerous - because it's riddled with collateral damage since the attackers answer to nobody.
Re:Vigilances (Score:4, Insightful)
Dude -- climb down out of the ivory tower for a moment. You are over-analyzing a very simple, straight forward situation. If it is not morally allowable for one person -- a single, solitary hacker let's say -- to take down a website (deface a system, in your terminology) why would it be morally allowable if a bunch of people conspired to do the same thing? Your attempt to mitigate the immorality of the act by diluting it over the number of conspirators, or diluting the harm done by spreading the damage out over society at large is interesting, but de Tocqueville and Mill, the architects of modern political philosophy and Utilitarians to the core (especially Mill,) rightly rejected that approach to the formulation of legislation and (in the case of de Tocqueville) the administration of justice. Indeed, in every jurisdiction that I am aware of, conspirators are all equally guilty; it follows that there is no safety in numbers if one is committing an immoral act.
Re:Covering up (Score:4, Insightful)
I hope your name is there, then you might think twice about the cops arresting people from some random list.
Cops have to gather hard evidence before arresting people, for good reasons.
Re:Vigilances (Score:4, Insightful)
To be fair, FTP is most decidedly designed around the sharing of files, and it (like The Pirate Bay) is completely agnostic as to whether they're 'illegal' or not.
Re:Covering up (Score:2, Insightful)
So Anonymous cracked into some sites hosted on Freedom Hosting and defaced them, stole some meaningless login ids (like those of people logging in with the names of their least-liked politicians or neighbours) and did not even get the IP addresses of the servers or the users because on the TOR network they would be meaningless.
You do realize that if they got far enough to be able to deface a site they had access to the server side right? This means that would have been pretty easy to obtain the actual IP address of the server. (Not the TOR endpoint one.)
Once you have the real IP address of the server you can find the actual owner of it.
Yes, I get that you just don't like Anonymous but please be less "trolly" about it.
Re:Vigilances (Score:5, Insightful)
They don't go against child porn sites because they are illegal. They couldn't care less about that. They go against child porn sites because they are immoral (at least from the perspective of the vast majority).
The vast majority also acknowledges that sites like The Pirate Bay are illegal, but the morality of these sites and their users is rather neutral, if not positively.
Re:Vigilances (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Vigilances (Score:5, Insightful)
Protocols in general are content-agnostic. Unless you want to argue that sharing any kind of content (even by content producers/owners) is illegal, no protocol is inherently illegal.
There are plenty of legitimate uses for P2P protocols, the most widely-used probably being WoW's patch system.
People seem to be confused as to who Anonymous are (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:whenever child porn comes up on slashdot (Score:2, Insightful)
Yeah, I thought it was funny, too. But some weirdo modded me interesting. Interesting? WTF?
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)