Re: [tor-talk] Tor as ecommerce platform

[Maxim Kammerer <mk@xxxxxx>]

On Thu, Aug 9, 2012 at 12:58 AM, adrelanos <adrelanos@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Is this actually true? I've seen in a discussion that there is 00, yes
> 0.0 cp on clearnet, because there are no countries which tolerate it and
> therefore all server admins immediately delete it.

That's most certainly not true, or at least wasn't true a couple of
years ago. After the famous Russian 2ch.ru imageboard untimely demise,
a few alternatives quickly sprang, and the most high-traffic one (I
think 02ch.net) had a /cp board on a separate (likely hacked) Chinese
domain (with actual CP). I don't know why they did that — for trolling
potential, or perhaps to clean up the regular boards due to lack of
resources for moderation, but there you have it: most trafficked
clearnet Russian imageboard had an active /cp board for a few months.

Mind you, this is only a well-known public example — who knows how
many password-protected or obscure forums there are (by now, most
probably use https, but it's still possible to MITM them on an exit
node for analysis, since some / most users will always click through a
certificate warning).

Also, the “immediate deletion” part is often not achievable, even if
server admins actively try to remove such content — CP videos (for
whatever definition of CP) in various social networks are a known
problem, especially when they are restricted to closed groups. A
“known problem” not in the sense of an argument that politicians use
to promote themselves over the think-of-the-children case du jour, but
you would actually see imageboard threads with (irony alert) links to
abuse report queues on said social networks, full of such content.

If I were to guess, I would say that for any definition of illegal
content / activity, most such content is located on clearnet, since
Tor is simply too small. If anything, Tor provides an immense
opportunity for law enforcement to discover such activities in a
centralized manner, by setting a few exit nodes (and maybe relays for
finding out popular .onion addresses). E.g., instead of crawling the
whole web for terrorism forums, just analyze those sites that are
accessed via exit nodes (where you also have the opportunity to MITM).
Terrorists are dumb, but some are bound to have the know-how to
install Tor.

-- 
Maxim Kammerer
Liberté Linux: http://dee.su/liberte
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