Comments on: Senator: Let's monitor P2P for illegal files
Democrat Joe Biden at Capitol Hill hearing urges more police to be trained in software developed by agent specializing in searching for child pornography.
Most Popular
15 sites that went kaput in 2009
Web sites launch all the time, but they also shut their doors. We highlight 15 that bit the dust this year.
Top 10 news stories of the decade
Let the debate begin: Was the iPhone more important than iTunes? Was anything bigger than Google finding a great business model? CNET offers its list of the 10 most important stories of the '00s.
About News Blog
Recent posts on technology, trends, and more.
Add this feed to your online news reader
So if I were a child predator, wouldn't it stand to reason that pushing files out with innocuous-sounding names would be a quick and ready countermeasure?
I mean, the paedoes may be sick and disgusting, but assuming they're stupid isn't exactly going to stop them.
/P
1 Billion Can Go A Long Way To Other Not So Important Things Like....Healthcare, Schools, Maybe Our Economyyy
I can see spending the money on protecting children from pervs but really how much is going to be devoted to stopping Joe Smoe from downloading MC Hammers Greatest Hits
Common...
This wont protect people from pervs.. any more than drug laws protect drug users. The reason is the people who are seeking this stuff (like willing drug users) already believe it's illegal and do it anyway. The fact that its illegal does not stop them. You think *extra* laws will make any difference to pedo's who are already harshly punished if caught?
Everyone knows all the scary **** is not out on p2p anyhow but on Tor's .onion network. The real creeps will just fine a way around the system leaving legitimate people using P2P to be the subject of these serial numbers and investigations.
Joe Biden is a moron.. no worse.. a very powerful moron.
it's name, files are commonly mislabelled.
Secondly, just because someone downloads such a file doesn't mean they had any
interest in it's content. They might have made a mistake, been after something else,
or downloaded something poorly labelled. Also is the problem of identifying
someone by an IP address, these days with NAT multiple people can share an IP
address. In addition if someone has a wireless network.., if hacked or unsecured, that
would be the preferred way of a clever pedophile to try and get child porn.
Thirdly, and most importantly. It is absurd in a democracy that someone can be
arrested merely for watching a video or a picture. They should go after the people
making the videos, they are committing the child abuse. Even child abuse doesn't
give the government an excuse to act like a totalitarian state and decide it has a right
to censor things on the internet!
There are several possibilities. Gnutella for example, assigns a unique id to each packet and uses a numerical id called the file index for file requests. It could also be a hash, which are in use by several p2p protocols.
And it does not require a warrant.
Oh, that's right, no government workers have committed crimes.
bwahahaha
The government can't even find a balanced budget, how can they find illegal files?
Oh but that is an issue not politician wants to address...
KieranMullen
http://360Oregon.com
to be created. This to me sounds no different than the NSA
spying program. Basically stating that they review every
communication on the internet/fiber network, and selectively prosecuting individuals is not constitutionally acceptable in my
opinion. And take the case were they find other incriminating
evidence on something like insider trading, would they than
prosecute that case as well. I guess Joe Biden is in league with
the Bush Administration at least on the issue of questionable
federal actions as of late.
authorize any sort of domestic eavesdropping it seems. It's all
back to ATT v Hepting which is bs. The DHS has their little pet
project for the community to spy on each other's networks with
the Neighborhood Network Watch (www.dhsnnw.org/hnap.html).
The pretense for the existence of this group is of course
"terrorism". Yeah, that's the other sure fire winner for any type
of broad sweeping sweeping eavesdropping. Biden's thing just
seems like another on a long list of moves to just surveil all
network traffic.
However, I'm glad that it seems like he gets that MAC addresses, IP numbers, and things like that can be faked. You can't just barge in on someone based on an IP numbers alone. I'm also glad he understands the technology isn't the problem. It's the criminals using it in the wrong way that is the problem.
I don't know what this "serial number" is, but it can probably be faked too. We just don't know which number he's talking about.
However, the smartest thing they're doing is monitoring the connection over time to collect the evidence they need. They're not just saying oh this IP was being used this must be our guy. A little caution can go a long way.
I highly doubt their method is fool proof though. I wouldn't want to be the one that gets falsely accused of having child porn. Life as you know it would be over from simply being accused.
Without knowing all the details I have to say I'm still not sure they should be tracking people through P2P since it is possible to fake your ID on the net. I know they can't track most spammers down so I have to wonder how accurate their methods really are.
But how I can judge the risks if I'm not being told everything about their methods? I can't I have no way to form an absolute opinion.
However, if there is some unique number that your computer generates such as the ID number that Pentium III chips generated their for a bit then I bet there are a whole bunch of privacy advocates that would love to jump down somebody's throat about it.
While it could be used for good, such a thing could be used to uniquely identify you amongst spammers, scammers, and phishers too. I'm against child porn, but aren't they a minority? Shouldn't our main concern be protecting the privacy of the majority? Like I said, can't say without knowing the details. I don't like the people being left in the dark, but I don't like child abusers either. So, what to do?
I wonder if they'll have to reveal their methods at trial as a part of discovery.
Then make them all hand write any legislation they wish to vote for. That's the end of those ten thousand pages bills that nobody understands.
Of course we live in a world where the government taps your phone lines, but if we tap their phone lines we're going to prison for a long, long, long, long long time.
Strange huh?
C|NET placed a smiling photo of Joe Biden for what? This picture isn't neutral, it's a positive picture. I tell you, C|NET places a lot of pictures to fit into the stories that it spins.
This is a journalistic malpractice.
Biden is a crook dressed in a white suit.
- what is it with comp fact illiterates making decisions?
- by joebloe3000 April 18, 2008 10:28 PM PDT
- Seriously... What is it with senators who most likely don't know anything about technology and their need to find issues and go to town on em.
- Like this Reply to this comment
-
-
- by johnsunvalley November 21, 2008 1:15 AM PST
- http://www.babatek.com
- Like this
-
Showing 1 of 2 pages (44 Comments)The idea is not wrong, but the inability to understand that you simply can't control online activity like that is wrong.
File names? Seriously... Encrypted files, hashes, private networks etc etc. You're catching a few idiots, you're not catching anyone that knows anything, if at all.
There will be another revolution soon and it'll have to do with the fact that knowledge is power and now knowledge can be duplicated and shared for free instantly without boundaries. The same thing happened with the press, same will happen with copyright and the net and everything relating to the net.
The idea isn't wrong (protecting kids) but the way they want to go at it so totally wrong. 1 billion to get a bunch of people to infiltrate p2p networks is a waste of tax payers money.