How do the police know “who” and “where” to look for those who have downloaded child pornography? Can police issue a warrant just on a “tip” that someone is doing this?
http://www.local6.com/news/2542360/detail.html
Noodles The Clown
http://www.ananova.com/entertainment/story/sm_460495.html
Pee Wee Herman
Usually via stings or by cracking a supplier and then going after his customers.
There’s also cyberangels.org, I’d post a link but the site doesn’t seem to be responding at the moment.
I’ve reported suspicious pictures to them beore, some sicko evidently photoshopped Emma Watson’s head onto some other pre-teens’ nude bodies and spammed them to a usenet group. By “spammed”, I mean they were off topic; it was a toon group and the pics definately were not toons.
Good site, Jeff.
Bad information, though. In the section on hackers, the following is stated:
Unless I’ve been grossly misinformed, MP3, picture, and movie files can’t contain a virus. Think they’re shilling for the RIAA or something?
Or you could check the membership lists of the perfectly legal (for the moment) Danish Paedophile Organization. For obvious reasons I’m not even Googling for their (perfectly legal – for the moment) website, let alone posting a link.
Those wacky Danes.
Trojans are slightly different. Symantec knows of at least one Linux-centered trojan that comes embedded in an MP3. Pictures and movies should still be safe.
What they mean by that is things like “annakournikovanaked.jpg.exe”. Since Windows hides the last extension by default, they’ll display as whatever.jpg or whatever.mp3.
Ah yes, Alereon. Thank you for the reminder. First thing I do when I get a new computer is turn that default setting off, so it shows the whole filename.
Guess I forgot not everyone turns that infernal feature off.
IIRC, someone created a virus that could be embedded in a jpeg, but you would have had to have downloaded the activation program.
I’ve come across ASF movie files that can launch web pages while they play - so in theory there could be a movie that opens up a page that exploits an Internet Explorer (or other web browser) vulnerability to cause trouble. I haven’t heard of anything like that ever actually happening though.
I always have it on unless I need to change an extension to another extension. Remember, it’s only the extensions with an associated function that are hidden. Thus, if there’s an extension which is normally hidden and it isn’t, there’s a problem.
Yeah, I saw something about that at the Symantec site while I was researching. Didn’t think much of it at the time.
Yeah, ASF can launch IE but it can be turned off in Media Player 9 (or get a non-MS media player which will not launch IE).
But for the most part a movie cannot contain a virus. Even the IE launch issue cannot automatically download a virus (but it could, indirectly, ask you to download/run a file from the internet, but you’d have to be pretty stoned to let that happen).
I suppose it might be possible to create a JPEG that causes the viewer to crash Windows (probably not though but we are talking about Windows here). I’ve encountered bad movie files that caused Media Player to crash Windows.
Back to the OP. I suppose the police could track IP logs when they bust a porn distributer. If I was the investigator I would be tracking all IP hits to the suspect’s machine and tracing the IPs back to the ISPs.
If the police got a ‘tip’ they might find out who the perp’s ISP is and have them track IP traffic. I don’t know how much legal leg work would be needed to get permission to track someone’s data traffic but it could be done without anyone knowing.
I used to trawl webcam chat programs for child pornographers, send them trojans, then wipe out their hard drives. Although it’s still illegal, does that make it wrong? It was the only reason I used the trojans anyway.
It’s viligantism, SirMuffinMan. Did you have no recourse to let a legitimate authority take care of it?
Well, if members of The Who are anything to go by, some can be caught by the simple expedient of going through credit card numbers used to purchase such “materials”. To paraphrase a favorite comic book character: Batman once told me that criminals were a cowardly, superstitious lot. He forgot to mention that most of them also weren’t too darn bright.
What JRDelirious said. Also, if you had actually reported them to the police, and it turned out they really were child pornographers, they’d have been put behind bars for a few years. All you’re doing is making them spend time cleaning their hard drive.
It’s an issue that can only be solved to my extent in most cases, I believe.
What am I supposed to do, hand the police an IP and say “Here you go guys, have fun.”? If he were a 56K user, his IP would most likely change in a few hours, and if he were smart, it wouldn’t even be his real IP (Then again, if he were smart, he wouldn’t have gotten the trojan in the first place.). Also, the authorities would probably not done anything about it, at least not for a while.
Whom exactly am I supposed to report it to, anyway? What if the person is based in another country? I can’t just hand him over to his authorities, and there’s no point in giving the information to mine.
Also, I don’t consider it reasonable to confess that I illegally accessed anothers computer, no sense in potentially putting myself at risk of arrest for doing something which I think is quite admirable.
As I said, I don’t do it anymore, that was back when I was a younger child. I’ve found more wholesome ways to spend my time on the computer.
goes back to playing Grand Theft Auto: Vice City