zlacker

Do we know whether this uploading is motivated by actual pedo reasons, by anti-pedo honeypot reasons, by sociopathic trolling reasons, by sabotage reasons (state, or commercial), or something else?

It's discouraging to think that privacy&security solutions for good people might end up being used primarily by bad people, but I don't know whether that's the situation, nor what the actual numbers are.

>>neilv+(OP)
It is just pedophiles. A user posted here on HN a while ago that they ran a Tor exist node and the overwhelming majority of it was CSAM or other cybercrime. Here in Germany they busted some underground forum and a single individual had 35TB worth of it at home. There's no great conspiracy, the criminal underworld is huge and they use every service that doesn't clamp down on it in some form.

>>Barrin+g4
That's discouraging, if true. I don't mind doing the occasional on-principle thing (like running Tor Browser for general-purpose browsing, and Tor as the VPN plugin on my phone), and maybe it's a citizen-technologist obligation to do my share of that. But I'd rather not have some Orwellian Bayesian system flagging me for using Tor.

>>neilv+Se
run a node. but never an exit one.

>>Barrin+g4
Naive question. Isn't tor supposed to be private? How can you know the contents of the communication just by running a node?

>>jmoren+p31
If it's an exit node, you know what the user is connecting to but not which user.

>>Barrin+g4
How would they know their traffic was csam? Traffic passing through an exit node is traffic between a Tor user and the open Internet. Who's running csam servers on the open Internet instead of as hidden services? And without https? Especially when Tor Browser enforces https? This story doesn't add up at all.

They did bust a site owner despite Tor, though. That story's true.