Child Pornography, Easy Peasy
October 23rd 2006 05:47
It is actually true, you have no idea how easy it is to get underage porn on the internet. I came across this little fact when doing research a couple of years back on pornography that I was going to write for an assignment.
What I wanted to focus on was illegal pornography, particularly child porn. I’m the kind of person who’d rather try and find this ‘material’ on the internet to see how easy it is to get myself rather than read what someone else wrote. However, I’m not going to go Google ‘under age porn’, that won’t work, I know without even trying.
So what did I do to get to it? I used peer to peer software (or p2p for short). What is p2p software you might ask? Well basically it a system in which many computers from all across the globe link up to transfer data between one another. Let’s say you have a file that is 100 megabytes big. Let’s say there are ten computers all which want this file, and one computer that has it already and is sharing it with the other ten, this computer is the ‘seeder’. What happens is this one computer distributes bits and pieces of the 100 megabyte file to all ten computers which are known as the ‘leachers’, so to one computer it gives part ‘a’, to another it gives part ‘b’, so on and so forth, what happens after this is that each leaching computer will have so much of the data. They will then begin sharing the bits and pieces of data they have with the other computers on this p2p network.
Why would I be interested in this form of information sharing than others? Well simply because this form of information distribution is cheap, effective and available on a massive scale, the network of computers wanting the file will literally grow on its own depending on the popularity of the file and in most cases you’ll find there will be many more seeders and even more leachers. To put it in perspective, extremely popular files can have upwards of 5000 seeders and upwards of 50,000 leachers. That is for extremely popular files, and they usually grow from only one computer seeding.
Peer 2 Peer software is especially popular in ‘sharing’ music, movies, and games and is a cause of great concern for anti-piracy activists, it is impossible to stop because it is never centralized to any one computer.
As you can tell, p2p technology is a great way to share information, be it legal or illegal, it can be used to share anything from anywhere in the world, which is what worried me to begin with. What about, for instance, child pornography created in Romania which could easily be shared on these p2p networks?
I decided to try two ways to find said underage porn. The first way is the most popular form of p2p, it is called bittorrent. What happens is you go to a website and you download a ‘torrent’ which you can open with a Bittorrent client (such as BitComet) which will connect you to all the computers in the world that have the same torrent active. The torrent doesn’t contain anything about what your downloading so much as it guides your computer to obtaining it from seeds and leachers. Inevitably your PC also becomes a semi-seeder as it starts uploading data to other computers before finishing the download.
I went on a popular ‘torrent’ search engine (which shall remain nameless for fear of prosecution) and simply typed in ‘underage’, to see just how many torrents there were of underage material. I got fifty odd results back, from fetish to sex, it was all there. Whether or not it was the real deal I wouldn’t know, I’m not about to download them. The names were quite explicit, one really catching my eye: “13yo Girl Raped And Crying With Feet Bound Bd Sm Bdsm Torture Slave”. Wether or not it is real is another matter, but what if it is real?
Another form of p2p which is far simpler exists in programs such as ‘Shareaza’ and ‘Kazaa’. Simply download, install and you have it all set up for you, all you do is search for whatever you want, be it movies, games, and illicit pornography. Typing ‘underage’ here revealed just as many results, not any cleaner at all either.
I don’t know how this can be handled, the software itself is made in a way that it can’t be stopped by hitting any one particular location. I guess really, the best way to stop this is by stopping child exploitation all together.
What I wanted to focus on was illegal pornography, particularly child porn. I’m the kind of person who’d rather try and find this ‘material’ on the internet to see how easy it is to get myself rather than read what someone else wrote. However, I’m not going to go Google ‘under age porn’, that won’t work, I know without even trying.
Illustration of a BitTorrent network, Image taken from wikipedia
Why would I be interested in this form of information sharing than others? Well simply because this form of information distribution is cheap, effective and available on a massive scale, the network of computers wanting the file will literally grow on its own depending on the popularity of the file and in most cases you’ll find there will be many more seeders and even more leachers. To put it in perspective, extremely popular files can have upwards of 5000 seeders and upwards of 50,000 leachers. That is for extremely popular files, and they usually grow from only one computer seeding.
Peer 2 Peer software is especially popular in ‘sharing’ music, movies, and games and is a cause of great concern for anti-piracy activists, it is impossible to stop because it is never centralized to any one computer.
As you can tell, p2p technology is a great way to share information, be it legal or illegal, it can be used to share anything from anywhere in the world, which is what worried me to begin with. What about, for instance, child pornography created in Romania which could easily be shared on these p2p networks?
I decided to try two ways to find said underage porn. The first way is the most popular form of p2p, it is called bittorrent. What happens is you go to a website and you download a ‘torrent’ which you can open with a Bittorrent client (such as BitComet) which will connect you to all the computers in the world that have the same torrent active. The torrent doesn’t contain anything about what your downloading so much as it guides your computer to obtaining it from seeds and leachers. Inevitably your PC also becomes a semi-seeder as it starts uploading data to other computers before finishing the download.
A great book to pickup if you'd like to learn about torrents and p2p software in general
Another form of p2p which is far simpler exists in programs such as ‘Shareaza’ and ‘Kazaa’. Simply download, install and you have it all set up for you, all you do is search for whatever you want, be it movies, games, and illicit pornography. Typing ‘underage’ here revealed just as many results, not any cleaner at all either.
I don’t know how this can be handled, the software itself is made in a way that it can’t be stopped by hitting any one particular location. I guess really, the best way to stop this is by stopping child exploitation all together.
| 125 |
| Vote |
Add To: 
subscribe to this blog
Comment by Ahmed
Video Gamer Kids
Little Green Foosballs
PolyKicks
Comment by TonyK
AFL Central
NBL News
Comment by Damo
Getting paid to check out porn may sound like an ideal job but after his firt day he was looking for someone else to do the task.
Comment by spain01
Juan Carlos
spain again
While your'e about it
Viva l'difference
Fire News Blog
Cities dying of thirst.
Comment by Ahmed
Video Gamer Kids
Little Green Foosballs
PolyKicks
Damo, I once saw a documentary on the matter of pornography, people who would sit down (this is in Queensland) and review mainstream hollywood movies, nad more often, pornography (which are far more popular than hollywood movies), and rate them. The people doing it generally found it was quite draining, particularly all the hardcore stuff. The person doing the documentary simply asked 'how could people wan't to see this?', 'well appretnly there are people who want to see defications on one another' [sic]. Porn really isn't, how should we say? Decent. 9.98/10 It is pretty horrific and mentally draining.
spain01, well it is quite difficult to keep children from doing so, the internet is the perfect medium (especially via p2p software) to transfer pornography. To censort he internet it is impossible, if anyone should really be blamed for children being exposed to pornography on the internet it is the parents who allow it.
Comment by Cibbuano
Hunt Famous
Orble Post of the Day
Fat Cult
Techbreak
Comment by Luke
Old Movies
Cane Toad Warrior
Sadly, I'm probably just being naive.
Comment by Ahmed
Video Gamer Kids
Little Green Foosballs
PolyKicks
They can however using such a method find out how many people are looking for child porn...
Comment by TonyK
AFL Central
NBL News
Sad world we live in unfortunately where children are used and abused in such a manner
Comment by Joy
Comment by Ahmed
Video Gamer Kids
Little Green Foosballs
PolyKicks
Comment by Joy
Comment by Ahmed
Video Gamer Kids
Little Green Foosballs
PolyKicks
Just give 'em a good ol' public lashing, that'll straighten them out and put would be criminals off the idea all together.
Comment by Joy
Comment by Ahmed
Video Gamer Kids
Little Green Foosballs
PolyKicks
Comment by Joy
Comment by Ahmed
Video Gamer Kids
Little Green Foosballs
PolyKicks
Comment by Joy
Comment by Ahmed
Video Gamer Kids
Little Green Foosballs
PolyKicks
Comment by Joy
But wait. Are these people psychologically affected? Is there any way to change that?
Comment by Ahmed
Video Gamer Kids
Little Green Foosballs
PolyKicks
I guess we all have that evil in ourselves, but the difference is osme of us control it, others don't.
Comment by Joy
Comment by Ahmed
Video Gamer Kids
Little Green Foosballs
PolyKicks
Comment by Joy
Comment by Parenting Wisdom
Comment by Ahmed
Video Gamer Kids
Little Green Foosballs
PolyKicks
Comment by Brenton
Dr Spin
Tales From The Other Side
Blip Blog
Gadget Museum
So some of those 'raped teen' ones? Same filesize.
= same video. I'm 99% sure.
The concern there is some of these adds are ro things like dating sites. So... what sort of people are they attracting, to use their service to find... victims?
Comment by Ahmed
Video Gamer Kids
Little Green Foosballs
PolyKicks
The ones I was looking at I know aren't from these advertising companies because they weren't small and they weren't duplicates either, they were runnning in the 50 meg range, typically tehse advertising peoples (aka spambots) have their files down at just 800kb (0.8mb).
Comment by Anonymous
Comment by Brenton
Dr Spin
Tales From The Other Side
Blip Blog
Gadget Museum
Comment by Anonymous
Some people do like child porn but the whole sex law should be changed. It should be legal to view child porn as long as the kid(should be at least 13) and thier parents willingly allow them to do it. However I'm pretty sure that most people that search for underage porn are underage themselves so it really wouldn't be so wrong if it was just a 16 yr old searching for other 16 yr olds now would it?
Of course there are the pedophile groups u have to look out for I guess.
Comment by Anonymous
ah well. I guess we just dump more on the 'to be investigated' pile.
Comment by Anonymous
Comment by hooverviking