A new start

blog/2022/may/divide.html

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 				), use to take down content and bring to justice those responsible. Not that I suddenly like the cops or trust them to do anything correctly in this hellworld. But something needs to be done.</p>
 				<p>And what am I to do?</p>
 				<p>I wrestled with this question for several weeks, but first with Freenet, which <a href="https://archive.ph/https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/03/man-jailed-indefinitely-for-refusing-to-decrypt-hard-drives-loses-appeal/">has a reputation</a> for <a href="https://archive.ph/https://www.texarkanagazette.com/news/2022/apr/28/feds-charge-texarkana-man-with-child-porn/">being a haven</a> for <a href="https://archive.ph/https://www.vice.com/en/article/gvymzx/one-step-ahead-pedophiles-on-the-deep-web">pedophiles</a>. When one requests content on Freenet, said content is cached partially on every node that it passes through on route to the person who requested it. This is how popular content lives longer and is faster to access. But this also means that one has no idea what is being stored on their node at any given time and there is a non-zero chance one is helping in the dissemination of child sexual abuse material.</p>
-				<p>There is a small child in my life. <a href="../../2021/september/fire.html">She lives in the house behind me</a> and frequently comes to visit with her mother. <a href="../../2021/december/exhausted.html">We hold craft nights together.</a> She calls me her best friend. I cherish her very much. I cannot stand the thought of her, or any other child, coming to harm of any kind. The harms I supposedly wrought on strangers <a href="https://deadendshrine.online/p5.html">in a previous life</a>? I don't remember any of it, and I was being manipulated as basically a barely-sentient tool. I can live with myself. The harms I unknowingly inflicted on others in my childhood this life, only recognized decades after the fact looking back at memories of places I will never set foot in again? I can live with myself, difficult as it is in my weaker moments. But I could never and I would never live with myself knowing I, as I am now, helped a pedophile harm a small child and evade the consequences.</p>
+				<p>There is a small child in my life. <a href="../../2021/september/fire.html">She lives in the house behind me</a> and frequently comes to visit with her mother. We hold craft nights together. She calls me her best friend. I cherish her very much. I cannot stand the thought of her, or any other child, coming to harm of any kind. The harms I supposedly wrought on strangers <a href="https://deadendshrine.online/p5.html">in a previous life</a>? I don't remember any of it, and I was being manipulated as basically a barely-sentient tool. I can live with myself. The harms I unknowingly inflicted on others in my childhood this life, only recognized decades after the fact looking back at memories of places I will never set foot in again? I can live with myself, difficult as it is in my weaker moments. But I could never and I would never live with myself knowing I, as I am now, helped a pedophile harm a small child and evade the consequences.</p>
 				<p>So it would logically follow that I would refuse to support technologies that I <em>know</em> enable others to harm children. Except... Tor and Freenet and other darknets aren't used by just pedophiles. They're used by activists and people under repressive regimes and those seeking to leave abusive households and students wanting to get around school firewalls and webmasters who don't want to pay for domains or cloud hosting or a static IP. Unfortunately I have no way of quantifying what goes on in exit nodes. (A study done by others estimates <a href="https://archive.ph/o9Z5K#selection-1149.0-1161.43">98% of Tor traffic is through exit nodes and only 2% is to hidden services</a><!-- https://theconversation.com/how-the-worlds-biggest-dark-web-platform-spreads-millions-of-items-of-child-sex-abuse-material-and-why-its-hard-to-stop-167107 -->, but I have no data about what amount of that 98% was for non-illegal purposes.) The existence of that four to ten percent of Tor hidden services not dedicated to harm... does it outweigh the ninety-plus percent of abusive sites on the network?</p>
 				<p>I mean, child molestation is far older than any darknet, or even the Internet. A theoretical shutdown of Freenet or Tor or whatever wouldn't stop the spread of CSAM, and the bot spam on imageboards proves that plenty of illicit material gets traded on the clearnet anyway, but it <em>would</em> harm those legitimate users seeking more computing freedom. Never mind that, with peer-to-peer systems, a shutdown wouldn't even work since the source code is already out there. (Tor could theoretically be shut down, though, given that the whole network is dependent on a small handful of <a href="https://archive.ph/LPAJK">hardcoded consensus nodes</a>.)</p>
 				<p>The genie is out of the bottle. The <a href="../../2020/july/signal.html">signal can't be stopped.</a> There is no "universal backdoor" that would help law enforcement catch pedophiles without weakening legitimate and liberatory uses for the technology. All anyone can hope for, I guess, is that these scumbags mess up their OPSEC and get exposed whenever they pop up. The same tactics as always.</p>