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High Court In India Rules That Viewing, Downloading Child Porn Is Not A Crime - The Publica
(www.thepublica.com)
this post was submitted on 22 Apr 2024
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I don't think you can unknowingly download something. Sounds like a lie to cover up. I'm not a software engineer. But I do not think it works that way unless you are downloading immense files or zips. If that's the case it should be clearly shown with what they did download.
You just unknowingly downloaded this picture of Zoboomafoo. It is now on your storage drive in the form of a cached image file. It's temporary, and will be removed the next time your cache is cleared if you ever do that. Otherwise, it will sit there for some time, lurking in your system. Good thing it's only Zoboomafoo!
Enjoy!
It's on my phone?! Where?
In a temporary cache directory. If you're on Android, you can clear it by going to your app settings, viewing storage usage on whichever app you used to view this, and clearing the cache. For example, the app I use for lemmy currently has 100MB in it's cache. My Firefox app on my phone currently has 555MB is cached files. This can includes things such as web pages, JavaScript files, and the images I've encountered while visiting the web who knows when, I rarely clear that shit.
I always assumed that was cleared automatically after time.
It is, probably.
But it won't be written over with zeros, so it's all still there until something else actually writes over it. A mobile device is flash memory, so the controller wear leveling might not get back to that spot for a bit. It might decide that spot is a bad sector and never write over it.
Regardless. He can't be seeing this or downloading it unknowingly was my point. It can't be happening in the background. If he is viewing it, it's known.
The person in the article who apparently viewed it multiple times over a long period of time absolutely did so deliberately.
I think the point in sending you the image was to show that, in general, it is possible for images to be present on your computer without you actively attempting to access them. Not to say that the argument was valid in this particular case.
Well that's my point. Is they aren't there just on accident. But it's being taken as he didn't do it. He absolutely did it. The mechanism of how that exists is clearer now, but my point still stands. He didn't not view them causing them to be in temporary memory on accident. That doesn't happen.
Dude, someone posted that picture, explained to you how that unwarranted picture is now in the cache on your phone, and you're just doubling down? Come on. That was a top tier and educated explanation. Why ask the question in the first place if you don't want the answer?
Because I said it in the first statement. It didn't happen by accident. If you want to be rude I can come give you my address and you can try and act tough to my face and see how that works out for you. I stand by what I said and the facts fully support what I said. It wasn't an accident he was watching child porn. Now either grow a pair or lose you posture. Get it?
OK, suppose the police find out that a CSAM image was posted on a forum. About an hour later it was deleted by the mods, but in that time it was unwittingly viewed a number of times by users of the forum who had no idea it was in that thread. Some users didn't even scroll down far enough in the thread to actually see the image, but it still got grabbed by their web browser, because the browser loads the whole page, not just the part you're looking at. Now suppose that you are one of those users.
Now the cops subpoena a list of every IP address that downloaded that image, tie those IP addresses back to specific users. Now you get your door kicked in by the cops looking for evidence of child porn stored on your computer. And depending on various other factors, they might even still find that image stored there in some form, without you having any idea about it.
This is why it's important to understand that there is no technical difference between downloading and viewing. Your lawyer's job is now going to be to prove that you never wittingly chose for that image to be delivered to your computer, even though it absolutely was delivered there as a direct result of actions you took. Your web browser made the request to the server to send that image to it, because you made the request to open that page. So there has to be more than just the technical action of "downloading." There needs to be intent.
Now in this case, there clearly was intent, given that the image was viewed multiple times over two years. But that's important context that is needed on top of just the fact that the image was downloaded.
Careful guys, hes ~ dangerous ~
Good doggie ;)
Please tell me you work in tech. I want my daily lmfaoizzle.
Nope! I'm a logistics manager.
Sorry, but that's just incorrect. You unknowingly downloaded a whole bunch of things just in the process of making this comment.
This is one of the issues that has confounded people since the invention of the world wide web; from a computer's perspective, there is no such thing as "viewing" a file. Everything is a download. The only difference is what your computer does with the file after the fact.
If you load up a thread on a forum and someone posts a CSAM image to that thread, your compouter will download it. You don't have to make any active choice, other than loading the thread itself, for that to happen. Same on Discord, WhatsApp, or anything else. All forms of access are downloads.
Edit to add: None of this is relevant to this particular case since the defendant allegedly viewed the video multiple times across a period of two years, which, y'know, is in absolutely no way accidental. But it's still important to understand the distinction because there are a lot of situations where it absolutely does matter.
That... Is a relevant detail that is not in the article. That does seem to change things.
Oh really? I thought we just viewed it in a cloud based system and we only put it on our system if we choose to. Interesting.
Even if that were true, how would your device display anything without downloading it first? In your example, your device is the end point for the cloud based system, which means it downloads from the cloud.
I don't know enough about cloud based systems. I thought you were just viewing it. Such as all the work was done sever side and very little client side. I am not a software engineer. I just play games and have an idea of what's going on.
This person in question viewed it many times and that is not "accident". Which is exactly my point.
In reference to cloud gaming, that’s more akin to watching a live video stream. Your device may not be doing the processing to generate the video, but it is still streaming (live downloading) the video. Whether it decides to store that video is up to the device’s settings. But it is 100% downloading the video in order to display it.
I hear ya. I misunderstood the mechanism. I thought it was more of a pass through.
you might be shitposting here, and i can't tell. It's served to you over the internet. Even if hypothetically, someone were to send you an encrypted file of something highly illegal (lets say classified government documents) and asked you to hold on to it. But never gave you the key, and you never bothered figuring out what it was. Even if you downloaded it knowingly, you don't know what it is, and therefore have no reason to assume anything negative about it.
The semantic technicality here, is that download is 99.99% of the time used to refer to an action where the user explicitly grabs a copy of something, you computer doesn't automatically "download" something, in the form that the user downloads the something. This is called caching for a reason. Hell even download caching, is just caching used for an active download.
Download itself is also a network terminology, referring to incoming data, moving to you, also known as RX and TX in shorter form. But even that is only a referential term, and merely refers to where and how the data is flowing, rather than what it actually means for it to be downloaded. Because someone else, could upload illicit materials to your network, and under your description, that would also count as "you downloading it" regardless of whether it gets put anywhere in your network, or if it just gets bounced back or whatever.
you also use the term loading, which is incongruent with downloading, so i'm curious whether you think loading and downloading are the same, or different, if you are, again just shitposting.
This is just about the only correct statement in this rambling mess of a comment. Yes, downloading means that data is moving to your system.
So, given that fact, how do you imagine that your web browser displays an image without downloading it? How does the data comprising the content of the image end up on your system in order for the web browser to render it without traveling to it from the server; ie, being "downloaded"?
like i said it's all semantic. In this case, download is almost certainly being used to describe a scenario where the original image was sent in whatsapp, and then downloaded to the phone locally, and found on the phones filesystem. Otherwise we would not be using the term download here. That could be a language barrier thing i suppose. But in the contexts of what it's implying, i doubt it.
likewise, i could just as easily argue that everything you "post" on the internet is actually an upload, and as a result, you upload every interaction you have on the internet, however it's only contextually used to describe something like "uploading a youtube video" where there a very clear contextual meaning presented. Same thing with download, people download games, but listen to the music or "stream" it from spotify, it's technically downloading, but it's actually not.
Going by the contextual, and colloquially referred to definition of "download" (hell the article linked literally says "he watched it for two years" so try to semantic that one out) download in isolation, is the flow of traffic to you, from somewhere else, downloading, downloaded, or a download, that verb usage of it, as opposed to an adjective usage of it, is completely different. The article does not say "download" it says "downloaded, downloading" and any potentially related forms of that word refer to the act of download, of which is being locally and explicitly stored on your device. The only instance where this wouldn't apply is if he didn't download it (notice the verb form usage) and it was actually cached by whatsapp, and that somehow lead to him being arrested.
Which is a possibility, but is also a completely different scenario.
Yes. Again, that's literally what is actually happening.
You keep throwing out these statements like "Oh, well if that's true then we might as well also say this is true" and then "this" turns out to be just the most banal shit.
I genuinely don't think you even know what it is you're trying to argue here. You're either so down in the weeds of some bizarre semantic sophistry that you've lost track of daylight, or you're arguing points that no one else was disagreeing on while acting like you've just dropped the Pentagon Papers.
Either way, I really can't be bothered anymore. I've tried my best, but it's like trying to teach a pigeon to read.
i literally started this entire thread off based on semantic technicalities, why are we acting like this ISN'T what im talking about? Nobody should be shocked by this. I didn't come to argue the legality of holding CP because if i did, it would be very short, it's illegal, plain and simple, that's how the law in the US works.
Noooope, whatsapp by default downloads images and videos sent to you. I know cuz I have to disable it on my device and clean the downloaded shit from my grandpa's device. Grandpa does want it to keep downloading.
Edit: Fixed spelling. Misclicked almost evert N with B, lol
More to the point, anything which displays an image from a remote source has to download the image in order to do so. Whether or not you choose to store that image somewhere permanently, it was still downloaded either way.
Does it? I have never used that app. Ok seems more likely then.