This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Fuck man. I used to use a program called “Kidpix” when I was a kid. It was like ms paint but with fun effects and sounds.
When I read the very first bit I was like "oh is that a new kids tv streaming platform from the same creators as kidpix?" Then I was immediately hit with the reality of the grim world we live in
1.8m users, how the hell did they ran that website for 3 years?
it says "this hidden site", meaning it was a site on the dark web. It probably took them awhile to figure out were the site was located so they could shut it down.
That’s unfortunately (not really sure) probably the fault of Germanys approach to that. It is usually not taking these websites down but try to find the guys behind it and seize them. The argument is: they will just use a backup and start a “KidFlix 2” or sth like that. Some investigations show, that this is not the case and deleting is very effective. Also the German approach completely ignores the victim side. They have to deal with old men masturbating to them getting raped online. Very disturbing…
I think you are mixing here two different aspects of this and of similar past cases. I the past there was often a problem with takedowns of such sites, because german prosecutors did not regard themselves as being in charge of takedowns, if the servers were somewhere overseas. Their main focus was to get the admins and users of those sites and to get them into jail.
In this specific case they were observing this platform (together with prosecutors from other countries in an orchestrated operation) to gather as much data as possible about the structure, the payment flows, the admins and the users of this before moving into action and getting them arrested. The site was taken down meanwhile.
If you blow up and delete)such a darknet service immediately upon discovery, you may get rid of it (temporarily) but you might not catch many of the people behind it.
They have to deal with old men masturbating to them getting raped online.
The moment it was posted to wherever they were going to have to deal with that forever. It's not like they can ever know for certain that every copy of it ever made has been deleted.
This feels like one of those things where couch critics aren't qualified. There's a pretty strong history of three letter agencies using this strategy successfully in other organized crime industries.
I used to work in netsec and unfortunately government still sucks at hiring security experts everywhere.
That being said hiring here is extremely hard - you need to find someone with below market salary expectation working on such ugly subject. Very few people can do that. I do believe money fixes this though. Just pay people more and I'm sure every European citizen wouldn't mind 0.1% tax increase for a more effective investigation force.
With everything going on right now, the fact that I still feel physically sick reading things like this tells me I haven’t gone completely numb yet. Just absolutely repulsive.
Excellent work. That’s an unimaginable amount of abuse material.
If that's the actual splash screen that pops up when you try to access it (no, I'm not going to go to it and check, I don't want to be on a new and exciting list) then kudos to the person who put that together. Shit goes hard. So do all the agency logos.
