Can you make an argument that does not hinge on scripts and ads or malware and the downloader being some total idiot who falls for scam and trojans?

For example, if I downloaded CP that someone posted on freenet or an anonymous 4-chan style image board with no ads, how does the poster get money? (And no, you don't get a +1 count on p2p-distributed content addressed storage) Oh come on, that is so vastly different there's no point even arguing..

(Why are we arguing about child porn and prison rape on a gog.com release thread? :D)

Sure, but what's the point when we're talking about the grand majority of the user base? It's not like I haven't heard from the "hacker" community about such matters, before.

But I'll humor you: paywalls. The more niche the market, the higher the scarcity, the higher the prices. This is fundamental economics. Donations for starters. Using 4chan as an example, they have to pay the bills. But, hey, a quick google...

1. Ads (I have an ad blocker, and rarely visit 4chan)

2. Selling agregate information to advertisers (they'll pay, even if it's not personally identifiable, though i see no evidence that 4chan engages even in this)

3. Donations

4. Affiliate links (ads, again)

5. Selling the site (apparently Christopher Poole got lots of offers, but didn't take up on them)

Though, apparently 4chan is just breaking even according to an interview with Christopher Poole. Actually, p2p does give you +1 counts. I came to the internet in the mid-2000s, when i watched people downloading music and other things. You know when someone's connected directly to your computer. No, especially not if the opportunity presented itself (babysitting, or something).

It's the "distributed" and "content addressed" that don't. I request hash 8c5c04391361cbf4afd74c5ed8101ea4af881c4ee3b3df1d5b3716a19b1a834d which you might have originated once in the past but now it's been distributed and cached by thousands of nodes and I never make a direct connection to you. Indeed, you might not even be on that network; you could be dead and your hardware vaporized. Yeah tell me about it, I came to the internet pre-2000 and I develop networking equipment for a living. ;-) I think we'll just have to agree to disagree here.

It's a bit like saying that if you steal money in a game, then you're highly likely to do so when the opportunity presents itself irl..

Again, I think people have their moral compass and the vast majority of people can show restraint and avoid doing such things, even if they enjoy fantasizing about it in the private.

With those ones it's still possible, but far less likely to be accurate. For counters, anyway. And all those things mentioned before on how something like 4chan would get money still apply, even to that. People like Stefan Molyneux make enough money from youtube videos to travel across the world, just on donations, so i can easily imagine someone getting "a little extra spending money" for something like this, especially if you work on an illegal immigration trail of some kind or already do something similar that puts you in a good position to do this stuff and get away with it, and that's specifically talking about cases where oyu might see an adult abusing a child. For cases like "underage camgirls" it's actually much easier to convince someone to do, since "it's not really harmful" if the parent approves or "Eh, I'm a grown adult" (says the 10 year old with hormones). And then there's exploitation of webcams and such. Low risk actions that come with little investment but can still output rewards are very likely to be done.

I'd have to actually partake to know what's actually available and how they make money, but as a thought experiment, the most logical avenue would be personal engagement in places where i know children go that isn't really moderator protected. One of the cases i spoke about above where i caught people in the act, https://drrr.com/ was one of them. I was made aware of it, 'cause i was just chillin' in a video game chatroom for Resident Evil Revelations (3ds), when someone said "hey, check out this cool site." It didn't take me long to see what kind of stuff was going on at a similar site that actually lead me to that site. It's not inherently for pedophiles, but I actually ran into a guy there that was installing "RAT"s on peoples' computers, and he actually skype called me while he was turning on their webcams and stuff (i was looking for something to pin him to the "hacking"), but his things weren't pedophilic in nature, he was just trying to be edgy and cool. It's incredibly and ridiculously easy, and the guy did the usual thing of getting their personal information out of them and ordering pizzas to their house, often paid with money he made from doing basic VB coding. I never did get the guy, but I didn't have to, as he ended up getting so wrapped up in drugs he essentially destroyed his own life and, presumably, brought it to an end. I can't imagine how much worse it would've been if he didn't have a "Jesus complex" as he himself said, that kept him from "doing something really bad."

So to complete the thought experiment, if i were into trying to make money, i'd extort the children using previous victims as examples, then just make them into new examples anyway, then either come up with some BS story that i didn't get the money, or whatever, and/or just end up switching to another similar site. Children seem to generally be fairly susceptible to extortion, as we learned with the case from that teenager from Canada who famously drank bleach. And to top it off, bitcoin donatioin link, maybe going to a "market" using a proxy chain that involves sources in various jurisdictions that aren't friendly with each other, etc. Sell it there, etc. So many ways you could make money that ends up being incentivized by there even being a market for it, especially with donations. Does anyone outside of the proxy chain, distributed network, or content thing know that my presumed donations are involved with child porn and not some other project i'm doing that's perfectly legal, which then protects the donator. For every node, that's putting my donation information in more hands. And, like i said, we know from youtubers that this actually makes good money. Better you than me. I love low level, but I hate low level networking. Something like TWI or other clock dependent serial interfaces give me nightmares. Except stealing money in a game usually doesn't come with the risk of getting arrested or with the knowledge that the event actually took place. Fantasizing is only fantasizing, but the closer you get to action, the closer you are to action. Grabbing and contributing to a distribution network is more action than just fantasizing already. You have to take the risk of going to get it, you have to take the risk of getting caught with it, etc, which are all low for mere posession. Being part of the network that redistributes it ups the risks, but depending on the network the risks are still low (which is why the market's so alive and well, from my understanding, to the degree that it's even coming out into the open in some places). I come from an area where it's nothing to see a drug deal in the open, so it's not hard for me to imagine it being very similar to child porn. I've watched people, while growing up, get progressively worse not only with the drugs but also at being open about it.

I feel like you're trying to come up with schemes to make money instead of explaining how a passive leech of a file results money ending up in child abuser's pockets.. no, the point about 4chan still doesn't apply because the question wasn't how 4chan gets money, the question was how do I get money when someone posts a pic I took of naked five-year-old you on 4chan and then some unknown number of people leech it onto their HDs? I don't. Devising schemes how I could run a profitable CP business isn't the point I want to discuss. And no, you don't get a hit counter on freenet, unless you're a state level actor (or big enterprise) capable of performing large scale traffic analysis on the whole network. And no, I still couldn't get an ad network to pay me even if there were such an actor.

(If getting paid for random leeches is that easy, then all arguments against piracy should be done for)

As for the rest, well, I have to say I already got tired of arguing the opinion that watching porn (in a place where it's illegal) means you're likely to abuse.

I'm with kohlrak on this one. Very few people are able not only to "draw the line" but to walk by it for extended period of time.

Most people see laws and society norms (that can actually differ from the laws) as a baseline. And if you are ready to bend rules in minor things now, it's more likely you will do something major against the rules in the future.

And if you already found justification to cover up someone who abused a child (as you downloaded CP instead of reporting it), you would probably find justification to abuse child yourself.

Not baseline, but guideline. Lawmaking has gotten out of hand, they could put anyone they want in jail in the US because there are too many goddamn rules and almost everyone breaks one or more of them at some point.

So people take the guidelines they know, make personal interpretations and adjustments, and let their moral compass guide them for the rest. It's gateway theory all again. If I didn't report my neighbors fighting to the authorities, I'm going to beat my wife next. If I found justification to speed on the road today, I'm going to start running nightly street races next week. If I found justification to call someone an idiot on the internet, tomorrow I'm going to advocate burning churches and spread hate speech against muslims. Today I'm drinking coffee, so I'll probably find justification for alcohol and weed tomorrow. And then heroin.

I think it's bullshit, but I'm not interested in trying to convince anyone anymore.

It's very much the same thing. If you are leeching and seeding a file, as it's called, you are helping me generate fear for an extortion. If i have embedded data for taking donations, you are propagating that as well. And whomever acts as a note would be incentivized as well for redistributing, which then eventually incentivizes the original as you go backwards. Why not? Ok, then.

What I find ironic is that i'm applying the same logic to loli. But, i don't see the point in poking the hornet's nest too much.

Someone actually made a good case to me before that explains how most people most likely already have child porn on their computers, and not via viruses or anything like that, but ad. Things in general are just entirely out of hand, and the powers we've entrusted to keep things under control are too busy worrying about other things that we don't necessarily agree they should control. Gateway theory certainly seems valid in practice. Usually, though, it can be stopped by drawing a hard line in the sand. "Everyone's got their drug," and "everyone's got their kink," as they say about everything. When you talk to people when they know they can be honest with you without suffering punishment for their deeds, it's quite intreresting what kind of information people offer you. Some people offer you knowledge accidentally without even knowing it, which is when you confront them with it and then you can learn the truth. Do we really believe that "normies" are stupid, that the average person can't think? No, we just see the byproducts of how they tried to hide their deeds and suffering from themselves. Those of us who have faced our demons are very much aware of this. What we learned the hard way throughout the 20th century is that pretty much everyone has the capacity for pretty much all the evil we've ever seen, but we don't like to acknowledge that, as that's a really uncomfortable piece of information. I know, from the fact that I am human, that despite my free will, i do have the ability to end up a murderer, a thief, or whatever, given similar motivations as someone who already does it. I'm obviously different, but we're not as different as we'd like to be. How do you think these things happen in the first place? If someone just has a wire crossed in their head or something, these things would be so much more rare, right? Usually when something significant like that goes awry, you die, yet people who act adversely are far more common than people who randomly cross the wires in their brain, suggesting very much that this is all well within more than just our physical capabilities.

If this, if that, yada yada. How about no ifs? Pls suppose I uploaded this file and leech it 1000 times: https://tbib.org//images/111/37cde034b0d9bb18ba4095ecee17971d6a706df5.png

Then tell me where's my money. Same thing, right? Because they want to control the ads, count the impressions, etc. Can you show me one ad network willing to strike a deal over some freesite? How do they strike a deal over a single file with no embedded ads?

I imagine you'd need something a bit more provocative, but if we were to assume this were something actually far more provocative an explicit, we could have meta data in the file, we could actually get a watermark thrown in a corner that points somewhere, we could presumably use something like the jpeg of death, etc. That image specifically, no, you're not going to make money off of it. Loli is far less lucrative than real child porn (especially because of extortion value), and that's not even provacative (and i naturally didn't expect that to be, 'cause we're on gog).

But, if you want to talk about loli, instead of child porn, you could make a customer attraction case, at best. Loli seems to be more of a community thing from what i've seen. People usually use loli to get people looking at their other artwork to get commission. Still, you'd need to watermark or something. You would embed ads, or something for tracking, or something like that. Apparently, some ad networks are willing to throw down money even for agregate information. Perhaps for selling lingerie or something. Or maybe they just want to know what kind of clothes sucker kids aren't wearing. Search query information is really valuable (which is why google makes money off of it). If someone in the network is making money by people being in the network (especially if it's dedicated to more than just child porn), sources of big attractions (which might be traceable in the meta data, watermarks, etc) could end up getting paid just simply to ensure that the network is still going strong. You wouldn't exactly be making big money that way, you could, and it's certainly why youtube has incentivized certain creators. Remember, the attracting facctor doesn't matter to the company so much if they are making money, but instead the fact that attraction is taking place.

I'm not going to prove it to you, but you can find files just like that, with pantsless kids instead of illustrated loli. No watermarks, no embedded ads, no metadata pointing to the originator or any other party that could benefit from the image's distribution.

That was my point. CP without money in it is a real thing. And my argument is that no, downloading that file does not support it. Just like downloading this file I linked does not give me any money. Yeah, you just don't get that necessarily get that information on a distributed CAS. It's just hashes or keys (as links) and possibly static indexes, searched locally. Youtube doesn't make money by people being on the network.. they make money by profiling and showing ads to these people. That's a little different.

Of course, there are other incentives than just money. But are there ones there that do have embedded ads and stuff? And do you not end up downloading those as well? As for the other incentives, if you're hosting a node, can't he (the author) count the nodes throughout the day and get a rough idea that his work is popular? You can with a dedicated bot or something, though a company could presumably just throw their own node on there to log incomming requests, depending on how the network is set up. Someone has to get the searches, and that's either every node on the network or a centralized database, otherwise the search just wouldn't work. No, but content creators get money from the ads, and they also get rewards for having X numbers of subscibers, as well, so youtube incentivizes both ways. I'm sure those play buttons are worth something, and not just sentimental value.

And that is exactly what I'm arguing against. Child porn is made using children - that's a crime, anime (including the one that has loli) is made using artist skills - that's not a crime.

Back when I stumbled upon such files, I don't recall seeing any ads but that was quite a while ago. The way freenet works, no, not really. All the nodes form one big network and anyone could be hosting anything. Generally speaking you can't tell who's hosting what or why. For example, if you request a file from your direct peer, and they don't have it, the request will be forwarded to the next peer and so on until the content is found. On the return path, the nodes which participated in the delivery may cache the content. So you can tell the (open) network has so and so many nodes, though you don't know how many dark nodes are there, and you can't tell who's hosting what. There are no search requests on freenet. The only way you find content is either by following links people posted (on boards, freesites, index sites, etc), or by running a spider which crawls the network, and builds a local database, which you can then locally search. So no search keywords ever get sent anywhere.

Actually, it is a crime in some countries, and it's on really shakey ground in the US, basically legal or illegal depending on district.

But the point is, the same logic does apply, that you applied to actual child porn. You do have that creep. The same thing could be said of all porn, to be fair. From "normal porn" to "cartoons of women who are far better than real women, 'cause they aren't so self-absorbed," and "ok, young isn't to bad, to "well, they're not actually people," to "well, i'm not contributing to the abuse of these real children," to... well..

That said, since it's not real children, the jump is actually harder than with "real porn," so it does seem perfectly reasonable to say that it would likely reduce the number of abuses per capita of those into children. My concern is whether or not the clear legalization, or just legalisation in general, would lead to more people taking the leep. And if you reduce the number per capita of actual child molesters in half, but increase the number of people into it ten fold (over time), you've basically increased the number of child molesters five fold. Of course, the real numbers would look differently, and we don't know what they are, but it's an argument i can't let go of.

My argument still stands that perhaps we shouldn't make laws based on that idea in the first place, 'cause it's essentially legal mind control (victimless crime), just like, say, "sin taxes." If the goverment's job is to protect us from threats internal and external, then mind control for the purpose of prevention of such crime would indeed fall under their responsibility. However, giving the government the moral goahead gives them the ability to do it with other things, such as voting. The same thing, however, can be said about "reckless endangerment" (most common example is DUI), but we most certainly need that enforced. So it's a tough call to make from this angle, as well.

I know with "regular porn" that ads are indeed a thing, especially ones that advertise a site or something, so it seems reasonable to apply the same logic (especially if the site hosted in places where it might be legal or something). However, i'm not on such a network, so i'll just have to take your word for it that child porn is an exception. Is there a way of calculating the nodes it took, like one would do with a traceroute to an IP or something outside of such a network? And, if so, is it possible for the person to connect randomly to various nodes to do the counting? Ok, so then would it not be reasonable for certain index sites to provide such information? I assume, too, that the whole point of an index site is to point directly to known nodes with the content, which means that if the node was the original host, they would get it that way, too.

I mean, unless you basically get on and only randomly get content, there are still ways of centralling getting some rough guestimation. Kind of like how IRC is decentralized, but I can go around taking notes of how many IRC servers are advertised to get a rough idea that IRC is the most popular protocol for embedding a chat into your program, and i can tell by going to a few different networks what my best chance of finding someone to talk to is. If i make a virus, for example, too, I could find out how successful it was by looking for whether or not people are talking about my bug, without ever having to have something that dialed home.