if the police will be really seeding child porn movies. Wouldn't that be a strange attitude?

What's to stop as-yet-unknown pedophiles working in these government agencies from accessing the data they want as part of their every day job? Part of the software mandates download. That means they'll have access to all of the child porn they could ever want or need, 100% free pass, with no oversight.

That's my problem with this.

Congress members and other government officials are probably the ones who would be caught most often by a system such as this.

I think it's a very big problem for the US government to be spying on its citizens. I don't care if a Republican thinks it's a good idea or if a Democrat thinks it's a good idea. The government needs to stay the hell out of private citizens' business!

Where are these power-whores going to draw the line? "Alright, we're snooping for terrorists and sex offenders... while we're at it, let's make sure people aren't doing anything else we don't like."

That's right.

I've been using P2P and such services for many years, never once had I come across any 'really dodgy' material (then again I've never looked). One day I was downloading what I thought was a benign (and not even copyrighted) video clip. I went to preview some finished chunks only to find:
- It obviously wasn't what I wanted
- It was rude
- It had a minor (thankfully not in distress)

Aside from being shocked and saddened, I was panicking to get that sh*t off my machine as quick as possible.

Now by this new bill I would have been prosecuted and faced a lengthy prison sentence for downloading those chunks, as well being put on ‘that’ list – for what? How could I possibly have proven my (lack of) intent?


There are other ways of sharing ‘really dodgy’ material: encrypted files with segmented passwords and/or ‘redundant random dusting’ then archiving/renaming it. Hence this would be yet another law that punishes the well meaning without actually doing anything against the real criminals.

Perhaps this is a devious ploy by the RIAA/MPAA?

Thank you, you've just enlightened me as to why they are checking filenames :)

Until your comment I thought it was dumb, but IF the file is dodgy AND the filename is dodgy, there has to be intent really. I mean, if you clicked on a web link that said it was Gardeners world but the filenames in the torrent were....not..... you'd probably stop it fairly fast.

What will happen next, of course, is the scumbags will use innocuous names more, meaning the police only catch dumb people. (I'm assuming the crafty ones are more dangerous)

I'd like to hope the police also download the full file before saying it's deffo dodgy, but otherwise I'd say the procedures are spot-on - gather evidence that people's own computers will happily send to you just by asking, go through proper channels to get real info on them, and then check that the computers found are the computers they detected. Almost like the RIAA, except with rigour, and against a deserving target. Er... so nothing like the RIAA then ;)

They really should stop letting children into the US senate and house.

I'm sure I can't be the only person here who's seen this, but quite a few times I've gone to download something from p2p which was completely innocent (well apart from the normal p2p issues of course), only to find that someone has seeded a porn movie with the name of whatever I was after.

Obviously when I realise that no way is this Gardeners world, and Alan Titchmarsh would never appear naked, I delete the offending falsely named file.

It wouldn't take much for one of these falsely named offerings to be "really" dodgy, set the big red lights a flashing, and suddenly I'll be hauled up before the beak and find my name on the sex offenders register, aka life goes down the toilet.

The law must prove intent.

If you walked out of a bank with twice the amount of cash in a bag as you had expected (cashier mistake) , you can't be arrested for bank robbery or fraud unless they can prove you realised you had too much. The same should apply for p2p snooping.

Without getting into specifics, I just did a test with four child porn videos on ed2k and I got some mixed results. One of the videos had mostly correctly labeled copies and the other three had roughly 40% mislabeled. The mislabels ranged from Indiana Jones to DVDShrink and most of them were unique, suggesting that they probably weren't accidental downloads.

More interetingly, I also looked at the individual hosts I was connected to and only a very small handful, 1-3%, were from the US (somewhat due to ed2k's userbase). Working on a national level to address such an international issue is problematic at best.

Three comments:

1) How can a unique serial number be applied or derived? IIRC the idea of hardware CPU unique IDs was shot down back in about '98. The mac address does not get used outside the local area network. So what is unique?

2) P2P networks: there is a good chance that what one downloads is not what one thinks one is downloading. So the system will log innocent people as well as paedophiles. Will a false ID be removable from the system? So far it has proven difficult to remove people from the homeland security no-fly databases.

3) I think it is kinda cool that the police are treating P2P networks like a commons. Any claim that police listing the shared files should founder on a definition of the commons. This could go to court and might be a case that actually helps define the 'net as a public space.

I've heard many scary stories about the people who sexually abuse minors, but I've never before heard the one about how they molest through the peer-2-peer protocol.