European police say KidFlix, "one of the largest pedophile platforms in the world," busted in joint operation.
Global crackdown on Kidflix, a major child sexual exploitation platform with almost two million users | Europol
The name of it sounds like a streaming service for children's movies and TV shows. Like, Netflix for kids. In the past 5 years I have seen at least 3 deepweb social communities that started out normally, with a lot of people talking shit and enjoying anonymous free speech. Then I log in a couple weeks or months later to find CP being posted and no mods doing anything to stop it. In all those cases, I reported the site to the FBI anonymously and erased my login from my password manager.
Goddam what an obvious fucking name. If you wrote a procedural cop show where the child traffickers ran a site called KidFlix, you'd be laughed out of the building for being so on-the-nose.
During the investigation, Europolβs analysts from the European Cybercrime Centre (EC3) provided intensive operational support to national authorities by analysing thousands of videos.
I don't know how you can do this job and not get sick because looking away is not an option
You do get sick, and I would be most surprised if they didnt allow people to look away and take breaks/get support as needed.
Most emergency line operators and similar kinds of inspectors get them, so it would be odd if they did not.
Yes, my wife used to work in the ER, she still tells the same stories over and over again 15 years later, because the memories of the horrible shit she saw doesn't go away
Indeed, but in my country the psychological support is even mandatory. Furthermore, I know there have been pilots with using ML to go through the videos. When the system detects explicit material, an officer has to confirm it. But it prevents them going through it all day every day for each video. I think Microsoft has also been working on a database with hashes that LEO provides to automatically detect materials that have already been identified. All in all, a gruesome job, but fortunately technique is alleviating the harshest activities bit by bit.
This kind of shit is why i noped out of the digital forensics field. I would have killed myself if I had to see that shit everyday.
I'm sure many of them numb themselves to it, and pretend it isn't real in order to do the job. Then unfortunately, I'm sure some of them get addicted themselves.
Similar to undercover cops who do drugs while undercover, then get addicted to the drugs.
And it didn't even require sacrificing encryption huh!
Basically the only reason I read the article is to know if they needed a "backdoor" in encryption, guess the don't need it, like everyone with a little bit of IT knowledge always told them.
"See we caught these guys without doing it, thank of how many more we can catch if we do! Like all the terrorists America has caught with violating their privacy. ...Maybe some day they will."
They also seized 72,000 illegal videos from the site and personal information of its users, resulting in arrests of 1,400 suspects around the world.
Wow
1,393 suspects identified 79 suspects arrested Over 3,000 electronic devices seized 39 children protected
Imagine if humans evolved enough to self-solve the problem of liking this shit.
Kidflix sounds like a feature on Nickelodeon. The world is disgusting.
Or a Netflix for children/video editing app for primary schoolers in the early 2000s/late 1900s.
Geez, two million? Good riddance. Great job everyone!
Happy cake day!
Thank you! π
Massive congratulations to Europol and its partners in taking this shit down and putting these perverts away. However, they shouldn't rest on their laurels. The objective now is to ensure that the distribution of this disgusting material is stopped outright and that no further children are harmed.
The objective now is to ensure that the distribution of this disgusting material is stopped outright and that no further children are harmed.
Sure, it'll only cost you every bit of your privacy as governments make illegal and eliminate any means for people to communicate without the eye of Big Brother watching.
Every anti-privacy measure that governments put forward is always like "We need to be able to track your location in real time, read all of your text messages and see every picture that your phone ever takes so that we can catch the .001% of people who are child predators. Look at how scary they are!
Why are you arguing against these anti-pedophile laws?! You don't support child sex predators do you?!"
Hereβs a reminder that you can submit photos of your hotel room to law enforcement, to assist in tracking down CSAM producers. The vast majority of sex trafficking media is produced in hotels. So being able to match furniture, bedspreads, carpet patterns, wallpaper, curtains, etc in the background to a specific hotel helps investigators narrow down when and where it was produced.
Maybe Jeff Bezos will write an article about him and editorialize about "personal liberty". I have to keep posting this because every day another MAGA/lover - religious bigot or otherwise pretend upstanding community member is indicted or arrested for heinous acts against women and children.
Good fucking riddance
1.8 million users and they only caught 1000?
I imagine it's easier to catch uploaders than viewers.
It's also probably more impactful to go for the big "power producers" simultaneously and quickly before word gets out and people start locking things down.
It also likely gives you the best $ spent/children protected rate, because you know the producers have children they are abusing which may or may not be the case for a viewer.
Yeah, I don't suspect they went after any viewers, only uploaders.
Hopefully, they went after the pimps and financiers.
Excellent work. Thatβs an unimaginable amount of abuse material.
Wow, with such a daring name as well. Fucking disgusting.
I once saw a list of defederated lemmy instances. In most cases, and I mean like 95% of them, the reason of thedefederation was pretty much in the instance name. CP everywhere. Humanity is a freaking mistake.
I regularly see people on Lemmy advocating for pedophilia, at LEAST every 3 months as a popular, upvoted stance. I argue with them in my history
Isnit not encouraging that it is ostracised and removed from normal people. There are horrible parts of everything in nature, life is good despite those people and because of the rest combatting their shittiness
You're just seeing "survivor's bias" (as nasty as that sounds in this case) not a general representation.
On average, around 3.5 new videos were uploaded to the platform every hour, many of which were previously unknown to law enforcement.
Absolutely sick and vile. I hope they honey potted the site and that the arrests keep coming.
I just got ill
Does it feel odd to anyone else that a platform for something this universally condemned in any jurisdiction can operate for 4 years, with a catchy name clearly thought up by a marketing person, its own payment system and nearly six figure number of videos? I mean even if we assume that some of those 4 years were intentional to allow law enforcement to catch as many perpetrators as possible this feels too similar to fully legal operations in scope.
It would feel odd, but you have to remember we live in a world where Epstein was allowed to get away with what he did until the little people found out.
Epstein was very smart, and figured out early on there were many, many rich pedophiles.
So, he got buddy buddy with them, supplied young girls to them.
BUT, he filmed the encounters in secret, and blackmailed the shit out of these people.
He was smart enough to become obscenely rich on Wall Street legitimately, but he liked to bang little girls, found others who did too, and then extorted them.
There's an anecdote about how when Epstein was holding court with other Aristos, they would bring up any random subject, to get his opinion.
What would he say? "What does that have to do with pussy?"
Many, many people have verified that. But because we was filthy rich, everyone just laughed, and blew it off.
Epstein was murdered. I'm not a conspiracy nut. It's just blatantly obvious. The 2 guards on duty admitted to fucking off (bribed,) and were aquitted.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/case-dropped-jail-guards-duty-night-epstein-died-rcna10557
with a catchy name clearly thought up by a marketing person
A marketing person? They took "Netflix" and changed the first three letters lol
So you are saying it is too creative for the average person in marketing?
Exactly! There are plethora of *flix sites out there including adult ones. It does not take much of marketing skill to name site like this.
It definitely seems weird how easy it is to stumble upon CP online, and how open people are about sharing it, with no effort made, in many instances, to hide what they're doing. I've often wondered how much of the stuff is spread by pedo rings and how much is shared by cops trying to see how many people they can catch with it.
it can hide in plain sight, and then when you dig into someones profile, it can lead to someone or a group discussing CSAM and beastility, not just CP. like a site similar to r/pics, or porn site. yea sometimes you stumble into a site like that, but it seems to occur when people search for porn outside of the Pornhub and affiliates sites. remember PH sanatized thier site because of this. last decade there was article about an obscure site that was taken down, it had reddit like porn subs,,,,etc. then people were complaining about the csam, and nothing was done about it. it was eventually taken down for legal reasons, thats not related to csam.
If you have stumbled on CP online in the last 10 years, you're either really unlucky or trawling some dark waters. This ain't 2006. The internet has largely been cleaned up.
It's a side effect of privacy and security. The one side effect they're trying to use to undermine all of the privacy and security.
This has nothing to do with privacy! Criminals have their techniques and methods to protect themselves and their "businesses" from discovery, both in the real world and in the online world. Even in a complete absence of privacy they would find a way to hide their stuff from the police - at least for a while.
In the real world, criminals (e.g. drug dealers) also use cars, so you could argue, that druck trafficking is a side effect of people having cars...
With the amount of sites that are easily accessed on the dark net though the hidden wiki and other sites. This might of been a honeypot from the start.
On the contrary, why would they announce that they seized the site? To cause more panic, and to exaggerate the actual situation?
In addition, that last point should be considered because even if they used these type of operations, honeypotting would still be considered illegal. So Ultimately what is stopping the supreme power to abuse that power on other people?
No judge would authorise a honeypot that runs for multiple years, hosting original child abuse material meaning that children are actively being abused to produce content for it. That would be an unspeakable atrocity. A few years ago the Australian police seized a similar website and ran it for a matter of weeks to gather intelligence which undoubtedly protected far more children than it harmed and even that was considered too far for many.
Fuck man. I used to use a program called βKidpixβ when I was a kid. It was like ms paint but with fun effects and sounds.
I used to love the dynamite tool!
I loved the explosion sound, and the "oh no" when you click the undo button. I have the Windows versions of KidPix on CD somewhere.
Holy. Shit. This is somehow glorious on an oled iPad screen. The late 1900s never looked so good.
Thank you for given me a nostalgia jolt that I didnβt know I wanted, but am fully enjoying right now
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
Omg I remember Kidpix! It was great!
This⦠not so much.
Haha yep, kidpix deluxe 3 I remember fondly
Oh no!
Same here! We had it on a Macintosh LC 575. I will never forget those sound effects haha.
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.
it says βthis hidden siteβ, meaning it was a site on the dark web.
Not just on the dark web (which technically is anything not indexed by search engines) but hidden sites are specifically a TOR thing (though Freenet/Hyphanet has something similar but it's called something else). Usually a TOR hidden site has a URL that ends in .onion and the TOR protocol has a structure for routing .onion addresses.
Bribes, most likely. Until the wrong people (the Right People) became aware of it.
Thatβs 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 βKidFlix 2β 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 disturbingβ¦
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.
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.
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.
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.
Honestly, if the existing victims have to deal with a few more people masturbating to the existing video material and in exchange it leads to fewer future victims it might be worth the trade-off but it is certainly not an easy choice to make.
And yet there are cases like Kim Dotcom, Snowden, Manning, Assange...
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.
Feds have been stepping up their seized website banner game lately. The one for Genesis Market was pretty cool too.
With everything going on right now, the fact that I still feel physically sick reading things like this tells me I havenβt gone completely numb yet. Just absolutely repulsive.
I know I'm not heartless yet because I am still traumatized by the brick in the window video...
Every now and again I am reminded of my sentiment that the introduction of "media" onto the Internet is a net harm. Maybe 256 dithered color photos like you'd see in Encarta 95 and that's the maximum extent of what should be allowed. There's just so much abuse from this kind of shit... despicable.
Raping kids has unfortunately been a thing since long before the internet. You could legally bang a 13 year old right up to the 1800s and in some places you still can.
As recently as the 1980s people would openly advocate for it to be legal, and remove the age of consent altogether. They'd get it in magazines from countries where it was still legal.
I suspect it's far less prevalent now than it's ever been. It's now pretty much universally seen as unacceptable, which is a good start.
The youngest Playboy model, Eva Ionesco, was only 12 years old at the time of the photo shoot, and that was back in the late 1970βs... It ended up being used as evidence against the Evaβs mother (who was also the photographer), and she ended up losing custody of Eva as a result. The mother had started taking erotic photos (ugh) of Eva when she was only like 5 or 6 years old, under the guise of βartβ. It wasnβt until the Playboy shoot that authorities started digging into the motherβs portfolio.
But also worth noting that the mother still holds copyright over the photos, and has refused to remove/redact/recall photos at Evaβs request. The police have confiscated hundreds of photos for being blatant CSAM, but the mother has been uncooperative in a full recall. Eva has sued the mother numerous times to try and get the copyright turned over, which would allow her to initiate the recall instead.
With that logic, I might as well throw away my computer and phone and go full Uncle Ted.
It is easy to very feel disillusioned with the world, but it is important to remember that there are still good people all around willing to fight the good fight. And it is also important to remember that technology is not inherently bad, it is a neutral object, but people could use it for either good or bad purposes.
I think it just shows all the hideousness of humanity and all it's glory in a way that we have never confronted before. It's shatters the illusion the humanity has grown from its barbaric ways.
