Quote:
Quote by: ruksak  This is unrelated, but aren't P2P services often used for the sharing of child pornography? I heard something awhile back about the government trying to squeeze companies like Bearshare into preventing this activity. |
It's technically possible, since there is no current regulation of what you store on your own computer.
You could have a pile stored on your computer, and all you gotta do is share the main folder containing what you wish to share, and anybody searching for one of those files, or similar, would find them in the search, and begin to download form your computer.
If one was so inclined to share child porn, then this is probably one of the more easier methods..... but it does come with the possibility of tracking..... for example:
If I was a police officer scanning for general online offenses or a paticular case of child abuse, all I'd have to do is go onto a P2P such as Bearshare, Morpheus, Imesh, etc... type in the search words I am looking for and then they pop up in my list. Now I can click to download these files, but at the same time, you can also click on those files and select "Browse Host" and then you can locate all the files that one person has on their storage. I then in turn contact the company and issue a warrent for the IP and identity of the member of that program in which had the files in question, locate where they live, track back all the things they have done, accumulate a large list of charges, and then come down on the freak with no abandon.
If they are not in my jurisdiction, then I send my findings and reports to the proper authorities in the person's jurisdiction and let them take over.
Of course, technically anybody can do this to a degree.... and some programs already display the other person's IP address, so all one would have to do is to pass the info to the proper authorities.
The reason why there isn't anything in place for many P2P programs, is because:
#1 - It'd take to long to manually check the millions of computers connected to the system, to download each file off their systems and confirm their contents of each of the billions of files available in all shapes, sizes and forms.
#2 - Any programs used to block certain kinds of files, would also in turn, block many other file formats which are not illegal.
Most movies and music you download, are in their designated file extensions, like Mp3, Mpeg, AVI, JPG, yadda yadda..... the programs know which file extension is for what, but they can not determine by the media content what is in those files, without actually having to manually view each file.