http://www.guardian.co.uk/online/comment/story/0,,1331820,00.html Dave Birch October 21, 2004 The Guardian I was involved in a discussion about internet policing and child pornography the other day. There were a number of suggestions: ID cards, expanding police IT training and so on. None, in my opinion, were likely to have much impact. A cursory search on any of the file-sharing networks reveals the IP addresses of servers distributing child pornography. These "sick servers" change frequently, but they are discoverable. That is obvious, otherwise the judges, teachers, policemen et al, convicted of downloading such material wouldn't be able to find it. But what to do about them? Knowing that a sick server in some far-flung former Soviet province is distributing child pornography is one thing, stopping it is another. The scale and distributed nature of this problem makes conventional policing impossible. There are simply not enough resources to track down every sick server, find the people behind them (even if you could), and then prosecute. A more realistic goal may be to disrupt the servers. In many cases, the owners of the servers have no idea they are being used in this way. But if their servers go down, then the distribution of the material will be halted and the owners alerted to the problem. If a web-hosting company sees a server go down, I am sure they will do something about it. One approach might be to capitalise on the internet dynamic of decentralised cooperation. Instead of internet users calling for someone else to police their environment, perhaps they should band together to tackle it themselves. Internet users already cooperate in a distributed, coordinated way to tackle other big problems. The canonical example is the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence (Seti). Around the world, users have downloaded screensavers that crunch through the signals picked up from outer space, searching for patterns that could indicate unnatural sources. When they find one, as happened earlier this year, they report the signal to a central system for further investigation. Suppose they were, instead, searching for sick servers? Instead of merely reporting the problem, they could launch a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack. A DDoS attack occurs when PCs connected to the internet (often because of a malicious virus, of which users are unaware) simultaneously try to connect to a website. The target site is swamped, and legitimate users cannot get through. Why not link the automated scouring of the internet for sick servers with the distributed power of screensavers and the DDoS? I am writing this on a plane: at home there are two G4s doing nothing. If I could download a screensaver that either searched for sick servers or obtained a list (from the Internet Watch Foundation) of servers to attack and then cooperated with thousands of other machines to launch DDoS attacks against those servers, I would be doing something to help. The police could spend their time chasing the paedophile sources of the sick content rather than trying to put their fingers in the dyke. My screensaver might become a life saver. Second _________________________________________ Open Source Vulnerability Database (OSVDB) Everything is Vulnerable - http://www.osvdb.org/
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