If that's what your lawyer says, either follow his advice or get a 2nd opinion (and if they agree, follow the advice). They know the law as written and as enforced (i.e. whether the local, state, and national prosecutors will be "friendly" or "hostile" to you regardless of the actual statute) better than I do.

Based on what I read a few years ago, unlike child prostitution where there is a significant $/commercial aspect, there wasn't a significant $/commercial child-porn trade. However, there was a very significant "in-kind" child-porn trade among creators and collectors.

Unlike legal adult porn, there isn't any copyright protection, which really cuts down on the potential profits. That, and the constant threat of getting busted makes running a $-profitable kiddie-porn enterprise difficult if not outright infeasible.

Child prostitution, unlike child porn, can't be freely copied over and over again, so despite the threat of getting busted there is some viable economic model.

As they say on Wikipedia, "citation needed."

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I assume by "legal" you mean legal according to national, regional, and local laws. If you mean legal as enforced due to the cops just not caring or the cops being sufficiently bribed, well, I won't argue that one way or the other. If there are "self-governing" or "lawless" areas in Saudi Arabia then I won't argue with you with respect to those areas either.

Maybe Anonymous's next project will be to write a computer program to help with this, so the Chief Censor in NZ won't have to wade through 19,980 not-quite-the-worst images while looking for the 20 worst ones.

A few years back I did some pre-screenings for Asperger Syndrome. I was below the cutoff for further screening.

If you are correct, then I hope the lawyer that I also advised "active hunters" to hire will tell them so.

Excluding the obviously likely "victimless" cases of non-circulating self-pics and never-forwarded-on pics your same-aged boy/girlfriend sent you without you asking, child porn is very rarely victim-less.

Some people will try to turn those very rare exceptions into a broad generalization that as a whole child porn is harmless. I'm with you in saying that such an argument is hogwash.

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Oh, and for anyone wanting a very rare example, here is a fictional contrived example:
Suppose my young daughter is a heavy sleeper. I carefully pose her in a pornographic pose while she is sleeping and snap the shutter. The next day she is killed in a freak accident which is completely unrelated to what I did the day before. For the next few decades I look at that image, sometimes because it is the last photo of my daughter and sometimes for sexual reasons. I never seek out or see any other child porn. I never show the image to anyone. Before I die I destroy the image.

I would argue that my daughter didn't live long enough to become aware that I photographed her much less suffer any mental, physical, or emotional harm as a result. Obviously nobody else was hurt either. Therefore, it was a victimless crime. It was a crime and had I been caught I would expect to go to prison. But it was victimless. As I said, this is a contrived example but I'm sure there are cases where children were photographed in pornographic poses where they were not physically harmed, they were too young or too asleep to remember enough to be mentally harmed until they become aware that the photograph was made (which may never happen), and due to lack of circulation, the existence of the photograph did not create any demand. The photographers are still criminals - the playground rule of "no harm no foul" does NOT apply to this sort of crime.

I guess that depends on what you mean by sympathetic and what you mean by pedophile.

I assume you meant "child molester" not pedophile. Someone else has in another sub-thread already said that pedophiles who control their urges should be commended not called scum.

As for child molesters:

Anyone who due to biology or upbringing (e.g. being brainwashed to enjoy sex while a child themselves) that lets them enjoy having sex with kids or young teens and who due to biology or upbringing lacks the self control to keep away from the insides of kids' pants deserves prison (or a psych lockup if legally insane), in- and (if not a life sentence) post-prison mental-health care, and, yes, sympathy.

Why sympathy? You can't help your biology. You can't help your up-bringing. You CAN and MUST make your own choices as an adult, but if you are facing life with "two strikes against you," you do deserve and have my sympathy. But if I'm your juror that sympathy won't reduce your punishment.

The paragraph should read:

This was practically true in the early 1980s, before digital tech got cheap.

For a few years, the postal inspectors were catching each other far more than they were catching real child-porn purveyors.

Prior to the very late 1980s, child porn was *arguably* legal in at least some parts of the United States. Congress changed the laws and the feds started cracking down big-time on international and postal child-porn traffic (this was in the early days of FedEx) and the open-market importing of child-porn-containing magazines from abroad through the mail system ended for good as a result.

The advent of cheap/free ways of getting a photo into a computer and sending it to anyone who wanted it with a low risk of getting caught (at least a low risk in the 1980s and early 1990s) allowed the problem to go from almost nothing to whatever it is today.

Only 45 replies and we are Godwin'd. On a serious note, I think your 2nd paragraph is unfortunately true on a practical level. So is your first, for that matter.

Suspected != guilty and if they go around publicizing suspects or even people who the police have named as suspects or "persons of interest" who turn out to be innocent, it will hurt Anonymous's own reputation big-time.

What they - and everyone else - can and should do is make sure that if you do run across child porn or links to what you think is child porn, you immediately report it to all relevant authorities and that if the authorities seem to be ignoring a case, that all relevant news outlets are notified. If the news outlets seem to be participating in a cover up, notify other news outlets, but be careful: What looks like a "news outlet conspiracy of silence" may be because the FBI is in the middle of a sting and the feds have asked the news outlets to keep quiet until the trap is sprung. If Anonymous's well-meaning attempts to bring things into the open result in the sting being aborted or going bust, well, that would be bad.

On a side-note:

* Do not go "looking for" child porn - you could wind up being charged and convicted yourself. If you are wondering what it's like, my best educated guess is it is like looking at images of concentration-camp children: 1) the underlying event that happened to land on camera haunts the person in the photograph for his or her life, 2) the image itself is likely to be so stomach-churning that it will haunt you for a long time, and even if it doesn't, 3) the knowledge of what happened to that child should haunt you for a long long time (if it doesn't, either you have grown jaded and I'm sad for you, or you need to talk to someone because your conscience may be less than that of the average adult's and this diminished conscience may lead you to hurt someone without realizing it and/or without caring)

* If you routinely do things in your fight against child-porn that put you at a higher risk of running across it, as some of these Anonymous guys likely are, take technical steps to reduce your risk (use a text-only browser, for instance), and have a lawyer on retainer. Ask your lawyer what steps you need to take so when the police do come knocking it's painfully obvious to the police, the jury, and to everyone else that you are not intending to actually download or possess the stuff but sometimes it gets through your technical barriers.

I have a cheap knock-off of the very box you pointed to.

It works fine as a DVR but as far as I can tell, it's just recording one of the programs not the entire stream. Also, there is no indication of whether it is recording meta-data and other data or if it's discarding it before recording it. In other words, it's not what I am looking for.

Anyone know of a sub-$1000 device that will record and play back "raw" ATSC signals?

In short,

* a recording device that will take an arbitrary digital TV channel, convert it from analog to digital (all airwaves are inherently analog at some level), and record the bits verbatim, along with some meta-data like the time of day, the frequency recorded, and maybe some extracted data like the digital sub-channels in the stream and information about what is playing on each sub-channel now and in the near future.

* ideally, DVR-like timer recording capability.

* a playback device that will put that recording onto a specific RF frequency. If the RF frequency is the same as the originally recorded frequency, my television should be fooled into thinking it is a channel that the TV already has mapped (e.g. RF channel 14, "display" as channel 20).

* ideally, a DVR-playback capability that would make the box act like a DVR, albeit one that uses a lot more disk space than your typical DVR. The output would go to the TV over a dedicated AV connection not the RF "CATV/Antenna" connection.

* ideally, the ability to recognize a USB device and copy the raw recording to it for storage or analysis/playback on a computer that can read the format.

Q: The use of such a device for legal and engineering purposes is obvious, but why would any normal consumer want such a thing?

A: Because at least then I'll KNOW for sure that I recorded what my receiver (or more specifically, the receiver in this magic box) received, not some partially-processed intermediate version. It will also allow me to record content encoded in formats that haven't been developed yet (as of January 2015), so I can play them back on a TV that supports that format.

I want large-data formats to succeed because I want my "boxed sets" to take up less shelf space. Give me an entire season at as-broadcast resolution on a single disk (13 episodes of HD or 3-4 times that for a very-good-quality digitization of old stuff that only exists on broadcast-quality NTSC tapes would be nice), including bonus material, and I'll be happier than if the large disks are used only for higher-definition content. My eyes aren't what they once were and neither are my ears.

For the same reason I wish all CD players (especially those in cars) were replaced with "audio disk" players that could play audio from video DVDs, DVD-audio, and all common computer audio formats in addition to the current CD-audio/MP3/WAV formats that seem common for new players today.

How about taking a Yacc-like approach and creating a meta-standard that has each "file" on the disk include a list of codecs required for that file and which has each disk include a description of the various video- and audio-decoding algorithms needed to play the "files" on the disk (excluding the common standards that existed when the "meta-standard" was finalized - those would be baked in to all players), then let the player figure out what to send to the output ports based on the data format, the data, the processing capability of the player, and if known (or presumed, for one-way "outputs" like analog) the capability of the display device.

This way the only "hardcoded" part of the standard would have to deal with the raw laser I/O from the disk to the laser pickup on the player, basic things like the layout of error-correcting code, slightly-less-basic things like the filesystem-layout or equivalent, and a standard way for the player to understand the disk and file meta-data. Then the player could take it from there, creating codecs (or more accurately, de-coders) as needed based on the information on the disks.

The same technique could be used for future-proofing display devices. For display-devices with 2-way communication, the display could communicate its capabilities to the player in a standardized format, and possibly even communicate as-yet-undefined capabilities to the player as well (UV/IR, specialized color gamuts, infra/ultrasonic capability, alarms and sensors, etc.). These capabilities could be matched up with the format of the disk.

Example:

If the disk has a codec that says "supports SENSOR_STD_2019a" and the meta-code for the standard "SENSOR_STD_2019a" says
"if SENSOR_STD_2019a data NO_WARM_BODY_PRESENT becomes TRUE then execute GO_BACK_15_SECONDS_AND_PAUSE"

and the display tells the player
"SENSOR_STD_2019a:NO_WARM_BODY_PRESENT=TRUE"
then the player can act on it, even if the player was manufactured well before SENSOR_STD_2019a even existed.