We are gun-loving. But that doesn't make us crazy SOBs. Just a part of our long standing tradition and culture, as all...

That's a completely functional explanation. Shame on you! :-)

Of course, explaining HOW a rootkit does all of that is another matter. Whether or not that level of understanding is necessary to the investigation is even more of another matter.

Nice little trick. And then all you'd need is some Flash or JavaScript to copy the images to some place else on the computer.

Good.

More Guns, Less Crime by John Lott.

Agreed.

Here we disagree. The government should NOT be in the business of regulating our rights to bear arms. Period. While I hold strongly that all who do bear arms should also go for a training course or otherwise become HIGHLY educated in the proper use of firearms, it's not the government's place to force that upon us.

Besides, I think most would want to train up as they arm up, anyway.

And so beating up people in our country who happen to have it on their hard drives does NOTHING to stop the production of kiddie porn in those areas of the world it's coming from.

Maybe they are not drawing "kiddie porn" in their minds -- but something else. Aliens who mature differently. Or maybe they are drawing childhood fantasies. Who knows?

This is wrong in every respect (with the exception of paid for consumption, of course). If someone downloads kiddie porn for free that consumption is largely invisible. I think only true idiots would post the stuff on a website, which would get taken down quickly anyway (and be highly trackable). So the vast majority of the consumption will be by less visible means, such as Usenet, P2P, and the like.

If there is no money incentive, why go through the risks of recording the illicit acts? It doesn't make sense. If one is predisposed to do it anyway just for the hell of it, it is obvious such a person will not be deterred by lack of consumption, so the kid is violated anyway. 1 download or 1000000 downloads would make no difference, since the perpetrator would not ever know about them.

My point exactly. It's hard to make a profit at your business if people are getting their copies for free.

So again you prove my point -- it's the *paid for* consumption that drives it, not the free consumption. And most likely, the "third-world hovels", as you put it, make their money locally anyway. They will probably not be able to put together the resources to charge for this stuff online, and if they did, would make themselves easy targets to track down. At which point Law Enforcement will actually have some worthwhile work to do -- finally.

And the "third world" people have a tough problem -- sell your kids and eat; don't sell your kids and starve. And it's not just porn -- it's for "terrorist" operations as well. We here in the Rich West have the luxury of being able to moralize about such things, but if you are in their shoes, what would you do? I often find that one's morality is almost always one of convenience. It's always someone else that's "amoral", never oneself. Funny how that works.

Want to end child porn? Want to end the recruitment of kids turning them into human bombs? Then you have to end the conditions that causes people to have to make the choice between their kids and their food. It's just that simple -- and that complicated.

Not most of the stories I hear about. But then it may be in the way they are reported. If there's an actual child molestation case, then the computers are taken to find more evidence as a part of the bigger investigation, and are probably not even mentioned in the news story.

The noted ones are those where there is no real molestation or exploitation -- just bits and bytes discovered on someone's hard drive.

If I were to write such a beast (which I would not, of course!) I would have that in mind as I were writing the code, and would make sure it would lay down differently-patterned tracks each time so that it would fool all but the most astute of forensics investigators.

And it wouldn't even be a challenge to fool the point-and-click software most of the lackeys use, in any case.

Probably the biggest headache would be getting past all the different malware detectors out there. That would actually be a much bigger challenge than fooling the forensics investigations.

It can be fun contemplating how to fool the idiot investigators and the virus scanners alike, but I would never DO such a horrid thing, and I hope no one ever does. I am very big on the rights of innocent people.

That being the case, these morons would be totally lost with a computer like mine running Linux. I'm using XFS in most places, and have files I mount as encrypted drives for stuff I want to keep private. They probably wouldn't even recognize those files as mountable drives nor know what to do with the Bash scripts I've written to mount and unmount them. Not to mention the several virtual Windows installations.

And yes, they do hate geeks. The local cops have certainty given me enough hell in the past. I should've sued them for their efforts, but didn't have time. If they screw with me again,this time I'm prepared. They WILL be sued.

I guess it's just not easy being a cop. ;-)

True, but how do these guys sleep at night? I mean, knowing you are destroying the lives of innocent people? I've always wondered about that.

What's worse is that you could dump a random set of bits on someone's computer and claim it's an encrypted drive of kiddie porn. There'd be almost no way to prove otherwise, unless a really bad PRNG was used to generate the sequence.