Thursday, April 17, 2008

Stamping out child abuse image websites?

Interesting report on the Beeb about how the IWF have identified how many sites trade such images and concluded there are 2,755 such sites worldwide.

"Of these, 80% are judged to be fully commercial operations.

The IWF said this "manageable" number could be eliminated if net firms, governments and police worked together".

A laudable aim and if achieved, quite amazing. It doesn't of course take into account the anecdotally well known fact that serious organised pedophile rings now mainly obtain and swap their wares via closed P2p nets - "darknets" - and that penetrating these is getting ever harder since the arrival of easily used encrypted P2P.

However perhaps this isn't the time to be too cynical (what me?) and as the IWF imply, closing down commercial websites would at least cut off the feed from those not already inducted into the "inner circles" of darknets.

Then perhaps we could start putting more resources into actual child abuse in this country and less into the shadowy scare figure of the online pedophile :)

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