[tor-talk] Porn make the world more free: Tor Porn Bundle?

[Matt Joyce]

Interesting discussion, the first point it occurs to me to make here 
after reading some of the points here is that whatever your personal 
feelings may be on the subject matter the fact is that it is a form of 
expression like any other and they have equal right to their expression 
as any other human being.  Supporting free speech sometimes means 
accepting and even speaking up for the rights of people who's particular 
form of expression we don't personally like.  Every human being has a 
right to their freedom of expression and equally human beings have the 
right to make their own choice what expression they wish to access and 
not to be persecuted for doing so.  Bear in mind that if every an 
authority wants to step in and lock down free speech the first ones to 
go will be the more obscure and or unpopular in society.  Much easier to 
bring in laws and oppression quietly that way, problem becomes that as 
each additional domino falls and the easier it becomes to take down the 
next one.

I note in particular the argument that the industry is associated with 
crimes and abuses, first off while I would not dispute that it has been 
given that *reputation* I would be interested to see someone present 
hard data to show that these sorts of crimes are in fact more common 
than in other ostracised vulnerable groups, like the homeless or the 
poor in general for example.  The argument reminds me a lot of the UK 
governments arguments in forcing through the "extreme porn" censorship 
law that essentially could be applied to just about any form of 
consensual BDSM, the government argued that the motivation and the 
reason why even realistic looking simulated images must be included was 
that models were apparently actually being harmed in the production of 
this material.  However when repeatedly challenged they failed to 
actually cite any significant cases of this actually occurring and cited 
exactly zero to support the strongest of their claims.

That quite aside there is a good reason why those acts were they to 
occur are illegal, well substance abuse I'll get to in a moment.  There 
is no justification for suppressing expression even if some attempt to 
use that expression as an excuse or cover for their criminal acts, this 
could be used as a justification for suppressing just about any form of 
expression you can imagine not least of all that I can't think of any 
religion or for that matter any sub denominations which have not 
suffered from this issue on multiple occasions does that justify 
suppression, not at all. This being from someone who personally is not a 
supporter of religion in general I will stand up any time for the right 
of others to such expression all the same.

As for the substance abuse issue that touches on another area I 
personally feel very strongly about, In trying to be brief on the 
subject the substance abuse issue and the global policies and practices 
which have been tasked against mostly in the latter half of the last 
century and into this one are also oppression on a global scale.  Even 
discounting the xenophobic and racist justifications which gave rise to 
the current system.  The system in it's current form is oppressive while 
at the same time cannot be justified on any grounds with a little 
history and ongoing scientific evidence from the modern era it can be 
proven to not only have failed in it's objectives but quite the opposite 
and that by disambiguating the harms of the substances themselves from 
those of the organised attempts to suppress them that it can be shown 
the majority of the total harm results from the latter.

Breif example the UK in the 50's when it was still possible to buy 
cocaine in a package with syringe and needle in boots the chemist on the 
high street had a total of 500 heroin and cocaine addicts in the country 
a number which had been stable for the first half of the 20th century 
with well over 90% of those being doctors, nurses, pharmacists etc who 
were in a position to know it's effects.  There are little to no 
incidents of acquisitive crime arising from it, of any form of organized 
crime or violence around it or for that matter of any massive health 
issues other than the addiction itself even for the ~8% that were not 
medical experts (Ironically the substances are quite safe for prolonged 
periods when in uncut form and with safe and reliable dosages 
available).   It was not until heroin and cocaine were both banned did 
an appreciable number of ordinary laypeople begin using it 
recreationally and that number exploded dramatically, at the same time 
the price also exploded leading to acquisitive crime and increasingly 
more dangerous and violent criminal gangs forming on the profits, the 
emergence of which caused a rapid increase in the rate of new addicts 
also, 50 years turned the stable 500 of the 50 years before into over 
310,000 and resulted in harms per addict that exceed by far those of the 
entire 500 for the most part.  In response we have forcibly removed 
thousands of people with a medical problem from their homes, their 
families, locked them up against their will and in general abused the 
human rights of these already marginalised and poor people and despite 
ever increasing aggressiveness in oppressing these people all we have 
done is created the pproblem that we supposably wanted to prevent and 
compound it with the oppression unleashed in response.

As I say it's a subject I feel strongly about and could probably write 
books on and provide sources for more but I think it is probably rather 
offtopic for the list, am happy if anyone wants to respond off list.




The short replies:

Ok, that out of the way back to the original idea and a few responses on 
that, as anyone who read above can probably guess I would not have any 
objection in principle to the idea, supporting and enabling expression 
and access to such expression or information should be universal.  
Censorship in all it's forms is oppression and abuse, and nobody has the 
right to dictate to others what forms of expression are acceptable short 
of speech/expression which is by intent directly harmful in and of 
itself meaning involving actual malice ie deception, fraud, harassment 
etc.  Answers to some specific points brought up:

@fakefake: Your point about users being "too stupid" to know about tor 
not being able to send anonymous money.  It is not so much stupidity but 
lack of information/education and deliberate suppression, having the 
access to tor, to information and a community of other people who have 
the knowledge and experience is likely to open some eyes to new 
opportunities that were hidden before.  Similar comment on the subject 
of "let them fight" to support and encourage such activism in many of 
these countries is not something that one can do in the clear, any group 
with identities in the clear that seemed to have any promise would be 
likely to suffer reprisals.  Tor can help those with the will to fight 
to communicate, band together, gain the strength needed to fight back 
effectively.  If used properly of course.

@Fabio: Multiple intermediaries you mention are absolutely not an option 
if criminal persecution is likely, western union agents would face legal 
force to surrender customer details, the agents are independent 
businesses resident in the country too vulnerable to fight to protect 
the info even if they desired.  Some of the larger providers that are 
based in safe countries operating online etc you mention however could 
*if* they were willing to fight and not take the cheap option.  
Unfortunately many will just hand over anything a subpoena asks for to 
give them an easy life.  Then you have the issue of the finance 
provider, if a bank in that country they or their employees could face 
significant pressure to reveal details.

@Seb: Sure video content is a bandwidth increase but many streams will 
only be like 1-3Mbit based on yesterdays consensus tracker the network 
has a total of 19.57 GBit/s now yes there is other traffic also but 
another thing with this particular use is that probably quite a fair 
amount is quite short sessions.  There are a lot of people that use tor 
for anti-censorship to reach such as youtube now without much anonymity 
true but those are around 1Mbit streams.  Another use getting around 
geographic restrictions of the likes of the BBC will be HD video also, a 
breif search on the web will turn up a few dozen howto's on setting up 
tor to pull that off.  As for the HTML5 question, can't say I've heard 
of any, but most of the better paysites provide their movies in 
downloadable form as a regular video file, such as wmv (Mostly old 
content) or most common now is standard H.264/AAC especially for the the 
higher quality files, occasionally see nasty wmv's or gah real for some 
really low end stuff.  All can be watched offline without needing such 
as flash, most WMV's many open source video players that could be 
trusted not to leak anything in phone homes, not sure this could be said 
for windows media player.  H.264 is probably even better supported, 
would be a lower resolution and bitrate to the high def 720/1080p tv 
shows somebody gets and has always found work perfectly on their linux 
computer WMV's on the other hand are known to occasionally have issues 
and perhaps one in a few hundred still just decide they really don't 
feel like playing at all.  What might cause a larger load is if someone 
downloads a set of videos at once for later viewing etc that could burn 
up several GB though from what I've seen is rare to get a single tor 
connection to download much over 200-300kBytes/s and paysites almost 
invariably implement their own anti-leech restrictions some only allow 
one or perhaps up to a handful of active downloading connections from 
either a single IP address or login identity so leeching massive amounts 
of data in bulk by segmenting the downloading is probably going to be 
fairly capably throttled by that combination.  I think much of the slow 
max on tor could be tcp buffers needing adjustment for the elevated RTT 
so the clients OS is in effect throttling itself because the window is 
too small, I've had one like that where all nodes including mine had 
more capacity but never took the time to try tuning tcp to compensate.

@fakefake: There is no certainty in the claim they wouldn't contribute 
some relay capacity back if capable, sure would almost certainly be a 
dangerous idea for them to run an exit but those in countries where tor 
isn't blocked or at least not very effectively they could run a pretty 
safe middle, middle relays have the side benefit also that they 
additional encrypted tor connections for the relayed clients act as 
confounders making traffic analysis on the client connections that much 
harder, it adds the entire extra task of first monitoring and analysing 
to get enough data to infer information on which connections are likely 
client ones before they can even start doing the regular network 
analysis on the connection patterns and timings that they could begin 
right away on a client only tor.

@Greg, it should do I suspect, granted I havn't used the bundle I just 
run an exit, and definitely flash is a big no still I'd have thought 
what I don't know is what support does the TBB have for standard video 
formats such as H.264 or WMV?  Many pay-sites have 
downloadable/streamable videos in those formats with a plugin they will 
stream right in the browser.  There are a lot of options on the choice 
of media player w/ plugin also unlike flash where you have Adobe and 
Adobe.  Many of the possibilities for the media player are also open 
source a big plus for bundling obviously because of the likely existence 
of a suitable player with a compatible licence that could simply be 
bundled and the ability to vet the code as necessary to make absolutely 
sure it is not accidentally leaking anything.  For example any support 
for features like online metadata lookup/retrieval on files which some 
have would for this use probably be better set default disabled or 
perhaps even being extracted completely.  The community db's for such 
are not exactly the sort of worrysome intentional privacy invading 
executable code from marketing data-harvesters you would be getting with 
flash support for sure but it would still be a leak to have them 
accessed by default and would be another party that could potentially be 
targeted to attempt to gain data-points so to me seems logical to 
default disable/strip any such features.