And again the media doesn't know how Tor works

I hadn't heard this one yet, but among the gems I've heard from the media regarding this:

- These guys actually brought a site down
- They gained some sort of privileged access
- The police have been unable to intervene with these sites because the servers are hosted outside of their jurisdiction

(the following information is gained second hand---I have not intentionally gained access to child pornography)

What went down, so far as I can tell is that someone managed to slow down freedom hosting for a few hours. Anyone who's familiar with Tor will know that name, and it's the same host that various child pornography sites were hosted on that Dutch police broke into recently---by no fault of FH, in every case they gained access through SQL injection and some known vulnerabilities with the software that was running (user installed) on the server (outdated forums and such).

Freedom hosting's site says:
"Recently FH was the victim of DoS attacks which resulted in unavailability of php or mysql on hosted sites.

A user registered an account and used it to run extremely slow mysql queries among other things to purposely harm the server."

The target of the "hacking" was a site called "Lolita City" (that name should be safe to post because I got that from a CBC article), which contains purportedly the largest child porn collection on the Internet.

The "hackers" did nothing that got them access to any information that is not publicly available. This site publicly lists all registered usernames. All they did was copy and paste from a page on the site, that is publicly available... to *everyone*, not just a privileged few who are paying into it or something, but absolutely everyone who has an Internet connection and the knowledge of how to find the site.

After this the "hackers" looked through the list of usernames and tried to identify people they belonged to. This is just incredibly stupid. Anyone can register with any name. Even if someone were to do something as incredibly stupid as to sign up with their full name followed by their SIN, there is no way to show that that person even actually visited the site. And of course, no one signed up with their full name followed by their SIN, they just found a few names that happened to be registered on other sites, and attached a name, and in a few cases even a photograph to a username that was on the site. This is not what we do in a just society. There is no way for them to justify what they did except that we all have to pretend they're great people because they're outing the worst criminals of all, and now that we're the worst criminals of all (that is the thought-crime of paedophilia and not necessarily accessing child pornography) we commend people who circumvent due process.

This group is also claiming that they have determined the location of the FH server by timing attacks done from servers at various places in Europe and North America. I don't doubt they did that. But fortunately, Tor was designed so that this is not a possible attack on the network, and so if they even did do a timing attack, their data means absolutely nothing.

What is interesting though are their demands. As they did not just bring down Lolita City and various other child porn sites that were hosted by FH (this is the past tense because anyone can check that FH is currently up), they brought down every site hosted by FH for maybe an hour. FH is the biggest host on Tor. Not only do they host child porn, they host "legitimate" websites such as sites to undermine governments and assassination markets. But this is okay because they believe that there should be a hosting service that will host anything to prevent arbitrary censorship, and they should not disallow content because they are afraid of their government or any such reason. Oh, except child porn because that's just gross. ew.