Illegal content in the blockchain

[indio007]

Oh ya ignorance of a foreign law is an excuse as well.

[MaGNeT]

I thought we had a newbie section for newbies... How did this guy get in here?

[indicasteve]

(.)Y(.)   <----  My password. 

I'm storing pron on every website I log into!

edit: oh dam...now everyone knows my password....

[johanatan]

you do know that you get convicted if some website loads some child porn in some invisible iframe without you knowing if the cops can find it in your browser cache? Or, to take it somewhere offline, that you get convicted if you buy something off ebay and when you try to register it to your name and it happens to come out that it was stolen.

You do know that in most jurisdictions, receiving stolen property requires the keyword: "knowingly"?

How are you going to prove your own 'ignorance'?  Prove the non-existence of your knowledge.  Good luck with that.

All it takes is some prosecutor who thinks he can convincingly prove that you did 'know' to cause a lot of trouble for you (even if you ultimately win).

[giantdragon]

In most countries prosecutor must prove that you was acting illegally (i.e. knew that property was stolen). This is almost impossible, so it is very, very rare when reseller of stolen goods get imprisoned.

There is flea market in Riga, anyone knows that vast majority of goods selling there are stolen (auto radios, cell phones, bicycles etc.). But I can't mention even one person who was imprisoned for this activity. Police regularly make raids, but just confiscate items that legitimate owner described or told serial number.

[makomk]

To make the example more clear:
1. Let X = illegal file
2. Let Y = completely random bitstring of same length as X
3. Let Z = X xor Y
4. Post Y on one server, say a google blog.  Post Z on another, say a wordpress blog.

Now observe the following: Y is a totally random string, so clearly it contains no information about X.  What about Z?  Well think about it: if I take some fixed string X and XOR it with a totally random string, what do I get?  I get another totally random string.  So Z is also a totally random string, containing no information about X either.

So now we have two servers both storing totally random strings.  Clearly, neither is illegal alone.  But their XOR is illegal.  Who commited a crime, other than the uploader?

Does either of them have a purpose other than being able to be recombined to reconstruct the original illegal file? If not, what's to stop the courts from ordering both to be removed? (Obviously if one of them does have a purpose other than being able to be used to reconstruct the illegal file, the other one must contain the information about said illegal file; due to the way the two files have to be constructed it's impossible for both of them to have been created for another purpose.)

[xlcus]

To make the example more clear:
1. Let X = illegal file
2. Let Y = completely random bitstring of same length as X
3. Let Z = X xor Y
4. Post Y on one server, say a google blog.  Post Z on another, say a wordpress blog.

Now observe the following: Y is a totally random string, so clearly it contains no information about X.  What about Z?  Well think about it: if I take some fixed string X and XOR it with a totally random string, what do I get?  I get another totally random string.  So Z is also a totally random string, containing no information about X either.

So now we have two servers both storing totally random strings.  Clearly, neither is illegal alone.  But their XOR is illegal.  Who commited a crime, other than the uploader?

Does either of them have a purpose other than being able to be recombined to reconstruct the original illegal file? If not, what's to stop the courts from ordering both to be removed? (Obviously if one of them does have a purpose other than being able to be used to reconstruct the illegal file, the other one must contain the information about said illegal file; due to the way the two files have to be constructed it's impossible for both of them to have been created for another purpose.)

They could both have another purpose.

Let P = Public domain file 1
Let Q = Public domain file 2
Let R = Y xor P
Let S = Z xor Q

Host R and S on other separate websites.


Now we have the situation where Y and Z have a legitimate purpose, since...

Y xor R produces P
Z xor S produces Q

[timsmith]

Someone should write a program that interprets random chunks of the blockchain as bitmap data, and see what pops out.

This sounds like the Bible Code. If you take a large pseudo-random data source, apply thousands of analysis functions over it, and apply a liberal dose of interpretation to the results, you'll undoubtedly end up with "meaningful data". It's like Rorschach blobs.

I suspect if you make images out of the block chain data, you'll probably find at least 4 or 5 vaguely plausible pictures. The problem is finding them amongst the 10 million random noise pictures.

[myrkul]

Someone should write a program that interprets random chunks of the blockchain as bitmap data, and see what pops out.

This sounds like the Bible Code. If you take a large pseudo-random data source, apply thousands of analysis functions over it, and apply a liberal dose of interpretation to the results, you'll undoubtedly end up with "meaningful data". It's like Rorschach blobs.

I suspect if you make images out of the block chain data, you'll probably find at least 4 or 5 vaguely plausible pictures. The problem is finding them amongst the 10 million random noise pictures.

And in the meantime, You get a nice screensaver with random colors and shapes

[DonnyCMU]

To OP,
Please remove the word 'Thai' from your name.
It is a disgrace to my country.

[film2240]

Wait a minute man.How can you be so damn sure that blockchains can hold 'illegal' content that can throw me in jail?I don't understand much about cryptography or code cracking but what ind of 'illegal' data are we talking about here.The odd stray bits? or something bigger than that?

I'd love to know how UK law handles this as Im based in UK.If anyone knows please tell me.

I've got these questions for you:
1.how do you find or 'sniff' the 'illegal' data from a block chain?
2.How can running a BTC client (or miner) cause legal issues for me?
3.Is this a big problem?or something I can ignore (for a bit)?
4.What legal issues can this cause me? and can they be serious?
5.How can law enforcement and the like reconstruct the file,trace it back to you and throw u in da slammer?

Thanks

[gnaget]

1.how do you find or 'sniff' the 'illegal' data from a block chain?

I guess the easiest way is to encode data in the amounts or in the addresses.  The amounts would cost more, but the addresses would cost more cpu.  Either way it is only an intellectual exercise

2.How can running a BTC client (or miner) cause legal issues for me?

It can't

3.Is this a big problem?or something I can ignore (for a bit)?

It's irrelevant, OP is only a troll, or completely delusional if he actually means this as a threat

4.What legal issues can this cause me? and can they be serious?

None

5.How can law enforcement and the like reconstruct the file,trace it back to you and throw u in da slammer?

If they know how data is encoded, it can be decoded. 

Thanks

You're welcome

[film2240]

Thanx 4 the gr8 reply gnaget.Saved me a lot of worry.and yes I find that trolls are really annoying.They spread crap (info) everywhere and they confuse people (like me as well).Then they wonder why we get so pissed off with them.(Serves them right too)

[TiagoTiago]

(.)Y(.)   <----  My password. 

I'm storing pron on every website I log into!

edit: oh dam...now everyone knows my password....

Only in unsafe sites; sites that do it right don't store your password, they store a salted hash.

[TiagoTiago]

Thanx 4 the gr8 reply gnaget.Saved me a lot of worry.and yes I find that trolls are really annoying.They spread crap (info) everywhere and they confuse people (like me as well).Then they wonder why we get so pissed off with them.(Serves them right too)

They don't wonder why people get pissed at them, they know it; it's because they made them get pissed at them, that is their goal from the start...

[elggawf]

How are you going to prove your own 'ignorance'?  Prove the non-existence of your knowledge.  Good luck with that.

Criminal justice: You're doing it wrong.

[burp]

This thread reminds me of http://www.angio.net/pi/piquery

[natman3400]

Consider this situation:
Person A decides to sell off his old hard drive. Before he sells it, he makes some "random" data by making a disk image the size of the drive full of kiddie porn and then encrypts it with 20 minutes of 'cat /dev/urandom'. After this he then uses 'dd' to copy the raw encrypted data to the drive, effectively wiping his data (assuming the new owner knows nothing beyond foremost, but if he didn't feel secure, he could just do this multiple times with different keys) in the process. Lets also say he only had a 10gb collection of kiddie porn, so he just repeated it 8 times (assuming an 80gb drive). Person A then sells this drive to person B. After only putting 15gb or so on the drive, person B, not knowing deleted files can be recovered easily, just reinstalls windows (using quick format to boot!), and sells the drive to person C, unknowingly having distributed 6 good copies of person A's kiddie porn collection. Then, person C having been a friend to person A, and knowing the key, reports person C for possession and distribution of kiddie porn. Do we charge person B with possession and distribution? Probably not, but in the off chance we do we also have to charge person c, it would be like charging some one with dealing because there was cocaine residue on there dollar bill that they exchanged for bitcoins. If they do charge them, will they case get past a jury? Hell no, there is something called a reasonable doubt that he knew that he was selling the kiddie porn with the drive.

It is pretty much the same thing here folks.

[phillipsjk]

Person A decides to sell off his old hard drive. Before he sells it, he makes some "random" data by making a disk image the size of the drive full of kiddie porn and then encrypts it with 20 minutes of 'cat /dev/urandom'.

You lost me here. Isn't /dev/urandom a one-way function?

I recently bought a 500GB hard-drive used. Spent 25 hours overwriting it with /dev/urandom (CPU bound). I then spent 5 hours overwriting with /dev/zero (I/O Bound).

Without the "Key" you can't prove whether something is data or meaningless noise.

[hashcoin]

The issue is not just storing it unknowingly; for that, it would seem extremely unlikely one could be prosecuted(but IANAL not legal advice etc).  The problem is if you are told you are storing it, you now know it and must delete it.  But it is completely unreasonable to erase bitcoin history, because it is needed for verification.

In other words, this problem won't arise in other contexts because you either don't know about it, or have deleted it.  But here, even if we are told about it, we can't delete it or the whole network breaks.
 
One solution is txs can be blacklisted as bad: nodes won't store them anymore and just reject all TX spending them.  But this will fork the chain.

It might be worth asking EFF about this.