Several years prior I had a coworker get arrested on CSAM charges because, you guessed it, he ran an Tor exit node.
Of course there was no reporting on the Tor aspect, just “local man arrested for CSAM” in the local papers. He eventually had the charges dropped after years of court battles, but his name is forever tarnished as a result.
This particular job we had a lot of idealist folks, two of whom ran relays - they immediately ceased to do so in the aftermath of the coworker’s arrest.
> This particular job we had a lot of idealist folks, two of whom ran relays - they immediately ceased to do so in the aftermath of the coworker’s arrest
Even from the early days of Tor I remember all of the warnings to not run an exit node in a country where internet activity was likely to lead to prosecution.
Running any sort of proxy (including Tor exit nodes) allows other people’s traffic to appear as your traffic. That’s the entire purpose of the software. You’d have to be willing and able to handle the consequences of any traffic any other person decides to send through the system.
Reminds me of a similar case against Dmitry Bogatov in Russia in 2017, it was a big deal back in the day (though of course times have drastically changed and now something like this wouldn't even appear in the news over there).
If you run a Tor exit node, it is quite possible that you will end up downloading things on behalf of other people. CSAM carries strict liability charges.
Someone somehow downloaded the images in LAION 5B to do the actual training, and we know that thousands of these images contained illegal content.
Where's the strict liability? Everyone who ever downloaded and ran Stable Diffusion 1.5, or even Lora's from it, could in some way be held "strictly liable" for the fact that you are simply one prompt away...
That's not the key precedent they are setting. They are working on a much more important case: Making the population understand that disobedience will result in punishment
There's plenty of laws they write that they know the population can't reasonably comply with and give the government discretionary power to screw people. And then there's more laws that just give the government enforcement arm discretionary power to choose whether the law is applicable or exercise unilateral judgement regarding whether compliance is satisfactory.
Your local zoning code is probably chock full of them. And if not there then your local stormwater/runoff rules probably have a bunch of examples too.
Federal stuff is much more highly litigated so you don't see as much of it there. State is a middle ground.
Several years prior I had a coworker get arrested on CSAM charges because, you guessed it, he ran an Tor exit node.
Of course there was no reporting on the Tor aspect, just “local man arrested for CSAM” in the local papers. He eventually had the charges dropped after years of court battles, but his name is forever tarnished as a result.
This particular job we had a lot of idealist folks, two of whom ran relays - they immediately ceased to do so in the aftermath of the coworker’s arrest.
> This particular job we had a lot of idealist folks, two of whom ran relays - they immediately ceased to do so in the aftermath of the coworker’s arrest
Even from the early days of Tor I remember all of the warnings to not run an exit node in a country where internet activity was likely to lead to prosecution.
Running any sort of proxy (including Tor exit nodes) allows other people’s traffic to appear as your traffic. That’s the entire purpose of the software. You’d have to be willing and able to handle the consequences of any traffic any other person decides to send through the system.
Reminds me of a similar case against Dmitry Bogatov in Russia in 2017, it was a big deal back in the day (though of course times have drastically changed and now something like this wouldn't even appear in the news over there).
If you run a Tor exit node, it is quite possible that you will end up downloading things on behalf of other people. CSAM carries strict liability charges.
Seems not to if you're working at an AI image generation company.
https://cyber.fsi.stanford.edu/news/investigation-finds-ai-i...
https://www.techpolicy.press/laion5b-stable-diffusion-and-th...
Someone somehow downloaded the images in LAION 5B to do the actual training, and we know that thousands of these images contained illegal content.
Where's the strict liability? Everyone who ever downloaded and ran Stable Diffusion 1.5, or even Lora's from it, could in some way be held "strictly liable" for the fact that you are simply one prompt away...
That's not the key precedent they are setting. They are working on a much more important case: Making the population understand that disobedience will result in punishment
Isn't this the goal of most laws?
The goal of the laws is that you have to obey the laws. Here the case is that you have to obey the people holding the badges.
There's plenty of laws they write that they know the population can't reasonably comply with and give the government discretionary power to screw people. And then there's more laws that just give the government enforcement arm discretionary power to choose whether the law is applicable or exercise unilateral judgement regarding whether compliance is satisfactory.
Your local zoning code is probably chock full of them. And if not there then your local stormwater/runoff rules probably have a bunch of examples too.
Federal stuff is much more highly litigated so you don't see as much of it there. State is a middle ground.
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