Danbooru

a legal/ "arse covering" concern

Posted under General

As of today (April 6) it is now illegal to possess drawn/cartoon images of children involved or even in the presence of sexual activity in the United Kingdom.

Overview here :
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/04/06/cartoon_law_live/

As such it may be prudent to attach a disclaimer or similar to registrants/participants from the UK (including myself until further notice) so that Danbooru doesn't fall foul of the escalating censorship laws, or indeed the hassle of a probably unsound but nonetheless disruptive piece of international legal action.

it was fun to be part of Danbooru while I could

love

r.

Updated by user 344162

Ugh. I hope they die in a chemical fire. Bloody cunts.

Re: disclaimer, I don't really see how that'd help in any way regarding "falling afoul of the escalating censorship laws". Care to clarify? Also, as far as I'm aware, even the UK still can't sue anyone over the internet for violating their own retarded laws. That's not how international law works, no matter how much idiotic governments would like it to be different.

you would need to add a lot more that just the UK, heck, Australia will considder ANYTHING that looks like it could be underage as being underage, not to mention a seperate ruling stating that fictional characters can be considdered real people. (something that caused many scoffs as the simpsons is still allowed here, dispite rampant child abuse worse than that of a baby swinging video that became a hot topic on the australian tubes at around time as the simpsons felatio ruling).

Actually, you can still browse Danbooru, but you can't save any images. The way that bullshit works is: If you save a photograph(real or otherwise) or video of "child pornography" to your hard drive or other device, you are basically creating a copy that didn't exist before then, which is why you can get busted for manufacturing and/or possesion of child pornography. But still, those lawmakers should be confined to the lowest, coldest circle of hell.

Um... how do you think your browser works? It downloads (makes a copy of, saves) the images from the remote server to your local computer so that it can display them for you. It typically caches those images on your hard drive, so that you don't beat up the server by downloading them over and over should you visit the same page twice.

If law enforcement busted your door down for some reason, you actually *would* be in possession of anything you recently browsed online, unless you constantly clear your cache. Even then, if they subpoena your ISP logs they'd have pretty good evidence of what you had been in possession of.

That fact coupled with the other dumb internet law the UK is just now passing (that you are personally liable for everything that goes through your internet connection whether you are aware of it or not) would likely bolster that evidence in court.

I'm not saying this to make people unduly afraid or telling them to get off Danbooru. For all we know the UK will be lax with enforcement. On the other hand, I wouldn't want to get people into the wrong idea that browsing != possession as far as technology or law is concerned.

If it's a real concern, and you want to stay on Danbooru, blacklists are probably a better solution.

Updated

Ok that's a hyperbolic statement as well. On a modern hard drive with modern forensic technology anything that has been overwritten at least once cannot be reliably recovered (though if it's deleted, but not overwritten it usually can be).

The DoD considers three overwriting passes to be secure erasure of unclassified government documents, the NSA requires seven overwrites for its material.

If you are *really* paranoid, use a tool like CyberShredder to securely erase anything you are worried about. If you are worried about normally deleted files being recovered, download CCleaner , set it for secure deletion in options|settings, and tell it to explicitly wipe free space. (this will likely take a very long time).

That said, unless someone has a reason to come after you this is probably overly cautious. Those solutions work for Windows, I'm sure Linux and OS X have similar utilities, but I'm not particularly familiar with them.

Updated

As of today (April 6) it is now illegal to possess drawn/cartoon images of children involved or even in the presence of sexual activity in the United Kingdom.

It's already illegal in the US, as the infamous Christopher Handley case demonstrates. How strictly the law will be enforced is another question.

I should note that the UK law defines children to be any person under 18. Likewise, US law prohibits obscene images of minors. So it's not just lolis you have to worry about; hentai of any non-adult character could potentially be considered child porn.

葉月 said:
Also, as far as I'm aware, even the UK still can't sue anyone over the internet for violating their own retarded laws.

Apparently you can be sued for libel in the UK, even if neither you nor the plaintiff are citizens of the UK, as long as your allegedly libelous statements were made available in the UK. See this article.

evazion said:
It's already illegal in the US, as the infamous Christopher Handley case demonstrates.

Hmm, I had been under the impression that in the US it was still a grey-area under current law and under appeal, but I guess not.

At least I don't live in Iowa. It may be a stereotype to say so, but I wouldn't be surprised if prosecutors in more conservative areas would be more keen to enforce this.

Maybe it's a legal argument for Hazuki-approved NSFW images. At least with them you are more likely to be able to say they have arguable artistic value, and as such not obscene.

Updated

evazion said:
Apparently you can be sued for libel in the UK, even if neither you nor the plaintiff are citizens of the UK, as long as your allegedly libelous statements were made available in the UK. See this article.

Yeah, but it's still not acceptable according to international law. UK can be retarded all they want, so can North Korea. It doesn't make it automatically valid.

Shinjidude said:
Maybe it's a legal argument for Hazuki-approved NSFW images. At least with them you are more likely to be able to say they have arguable artistic value, and as such not obscene.

I'm required to say here that my opinions and tastes, impeccable as they might be, do not constitute legal defence or advice.

Hehe, yeah, I was mostly being facetious. I'll also go on record saying nothing I've said in this thread is legal advice or defense either. Use your own good judgment and risk tolerance when making decisions, and take everything you hear with a grain of salt.

Fortunately I found a suitable workaround thanks to a Scot's Law acquaintance of mine and some proxy experimentation (X tunneling).

I'd further like to know if possible what encryption the account details have, in case it proves more useful to use public web proxies than the convoluted method i'm using currently.

Peripherally how easy would it be to run a mirror of the danbooru data set? If it ends up that i must continue running an X tunnel on a collocated machine for the exclusive purpose of danbooru browsing, I might as well run a mirror on the same hardware to reduce my cable usage.

lots of love

r.

I wouldn't want to use Danbooru through any untrusted network, especially a public proxy, if you're concerned about keeping your activity private. There's no HTTPS support, and your cookies will reveal quite a lot of your account information - most notably username, though also tag blacklist and (salted) password hash.

Because the password is hashed and salted, an attacker (such as a malicious proxy operator) almost certainly can't work out your actual password. However, the username and password cookies seem to be present to allow auto-login if the session expires; I don't know if Danbooru does any IP address checking, but that wouldn't stop a proxy operator anyway.

(Actually, the more I think about this, the worse it looks. Does anyone know if there's already a Trac issue open for it?)

Edited: I couldn't find an existing issue, and confirmed that this can be used to gain access to an account without knowing the password, so I opened ticket #1183.

Updated

tah muchly on the web proxy = bad alert, probably wouldn't have flown anyway but was worth investigating.

I'll stick to remote GUI terminals, which will probably mean a trip to (RO)Ireland or France sometime soon.

Danbooru doesn't use HTTPS so, at most you'd be hiding transmitted and received data only on the "last mile" between yourself and the proxy, and even then only if you had some sort of VPN set up.

On the upside, using a proxy like that would probably make your ISP oblivious to the fact that you are accessing a given site (e.g. Danbooru). If the proxy is out of the country, it might make it more difficult for the operator to get subpoenaed (like I said though, I can't foresee that happening out of the blue anyway).

As for the "user accounts being encrypted", I'm almost certain nothing like that happens, and all public data is available to anyone who wants it anyway, so long as they know which user account to look up.

If you are concerned, and you use an alias that is publicly known to be used by your real world identity, maybe you could PM Albert and have him change it for you.

The whole mirroring Danbooru thing cannot be done easily. That is actually part of the point of forum #37101. And even if the DB dump is done as requested, there is still privileged data you wouldn't be able to replicate.

All in all this sounds awfully paranoid. If you got into the situation where people cared about your Danbooru usage, chances are they already have evidence on you that led them to look here, and you're already in trouble.

Even if they could show you went here, if you had a blacklist set up that blocked questionable images, you would have plausible deniability to refute their charges (so long as they didn't find anything directly on your machine).

I dunno, altogether it doesn't sound like something worth jumping through hoops for.

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