They use monero because what they are doing (copyright infringement) will get you in to big trouble anywhere in the western world. Without cryptocurrencies much of the modern large scale archival efforts wouldn't be possible, or at the very least would significantly increase risks for the people participating in it. For me this alone is a good enough reason to admit that there are valid reasons for existence of privacy coins.
The harm they may cause in the short term via tax avoidance or being used to buy drugs is minimal, but the possibility that because of them archivists are able to fund servers for data that future historians wouldn't have otherwise been able to get their hands on? Priceless.
Assuming the person is a passive consumer with no messages / money exchanged with anyone, it is very hard to prove social harm or damage. Sentences should be proportional to the crime. Treating possession of cp as equivalent of literally raping a child just seems absurd to me. IMO, just for the legal protection of the average citizen, a simple possession should never warrant jail time.
For the record, i'm against any kind of child abuse, and 25 years for an actual abuser would not be a problem.
But...
Should you go to prison for possesing images of an adult being raped? What if you don't even know it's rape? What if the person is underage, but you don't know (looks adult to you)? What about a murder video instead of rape? What if the child porn is digitally created (AI, photoshop, whatever)? What if a murder scene is digitally created (fake bullets, holes+blood made in video editing software)? What if you go to a mainstream porno store, buy a mainsteam professional porno video and you later find out that the actress way a 15yo Traci Lords?
You do in some countries. For instance, knowingly possessing video of the Christchurch massacre is illegal in New Zealand, due to a ruling by NZ’s Chief Censor (yes, that’s the actual title), and punishable by up to 14 years in prison.
Way to dismiss a solid argument based on an anecdote. I wouldn't be so quick to conclude that porn has nothing to do with seeking out real life sex, especially given how it has been widely studied that the amount of sex young adults are having has been steadily going down since the end of 90's.
I saw a twitter thread about the "WormGPT" a few days ago and was annoyed to see how much engagement it seemed to get given how obvious nothing burger it was. The few examples of its code output were laughably bad.
Hackforums has been the place where skiddies sell overhyped shit to other skiddies for well over a decade, I can guarantee that absolutely no one there is training their own AI. Everything that the article mentions, GPT3 turbo or GPT4 can already do and it wouldn't surprise me one bit if it turned out most of the stuff being sold at HF turned out to be just glorified frontends for gpt3 turbo or some open source LLM.
> It wouldn't surprise me one bit if it turned out most of the stuff being sold at HF turned out to be just glorified frontends for gpt3 turbo or some open source LLM.
They claim it is a gpt-j (6b?) finetune. Thats kind of plausible, as its not that hard to make.
“We have been following <insert company> closely and are really impressed with what you are doing! We know you are busy but hope our persistence is interpreted as a compliment.
Are you interested in leveraging outsourced sales talent to…”
True, but given the descriptions above I would expect that it mostly doesn't get the job done.
My experiences are with ChatGPT, which is apparently better than WormGPT but I wouldn't know… 80% of the time ChatGPT works great, 10% doesn't compile but it can fix itself with the error message, the other 10% it gets stuck in a loop of introducing as many issues as it fixes (which may be zero for both if it doesn't understand the problem).
It's still bad, because one should look where the ball is going and not just where it is now; so, if you excuse the anthropomorphism, I hope there's another… WeaverGPT?… being "tasked" with digital security improvements.
(If you do anthropomorphise your AI you can get the Waluigi effect, I wonder if that works both directions, making it easy to take one prompted with "you are an evil AI who hacks on behalf of Dread Software Pirate Roberts" and turn it good with "Plot twist! Roberts just pretends to be evil"?)
Illegal doesn't necessary mean that something is morally wrong. I'm all for making ransomware actors life harder, but it should not come at the cost of also affecting regular drug buyers/sellers.
The methods this malware uses for anti debugging wouldn't cause headache for anyone that isn't completely new to the subject. Download 10 random python malware samples and you'll notice that probably at least 8 of them follow this exact same packing and execution pattern. Discord hook and laughable end payload are a good indication that whoever wrote this is probably some high school kid.
The only surprising thing about this article is the claim that these type of malware haven't been spotted in pypi before. That would suggest that there isn't much of credible actors trying to spread through pypi at all.
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