Should a man go to jail if he's caught with child porn in his house?

[earth_as_one]

...Cartoons are not child pornography because no one has been exploited. I have to wonder why you want to confuse the definition of "child pornography" according to the law. A cartoon of murder is not murder, but the person depicting the cartoon merits further consideration. A cartoon of sodomizing babies is not child pornography, but it merits further consideration. The person with a sick mind has not necessarily committed a crime (unless your name is Ernst Zundel). Prosecutors are not exercising judgment when they don't prosecute someone, they're exercising judgment when they do prosecute someone.

Ignorance of the law is no excuse. Child porn includes depictions of children in sexual situations. A cartoon is a depiction.

Under the Criminal Code provisions in Canada, material that shows someone who is or is "depicted as being" under 18, and is engaged or "depicted as engaged" in explicit sexual activity, is classified as "child pornography"...

...The penalty for making or distributing child pornography is up to 10 years in prison. Possession or "accessing" carries a potential sentence of up to 5 years....
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_pornography#Canada

de·pict
–verb (used with object) 1.to represent by or as if by painting; portray; delineate. 2.to represent or characterize in words; describe.

Depictions can have serious consequences. For example:

More Than 1,000 Protest Cartoon Depiction of Prophet
by Kareem Fatim
The New York Times
More than 1,000 Muslims gathered yesterday for a rally and prayer session across the street from the Danish Consulate in Manhattan, protesting cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad that have set off a series of violent demonstrations around the world since their first publication in Denmark....

...We were tired of demonization," said Dr. Shaikh Ubaid, a spokesman for the Muslim Leadership Council, which organized the rally. "There is a rise of Islamophobia in Europe. More and more Americans think negatively about Islam." The depiction of the prophet as a terrorist mirrored insults that in the past were heaped on other immigrant populations here, including blacks, Jews and Native Americans, he said...

http://pewforum.org/news/display.php?NewsID=10029

Possessing a cartoon depiction of child porn could potentially result in five years in prison. Doodling a child porn depiction, even a bad one, and passing it on to someone could result in 10 years incarceration.

I disagree with this part of Canada's child porn law for similar reasons why I disagree with the way many Muslims reacted over depictions of the prophet.

 

[hermanntrude]

having said the above, i'd like you to consider anime porn. it nearly always involves someone of no specific age but who looks very young, and is often dressed as a schoolchild. yet this is considered mainstream pornography

 

[DurkaDurka]

having said the above, i'd like you to consider anime porn. it nearly always involves someone of no specific age but who looks very young, and is often dressed as a schoolchild. yet this is considered mainstream pornography

herman, you hit a good point there. What flies in Japn as Anime/Hentai is legally questionable here. How do you seperate the fiction from the filth?

 

[hermanntrude]

yes exactly how do u know the age of a cartoon? where is the line?

 

[Dexter Sinister]

If someone has deliberately accessed child pornography, they should be prosecuted. I don't believe that child pornography accidentally plants itself on people's computers while they are reading the news at CNN, FOX and Canadian Content. It's impossible.
Dream on ... if it's on your computer it's because you looked for it.

On the contrary, your computer can be hijacked without your knowledge and used to distribute pornography, viruses, trojans, and other such malware and crapware, and it can appear in nicely structured directories that you won't notice unless you know a great deal about what should and shouldn't be on your system and how to display everything that's there.

If you doubt that that can be done, you should know that Windows itself hides things and does things you don't know about. At the root of every drive in recent versions of Windows is a hidden directory called System Volume Information. You can unhide it, if you know how, show it'll show up in the Explorer pane with all the other directories there, but you still can't access what's in there. Internet Explorer similarly creates directories and files you can't see. Done a Windows update lately and installed the so-called Windows Genuine Advantage update? That's the thing that tells you whether or not you have a properly licenced copy of Windows. It also reports that to Microsoft over the Internet, every time you reboot. Those functions are built into the operating system, and they can be hijacked. I run Windows update manually once a week, and pretty much without fail there's at least one security update that says a bug has been found that would enable an attacker to take over your machine and you better get this update installed ASAP to protect yourself. That's always the phrase used, "enable an attacker to take over." That means the attacker can do anything with your machine that you can do sitting in front of it with the mouse and keyboard.

And that's why the only rational attitude when it comes to protecting a PC on the Internet is paranoia.

 

[DurkaDurka]

On the contrary, your computer can be hijacked without your knowledge and used to distribute pornography, viruses, trojans, and other such malware and crapware, and it can appear in nicely structured directories that you won't notice unless you know a great deal about what should and shouldn't be on your system and how to display everything that's there.

If you doubt that that can be done, you should know that Windows itself hides things and does things you don't know about. At the root of every drive in recent versions of Windows is a hidden directory called System Volume Information. You can unhide it, if you know how, show it'll show up in the Explorer pane with all the other directories there, but you still can't access what's in there. Internet Explorer similarly creates directories and files you can't see. Done a Windows update lately and installed the so-called Windows Genuine Advantage update? That's the thing that tells you whether or not you have a properly licenced copy of Windows. It also reports that to Microsoft over the Internet, every time you reboot. Those functions are built into the operating system, and they can be hijacked. I run Windows update manually once a week, and pretty much without fail there's at least one security update that says a bug has been found that would enable an attacker to take over your machine and you better get this update installed ASAP to protect yourself. That's always the phrase used, "enable an attacker to take over." That means the attacker can do anything with your machine that you can do sitting in front of it with the mouse and keyboard.

And that's why the only rational attitude when it comes to protecting a PC on the Internet is paranoia.

Dexter, you forgot what Windows stores in the registry + VRAM.

Start - run- regedit - hkey local machine - software
Can find out all sorts of intersting things there

Disclaimer: if you modify anything within the registry, know what you are doing. You cann kill your OS.

 

[hermanntrude]

i've got one thing there. just says default

 

[Dexter Sinister]

Click on the little plus sign to the left of the word Software.

 

[DurkaDurka]

Dex, If i recall correct. You are a system admin of some sort?

 

[hermanntrude]

crikey

 

[Dexter Sinister]

Dex, If i recall correct. You are a system admin of some sort?

Used to be. I'm gratefully retired now and no longer have to deal with newbies and nullbies and the personal problems of a dozen employees on a daily basis, but yes, I've had pretty much every job it's possible to have in the Information Technology field over the last 30 years, and I've probably forgotten more than I think I know. But I still run a network in my home and have to maintain a certain level of knowledge to do that successfully, so I still know Windows and Unix and networking pretty well.

 

[L Gilbert]

crikey

LOL
Found something shocking, Herm?
Dex, what's a nullbie?

 

[Dexter Sinister]

...what's a nullbie?

Somebody who knows even less than a newbie and doesn't know it. A zero. Or somebody who knows a tiny bit and extrapolates it into thinking he knows everything. And I use the male pronoun quite deliberately. Women, not being saddled with toxic levels of testosterone in their youth, rarely make that mistake. At least, not about computing technology... ;-)

 

[DurkaDurka]

Dex, do you run windows in your home environment?

What do you use as a firewall? Router NAT? Software firewall?

 

[L Gilbert]

Geeez. I have D-link wireless stuff, AdAware Pro, ZoneAlarm, Spybot, Spyware Blaster, PopupStopper Pro, Etrust NOD32, Etrust Antispam, Cache Cleaner, and BPS data shredder. What's this either/or bit?

 

[DurkaDurka]

Geeez. I have D-link wireless stuff, AdAware Pro, ZoneAlarm, Spybot, Spyware Blaster, PopupStopper Pro, Etrust NOD32, Cache Cleaner, and BPS data shredder. What's this either/or bit?

Gilbert, you have your self covered more or less. depeding on how paranoid you are, you can start getting into hardware firwwalls, proxies etc. I am personally lazy with security, no AV, no s[yware cleaner etc. Just my router, I keep my windows installation as a small parition, if something gets screwed up, I format and clean. + my storage drives are encrypted, making it a little more difficult for junk to spread.

 

[L Gilbert]

Cool. You lost me with the "Just my router, I keep my windows installation as a small parition, if something gets screwed up, I format and clean. + my storage drives are encrypted, making it a little more difficult for junk to spread." but I haven't had anything strange other than software problems with windows, so I think I'm ok.

 

[Dexter Sinister]

Dex, do you run windows in your home environment?

What do you use as a firewall? Router NAT? Software firewall?

Yes. I have a Linux file server and 3 Windows workstations, though my personal workstation is a dual boot Windows/Mandrake Linux system. Nobody but me in the house cares to learn about Linux. There's a firewall in the Linksys router, and every workstation has McAfee Security Center (which includes a virus scanner and a software firewall and some other tools), AdAware, Spybot Search&Destroy, SpyWareBlaster, Registry Medic, PC Tools' Registry Mechanic and Spyware Doctor, Emco Malware Destroyer, and CrapCleaner. Once a week or so I make the rounds of all of them, update and run all those tools, and inspect their hard drives with Windows Explorer to see what's there. And I always find some crap. The router is set to log all incoming access attempts, and I always find some known bad sites in there too. Years ago I read somewhere that the average interval between the time a new machine appears on the Internet and somebody trying to hack into it is about 20 minutes, so I decided to be paranoid. I also do backups religiously. Only once in ten years has anything got past all the alarms and barricades, a new worm that nobody'd spotted yet, and my backups saved me.

 

[DurkaDurka]

Cool. You lost me with the "Just my router, I keep my windows installation as a small parition, if something gets screwed up, I format and clean. + my storage drives are encrypted, making it a little more difficult for junk to spread." but I haven't had anything strange other than software problems with windows, so I think I'm ok.

You fit into the 5% of windows users who know how to manage a pc.

 

[mapleleafgirl]

what the heck does all this techno computer stuff have to do with child porn? why do people do that so much on this forum? im on other forms where you have to keep on topic or some mod comes along and makes you do so. on here, things just get all strange