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Linux - a platform for pedophiliacs?

Posted by wjl on · 4 comments
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Last night, my son Jeremy posted some news on his blog, which sounded really weird. But it's all true I fear: the German "ARD" broadcasted some "Tatort" crime series which showed a cop hunting pedophiles using IRC chat. The shown chat was the Kanotix channel on Freenode.

Unbelievable?

Well, see my son's page at jeremy.lonien.de (in German), or the gamers page he found it first at sidux.sofastil.de (also in German) - a screenshot of the channel is at Jeremy's page and at an Austrian page - and a YouTube video excerpt can be seen at YouTube.

Freenode is one of the big usenet IRC networks, Kanotix is a Linux distribution, "Tatort" is a long-running crime series here in Germany, and the "ARD" are a conglomeration of the public TV stations of the states here in Germany.

We hope that Kano, the founder of Kanotix, will receive some apology from the ARD...

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Comments (4)

wjl Story submitter ·
Dunno how that "usenet" crept into my mind - that's obviously wrong of course.

And that happened to me - who is so proud of using "the Net" since longer than when Marc invented the first browser...

See? If that can happen to me, then how should an average film maker know the IRC networks? Reminds me of the book "Surfing On The Internet" by J.C. Herz, which is still a good read after all these years.
techiem2 ·
Ya wonder if they just picked a random channel when shooting. Of course, ya gotta wonder why they chose freenode to begin with, as it's not exactly a network that comes to mind for this sort thing. Besides the strangeness of the network and channel picked, there's also the issue that they are showing the actual real activity of the channel, including the join/part messages of users including their hostmasks.. Doesn't seem exactly professional to me to be spreading that around on TV.
wjl Story submitter ·
Right. The "hot topic" around here is that you actually see their IP addresses and nick names, and that all in the context of the ongoing discussions about the state spying on its citizens...

But then again, no real criminal would be that stupid - they would use several hops to keep the authorities from tracking them down. That seems to be the thing our politicians are missing. They might get the one or other not-so-skilled pedo, but they surely won't get Osama Bin Laden like this...

Ok, I'm drifting a bit off-topic here - it's late already in this area ;-)

Silly that the film makers didn't have the time or budget or knowledge to come up with something more interesting, and that they mixed a Linux support channel with their story. Maybe they should have consulted an experienced SysAdmin first? Just food for thought...
techiem2 ·
Or just made their own channel to use...

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