How someone might end up with 50,000 child porn images, you ask? Does 50,000 child porn images even exist, you ask?
I won't claim to be an expert on the topic, but one time I was bored and was passing time clicking on random videos on YouTube. I had somehow fallen off the narrow path and gotten myself lost in the seedier parts of the Spanish-speaking section. I may not understand Spanish, but boobs are boobs, so I kept clicking on recommended videos!
One video had some kind of weather lady. Nice boobs! But my eyes inadvertently caught the description underneath, screaming in all caps:
"18 GB KIDDIE PORN!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"
Followed by a long list of links, and a password.
Back in those days I thought "child pornography" was mostly mythical, a made-up thing that almost never happens, totally blown out of proportion to serve as an excuse for stealing our freedoms. And even if it existed, surely no-one would be just posting it openly on YouTube like that! I was dead certain this was bullshit, probably some troll posting a virus or something.
I clicked on the first link, just to verify my virus theory (I'm stupidly fearless on the internet!). The link led to some kind of ad page that linked to another ad page, which linked to another ad page, and so on, ad nauseam.
I swear I clicked through at least ten of these annoying ad pages that had ten second timers before you could move on. I was keking happily at this masterful pedo trolling, what a fantastic idea, get stupid people looking for child porn to spend an afternoon lost in a forest of ads without ever getting anywhere, and get paid for every click they make! Just brilliant!
But suddenly there was an unexpected clearing in the ad forest, and I landed on a google drive page with a 500 MB rar file. "Oh, so there IS a virus after all!" I mused to myself with great satisfaction over my brilliant deductive powers. So I downloaded it and used the handy password from the YouTube page to pry it open.
There were no executable files in there. Just a couple of videos. My heart sank. Could this really be child pornography after all? Does such a thing really exist after all?
Only one way to know. So I clicked on one of the videos. I caught a quick glimpse of an obese middle-aged white man getting a blowjob from what looked like a 5 year old Asian girl, then I shut it down.
No idea what was on the rest of the movies because I wasn't in the mood to find out. Instead I spent the rest of the day scrubbing my hard drive and reinstalling from scratch, to be sure to get the stink out.
So, yeah, that's how I was convinced child pornography is indeed a thing, and it isn't as hard to find as you'd think. There's at the very least 18 GB of it out there, but I'm sure that's just a drop in the bucket.>>212590