A thief in the city of Ballarat in southwest Australia made a perverted discovery after stealing two cellphones from an unattended car. The unnamed man found child pornography on the phones and decided to turn himself into police in order to catch the man responsible for the photos.

The Age reports that the thief, who was not named due to legal reasons, was warned by police that if he turned in the phones he could be prosecuted for theft. The man agreed to turn himself in and said that he would cooperate in anyway to help police with their investigation into the child pornography on the phones.

Magistrate Michelle Hodgson said:

“You did the right thing. That kind of offending is very serious. You are to be commended for your conduct even though it placed you at jeopardy of losing your own liberty.”

The thief was also wanted for stealing a car last year. The thief ended up pleading guilty to 7 charges. He was jailed for one month and fined $400.

Hodgson said that he gave the man a lenient sentence because he didn’t want to discourage this type of behavior. Hodgson said:

“We don’t want to discourage other like minded people to act in the manner you have.”

The thief may have had to serve a month in prison, but he was probably pretty happy to found out that his selfless act led to child pornography charges against a 46-year-old man.

Would you have turned yourself in?

Thief Turns Self In After Finding Child Porn on Cellphone, Gets Fined $400 is a post from: The Inquisitr

Pornographers shooting movies in Los Angeles are now required by law to have all male performers wear condoms during filming.

City Council members voted 9-1 to approve the ordinance which will go into effect 90 days from Tuesday. Under the cities plans a film permit fee will then be used to fund surprise inspections on porn shoots to ensure compliance.

While California occupational health authorities have had a similar rule in effect for some time it has never been fully enforced.

Speaking to Reuters the chief of a porn industry trade group complained:

“Clearly, this is about the government overreaching and intruding into consenting adults’ decisions.” That Chief adds, “They are taking something they know nothing about and imposing their morality on our industry.”

In the meantime the AIDS Healthcare Foundation has applauded the measure which it fought to have enacted into law for years. The agency believes that changes will be made since receiving porn permits in other towns outside of California have been hard to come by. Even in parts of Las Vegas where prostitution has been legalized the use of condoms is a requirement for sex workers.

The Aids organization promises to “follow them wherever they go” in referring to the pornographers who may flee Los Angeles and head for no condom required areas throughout the United States, that is if other cities will have them.

Do you believe that the Los Angeles city council has overstepped its bounds in forcing pornographers to make performers wear condoms while filming?

Los Angeles Passes Porn Condoms Act After Years Of Debate is a post from: The Inquisitr

Say what you will about some of those hackers out there being in it just for the laughs and being a thorn in the side of businesses but there are also hacker groups out there who are going after the scummiest of the lowest on or off the web.

Called OpDarkNet the people involved are going after underground sites that are proliferating what is called the Dark Net, the darkest recesses of the web where pedophile groups hang out and share their sickening information and images. Of these there is one forum called Lolita City that has gotten the attention of the hackers and they have sworn to bring it down.

As one of the group members, Arson, told Andrew Chen in a post on Gawker the hacker group has been targeting the Lolita City forum in secret for some time now, which usually meant taking down their servers whenever possible. The only reason that the group has brought its activities out in public view is that they hope this move will get them additional resources so they can shut this one pedophile service down for good.

Part of shutting down the Lolita City forums also involves going after their hosting service Freedom Hosting, which the hacking group says openly provides hosting for sites carrying child pornography and forum sites for pedophiles. When it comes to Lolita City the hacker group claims that one pedophile forum site contains over 100GB of child porn.

As a result both it and its hosting company, Freedom Hosting, have been declared public enemy number one for #OpDarkNet.

No lulz here as activist hackers target kiddie porn underground is a post from: The Inquisitr

I am not sure what is going on in Australia but I’m seriously beginning to think that the politicians in that country have been spending too long hanging upside down. After all how else do you explain one of the stupidest ideas to come out of any bureaucracy let alone from a supposed democratic one.

Just in case you missed this during your daily surfing of the news it seems that the Australian customs officers have a whole new set of powers that will let them search incoming travellers’ laptops and mobile phones for <GASP> pornography.

A spokesman said that the customs officers have been trained to apply “tact and discretion” in their interactions with passengers but that the idea behind the added powers are meant to inform travellers that some forms of pornography maybe prohibited from being imported.

“Is it fair that customs officers rummage through someone’s luggage and pull out a legal men’s magazine or a lesbian journal in front of their children or their mother-in-law?” she [Fiona Patten - president of the Australian Sex Party] said.

“If you and your partner have filmed or photographed yourselves making love in an exotic destination or even taking a bath, you will have to answer ‘Yes’ to the question or you will be breaking the law.”

Customs confirmed the new reference to “pornography” on the Incoming Passenger Cards and the search powers, acknowledging that searches conducted by officers may involve the discovery of “personal or sensitive possessions”.

Source: Sydney Morning Herald

I wonder if that will include sex toys?

hat tip to Paul O’Flaherty for the story tip

Don’t plan on taking that copy of Playboy on your trip to Australia is a post from: The Inquisitr

While roughly half of humans will tell you they were already born with a porn detection stick, a company is marketing a device that purports to offer a “robust illicit image detection device designed to protect your family, business or organization.”

If finding out that someone besides yourself is looking at porn on a computer is the kind of thing you do in lieu of hobbies or other constructive things, for a mere $100 you too can own Paraben’s “Porn Detection Stick.” Employing “different algorithms that look at things such as flesh tones, shapes, facial recognition, and more,” the anti-porn stick compiles these instances and marks them “suspect” or “highly suspect.” However, I think this aspect of the copy is highly telling about the whole exercise of covertly rooting out porn viewing:

Images that are determined to be suspect can easily be a false positive hit. This means there are elements in the image that triggered enough suspicion for it to be categorized as suspicious. You’ll notice many of these pictures are of people who have a larger amount of skin showing (pictures of babies often get marked as suspicious) or contain a lot of flesh tones (a picture of a cardboard box may be marked as a false positive) or even have round or elongated shapes. Sometimes it’s not obvious why an image is marked as a false positive.

A lot of people look at straight up porn. But some people come across it incidentally on the internet. And a lot of what people look at online to get their rocks off won’t read as “porn” to lots of other people. (Foot fetishes, pregnancy fetishes, leather or latex kinks, for instance.) On the surface, I can only think of two instances in which this kind of technology would be used- suspect employees and suspect significant others. However, output is much more indicative of an employee’s worth than what they look at during their downtime and it’s not really anyone’s place to tell their spouse or partner not to look at dirty pictures on the interwebs. Basically, if you buy this thing, you’re a paranoid jerk. (And very likely to harass someone for an errant Evony banner ad.)

Besides, for just $50 I will accurately tell you that every male you know is looking at computer porn. I take PayPal or cash, no personal checks.

[ProofPronto via ChipChick]

Busted: Porn detection stick does what it says on the tin is a post from: The Inquisitr

Many of the laws that are in place to protect our children from abuse and as objects of child pornography are a good thing. Unfortunately though those same laws are being called into question because some of those people creating this type of photographs are the kids themselves. In fact there seems to be a rising number of charges being brought against children of both sexes because of them taking and sharing pictures of themselves in the nude.

This week, prosecutors in Greensburg, Pennsylvania charged six teens ranging in age from 14 to 17with creating, distributing and possessing child pornography, after three girls were found to have taken photos of themselves in the nude or partially nude and e-mailed them to friends, including three boys who are among the defendants.

The case is only one of the latest in a spate of similar prosecutions and investigations. In Florida, officials similarly charged a 16-year-old girl and her 17-year-old boyfriend with producing, directing or promoting child pornafter they photographed themselves having sex. Neither of the teens shared the images with anyone else.

Source: Threat Level

As Mark Rasch a former federal cybercrimes prosecutor said recently – “the problem is that that the child porn laws were really designed for a situation where an adult abuses a minor by forcing the minor – psychologically as well as physically – into taking these pictures. But here when the person takes the pictures herself or consents to the picture being taken it turns the whole statute on its head.”

some authorities argue that bringing child porn charges against these kids should be looked at as a education against the dangers of taking these types of pictures others argue that charges like these won’t achieve the desired effect. Which makes sense considering that just about every kid around considers themselves invincible and above the law in every regard. I have never understood why children who can’t even afford to pay for things like cell phones on their own are being given the tools to spread themselves around the Internet before they can even understand; or care, about the implications.

As Kim Zetter wrote in the post on Threat Level

In the case of teens charged with child pornography, they simply don’t see a difference between posting provocative pictures on MySpace and sending nude photos to friends.

"These kids are now seeing stuff on MySpace and other places online where other kids are posing in sexual poses in the nude performing real or mock sex, and to them it’s just their 15 megabytes of fame. They think it’s the norm," she said.

So what do we do when the laws that have been created to protect our children are the same laws being used to prosecute our children for exploring their personalities and lives with the tools that we the adults hand over to them.

Child porn laws being turn on their heads – by the kids themselves is a post from: The Inquisitr

Because of this, Bloomberg reported that American Airlines flight attendants, through the Association of Professional Flight Attendants is asking the carrier to filter its in-flight Internet service to block access to pornography and other web sites that are inappropriate.

“We’ve heard a lot of complaints from flight attendants and passengers” about travelers pulling up objectionable Web pages,” union spokesman David Roscow said.

This is a good call from the flight attendants and its union. Besides, why go to those websites while out in public and way up in the sky? Such idiots.

Would You Surf Porn Sites While Way Up in the Sky? is a post from: The Inquisitr