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Comment by fineman | Hacker News Reader

How about ascii art?

Actually, this is an interesting topic. Poisoning a dataset. CP would work for private security investigators, and to poison against government investigators you could use leaked classified secrets.

Could you work around this by operating on the files on VPS you don't own, streaming a very low-res ('Basilisk'-proof - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BLIT_(short_story) ) remote desktop image.

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Possession laws are pretty strict and hard to decode. I wouldn't want to be the test case in court. The idea of "poisoning" a dataset is an interesting theoretical. But in practice, I just want to judge the likelihood that the dataset is poisoned by the presence of images. If it is then there's not much I can do with it.

Yes, this absolutely needs to be clarified by Gwern. This is a very dangerous thing to link researchers to if it contains any illegal content.

Nonsense. Gwern doesn't need to do anything for anyone.

It's an interesting issue, and a way investigators may be attacked, but it's their responsibility alone. There exists data. This is that data. The data may bite. Touch the data at your own risk.

Um... Dark market

Um.. It says Black Market right on the tin.

Indeed, a warning that it may contain illegal content would be about as sensible as the standard "Warning: may contain nuts" label on a tin of nuts.

What is illegal in a download of an online drug marketplace? Are pictures of drugs banned where you live?

It's a general black market, not just drugs. For example, one of the sites described on that page is PEDOFUNDING, "A crowdfunding site for child pornography." Now the dump isn't supposed to contain any images, but it's hard to be 100% sure. In any case, whatever risk there might be seems to be clearly implied in the name and description there.

FreeeOW, that's what I get for skimming the list I guess.

Guess what, laws aren't universal! Unless gwern has a complete understanding of your jurisdiction and can somehow guess how you plan to use the data, he cannot know what is legal and wasn't isn't. The burden lies on you.

Does ASCII art have victims? Other than its audience, I mean.

Technically it could be translated from more traditional pictures. (Instead of being an original creation.)

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