Lolita City was a

child pornography Child pornography (also called CP, child sexual abuse material, CSAM, child porn, or kiddie porn) is pornography that unlawfully exploits children for sexual stimulation. It may be produced with the direct involvement or sexual assault of a ...

website that used hidden services available through the

Tor network Tor, short for The Onion Router, is free and open-source software for enabling anonymous communication. It directs Internet traffic through a free, worldwide, volunteer overlay network, consisting of more than seven thousand relays, to conc ...

. The site hosted images and videos of underage males and females ranging up to 17 years of age (18 is the minimum legal age in many jurisdictions, including the US, for a person to appear in pornography). The website was hosted by

Freedom Hosting :''This defunct hosting site is not related to Freedom Hosting Pty Ltd, which is operating in Australia.'' Freedom Hosting is a defunct Tor specialist web hosting service that was established in 2008. At its height in August 2013, it was the la ...

, a defunct Tor based web hosting provider.

Background

As a hidden service, Lolita City operated through the

.onion 



.onion is a special-use  top level domain name designating an anonymous  onion service, which was formerly known as a "hidden service", reachable via the  Tor network. Such addresses are not actual  DNS names, and the .onion TLD is not in the  I ...

pseudo top-level domain and could be accessed only via the Tor network. Like adult pornography sites, Lolita City featured and promoted specific models whom fans could follow. Some of the photographers were professionals, others were hobbyists. The site included softcore and

hardcore Hardcore, hard core or hard-core may refer to: Arts and media Film * ''Hardcore'' (1977 film), a British comedy film * ''Hardcore'' (1979 film), an American crime drama film starring George C Scott * ''Hardcore'' (2001 film), a British documen ...

images, and the subjects ranged from near-newborns and toddlers to 17-year-olds and included both boys and girls. As of June 2013, the website hosted about 1.4 million pictures. Videos had been available on the site since November 2012.

2011 anti-child porn operation by Anonymous

In October 2011, the hacktivist collective

Anonymous Anonymous may refer to: * Anonymity, the state of an individual's identity, or personally identifiable information, being publicly unknown ** Anonymous work, a work of art or literature that has an unnamed or unknown creator or author * Anony ...

launched "Operation Darknet", in an attempt to disrupt the activities of child porn sites accessed through hidden services. Anonymous published in a

pastebin A pastebin or text storage site is a type of online content-hosting service where users can store plain text (e.g. source code snippets for code review via Internet Relay Chat (IRC)). The first pastebin was the eponymous pastebin.com. Other s ...

link what it claimed were the user names of 1,589 members of Lolita City, including membership time, and number of images uploaded. Anonymous said that it had found the site via

The Hidden Wiki The Hidden Wiki was a dark web MediaWiki wiki operating as Tor hidden services that could be anonymously edited after registering on the site. The main page served as a directory of links to other .onion sites. History The first Hidden Wiki ...

, and that it contained over 100

gigabyte The gigabyte () is a multiple of the unit byte for digital information. The prefix '' giga'' means 109 in the International System of Units (SI). Therefore, one gigabyte is one billion bytes. The unit symbol for the gigabyte is GB. This definit ...

s of child pornography. Lolita City was taken offline for a short time in a

denial-of-service attack In computing, a denial-of-service attack (DoS attack) is a cyber-attack in which the perpetrator seeks to make a machine or network resource unavailable to its intended users by temporarily or indefinitely disrupting services of a host conne ...

by Anonymous.

References

{{Tor hidden services Underground culture Defunct Tor hidden services Child pornography websites Internet properties established in 2010 Internet properties disestablished in 2013