Freaks don't automatically become cyber crime experts. Otherwise they'll likely be using browser inside VM that only have access to TOR proxy and no connection to real internet.
It's not that simple. Using the Tor browser bundle, there is no protection against phone-home exploits outside the browser. Firewall rules would prevent them, but that's up to users. Far better is to use Whonix Tor gateway and workstation VMs in VirtualBox. The workstation VM has no Internet connectivity except via Tor running in the gateway.
Using the Tor browser bundle in Windows is especially risky. The FBI has relied on Firefox bugs and dropped Windows executables. In the Freedom Hosting case, the FBI used a Firefox vulnerability that had just been patched in Tor browser a week or so before.
>Using the Tor browser bundle, there is no protection
Of course not, which is precisely why running Flash is ludicrously stupid.
Nobody is claiming that the "victims" of these other exploits are stupid -- just the ones who installed and used Flash (and probably had to deactivate noscript in the process).
And more to the point, any remotely reasonable person will RTFM (at least superficially) before using a tool to do something highly illegal. Not doing so is the very definition of stupid.
it's pedophiles, not tech experts or even users. I would guess a lot of them don't significantly use their computers, and only got someone to show them the whole tor thing, or watched a youtube video on it or something.
It's still possible to make Flash plugin work in "Tor Browser", at least it's was possible in past. And there is many ways to trick somebody install and activate plugin.
Reconfiguring a security tool without reading the FM, and then using said tool to commit a federal-pound-me-in-the-ass-prison-crime is mind-bogglingly stupid.
These people lack even the most basic forms of common sense.
These are people that were using said security tool for one of the worst possible uses imaginable not security experts or even what most people would call "power users". IF they had common sense they wouldn't be looking up pictures of kids in the first place.
As someone else pointed out they probably got told about Tor to avoid being caught either on a a really creepy message board or wherever it is creeps hangout (the 70's wire frame glasses and fanny pack store?), watched a youtube video or read a text file/readme that has been passed around on these boards or whatever. They likely have very little actual computer knowledge.
Or they are mundane people who wants to discover tor. It happened to me (20 years ago). Hopefully the hard disk where the picture has been stored (during less than one minute, before I removed it) does not exist anymore.
