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Software That Can Censor 'Sexual Images.' Or Not.
Halster writes: "Here's an interesting story on Newswire about censorware that detects excessive skintones in images, and implements blocking accordingly. What next?" What's next is (you'd hope) the realization that image-analysis heuristics are inherently limited, and not the best thing on which to pre-emptively base system-admin decisions. ( michael : That story is a company press release. For a much better evaluation of how this software works, see this Wired expose detailing the fraudulent nature of image-filtering "artificial intelligence," or an older review from Businessweek on Eyeguard.)
"...Not only does eyeguard alert the network administrator, but it also disables the computer and takes a snapshot of the suspect image.."
My boss has installed this software, and is now forcing the entire office to surf for porn. These "snapshots" are sent directly to his hard drive, which is saving him the time of having to sift through thousands of non-porn pictures to get the ones he wants. Thanks to this software and the snapshot feature, my boss is able to accumulate pornographic images at 10X his previous efficiency.
Eye-T, Mr. Wilkerson thanks you.
Phallic Symbols in LOTR
I would love to have a configurable discriminator for pornography.
If they can tell what the people in the picture are doing by analyzing the picture, I wouldn't have to sort through all of those GIFS myself...
(grin)
shit! Then I'll just have to download the new version of the picture too!
See how this works?
If it ain't broke, fix it 'til it is!
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
[quickly, since I'm in a hurry]:
Me and a buddy actually started "development" (we talked a lot) about "p0rnster", a webcrawler that would take links from the porn-linksites, look for certain keywords, follow X links through, and save all jpeg's over Y kb big.
Never got around to it though.
The entire premise of associating skin tones with pornography is flawed. It's trivial to create a work that would be widely regarded as pornographic despite not showing ANY normal skin tones at all, or even any skin at all.
Pornography is not a property of images. It is a property of a culture, and of the value judgements that that culture makes about sex and nudity.
Imbued as we are with American values acquired through film, we tend to forget the above, but in Europe we're fortunate enough to have a million beaches where nudity is nothing special to bring back home the relativity of values. Nothing else makes the point so effectively.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
How soon can we expect ISPs, most likely after being strong-armed by the government (just look what's happening in the UK), to start scanning data streams for porn images, unpopular political symbols or even faces? --Peter Dyck
This is well calculated advertisement. This page will hit the decency filters of any web fashist around. And it will be forwarded to HR. And they will buy it. That is the idea. I would say very well calculated and congratulate the inventor
On the topic of the filter itself. I bet that this crapware will fail on:
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
Yeah. I've often thought of the state of computers now like the auto industry of the 50's. It was the "American Dream" to own a computer now, like it was for cars. People want it so badly that they are willing to settle for crap. Once they become more integrated into everyday life (not like an obsession device, but the way you use your fridge or car), then quality will start to improve. I'll give it 40 years, maybe they'll straighten it out.
Aside from the fact that it would be unable to distinuish between the pigmentation of various races it would also fall completely flat on those with an interest in rubber & latex.
After reading this article I decided to make a background tile skin.jpg made from my very own fleshtones, yes you can have a little piece of bytor on your web page. I think sticking enough images like this onto random web pages should keep the censorware occupied a little while.
what is even more amusing is that the people writing the filtering software don't understand this either, I'll bet more of them are using /sex/ig than /\bsex\b/ig
~ppppppppö
Skin tones, eh? I would imagine that they're mainly, shall we say, "caucasian" skin tones.
It'd be fun to see this turn into the biggest lawsuit since Crayola's whole "Flesh" colored crayon debacle.
Anyone know if they're still making "Indian Red"?
This is crazy. What's next? Will other companies follow suit and create software that filters ads, sites, etc about their competitors? Nobody would buy this kind of software, but what is to keep them from sticking it into some already proprietary code? What if MicroSoft decided to stick some Anti-Netscape code into IE? This is a step in the wrong direction. I agree that kids shouldn't be able to access some things on the internet, but whos responibility is this? Nevermind the fact that they have parents for that reason. This is just another instance that proves that parents have lost control. I think they should take some responsibility and monitor their kids. Or maybe it is our responsibility. I don't know.
(After, of course, they removed the manilla folder icon and replaced it with another...)
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
Since when-the-hell has naked human skin been pornographic?
Why is this always the equation:
naked = pornography = sex = bad
There is an absolute difference between nudity and pornography and sex.
nudity != pornography
nudity != sex
nudity != bad
Deal with it!
It's the utterly mindless tendency of unthinking, self-righteous people to equate the one with the other that needs to be remedied...
t_t_b
--
I'm on PJ's "enemies" list! Are you?
flmask
~ppppppppö
... but the problem with open censorware lists is that the block list becomes a very valuable commodity. Kid manages to hack round the protection - heck, the number of teenage boys who are better with the computers than their parents isn't low - and surfs straight through the blocklist, using it as a porn-only Yahoo! Or, for that matter, moves it to someone else's (unblocked) machine and surfs from there.
What we have here is a fantastically complex problem. Cyberpatrol has pulled some _disgusting_ stunts - like blokcing sites which criticised its methods - but that doesn't necessarily mean that all censorship software is bad.
Put it this way: imagine I'm (say) 10-15 years older, and with primary school age kids. Chances are, they're going to want to play with this Internet thing, just like we watched TV at that age. Now, do I want to have to say they can only surf whenever I'm watching over their shoulders? Of course not - that's ridiculously laborious and clearly impractical. The far simpler approach is to do what you do with kids and TV - bar by program / channel / time. So, in this case, don't allow access to Usenet & Gnutella (for example) and only allow websites you've approved. Kid gets a better net experience while you're prepared to let them spend longer online because it doesn't take so much effort on your part.
For this sector of the market - if nothing else - net censorship software is needed. You and I may well be able to get the desired result by configuring a spare box in the back bedroom as a proxy server, but we're not representative of the general population.
Censorship software hasn't yet hit the sweet spot but it's definitely necessary, if only within limited areas. And, while I see the advantage to an open blocklist, I hope you see the problem, too.
Greg
(Inside a nuclear plant)
Aaaarrrggh! Run! The canary has mutated!
Anyway, the product is called Internet Safari, and it's a web browser (I guess some hacked up version of IE) that includes a image analysis filter. My guess is that it does the same thing as eyeguard.
And the men who hold high places must be the ones who start
To mold a new reality... closer to the heart
heaven forbid that our children see pornographic material at home rather than going out and having sex, getting std's, and pregant.
So quick with fear you tiny fools!
In reading the previous posts to this news, I have come to one basic conclusion: People think that just because this technology is out there, they must implement it, and forever be cursed with the restrictions associated therewith.
Give me a break.
Although the possibility exists that some law will be passed forcing every OS in America to include this software--and force it upon the end user--the chances of that range anywhere from slim to none.
And despite what Microsoft may want you to believe, you still have control over what software you want to install. Or is that not the case? Did I miss something that everyone else got?
The bottom line is: If you don't like it, don't install it!
-={(.Y.)}=-
Thank you for reading One Man's Opinion. No participation necessary. Offer void where deemed by law or PATRIOT Act.
I think this is one of the down-falls of the way many businesses are conducting themselves on the internet. This is obviously a company that was able to drive up the hype on their product. Now they are able to keep saying, "we're working on it" and most people will say 'OK' and not really hold the company responsible. Imagine if a company that made a real physical object tried this. Cars that crashed or drove the wrong direction 90% of the time. Or a kitchen disposal that ground up your hand in addition to the kitchen waste. Consumers wouldn't allow this product to remain. Its time we do the same for e-companies. Especially ones that proclaim to help children. None of these products work well. Just check out Peacefire.org. Get the lowdown.
Pair up in threes. - Yogi Berra
This is the most relevant statement I've seen in this entire discussion.
From page 2...
"There are over 10 million neural networks involved in the thing," Beecher says."
Bloody hell! Imagine the computing power they've got to run 10 million neural _networks_.
...or maybe they mean 10 million neurons. Doh!
Why doesn't the gene pool have a life guard?
How did you find out about my She-Hulk collection!!!
Oh well, you know this wouldn't affect Captain Kirk: he's got that fetish for blue women...
So where's the web filter that filters out stupid e-censorship ideas?
Oh. It filtered itself. Never mind...
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
The problem with allowing child pornography and then prosicuting people who expolit children without their consent is that if this was allowed, it would let politicans give all sorts of reasons to make speaches about how they should make the internet into a police state so that they can track down everyone who might possibly be linked to the photo(s) in question. Then these politicans (isn't it odd how the most computer illiterate people are the ones making all the laws about technology?) will pass laws so that everything you do or say is monitored.
Imagine if you could not reply to this as "anonomyous coward", and you disagreed with my opinion (and just suppose that my opinion was the one the cops liked), a little "*" would appear next to your name on the great list of the citizen's offical internet accounts, and everything you say or do would be monitored. I think it's better not to encourage any regulation of the internet... I think there's enough wacky porn out there without kiddie pron... err uh, at least... um... I've been told. :)
I hope i didn't mis-understand your comment... but that's just the point that my mind recived and processed. Hope that's not too off topic.
So quick with fear you tiny fools!
(mpegs available upon request)
-Docvert converts MSWord to OpenDocument, clean HTML
Come see www.nudepinkgirls.com! All our girls wear pink body paint, guaranteed to beat your compay's software! Don't let your parents, your library, or your HR department jerk you around! Exercise your constitutional right to exercise your arm!
I could imagine heuristics which do a true analysis of the image to determine if it is pornographic, better than looking at the colors, but wouldn't that be an issue in and of itself, since it would take up processor time? People always say, "What would you do with that much processor?" Everything that we're not doing now. In the future, with faster processors, better analysis than this can be done, and instead of "Netnanny," parents will just load software that puts nice black blocks over everything that they're kids can't see. Real time censorship folks. And you wondered what a home supercomputer could be used for.
Eh...
The day that AI becomes smart enough to filter porn is that day that it realizes that it likes it and refuses to filter it.
Scunthorpe :)
Open Source. Closed Minds. We are Slashdot.
That is a good point. The article's use of the word "flesh" brought back images of the Crayola Crayon color of flesh, namely the pinkish skin tone prevalent among caucasians, that I used to use in kindergarten.
Given the fact that there are many different skin tones in the world, how is it to distinguish? Are they so arrogant that they assume only images of blond-haired, blue-eyed people are being downloaded?
1: What color is 'skin' exactly? From albinos to blacks, that's a lot of colors you have to check for. What if there's more than one person there, of different colors?
2: What if I have a picture of a naked *gasp* pig?! That should be close enough to skin tone.
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We would quickly see a round of green, purple and blue skin, with a lot of science fiction themed porn. It would be just like what started the whole Hackerspeak...back in BBS days, some software implemented the ability to filter out swear words, so we started doing things like substituting an * for a some letters like "sh*t", and "F*CK!". This later evolved to using numbers to sub for letters to further get around these "features". And thus, 3l33t and d00dz came into our vocabulary.
It would be interesting to see what other ways, beside coloured skin people would use to get around a "excessive skintone" filter...a return to black and white pictures? Weirdly skewed colour maps? Use of "oil paint" filters to break up the skin-tone areas?
ttyl
Farrell
(who has been on line far too long...)
CAN-CON 2019 - Ottawa's only book oriented Science Fiction Convention! October 18-20, Sheraton Hotel, Ottawa, Canada h
Send yourself a picture of your own face. This will trigger the software, which will disable your computer. Then call the support team, who will fix the problem within 24hrs, and take the rest of the day off.
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I just caught myself pronouncing Linus as "Lee-nus" like Linus Torvalds. It's not exactly wrong; the official site doesn't give pronunciations.
Will I retire or break 10K?
I agree with your sentiments...but what about the limitations already on speech (yelling "fire" in a theater)? Does that single limitation mean we do not have free speech?
I've heard someone argue that slander laws, etc. should be struck down, yes. I don't know if I buy it myself. It's a position I can probably argue myself around to in time, but I still have reservations about a position that extreme.
Basically if we can find other reasons for prosecuting what we now call slander or the "fire!" thing, I'd be OK with it.
-- Old Man Kensey
Think about it. You could have this magical software sell BOTH ways. One side would be to filter out porn images, the other side would be to filter out everything BUT the porn images. It's a win-win situation!
It's good to know that at least some good will come of this. :-)
Stay up hacking each weekend. Sleep is for the week.
Actually, if you invert the colors on pr0n, you get very sexy blue chicks. :)
Refrag
I have a website. It's about Macs.
"Black and White"
Jay (=
In our work with imaging technologies & the food processing industry, we are constantly trying to identify good product (fries, beans, carrots, etc) from junk & background. What we find is that even with the same cameras, same background lighting, etc, we still see degradations and fluctuations in pictures due to minor changes in product color, background lighting fluctuations & dimming, cameras getting dirty, etc. Spotting a defect with a very controlled set of variables is still tough.
Now, take all the cameras of the world that are taking those naughty pictures and all the variations of film, developing, shutter speed, lighting, skin color, etc. Endless variants. I could take a picture of the same naked person in the same position with the same lighting with 5 cameras and get 5 different shades of skin color.
What would really be needed is shape detection & proportional layout analysis of those nasty shapes. But then, given the large number of shapes & proportions of people's giggle-bits, I still doubt you could get to a solution that's even moderately effective in stopping the undesired and passing the desired.
managers...why god invented purgatory
I believe that the near-infite resources and creative know-how of the Open Source community should shed some light on this contentious issue.
Taking a leaf from SETI@Home and other distributed-computing systems, I propose the creation of a new application tentatively entitled SMUTI@Home. While programming an AI system to recognise porn is doubtless an unrealisable pipe-dream, I propose that we place the highly discriminating pr0n-appreciation skills of the OSS community in the hands of those who have taken on the holy mission of defending the welfare of our youth, skills honed by years of furtive self-abuse in front of the glass tty.
The system will work as follows. SMUTI@Home's spiders will traverse the Web, the alt.binaries.* hiearchy, everywhere we expect this filth to rear its swollen tumescent head. Any time J. Random Horny Geek feels in need of a little, uh, code break, he simply double-clicks the SMUTI@Home icon in his system tray/ GNOME bar/ whatever, and the SMUTI@Home servers will send him a dozen or so suspect images, which he votes upon. Anybody wishing to prevent their young 'uns perusing this sort of smut can nominate a SMUTI@Home server as a blocking proxy.
What a splendid system! The horny geeks are guaranteed a flood of images, saving them the irritation of having to go look for them, while the Moral Majority can rest assured that the images their kids are downloading are being vetted by real humans (or, at least, geeks), and not some faceless, Godless, and probably useless AI bot. One more way in which the Open Source community enriches the world!
What a load.
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
I disagree. This isn't going to work very well... most of the pr0n on the Net is of Asian women anyway.
Refrag
I have a website. It's about Macs.
well, if you are a doctor, better get all the image archives you need mirrored locally pronto.
and if you just collect porn, better start downloading more of it faster soon.
i liked the internet much more before companies got involved.
This is a FRIGHTENING bit of news.
The thought that ISPs could 'vchip' content is unnerving, and ripe for abuse.
God forbid we act as parents for our chilren, no...
we should just invent 'safe' boxes to sit them in front of for 18 to 20.
semantics are everything!
methinks he might have wanted to think things through a bit before posting :)
~ppppppppö
Based on what I know, it seems that most online porn is of "white folk", although that is by no means the rule. If they happen to use enough different "skin tone" ranges to cover the many different skin tones real people have, that would certainly explain all of the pictures that this censorware erroneously blocks.
In the other case, I suppose non-whites could be pleased that they don't have to be the subject of all this useless nonsese. There is always a way to get around such things. Weak encryption comes to mind, as well as color-shifting -- although it seems that the software is triggered by all sorts of images, so it would probably pick those up, too.
People just need to chill out. What's a workplace without the requisite porn, pirated music, and Quake 3 Deathmatches anyway?
my monitor is the same color as skin. would it block sonys web page?
Well, then, what about all those images depicting women in lingerie, where the lingerie has moved from the parts it usually covers. This suitably disrupts the continuous blobs of 'skin tone' while fully (or at least partly) exposing strategic body parts, thus passing the blocking software. But this sort of picture content represents the vast majority of porn out there, since lingerie is thought to spice up the image.
What I want to see is an image filter that will filter out the clothing.
134340: I am not a number. I am a free planet!
And what about Apuleius' novel "The Golden Ass"?
--Hikari
--Hikari
"Long distance information/ Disconnect me if you can/ On Detonation Boulevard..."
White marble? So is goth porn.
--Hikari
--Hikari
"Long distance information/ Disconnect me if you can/ On Detonation Boulevard..."
Shine on, you crazy diamond.
If there were a filtering proxy service you could use that would recolor the images, and a lens you could hold in front of the computer monitor to see the corrected color, you could avoid any color-based stuff like this :)
A Netscape plug-in would be just the ticket!
--
You think being a MIB is all voodoo mind control? You should see the paperwork!
A man who wants nothing is invincible
So, what does "excessive skin tone" really mean.
is it like a percentage of the picture with certain pixel colors? Well how would it be able to distinguish between a naked chick with a lot of background and a picture of someone's tattoo on their arm.
Now if they can design an algorithm to analyze a picture to tell exactly what part of the body it is... then i'd be impressed. This just seems like just another ploy to make money on something that doesn't really work that great.
What picture types will it protect against, how about movies and PDF? What if site admins just adjust the color slightly, to get out of the skin color definition. This software definitely would need a lot of work.
We have counties named Essex, and Sussex and historically though still used Middlesex and Wessex. Woops!
Award this sysadmin the BOFH award - Baldrick Operator From Hell (I have a cunning plan!).
I worked somewhere where a commercial filter the clowns into our system stopped access to well-known pron sites such as www.novell.com.
Maybe our definition of obscenity is the problem.
Hm... Yeah, perhaps. But this quote from the first link: :( On the off chance that eyeguard does not work like the above, consider it a free business idea and start hacking. You might get rich! ;^)
Once installed on a single PC or across a network, the antiporn software known as eyeguard is activated each time an image is displayed
Makes me speculate that eyeguard actually hooks into the operating system itself, so that it sits somewhere in the code that displays bitmaps on screen (on Win32, that'd be inside GDI, right?). If so, then most of the above techniques won't work very well, unless you can "counter-hook" those API calls, so that eyeguard sees an altered version of the image, then calls the original OS entry to display that, but actually ends up in your anti-blocker which turns the image back to normal and displays it. I suspect that it would be fairly easy for eyeguard to protect itself from calling a "false" original entrypoint, though... Hm, this is pretty close to some serious cyberwarfare. The lengths some people go to control each other... *Shrug*
main(O){10<putchar(4^--O?77-(15&5128 >>4*O):10)&&main(2+O);}
Does any remember the Bloom County strip where Oliver puts on a band-aid--on his black skin and Milo says "convenient flesh tone"?
Which color(s) exactly does this software block? Human skins varies from near-white to near-black (esp in a photograph).
Are they going to add new skin tones based on "popularity"? And if so, does that mean when I view so-called "inter-racial" pics, I'm going to see a black man apparently humping a blank space?
And of course, workarounds spring immediately to mind: Use gimp or photoshop scripts to automatically transform skin to purple and distribute a viewer that transforms back.
And let's don't even get into the perfectly valid images this will block (like closeups of non-porn humans), medical sites (esp dermatology), etc.
--
Compaq dropping MAILWorks?
Linux MAPI Server!
http://www.openone.com/software/MailOne/
(Exchange Migration HOWTO coming soon)
I stand corrected. That was Serrano.
:)
I get my avant-garde confused sometimes.
-- What you do today will cost you a day of your life.
This stuff was reviewed by Maximum PC a couple of months ago, and it works, BUT.... It can't tell the difference between skimpy swimwear and nudity, and it scores a big fat zero on hentai and other adult anime/cartoons. I think we need two internets, one for business and the politicians and one for normal people.
This might be a good way to filter out unwanted banner ads. Some banner ads are good, as they provide income to the maintainer of the website, so we shouldn't filter out everything, but when I'm looking for information on, say, the standard template library, I shouldn't have to look at banner ads that have body parts thrown about. Yes, I have had this happen before.
It would be nice to have the option of not filtering. I disagree with total censorship. But when it comes to be or my kids (later in life, hopefully), I don't want to have to worry about whether a search on "leather balls" will come up with something I don't want to be tempted with. Not that girls sticking beer bottles in weird places is all that tempting, but I should also have the option of being able to read through a page without being disgusted out of my mind.
And people wonder why I disable auto-load images in Netscape.
I don't know why I always come up with solutions for porn stopping programs so easily (motivation?), but all internet sites would really have to do is make a script-fu program to rotate the palette, make a negative of the image, etc. Am I right?
A more scientific version of this was reported a while back - Margaret Fleck and David Forsyth did work at Berkeley and Iowa in about 1996 that finds naked people or horses using descriptions of shapes of bodies. Wired Article.
This slashdot story doesn't appear to be related to it.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Basically if we can find other reasons for prosecuting what we now call slander or the "fire!" thing, I'd be OK with it.
Basically, it's illegal because it involves hurting someone. Your rights end where mine begin and all that. I can't publically tell lies about you since that hurts you. Someone yelling "fire" in a theater (why is it always a theater?) endangers the people in the theater by causing a stampede.
Also, the point could be made that there is a difference between "speech" and mere words. To call something speech implies content. Criticizing the government is speech. "Fire" is just a word. "Fuck" is just a word. And restricting their use in certain situations isn't really restricting speech.
-Dorsey
-Dorsey
If you can't beat them, exploit them. *Then* beat them... -Milk & Cheese
Does that mean I'm gonna be able to see more of those kinky blue chicks from Star Trek naked? Woohoo!
Don't trust a bull's horn, a doberman's tooth, a runaway horse or me.
This is kind of funny because I had a friend who had a great idea. He was a CS PHd and was thinking of developing an image compression technique that would be optimized for skin tone colors. So all porn images would be very small and load faster. He was going to use the .xxx extension for this wonderful image type.
Hmm, I wonder if this would censor the
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You are in a twisty little maze of open source licenses, all different.
Gotta love metallic "flesh" tones ;)
Stay up hacking each weekend. Sleep is for the week.
It's not funny till someone gets hurt.
The detection methods would be so easy to fool...
1) Image-maipulation approaches - You might try "inverting" all the colors in the image. The unnatural colors would probably fool the routines.
2)Photographic-approaches - Black and White Photos. Siloettes. Backlighting. Shear clothing. Colored lighing. Odd poses. Image Cropping.
3)Web-authoring approaches - excessive image slicing so many small photos make up a larger image.
I hope they make this software work. I'm skeptical, but hey, if it works I never have to see a fully clothed picture again. It can go find all the porn for me, saving valuable time!
What we need is to PAY PEOPLE to look for porn, download it, submit it to a database where it's cataloged with it's MD4 signature, and then the filter can just filter out those files that match.
I volunteer for this job! (as long as I can make copies of what I download for my own personal, um, research.)
If it ain't broke, fix it 'til it is!
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Anon Coward wrote:
Franklin and Linus were drawing with crayons and Franklin asks for the "Flesh" colored crayon. Linus hands him this peach colored crayon and ends with Franklin looking puzzled.
Yup. Crayola has changed the names of several colors over the years. In 1958, the name "Prussian Blue" was changed to "Midnight Blue". Apparently, it was perceived as somehow "Russian" at the height of the Cold War; in fact, Prussia was a German-speaking region of the Baltic coast that is mostly now part of Poland. Speaking as someone who's ethnically Prussian, I'm disappointed.
Second was "Flesh", which in 1962 was changed to "Peach", in recognition that there may actually be more than one flesh tone. (Later, Binney & Smith came out with a whole pack of skin-tone crayons.)
Finally, in 1999, "Indian Red" was changed to "Chestnut", probably because too many people wrongly associated it with the supposed "red skin" of Native Americans. In fact, the name refers to India and has nothing to do with flesh tones. Still, this is probably better than attaching a paragraph of explanatory text to the crayon.
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lake effect weblog
{Network engineer in Chicago--looking for work!}
Also, aside from that, if someone is one the Internet doing something legitimate and the software has a false positive and disables the computer ((!) how stupid is that?!) then that worker is completely idled until the admin re-enables it, and is unable to complete the task regarding the "forbidden" (by software, not company policy) image until the admin can override that too (if that is possible without disabling the software entirely).
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
This is my take:
You may pursue happiness as long as it doesn't not impinge on the same pursuit of any other person. Now, of course this is very vague. But IMHO, at the point you yell "fire" in a crowded theater, or threaten to assasinate the president, etc., you are infringing upon the rights of other people to otherwise feel safe. You may actually be causing harm. You are disturbing the peace. Sure, this is all very vague, but there can be obvious exceptions, like the above. Intimidating somebody with physical harm, e.g., I'd say is not "free speech".
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
Excuse me? What right do you have to stop someone from operating a perfectly legitimite business?
Or are you just talking about how it could theoretically be done?
In that case:
I'm sure that the credit card firms would love to give up their profits on what could very well be the most profitable enterprise on the net.
I'm sorry, but your post makes absolutely no sense to me.
I did.
It's not a hoax: it's a stellar example of how businesses will develop a concept that's implemented poorly in an actual product, and then market that concept to idiots who aren't really thinking about what they're doing, but only trying to get some manager or vice-president-for-employee-control off their back...
v.p for employee-control: "Oh god! Some of our staff might be looking at pr0n when they should be working! DO SOMETHING!"
IS Lackey: "Yessir.. We'll get this software I read about that keeps anyone from looking at skin tones."
v.p.: "Excellent. That's why I keep you on here. Do it."
IS Lackey: "Consider it done, sir. My I lick your boots, now? umm.. Thank you, sir."
It's not a hoax.
It's some small company with no qualms about hypeing (sp?) a bogus product doing exactly that: hypeing a bogus product.
t_t_b
--
I'm on PJ's "enemies" list! Are you?
As for actually detecting porn, even after the skin-tone question is answered (block any significant amount of any shade of brown?) and the human body's full range of motion, and with the comprehension of the latest fetishes is adequately digitized, your AI still needs to know, for example, the difference between:
- a bunch of partially nude people engaged in a beach orgy
- a bunch of partially clothed (shorts, no shirts) guys piling on in a beach rugby game
So, of all the people who need censorware to keep porn off their computers, how many find it just spontaneously appearing? I know that www.whitehouse.com (or is it--
JADBP
I agree with your sentiments...but what about the limitations already on speech (yelling "fire" in a theater)? Does that single limitation mean we do not have free speech?
wait a sec, what's to prevent every pornsite from here to kansas to just start using ssl some other sort of 'secure' connection? surely this lamebrain software can't decypher that.
(just use 40-bit keys so all the pacific islanders can get their pr0n)
semantics are everything!
Still, GPL'd censorware is the right approach. Use crypto to encode the site list, but be extremely sure about which sites are being blocked. Wanton censorship, or biased censorship, is MUCH worse than no censorship.
And make sure that the source code is available on the computer.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
But I can imagine a program which tracks the average flesh tone score for pictures over time. If the moving average goes over a certain threshold then a dialog box pops up on the sysadmins screen telling him that Joe in cubicle 69 may be abusing company bandwidth, click here for a list of the suspicious URLs. Or, as it might be, sends an email to Junior's father. The key point is that this stuff can work as part of a monitoring system that uses human judgement for the final bit, rather than being a blocking solution.
Companies do have a legitimate need to monitor this stuff. Quite apart from the abuse of company resources, companies who allow employees to download and view sexually explicit materials can find themselves on the wrong end of a big discrimination lawsuit.
Paul.
You are lost in a twisty maze of little standards, all different.
Scunthorpe, North Linconshire.
All spelling mistakes are in my mind and are faithfully reproduced by my fingers
Since the Venus is marble, that shouldn't be detected as skin tones.
--
As a matter of fact, I am a lawyer. But I play an actor on TV.
Of course this filtering software is flawed; all filtering software made to date is flawed. What's the range of the skin tones they're searching for? If it's really a full range of skin tones, it's going to be barely distinguishable from a palate of earth tones. It won't differentiate between portraits and landscapes and kinky sex. Or, for that matter, between "art" and "porn" -- most people have different opinions about where one ends and the other begins.
On the other hand, this filtering software takes a shot of the "questionable" page and then has it screened by a human monitor . This is invaluable. Even subject to the whims of a human monitor, this is much better than a purely digital filter. The filtering technology is used to point the human monitor to spots that he should be concerned with, not to make the final decisions. (Which is good, coming back to how flawed the technology can be.)
This may not be good, but at least it's a step in a productive direction. I'm not one for censorship, but if people demand a product, it should at least be an effective one. Too many people are gung-ho about filters because filters make them feel better or more in control; they often don't even think about how effective the filter may or may not be.
Do something about world hunger. Click here
When will people realize that anti-censoring measures do *NOT* work? If this thing proliferates to the point where online pr0n retailers are feeling it financially, you'll start seeing them offer encrypted pr0n images (the GIMP offers such a filter).
;-)
You'll then download this seeming random gibberish image and decrypt into an image of the luscious Ms. Portman in all her petrified glory!
That having been said, I think the reason is that any censorware, present or future, puts the decision of what is and is not appropriate for me or my kids into the hands of people who don't know me and don't share my values.
Open censorware (with open block lists) is a possible solution to this. This way, parents, who should be deciding what their children will see, can actually make real decisions, rather than have to abide by whatever decisions Mattel or whoever else makes for them.
It's just as wrong for a company to insist that my kids shouldn't see a certain site as it is for anti-censorware advocates to insist that my kids should be able to see anything. The right thing to do is to give parents the choice to make that call.
See RISKS for details.
Paul.
You are lost in a twisty maze of little standards, all different.
Has anyone combined this with a WWW spider? A great way to find more interesting web pages. ;)
When I sent this story in two days ago when I saw it on Salon, I wondered if this meant that fashion and art sites would end up being censored. Perhaps Salon is not as good a source as a company press release.....
Hey, you think your house is cool?
>> hypeing a bogus product.
Um, that's kinda what I meant when I used the word "hoax."
Yay so when the women are wearing high-heels it won't work
Sometimes I wish I had a baseball bat the size of Rhode island to beat the shit out of this world -Milk & Cheese
Anyone who uses the blink tag on their page should be criminally liable for it.
-
Ekapshi
BOSS: So, what is this suggested project?
DEVELOPER: Uh, we want to create a program which can determine if a picture is pornographic or not. I request the position of obtaining test pictures. I'll need the company VISA too.
BOSS: Sorry, that'll be my job. I'll be glad to help with that portion.
DEVELOPER: Yeah, but I have more... uh, experience, in, um, finding, er, them, uh, yeah.
SYS. ADMIN: We'll need more bandwidth for this project too, and I'll extended the capability of the web server on the alt.binaries.* and alt.sex.* news groups by 500%, OK?
BOSS: Approved! Now get to work, I've got some... research to do for this project.
DEVELOPER and SYS. ADMIN leave the office, and head back to their respective offices to obtain "test images." BOSS looses his belt, and...
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
Yeah, what about body painting or colored lights? What about black and white photos?
Put it this way: imagine I'm (say) 10-15 years older, and with primary school age kids. Chances are, they're going to want to play with this Internet thing, just like we watched TV at that age. Now, do I want to have to say they can only surf whenever I'm watching over their shoulders? Of course not - that's ridiculously laborious and clearly impractical.
When we watched TV, it was all thoroughly PG cartoons and sitcoms. Gov't regulation was in place to limit the violence and sexual imagery. Consequently, the TV-as-babysitter concept actually worked for a while. Now, with the proliferation of video games and the Internet, the violence and sexual imagery are coming back into Kid-Space, and its harder to block it out.
As a parent, you have two options: 1) Do to the Net what we did to TV (it's already happening), 2) Give up the TV-as-babysitter and take responsibility for every sight, sound, and printed word that the kids see.
Clearly impractical? How so? Don't buy games you wouldn't want the kids to play, and play before you buy. Inform their friends' parents of your preferences. Let the kids know that the computer is strictly off limits unless you're with them, or better yet do their browsing for them and deliver hard-copy. They don't need to surf anyway; all that's out there is the same pap that's on the already-censored TV.
--Threed
The Slashdot Sig Virus was foiled before it could spread.
This technology should be turned around into a search engine for porn. then with some crafty open source hacking some bright sparks could make a kind of napster but for porno sites. someone could even set up a porno equivalent to the cd database such that people could tag their images, thus simplifying searches. it sure would a) get al that filth off the web where adults can find it, b) force the porn industry to look elsewhere for their money and c) turn the whole world into one massive searchable distributed porn exchange. a seti at home for porn!
I used to have a better sig than this, but I got tired of it
Very true. :-)
The major problem I have with the censorship of sex-related stuff on the web is that quite often, the kids know more than the parents anyway. At least, they know what they hear from their peers. If parents were more responsible about providing their kids with accurate and honest information about sex, (and that includes EVERYTHING from puberty to masturbation to homosexuality) then kids would be less curious about 'that forbidden sex stuff online' and more likely to correct their friends' ignorance. Wouldn't it be great to know that when your 16 year old daughter goes out with her boyfriend, she knows all about STDs and date rape and contraception? The 'Bible thumpers' are only endangering their children by keeping them in the Dark.
Sorry for the rant...
The Divine Creatrix in a Mortal Shell that stays Crunchy in Milk
The House Between - Original Sci-Fi Series
Sorry I didn't know you went for animals.
Oh I didn't notice your nick.
Sorry again.
it says that it finds excessive flesh tones...which could mean any type of flesh, dark or light
plus i bet software like this sucks anyway, so it wont matter. And whats to stop this software from catching a user for having "porn" if he has a picture of someone in tan clothes, or someone in a swimsuit? I think this software is flawed enough...that it wont get big...so dont worry about it
"There is no there, there." ---William Gibson, on Cyberspace
Ok, I put up a mirror.
Mark Duell
AI is a research subject, and it might be tomorrow that a team comes up with an algorithm which reliably detects pornography (say, with a 99% success rate). The point is, "image-filtering AI" is not inherently fraudulent. The company making wild claims about software that doesn't work is.
Quite how the supposedly intelligent editorial of Slashdot can make such a simple and fatal semantic error is beyond me. These guys need meta-editorializing. They want to say "company bad" and instead they say "science bad".
--
It's a
-- Danny Vermin
I mean look at the yellow stone picture - :^)
bare rock, stiff pine trees pointing into
the sky, the wetness of the river washing the
rocks off.
BTW: how come wired didn't provide examples of
the images which passed the filter?
On the other hand, if they do include skintones from all races, then that's a lot of colours they're filtering.
In the case of the piece of software in question this would appear to be exactly the approach taken.
Hey! Hello world is _very_ useful. Which programmer hasn't used it to learn the beginning of a new programming language? Now?
----------------------------------------------
the pun is mightier than the sword
--
Here's my mirror
While the concept of pseudo-intelligent software trying to figure out what's depicted in an image is very interesting, it simply has nothing to gain from neural networks.
Surely it is quite possible to figure out if a picture depicts genitalia in most cases (excluding the cases where even human judgement is defeated), but I think it would be best applied by scanning small round areas iteratively like a spotlight, and trying to follow "interesting" trails until they can be identified. Once the image has been mapped and subdivided into physical elements, a second phase of the recognition could verify if indeed this is a human we're looking at, by analyzing the overall size of the "object" and checking the proportions/alignment of the individual areas. This is just typical visual recognition, the hard part comes when you consider the infinite angles and positions that the subject can assume.
A quick example: suppose the subject is facing away from the viewpoint on all fours (yeah I know, typical).. how will the software figure out if there is depiction of "bush" or just dark underwear ?
Image quality would also be of concern.. a blurry image would probably confuse the recognition engine, and overlaid text/graphics would be a serious problem. Not to mention the extreme cpu load for the entire process, repeated N times for all the images on a page.
It would probably be cheaper and faster to hire a few hundred gumbies and have them check all images manually (no pun intended).
-Billco
-Billco, Fnarg.com
Image recognition, refined enough to filter porn, will not be around for a VERY long time. I'm not that imaginitive, and I can easily picture all sorts of "unnatural" positions which an automated system would have a hard time recognizing as porn. :)
It will take an AI with the understanding of what "porn" means, with an appreciation for the human body's full range of motion, and with the comprehension of the latest fetishes - else National Geographic and CNN.com will find themselves filtered out of libraries and schools. After all, what is the difference between an image of a 'man riding a horse' and that of a 'man riding a horse'?
But the research being put into this sort of image recognition has an even seedier and more sinister side. It can/will filter based on LOGO. That's right.
Imagine Time-Warner/AOL being 'unable to connect' to sites which feature their competitor's logos.. Imagine ISPs who show Reebok ad banners suddenly disabling links to pages that display the Nike "swoosh". Imagine your favorite web-site suddenly not letting you click through to any other site that does not proudly wear a "VA" on it's 'sponsors' page.
And all this technology is being developed... (oh, say it with me) "In the name of the children!". BS - all the children I know would get a kick out of looking at porn, and are being damaged more by advertising than by sexual content.
Personally, I think we should assist in the development of this technology, and make sure that it only filters on Red Maple leaves on white backgrounds! Blame Canada!! Hooyah!
-- What you do today will cost you a day of your life.
On the other hand, if they do include skintones from all races, then that's a lot of colours they're filtering.
The statue is white marble. (not flesh toned)
Sculptor of the Venus De Milo is not DaVinci.
Now, If you said the painting "Birth of Venus" by Botticelli, then you would have a point!
Tom
Reality does not happen until you analyze the dots. -Don DeLillo (Underworld)
Say, has Nerve had its IPO yet?
I looked into the abyss, and the abyss looked into me--and we both winked.
Yeah, there's this independant testing lab, verifying our nano-cool neuronal rocket science algorithms, working with 99.8% reliability. The name ? No, that's really secret that the Rush Limbaugh institute for creative certification is the independent lab...
Nah, I've used it myself 30 or 60 days ago. I could only get to the dirty pickies at the XXXsmutshop after disabling our super software...
Wot ? An old version ? Hey we're into rocket science advancing our secret algorithm on a daily basis. Since it's so advanced we don't need version control, therefor we don't have a version that actually worked anymore. But trust me, I'm in the DOTCOM business...
Shheeeesh, that guy must have been straight out from twisted tongue marketing academy...
ich bin der musikant
mit taschenrechner in der hand
kraftwerk
All the AI hot air is just that - the only new thing about this is how they run it: it reroutes your traffic through their own server (see Wired article), so I imagine instead of going out and purchasing a program, you could just pay for monthly access to their service. A little more convenient, if you don't have the time to talk to your kids about anything important and just want to keep them ignorant.
I just took an image processing course and the professor was one of the leading researchers in the field of image compression. One of the technologies we covered was edge detection, and the use of edge extraction for catagorising images.
.
Frankly, you can tell whether an image has lots of straight lines, distribution of directions of the lines, find the average direction of the lines, and standard deviation from that average... This gives you a siganture that can be used to find similar images and descern between natural scenes and scenes with artificial constructs. And of course I'm sure these folks are using more advanced statistical anylsis than that... But, from what I've seen, it's chasing a cat with a blindfold on. As for the value of colour histograms? I think that points been made.
.
Processing power? Yes. This is not realtime technology for the masses.
.
If these folks could do this at all well, don't you think the AI folks would have put something better than Abio on the table? Ahh, those crazy VCs.
-- http://thegirlorthecar.com funny dating game for guys
There's a simple solution for getting rid of most of the Porn on the 'net.
Get a legal precedent started that absolves people from responsiblity for paying for access to porn websites. If credit card firms were allowed to simply refuse payment to porn vendors, they'd disappear in a matter of weeks.
Don't try to stop people from accessing the sites, just make it impossible for the site owners to collect from said people. There are very few non-pay sites on the web, and actual special interest groups like the BDSM people who hang out on various Usenet groups do have legitimate free speech issues to raise. Most of them would be glad to see the commercial website spammers eliminated from their newsfeeds.
Wow. This is one time I'm actually glad that I have a thing for albinos.
k.
p.s.: Not you, Nick. You lack the proper topology.
--
"In spite of everything, I still believe that people
are really good at heart." - Anne Frank
"In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart." - Anne Frank
Of football supporters discussing Arsenal.
Imagine being the one that gets^H^H^Hhas to surf through all the images after they are tagged.
"Hmm, lets see. Yes this one is nudity, I will save you for later..."
Imagine if software like this was possible, when installed on a computer it could hook into your OS and every time you looked at Natalie Portman's lashes hooters it would put a red rectangle over the most important places on her body - her head and her feet!
You can't handle the truth.
Well, yes. It appears to be some sort of aesthetic given that white people are in porn. Perhaps a lot of it comes from America where the census puts whites at 70-80% of the population. Or perhaps idiots post messages on usenet that say "don't post ugly n*gger b*tches!" to intimidate the posting of only whites. There seems to be a problem here, but it's most likely that white women/men have higher opinions and half the magazines contain whites. Go figure.
Lowmag.net
Why?
All in all, it comes back to what I've always said about these types of system. Give someone freedom to filter, ALL ON THEIR OWN, and they'll probably do so. Everyone, however "liberal", has something they just don't want to spend the time with. And that's OK! That's GOOD! But the definition of OK cannot come from outside, it has to come from inside.
As for parents of kids, same sort of thing applies. When you pick a meal to cook, do you select out of the cook book(s), or cook everything in them, all at once? You select! Ergo, being able to select out of a range of databases (eg: your own personal filters, the school's database, the databases built by the various clubs & societies the kids belong to, etc, ad nausium), makes MUCH more sense than blindly following one database built around the fiction of one-size-fits-all.
Yes, it takes more time. But in the end, you will ALWAYS have a trade-off. The easy and generic routes are INVARIABLY harmful in the long term. You can become a cabbage-patch human, and live in Number 6's Village for all eternity, or you can put some effort in and live as a human being, instead. This doesn't mean being "rebellious" - if you rebel for the sake of defying what someone else says, your brain is as much a rotten cabbage as the obsessive conformist.
Getting back to this censorware, it's market is that of the obsessive conformist, and the most vocal critics (in the media) are the obsessive rebels. It's a symbiotic relationship made in hell. The more extreme one group gets, the more it feeds the other. Don't you think the makers knew it would be controversial? Of course they did! They are counting on it! The more attention it gets, the more free advertising, the more money they make and the more brownie-points they can give themselves.
The media critics are the same. Without products like this, there's nothing to vent about, and therefore no reason for anyone to read their articles, and therefore no reason for anyone to keep them employed. They don't want their "enemies" to go away, because they're the ones who justify the pay-cheque.
IMHO, whilst the Extreme Wing and the Press are "best of enemies", there's no place for sanity in the world. Who needs it, when you've a symbiotic, self-perpetuating feeding-frenzy?
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
The good:
I think slashdot needs a solid color gif of just a skin tone color for it's new cencorship icon.
The next site to slashdot will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and start slashdotting it early!
Is why you would need to look at pr0n in a public library? Just because your tax dollars fund the library doesn't give you the right to set up a warez distro or download large amounts of pr0n.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
> there were a lot of things that looked like skin to it. Especially light colored woodwork.
Well, it's a good thing my kids won't be seeing lurid pictures of rigid, hard... wood. Heh. wood.
The irony here is way too good.
-Grendel Drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
The whole idea is extremely absurd.
How is software going to determine what is pornography if the courts can't come up with a good definition of it?
No to be nikpick, the cardinals and archbishops had a lot more fun (read: mistresses) than their later colleages in the high renaissance period.
/_____\. .......|
If you are interesting in Michelangelo's biography, I recommand The World of Michealangelo from the Time-Life series.
VY
vvvvvvv../|__/|
...I../O,O....|
...I./
..J|/^.^.^ \..|.._//|
...|^.^.^.^.|W|./oo.|
I don't see why you should be opposed to filtering software. After all, it is just a way to let people choose automatically what they want themselves and their dependents/customers to see.
I don't oppose the sale of filtering software. I think it's a silly, even stupid way to "raise" a child, but I'm all for allowing people to use it if they so choose.
I'm opposed to mandated filtering. I am also opposed to the anti-child hysteria that's whipped up every time some politician wants to push his agenda. And I'm really opposed to manipulating that hysteria to run what is essentially a patent-nostrum scam on an unsuspecting public.
-- Old Man Kensey
So, everyone remembers "chroma-key" (aka bluescreen, and the thing that makes weathermens' ties invisible.)
I always wanted to see them use "porno-key", the system which replaces any pornographic material with a calm mountain lake.
So, you'd have this giant, thrusting, penis-shaped calm mountain lake scene superimposed on an empty bedroom.
But it'd eliminate the pornography.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
What an obvious, but still obviously stupid idea! I've been doing image analysis for over 20 years, and this idea did not deserve a moment's consideration, much less venture capital.
Much "censorware" appears to fall in the catagory of "anyone who knew anything about the subject would not try". Resulting in the only organisations who try being those who are lacking in a clue.
Don't you want to filter the ones where she's *not* wearing the uniform? :)
Are you sure about '62? I thought it was rather recent.
That, and I wasn't born until a couple of years later, so I couldn't read the labels on my crayons until the late 60's, and my crayolas certainly had "flesh" as a color . . .
What about CATHOLIC school uniforms? ;-)
--
grappler
Vidi, Vici, Veni
Hmmmm.... I like porn. I enjoy looking at buck nekkid woman. I think it's quite healty actually. In fact I like looking at porn on the Internet. It's much safer, I don't have to drive my car to a seedy section of town and risk getting attacked by some down-on-his-luck criminal type. I don't have to worry about what my neighbors would think if they saw me walking around with the latest copy of "Lesbian Midgets". Yep... there ya go pally, I like porn and I like porn on the internet. In fact you should thank the porn industry because porn is driving the internet, just like it did with VCR's way back when. Yep, why do you think people bought those things????
So... if you're concerned about your children seeing porn then you should be a responsible parent and spend time with you're kids while they're on the net. Just like you do when they watch TV. You are a responsible parent aren't you???
And...yes...at some point in time your child is going to see a naked breast. Well listen up sparky, that was going to happen anyways so deal with it.
Oh the politicaly correct crowd is going to save us all.....sheesh
Censorship like this, as with all censorship, is culturally subjective. Obviously the Saudi Arabians have a different view of what is a socially acceptable amount of "skintone" for women than the frequenter of the beaches in the south of France does. Sure, maybe this software has a varying threshold of what skintones it will aloow throught the filter, but the bottom line is that many times the line between acceptable and not acceptable is so small that an algorithm would have a hard time (read: impossible) differenciating the two with any amount of accuracy.
OT: does this mean no more webcast Victoria's Secret shows?
----------
"From a programmers point of view, a user
is just a peripheral, that types when you
issue a 'read' command" - Peter Williams
This whole thing reminds me of an ancedote on image recognition using neural networks in the early 90's.
The military was developing a neural net to optically identify tanks hiding in brush and trees. They trained the net on photographs, and noticed exceptionally good performance. Then they tried a new set of photographs, and the success rate of the network suddenly fell flat.
It turned out that in the first set of photos, all the 'with tanks' pictures were taken on a sunny day, and all the 'no tank' pictures were taken on an overcast day. In the second photo set, this was reversed, and the network continued to correctly tell sunny and cloudy apart...
So I have to wonder what this new development holds in store. Will we be graced with filtering software which discriminates between gaudy, tacky motel room backgrounds rather than drunk co-eds on crack taking it in the ear? Will it be intelligent enough to tell if someone trims their hair, and is therefore a professional, versus those fat and hairy amateurs?
Hey, maybe it will finally be able to tell if the subject of the questionable photo is in fact "barely legal", or has the stretchmarks of a few litters of puppies to suggest the contrary.
Your point on skin color is well taken, and opens up the question: What does ALL porn have in common that can possibly be quantified and filtered? The answer, I'm afraid, is nothing at all.. One man's porn is another mans art.
Aside: I, for one, didn't consider the Maplethorpe photos to be obscene. They weren't artistic either. They were just 'for shock', to cause a furor, and get more attention through objection than through inherent value.
My strong suspicion is that whoever is behind this effort is a lot smarter than they seem at first glance. They are trying to bleed the "Religious Right" of money by getting 'upstanding' Bible-thumpers to fund this research - all the while knowing that it can not possibly be successful.
"Oh look, that girl is wearing a schoolgirl outfit - this is a porn pic, filter it!" -- so much for all the Brittney Spears fan pages..
-- What you do today will cost you a day of your life.
Of course there are several ways to defeat the program:
The best way to get rid of a stupid system is to think around it.
Wow, this article is some serious trollbait -- I'll bite!
Naked and petrified will live on, such as my creation for the /. trolls:
Natalie Portman naked and petrified.
Someone else created:
Signal 11 naked and petrified
and I wonder where they got the idea???
Young boys are always going to be able to get pictures of naked, not necessarily petrified women -- they're beautiful things, are they not? Didn't you ever stay up late to watch a "naughty" movie like Revenge of the Nerds or Porky's knowing that it would be an opportunity to catch a glimpse at some "hooters"? It's sad, but kinda funny, innit?
--
--
E2 IN2 IE?
I have the best solution to the Censorware problem, plus it'll make a lot of people very happy. First, in the rich, upper crust neighboroods, you advertise for realtime filtration of Bad Stuff to protect the whelplings. Next, you advertise in and around colleges such things as "Make Money Viewing Porn". You pay these students about $6.00/hour. Now you put all these students in front of computer terminals, and hook them up to heart monitors. Any time someone subscribing to the service wants to view a page, it's first shown to one of the random college students. Now, if their heart rate rises once they see the page, you know that the page should be filtered.
Marxism is the opiate of dumbasses
Lots of porno with red and blue body paint! JJ
This is a particularly disgusting (to me at least) instance of the "for the children!" canard. Now instead of politicians using it to achieve their aims, which is bad enough, we've got a company using it to bilk panicked consumers out of their money.
And of course, just as with the quality of our politicians, we Americans have only ourselves to thank for this. If people weren't so damn gullible, companies like this would never sell a dime of product (of course in this case it's questionable whether what they have constututes a "product", but the point stands...)
What's needed is people willing to stand up and say "Yes, damn it, I do support porn on the Internet, and the easy availability of information on things like bomb-making and lock-picking, and if you don't like the speech I support, TOUGH SHIT. You don't get to pick and choose. If you want free speech, you got it. If you don't want it, go start your own damn country and LEAVE MINE ALONE."
But what are the odds of that happening?
-- Old Man Kensey
All forms of naked women are to be filtered, except when their arms are missing, in which case it's Venus de Milo, and therefore a bona fide work of art.
:)
Clears the way for amputee fetishes, I think.
Boticcelli's Venus, the image of a naked woman coming out of the surf, that has been used as the box art for Adobe Illustrator (IIRC) would of course be flagged. She has nipples and a 'patch of hair', as do most nudes painted during that time period....
Hell, the Sistene Chapel ceiling is offensive, it shows Adam (naked youth) and God (Old man) touching fingers.... There's a bunch of naked little boy cherubs flouncing around them to boot. What horrific kinkiness!!
-- What you do today will cost you a day of your life.
Last week I attended a meeting in Santa Barbra and ran into one of the dudes coding for this place.
One planned enhancement for the software is configurability for the amount of *exposed flesh* shown before the engine kicks in and blocks the image. The idea is to have 'sliders' -- client-side java applets, I'm told -- on a admin/config page which would allow for a specific percentage of (for example) nipple. Once the network identifies the presence of nipple, the position of the configuration sliders determine if this presence is, in fact, pornographic or not pornographic.
My question to the dude I met was how does the program quantify 'pornography' in the first place? If the neural networks are scanning for flesh, then they must have some sort of way to contextualize and quantify porn. (Since the 'I know porn when i see it' definition can't possibly work in a programmatic environment.)
His response was interesting: he claimed that while he couldn't explain exactly how it was accomplished, he mentioned that several state governments are looking to extrope's definitions of a 'porn' image in order to settle various state and local pornographic cases throughout the country.
He explained that it will possible to dump out the specific 'porn' settings -- set by the sliders on the config page -- and generate a long list of what, according to the admin, constitutes porn: 63.5% exposed nipple, more than 72% bare (suntanned but not pale) flesh, the absence of either a shirt or pants [but the presence of black {but but not white} underwear], the presence of various objects in the room in which the photograph was taken (a smoking cigarette in an ashtry, for example; or a bottle of Dewar's scotch that looks as though it could have been inbibed by the photographic subject; one black high heeled pump turned on its side, pointing away from the camera but [an important distinction] *toward* the bed), and so on.
The difficulty, I was told, was derving an algorithm robust enough to exploit the neural networks but not tax it to its limit. (The employee was telling me that just a few hours ago successfully implemented the algorithm if the clothing on the subject in question was purchased from JC Penney's or from Victoria Secret.
"It was tough," he explained. "Victoria's Secret uses significantly smaller weaves in their nylon undergarments (hence the higher price for lingerie from VC as opposed to JC Penney's). Try getting a program to recognize a bra from VC, and you've got the holy grail of censorware!"
Would "Dick and Jane" be blocked as pornographic too?
--
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
ahhh... to early in the morning Am not thinking right... but you get the point.
--------========+++Dont Feed The Lab Techs+++========--------
How offensive! I think that erotic photos of trees mating should be censored!
Attention all planets of the Solar Federation! We have assumed control! - Neil Peart
You get to satisfy your porn addiction in peace, it would seem, assuming we postulate the narrow view of racial segregation in erotic desire (as if...).
"If one is really a superior person, the fact is likely to leak out without too much assistance" -- John Andrew Holmes
not to mention the fact that most of the "blondes" aren't really...
"Leave the gun, take the canoli."
this is just a placeholder till i send back my real sig from the future.
It's pretty humorous that for a bunch of people supposedly tech-savvy, you fail to understand that regular expressions can easily tell if a three or four letter pattern is bounded in whitespace or not.
/.
Naw, you're just carrying on to be cute, you couldn't be that clueless and hang out on
According to the Wired article, it's a proxy server setup for this software. It does the work on their servers (comparing it to their large database of images) and passes the "OK" images on to you.
I quote:
;)
Wired News tested BAIR by creating a Perl program to extract images randomly from an 87MB database of thousands of both pornographic and non-pornographic photographs. The program then assigned each of those images random numbers as file names.
...Do you suppose they could be convinced to open source that database? Quick, someone call ESR!
What would be more interesting is something that does analysis for gradients. I'm not sure how absolute this is, but in all the photography I've encountered (both studied and my own work), gradient of tonality accross skin is pretty unique. I don't mean absolute values that could be fooled by skin color, but the values of the colors relative to each other (due to reflectance values of skin and the limb effect of light falloff). Though this would not be able to take into account porn with dramatic, artistic lighting. Then again, it's not that I really need or want effective blocking software, but it would be interesting because something along those lines would be capable of determining.
Ah. That's just me being stuck in the old mind set of doing things, I guess. Nowadays, it's all done by proxy. ;^) Hm... I still think "my" way of doing it is cool, though.
main(O){10<putchar(4^--O?77-(15&5128 >>4*O):10)&&main(2+O);}
The solution then would be a computer that would simulate the stimulus/response patterns a horny raving sex addict. Then if it turns the 'droid on, block it. Heuristic programming would be trivial -- pipe in certain websites and a good chunk of Usenet's .alt hierarchy to yr handy neural net.
The spinoff value for teledildonics development is obvious. Sony announces Paibo the Pervbot.
__________
I guess we will now see some kind of very light scrambling built in image viewers akin to rot13 that will bypass those filters... (a reverse video for instance !)
a proliferation green martian alien pr0n
What about us black folk?
No, I am not trolling. This is seriously flawed. Not to mention stupid.
Hey,
it's a proxy server setup for this software
Couldn't the user circumvent this and any scanning for words by having a 128-bit SSL connection to thier porn provider?
I think it would work... an I missing something really big here?
Michael Tandy
"Goodness me, how unlike the FBI to abuse the trust of the American public." -- The Onion
Only joking, but for those of us using corporate HTTP proxies where the sysadmins look for 'abuse' of the network, we're going to get some strange looks after visiting a page called www.newswire.com.au/0006/porn.htm. Couldn't they have called the page something a bit more discreet?
I really hope you're trolling.
Not that I care if you are all for "sex for children," that just takes us back to the main issue at stake here. (besides, of course, the idea of crappy software being marketed to gullible consumers) Freedom of speech.
Someone said, waaaay back in the original thread, that that which is not specifically denied in the Constitution, is allowable to US citizens, and that any powers not specifically granted to the government are not valid. So they can't regulate what we like to look at, hear, create, etc.
So yeah sure, internet porn is good, great, grand, wonderful, and shouldn't be regulated in this way.
But what the "good grief" AC probably was referring to was adult-to-child porn... as in, the exploitation of very young children who may or may not have had a choice. Thus their freedoms were violated, in which case free speech has no bearing, as the rights of another were impinged upon, and/or that individual was harmed in some way. Think in terms of libel and slander, as much less extreme examples of the same idea. (again, see the really insightful posts farther up)
-k-
~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ *
1984 wasn't just a book..it was a warning --from a post by Lughlamfainn
If you post a hyperlink to a page that has a phone number on it, and when you call that number, you get a URL to another page that has nothing on it except <blink>I'm going to assassinate the president!</blink>, are you criminally liable?
"Beware he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he deems himself your master."
my website showing hot venusian love goddesses.
Orion slave girls
Being green, can still be seen
Pike says: Make it so!
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You are in a twisty little maze of open source licenses, all different.
Do I want to censor those images? =P
I remember a news report from a few years ago that Brigham Young University had implemented similar technology to monitor hits on pornography sites. Whether that was true, or simply an urban legend, I have no idea.
...I played with your pics
I made you belive
I'm blocking out porn...
Not just Baby One More Time, probably any Britney Spears picture will be banned, just look at what she wears in any publicity shot (and she wonders why people think of her as a sex object...)
Definitely not appropriate for kids.
Warning: The above is sarcastic if you didn't get that.
-Shroom
This happened at a place I once worked. All of a sudden, we couldn't (for instance) look up the words: they also added "young," "adult," and other words to the list...
keep in mind that this wasn't looking just in the domain name for the string, but in the entire URL.
At any rate, this sort of half-assed content filtering still doesn't replace mom or dad talking to Dick and Jane about the world and what's in it.
sig not found
Posted by 11223:
...of a dilbert strip (I'm looking for the link) where Dilber invents a device that detects naked bodies and tries it out on a teenager - wanders away and hears the kid's eyes popping (obviously because the device failed and he found it anyway). Besides, the porn industry is smart - they can defeat any kind of protection.
By swapping around the JPG color channels on a global scale (for a large country where the censors won) all those soft round fleshy smooth pinks would not trip the tan/pink AI censor.
Then by swapping the monitors RGB drive ( VERY easy if its BNC connectors) anyone could view the spread eagles in the correct color scheme!
BUT: If I EVER THINK I may have to get out my diagonal cutters over anything like this, there are going to be lots of other wires and things that are gonna get FIXED first.
Sheesh...
Joe Torre - X - HardwareEngineer @ Amiga Inc & ZapMedia Amiga, AmigaDE, BeOS, Linuxz, QNX, Rebol, Windoze, ZME: So
Seen on ZDNet:
t ure/169aa/dig_cam_fea_169aa_inli ne13.jpg
http://equip.zdnet.com/digitalimaging/cameras/fea
With this software in place I know I would be out of a job.
Get your own Red Swingline Stapler
This is of no suprise to me, this is something I had planned to do by use of a neural net. You could teach a software neural network to learn particular patterns involving curves of a human body and amounts of similar color found on that body. It would be more difficult as you would have to match it to a known sample of the skin (which would be commonly found on the face, but of course if they wore a mask, body paint, or...if the location for which you took the constant to be found was obscured it would make it tough. The other problem was to be able to train the network not to overtrain the net so that it would exclude to a certain pattern of bodies, and not those with more weight, hair, and such. The other problems I could see with this would be understanding how to have the net read from the different image types that a browser can understand. This means you would have to write a translator to a particular type of image format so the net could read it (to make it simple). Then there is that whole issue of trying to read video streams, but I don't think that would be a problem as you could sample each frame presented and run it through a filter...but man would that take a long time. I guess though for people who feel that strongly they could be lazy enough to let the neural net scan it vs. them taking a quick preview.
There are many packages out there that allow one to create a neural network, and really nice free ones such as SNNS, which is really cool because when you get done making your neural net, it will generate your network in C code. I would love to work on this with someone. I think it would be alot of fun.
Hasues
futang futang!
The range of human skin color isn't really all that wide.
You take burnt sienna (that's a type of brown) and mix in varying quantities of black and white. Sometimes you need just a trace of red or yellow to fine-tune the color, but almost all human skin colors, regardless of race, are mostly burnt sienna and white.
The range is amazingly small when you sit down and work with it.
Our secret is gamma-irradiated cow manure
Mitsubishi ad
We apologize for the inconvenience.
Many phallic trees : Yellowstone
Naughty Areas : Snoopy
Genitalia : Dogs
More phalluses : vegetables
I, for one, will use this software to protect myself from all this obscenity I hadn't noticed before.
My filter blocks 100% of pornographic images, requires little power, and is compatible with all POTS modem connections. I am working on repacking this hardware filter for DSL and cable modem users.
It consists of a 1 megaohm resister placed inline with each of the signal wires...
Interested venture capitalists, please send checks made out to CASH, thank-you!
It has a slight overblocking problem, but we are working on this issue...
"Flame away, I wear asbestos underwear"
Surely there is enough porn on the internet that 5% of it would be enough to satisfy even the most perverted of 15 year olds.
Also this seems to not make the distinction between nudity and porn. Certainly in America the two are interchangable but i've never seen it that way.
An algorithm like this may be able to filter a lot of stuff off the web. But it will filter a lot of other stuff too. I can also think of 100 ways to fool it. The easiest being put images through a color filter before posting them, or post them in black and white. Other people have pointed out that it will filter portraits and other shots of humans that arn't porn.
The specific product in question considers the Windows 3D text screensaver to be "skin tones" as well as sunsets.
The algorithms involved don't appeat to be very good at actually recognising "skin tones". Also they are proprietary, rather than carrying the name of some noted AI researcher.
Of course the companies that are just playing PR games and the like (and this one sounds like one of them) are bad.
I guess I just believe that parents should be able to raise their kids the way they see fit and should probably have some help in internet filtration if they want it
Of course as someone else said, if the software is 95% or even 99% accurate, that 1% or 5% is still an awful lot of content.
Vote Quimby.
I saw software similar to this a while ago (sorry, can't remember the name or anything), but what they did to detect was to look for a large "blobs" of a skin tone (white, black, tan, etc.) and then did some computations to determine what it was. They could "detect" a torso with legs and arms coming out even if they were crossed. So if someone had a bikini on, the blob wouldn't be continuous, and therefore not something naked. So if you add this algorithm with the other it might be pretty good.
Disclaimer: This information might be wrong, it was a while ago that I saw it.
That's the beauty of this thing (from a rather draconian management point of view anyway), it doesn't have to do a very good job, it just has to work well enough to intimidate the employees enough that they don't dare visit any sites without a really good reason. Viola! You've eliminated recreational use of the Internet at your company!
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
on Win32, that'd be inside GDI, right
Impossible. If that would be done (hooking BitBlt etc.) _every_ Bitmap-Copy would have to be checked which includes double-buffering etc. The System would be unbearable slow. So they probably only hook in IE
Ok... Say Im Studying the Venus DiMilo(Spelling) Is it gonna classify that as Porn considering its a Statue by that DaVinci Guy of a topless woman with no arms (I do not claim to know anything about this statue.. thats from memory..If facts are wrong boohooo its the point that matters)
--------========+++Dont Feed The Lab Techs+++========--------
The lengths to which some people will go to "protect" their children from information that they are seeking is incredible. It is unfathomable to me that this is even necessary. Nude pictures do not just appear in the absence of any context! What type of pornographic web site would this image-recognition algorithm block, that a simple text-parsing engine would not.
Maybe this is going to be used to protect children from the "flesh tones" that are part of the color scheme on a liberal web site. Go figure.
ByteMyCode.com: A Web 2.0 code sharing community.
I think that I am going to start a comic strip about pink little bunnies. Yes, they will be very large, flesh toned, round fat little bunnies, with bright pink bellybuttons, big round ears with sort of black hair in between, maybe a couple of mohawks. Red and blonde hair on a few. Big loving eyes, with red pupils.
Hrmm, this software probably works great already .
Next, I think that I'll do a photo spread on fields of wheat.
(Before you mod this down, read what I wrote, it's a joke about the heuristic).
Eh...
Well, there are a few ways to avoid this filtering technology.
.asdf is the new extension for JPGs, what can it do?
One involves the pads about which we learned yesterday. Those pads could be everyone's ticket around broken filtering.
Or, better yet, a local proxy server using those pads. Encryption, however, really is the only way around it -- or disguising other filetypes as images.
After all, if it doesn't realize that
Censorship is inherently broken. Have a look at www.peacefire.org.
|/usr/games/fortune
I can tell you one thing for certain: If I had a program that could go through the web and find pages that are almost certainly pornographic content, I wouldn't be censoring them ;)
Porn search engine, anyone?
-Denor
Or anything else that has a medical spin on dermatology. OR tattoos for that matter.
Hey, a guy could make money from reversing this type of program to add flesh tones where there is an extraordinary LACK of skintones...:o)
Then you could set up a search engine to dig through images, and add these skin tones, and display the results!
I'm gonna be rich!
regards.
"If voting could really change things, it would be illegal. " - Revolution Books, NY
But, of course, most of the test images would have to be non-pornographic so that they could check for false positives.
"Unlike most Internet filters, which search for keywords like 'sex', eyeguard checks for "excessive skin tones"."
What kind of skin tone? Caucasian? Negroid? Middle Eastern? Asian?
What if the image is black-and-white? What if it's been scanned and diddled-with too many times and the color balance is all off?
And excessive? What? What's going to happen to a site like www.speedo.com or www.jantzen.com?
(Hint: they're both swimwear...)
"Each time a suspect image is detected, the program will alert an office supervisor."
For christ's sake: what has to happen here is two things:
- the self-righteous minority of christian moral absolutists has got to lose its fear of the naked human body
- and fucking idiot supervisors and managers have got to establish serious web-use policies for their staff and enforce them
In my experience it's the supervisors themselves, and their pet lackeys, who are doing a whole lot of inappropriate surfing while at work.t_t_b
--
I'm on PJ's "enemies" list! Are you?
The sorts of images that would not be dealt with correctly;
1. People in swimsuits.
2. People doing nasty things, but wearing "fetish atire."
3. People doing nasty things with Members Of Other Species. (Animals, ICK!)
4. Wresting (Including Sumo.)
5. Sunsets. (Some of them have a lot of "flesh tones" in them.
6. Manipulated images with a slighly more blue color temperature.
7. Medical images.
8. Fine art.
9. Bodybuilding pictures. (see: swimsuits)
What an obvious, but still obviously stupid idea! I've been doing image analysis for over 20 years, and this idea did not deserve a moment's consideration, much less venture capital.
Dog is my co-pilot.
Excessive amount of flesh tone cause this filter to check in. Sounds like a chubby people filter to me ;)
If they truly believed that all images are of
>blond-haired, blue-eyed people
They're going about it all wrong. They could just block aryanporn.com.
Devil Ducky
Devil Ducky
MY peers would get out of jury duty.
Hmmm. According to this Wired story the technology blocks everything but smut.
This could be useful for people who don't want to see their porn cluttered with non-pornographic images on the same page. That stuff could be distracting!
I'm pretty sure software can't recognize porn, whatever the definition is.
But as an enterprise that forbids their employees to watch porn material, why not move a copy of each image file that comes over the network in a separate directory, also storing which computer requested it at what time.
I think it's sufficient to tell the employees that this is done and the 'image cache' browsed by a person on a regular basis.
What's is the point of filter and censorware? Wouldn't it be better just to have a simple logging program? Then mom and dad could check the log and have a talk with junior about the pr0n site he went to. The whole 'stop it before it starts' mentality of filters is stupid since seeing a nakie picture isn't going to kill anyone. It'd also be better because: 1) Knowing that you're being logged and that there's no way around is a more effective deterant for kids. 2) You wouldn't accidently be blocking sites. 3) The choice of banning sites(yelling at junior) would be at the discretion of the parents. anyways thats just my .02
Geez, gang. Everybody here is hyped up with the usual arguments against censorware. Some folks are taking this seriously, talking about the theory and the programming of it.
Read the damned Wired article. They report that the results are essentially random. They report that the company won't release the software, even under NDA. They report that the company claims that it was tested by an external lab, but won't name the lab.
This isn't a story about censorware, it's a story about an apparent hoax.
If there were a filtering proxy service you :)
could use that would recolor the images,
and a lens you could hold in front of the computer
monitor to see the corrected color, you could
avoid any color-based stuff like this
For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
- color index remapping. Write a trivial piece of program that swaps color indexes around. Even a simple color inversion would do.
- rename jpg files to something else.
- FFT's the images.
- uuencode/decode into ASCII files.
- encryption/steganography.
In other words, the software only catches stupid people viewing porn. It drives the smart people who view these things into inventing all sorts technologically interesting stuff. Thanks!!The professor suggested that we start with skin tones. He pointed us to research that tried to pick out the parts of the spectrum considered "skin tone". There were some simple algorithms that were suggested. We did this and it worked decently well, but there were a lot of things that looked like skin to it. Especially light colored woodwork.
An algorithm like this may be able to filter a lot of stuff off the web. But it will filter a lot of other stuff too. I can also think of 100 ways to fool it. The easiest being put images through a color filter before posting them, or post them in black and white. Other people have pointed out that it will filter portraits and other shots of humans that arn't porn.
... can detect excessive skintones
so i finally can filter out images of zit-covered, pubescent 15 year-olds?
Now censor this.
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Industrial space for lease in Flatlandia.