Slashdot Mirror
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
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
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/
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"?
... 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!
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
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?
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...
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?
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
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?
It's good to know that at least some good will come of this. :-)
Stay up hacking each weekend. Sleep is for the week.
"Black and White"
Jay (=
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!
Shine on, you crazy diamond.
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);}
I don't know how good their system is, but there is published research on this sort of thing. One of my former professors made a "naked people finder" that's based on finding cylinders in the picture and evaluating if they are skin tone, and if they make a reasonable human body. An interesting aspect is that bikini pictures are out, but maybe pictures that don't show caucasians are OK. For more info on finding naked people, see http://www.cs.hmc.edu/~fleck/naked.html
Walt
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.
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
Gotta love metallic "flesh" tones ;)
Stay up hacking each weekend. Sleep is for the week.
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?
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.
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.
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.
--
Here's my mirror
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.
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
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.
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)
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/
Don't you want to filter the ones where she's *not* wearing the uniform? :)
"Rant" nothing. It's just common sense.
We don't give 'the children' enough credit in seeking out information for themselves. They'll lear, whether we want them to or not - the only sensible thing to do is to tell them the truth.
Just as we tell them to 'be careful when driving', and 'don't speed'; we should also be telling them useful, practical information. "When making a left turn at an intersection, keep your wheels pointed straight - so if you get rear-ended, you will not be pushed into oncoming traffic." is the sort of common-sense knowledge which they need, and which we have (from experience) to give them.
Same goes for matters of sex. You may have different opinions than I but here's as good an example as any:
Rule #1: Whatever you do, I'll still love you because you are my child.
Rule #2: Don't hate or hit anyone just because they're different.
Rule #3: If someone hurts you, it isn't your fault - carry mace, just in case.
Rule #4: No means No!
Rule #5: Use a condom, whomever you do.
Rule #6: Your friends know as little as you do. If you don't know, ask me. If I don't know, we'll find out together.
You're far from 'ranting'. It's common sense - education is the key to solving most, if not all, of the world's problems. The worst thing we can to is stay silent while some self-appointed, holier-than-thou glory seeker defines a moral baseline for all of society (not just their own kids, unfortunatelly), including ourselves and our childern.
-- What you do today will cost you a day of your life.
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
--
Here's my mirror
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
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!"
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 about us black folk?
No, I am not trolling. This is seriously flawed. Not to mention stupid.
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?
Orion slave girls
Being green, can still be seen
Pike says: Make it so!
------
------
You are in a twisty little maze of open source licenses, all different.
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
Seen on ZDNet:
t ure/169aa/dig_cam_fea_169aa_inli ne13.jpg
http://equip.zdnet.com/digitalimaging/cameras/fea
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
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...
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
If you are the same color as your monitor you should get out more. That big yellow thing you see in pictures of the outside is called the sun. There is no reason to fear the sun, unless of course you spend a lot of time outside but staying off the 'net that long is just sick and unhealthy.
Devil Ducky
Devil Ducky
MY peers would get out of jury duty.
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.
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.
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.
- 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.
Now censor this.
--
Industrial space for lease in Flatlandia.