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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
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
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?
It's good to know that at least some good will come of this. :-)
Stay up hacking each weekend. Sleep is for the week.
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!
Maybe our definition of obscenity is the problem.
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.
Since the article specifically Refers to the Aussie situation (mandatory porn filtering by ISPs), here's what the final report of the Australian Government (National Office for the Information Economy) has to say about the weaknesses of this approach in their review of blocking technologies entitled
Access Prevention Techniques for Internet Content Filtering (Google cache) :
The quest to detect pornography is often more concerned with images than text and getting computers to recognise a pornographic image is equally, if not more, difficult than the task of distinguishing between erotica and other literature. There have been efforts to characterise pornographic pictures based on the amount of 'flesh tone' in the images and on the poses struck by the subjects. Computers have difficulty distinguishing between art and pornography, say between a Rubens painting and a Penthouse centrefold, and this approach is not generally regarded as being effective. Video and other streaming media further complicate the filtering task by supplying a constant flow of images to be examined for undesirable content.
Furthermore, they complain:
This approach is affected by the same issue as profile filtering in that an image - or a fair percentage of an image - needs to be loaded before it can be analysed, during which time it may be displayed on a user's screen..
Of course, this second problem only applies to an Aussie-type ISP restriction. Geocities did this years ago (don't know if they still do): scanning their own HDDs (Free user pages), deleting 'questionable graphics' (with or without human review) and waiting for the page authors to complain about any mistakes,
If you can go to bed, knowing you did a valuable thing today, you're very lucky. If you can't... it's not bedtime
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.
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.
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)
--
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.