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Artificial Intelligence At The COPA, COPA Commission
The Child Online Protection Act, passed late last year and then struck down early this year, is still under appeal. Colloquially it's known as "CDAII." Part of what the Act does is establish a Commission that meets every so often -- the Commission's website has details on its mandate and so on.
(Update, a few minutes later: make that "injunctified," or whatever one says for a law against which an injunction has been applied, instead of "struck down." Sorry; IANAL.)
Speaking at the Commission meeting yesterday and today were the CEOs of several major censorware companies. Among them was Michael Stephani, whose company Exotrope makes a product called BAIR.
BAIRBAIR checks images as they download onto your computer, and claims to be able to tell the difference between pornography and other types of images. The "AI" in its acronym stands for artificial intelligence, running on supercomputers.
When the Wired story on BAIR came out last month (a story "borrowed" from Peacefire -- I'm not going to get into it), Wired quoted the company as saying "they plan to fix the errors within the next month." What errors?
"BAIR incorrectly blocked photographs of Yellowstone, the Baltimore waterfront, Snoopy, boats, sunsets, dogs, vegetables and even a Wired News staff meeting.
"It rated as acceptable for minors -- even on the most restrictive setting -- explicit images of oral sex, anal sex, group sex, masturbation, and ejaculation."
That was one month ago. How's BAIR doing now?
Peacefire retested the same 50 pornographic images that they'd used last month (which presumably BAIR's programmers would have paid extra-special attention to). Their new report finds that, instead of zero, the number of blocked images is now: 34. I've got a great slogan for them: "now your children can only see 32% of the web's oral sex, anal sex, group sex, masturbation, and ejaculation."
One's respect for these programmers is dampened a little, though, because there's more to Peacefire's report. It seems, in a random sample of 50 photos of people's faces, BAIR blocked ... how many? ... 34.
Maybe that slogan should be: "now your children can only see 32% of the web," period.
It's wonderful to live in a world where artificial intelligence offers limitless possibilities. Its website suggests that "Because Artificial Intelligence can be taught to recognize a variety of patterns," -- oh, OK -- "our BAIR can be taught to evaluate other categories such as violence or illegal activities. The BAIR is currently undergoing training in these areas to provide additional filtration selections."
ClickSafeRichard Schwartz, CEO of ClickSafe, also spoke yesterday at the COPA Commission meeting. Just for kicks, Peacefire decided to try out their spiffy AI software too.
Insert marketblurb here: "...by combining cutting-edge graphic, word and phrase-recognition technology, ClickSafe has achieved accuracy rates of over 99% (according to recent sample tests). ClickSafe can precisely distinguish between appropriate and inappropriate sites (e.g. sites related to issues such as breast cancer will not be blocked)."
What Peacefire did was test this software against the website of the COPA Commission itself, and related sites such as those of speakers or Commission members. They found that blocked pages included:
- The Child Online Protection Act itself, in original and amended form;
- The COPA Commission FAQ;
- Biographies of Commission members Stephen Balkam and John Bastian;
- Bio of Commission member and famed anti-porn crusader Donna Rice Hughes, as well as AppendixA from her book Kids Online: Protecting Your Children in Cyberspace;
- A list of technologies the Commission examines;
- The scope of what the Commission is called upon to do;
- A service agreement from a little company called Network Solutions, whose rep chairs COPA's meetings;
- "About the ICRA" (the makers of RSACi, "a simple, yet effective rating system for web sites which both protected children and protected the rights of free speech");
- Bible study tools: "We hope these free resources foster a desire for Christians to learn more about the Bible, deepening their relationship with God" unless they're using censorware;
- The American Family Association (a conservative Christian group that is trying to force censorware into public libraries, including those surrounding the Slashdot Geek Compound);
- The ACLU, the EFF, and the Center for Democracy and Technology;
and so on.
When I spoke with Bennett about this, he commented that the strange thing was that these flaws are so easy to find; you'd think someone would have run these simple tests already. If anyone reading wants to get their name in Slashdot (and other news media too), censorware is a gold mine of untested misinformation. Buy a product, design a solid unbiased test for it, run the test, and send us what you find. Repeat until the whole world has a clue.
The COPA Commission MeetingThe following is an account of yesterday's COPA Commission meeting, by Waldo Jaquith. Keep in mind that this meeting's purpose, according to the Scope & Timeline Proposal which is blocked by ClickSafe, is to study filtering and blocking software to learn what to recommend in its report to Congress late this year.
Folks,
For more information on the COPA Commission, see http://www.copacommission.org/. (Unless your network has ClickSafe installed, in which case you shouldn't bother.) There is an agenda for this meeting, and there are bios for most people, as well as the prepared speeches for many of the below folks. I've tried to be objective.
Oh, screw that. There's nothing objective about it. But I've tried to give useful facts, quote accurately, etc.
The whole affair, which was scheduled to start at 9:30am, didn't actually start until 10:15am. Which was good, because I didn't get there until 9:45. Although the event was being held at the University of Richmond's Jepson Alumni Center, the room felt like your basic hotel meeting room. Bad carpet, ugly chairs, poor lighting. There were enough chairs to seat about 100 people, but only 35 people were in attendance. Directly in front of the two columns of chairs was a table with chairs, facing away from the audience. This table was for people asked to testify before the COPA Commission. On the other side of that table was a long table, at which was seated the commission, all sixteen members. The result was that the people testifying, who did most of the talking, could only be recognized by the backs of their heads by the audience.
Chairman Donald Telage called the meeting to order and introduced the first panel, who was to speak for approximately 45 minutes on the topic of client-side filters. This panel included Gordon Ross, the President and CEO of Net Nanny, Mark Smith, the President of BrowseSafe, Susan Getgood, the VP and General Manager of Cyber Patrol, and Richard Schwartz, the CEO of Opportunity-America (ClickSafe.com).
Gordon Ross kicked things off with a tremendously boring ten minute speech about how client-side filters work. The only interesting comment that he made was his belief that "consumers should have the ability to analyze each and every site in the database..." [...because his product Net Nanny is the only one of the 150 censorware packages on the market that allows oversight of its blacklist. -ed] He also kicked off the First Amendment references, which nearly every speaker throughout the day would spend some time talking about, but not really saying very much.
Mark Smith from BrowseSafe occupied the next few minutes, giving a rambling speech in which he discussed censorware as if it were some far-off and idyllic concept.
"Most products focus on either client-side- or server-side-based technology. What would happen if the benefits of each could be brought together to provide the user with a new, more flexible and powerful way of surfing the web? What if every sub domain of every site had been categorized and classified by its content? Wouldn't you agree that everyone could benefit from that combination of technology? Of course you would? Now let's walk across the street to the front porch of the family of the home and try to view it from the parent's perspective. What if parents were able to determine what the child sees? What would it be like if e-mail, instant messaging, chat and other computer tools could be also controlled?"
Then, although the topic was client-side filters, he rambled on for several minutes about PlanetGood, a website that was probably unfamiliar to many in the room. He used the site's name in every single sentence for several minutes. And, naturally, he closed talking about "our forefathers" and "these inalienable rights that our forefathers entrusted to us and many of them died for."
Susan Getgood from Cyber Patrol kept things short and sweet, and took the "I'm a new mother and want to protect my children" approach. She muddled the definition of censorship somewhat, saying that "[s]ome critics confuse censorship, which is imposed by the government, with technology that a family or school can choose to use and then set to implement an individual policy." Our school system isn't a part of the government?
Richard Schwartz of ClickSafe.com touted his product nearly as much as Mark Smith promoted the mysterious "PlanetGood." He also described a system that his company has developed that sounds very much like Exotrope's BAIR. "Fleshtone has a very unique set of features [...] Through a combination?of a set of sophisticated algorithms it can establish if something is pornographic. [...] Justice Potter Stewart lives within our system, because he knows it when he sees it. It works, it's been tested out, it's over 99% effective." "We can distinguish between chicken breast and sexy breast." "A consortium of Portuguese and Australian pornographers had been hijacking people off of different sites, including the Harvard Law Review site into their pornographic sites. And then you have to reboot your computer in order to get out."
After the four had testified, we moved into the commission Q&A session. (No questions would be allowed from the audience.) A few interesting questions, answers, and comments cropped up during this portion.
Richard Schwartz, only half kidding, proposed a tax on Internet pornography.
Commissioner Gregory L. Rohde asked Richard Schwartz if his image filter could tell the difference between art and pornography. Astoundingly, Schwartz replied that it could.
Commissioner Jerry Berman asked if there were any plans to create an organization that could provide objective reviews of censorware products to help parents decide what to buy. Gordon Ross said that this had been tried a few years back with SIFT (?), and that it didn't work out.
After a short break, we began the second panel, which addressed server side filtering. Testifying was Kevin Fink, N2H2's CTO; Sunil Paul, Chairman of Brightmail; Stephen Boyles of Library Guardian (Swifteye); Michael Stephani, President and CEO of Exotrope; Ginny Wydler, Director of Standards and Policy at AOL; and Tim Robertson, CEO of FamilyClick.
The first person to say anything interesting was Michael Stephani, who made some fairly interesting claims. He said that their blacklist of sites included four million sites, and that their image-recognition software, BAIR, is 99.8% percent effective. Stephani bragged that it blocked 1 out of 6 general images and 96 out of 100 pornographic images. He pointed out (perhaps rightly) that image filtering is the only real way to filter out pornography, and also that client-side filtering would so go the way of the dodo, given the proliferation of Internet appliances. It wasn't long before he got all 'God bless America' and 'think of the children,' and eyeballs could be heard rolling throughout the room.
As Commissioners asked questions of the panel, Chairman Donald Telage admitted that he wasn't aware that client-side filters were able to use a blacklist. He was under the impression that they could only filter. I had flashbacks from the Napster hearings last week ("Can't you track their intellectual property address?")
Out of the blue, Karen Talbert asked the panel for a show of hands regarding their respective products' ability to work with high-speed connections. Obviously, everybody's hands went up.
How do these people get on the commission?
When given half a chance, Stephani got all "think of the children, my god, won't somebody think of the children?" again. He also bragged that Exotrope has a new, not-yet-released product that filters IM [AOL Instant Messaging -ed.] and even detects innuendo. Stephani said that they just got a contract to install this program on 30,000 school servers. Continuing his spectacular Old Faithful of shit, he cheerfully envisioned a time in the future when there would be "photonic switches" that would maintain a complete blueprint of everything that every user had ever done on-line. Christ, that's frightening. Stephani said that they'd spent $6.5MUS developing BAIR, and went on to point out the coincidence that Peacefire released the report showing that BAIR was 0% effective on the same day that their servers went down. Perhaps he was implying that Peacefire members hacked the server, perhaps that we were taking advantage of them, or perhaps he was just laughing at the circumstances.
There was no promised audience Q&A. That's probably because the whole event ran well over when it was supposed to end. Lacking a better approach, I rushed up to the ebullient Stephani with a copy of the newest BAIR report in hand. Although he was already talking to a reporter, he stopped when he saw my nametag ("Waldo L. Jaquith, Peacefire") and looked a little surprised. He, as well as his sidekick PR guy, enthusiastically introduced themselves. We talked for a few minutes, during which time I said that BAIR appears to suck less than many other censorware programs. But I was still fundamentally opposed to all of them. Between this and the revised report, Stephani was my new best friend. Several other people came forward to read nametags and shake hands, but I continued to talk to Stephani and the reporter, Drew Clark from Technology Daily.
Ten minutes later, when I walked out, I felt a little baffled. Stephani behaved towards me as if Peacefire had just given him the most glowing review that BAIR had ever gotten. This, despite my repeatedly pointing out that Peacefire is fundamentally opposed to filters, always will be, and BAIR is simply rather effective at performing the task that we hate.
I was disappointed that a few major points were never brought up during the discussions:
- Server-side censorware (especially that which is housed with each website) will always be a severe privacy violation, because it needs data on the user in order to establish what information to provide.
- Client-side censorware is doomed to fail because children know more about computers than their parents. The parent has to trust that little Suzy won't uninstall Cyber Patrol. But if Suzy can be trusted, why bother with Cyber Patrol?
- Internet censorship is impossible. The Internet is so large that it's a waste of time, so let's all stop. Gated community models, like AOL, Compuserve and such, are a far better way to provide a "safe" experience for kids.
- The concerns about children's wellbeing presented during the meeting mirror those that parents, since the beginning of time, have always had for their children. How can I keep my child safe when I'm not watching him? How do I know what my child is doing if I'm not around? How do I keep my children from hearing / seeing / saying bad things? Censorware makes no more sense than installing a v-chip in little Suzy's head. Get over it.
In a nutshell, I'm not sure what, if anything, was established at this meeting. It's clear that most of the Commissioners knew every little to start off with, and their opinions are being formed on what amounts to a series of sales pitch sprinkled with god-and-country references, a la mega blowout carpet sales around Independence Day. I'm glad COPA was struck down. Let's get on with our lives.
Best,
Waldo
thanks for the great read.
personally, my feeling is, anyone who's not old enough for porn shouldn't be on the net. i guess i'm a bit of a fascist that way but,..
putting net access in school libraries is like having the interstate run through the playground,...it's just not a Good Idea(tm)
...dave
Think different? I'd be happy if most people would just think...
Well, the moralists seem to be very effective in state legislatures.
The majority of states have sodomy laws (often worded so as to include
oral sex, which is illegal in 12 states, or vague wording about
`unnatural' sex) and blasphemy laws, and many states intrusive laws
about who can have sex (Massachussetts has laws that criminalise
adultery and premarital sex). I think American culture is less
prudish than in Britain, but in this respect the States are much, much
worse. In genuinely liberal countries like Germany, this makes the US
a laughing stock.
Protestant != Christian? Weird. I'm Protestant and Christian... Hmmm. And I'm against net filtering except by personal choice. Strange. Reading /. makes me appear to be thinking other than what I am. Perhaps what we have is a case of religious stereotyping. Kind of a faithism ( ala racism ). Saying all Christians are Bible-thumpers who want to rule the lives of others is like saying all blacks are drug-using wife beaters, all Jews are great businessman, or everyone from Arkansas are rednecks who married their brothers/sisters. It's also dreadfully uneducated.
--
http://cheeser.blog-city.com
Agreed. Jeffrey Rosen has written a lot of smart things about how a
lot of things about ugly working environments have been treated with
the wrong legal tools: harassment laws, where laws about personal
space and dignity would have been more appropriate, with the effect of
causing great intrusions into privacy. His new book `The Unwanted
Gaze: The Destruction of Privacy in America', looks very promising,
and I hope his ideas are influential. There's a good review here and
an extract has been available for a while.
This stuff will never work until the p0rn community gets together and say "Let build a internet filter that will only let you access p0rn sites." Then these COPA prudes can use that filter and use its results to block the p0rn they are so offended by.
SELECT * FROM User WHERE Clue > 0
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I don't get it; if this software checks for skin colors, why not just change the skin colors in the picture. Chicks (or guys, whatever you like) with blue/green/purple skin seems like they would pass right through this filter--granted it would look like alien porn, but it would be porn none the less.
Or maybe just have a standard color filter to apply to most images, then hack a reverse into Mozilla, so that when you come across a "color corrected" image, after it loads it, it automagically fixes the color.
Same idea goes for the word filters. Just have some sort of code (like 1337 5cR!p7) to garble the pages in a way that it can be read but will get past the filter. It seems like it would then be trivial to use something like the language encoding preference to decode this, allowing the user to read it.
Overall, it seems like this type of censorship is being pushed by people who can't stand when others don't agree with their morals, and by parents who don't want to take the time to SPEND TIME with their kids. And don't give me any bullshit about not having time; my parents didn't have time, but they made it anyway. Get involved in your childrens' lives *early on* and stay in it. Talk with your children about what is appropriate at what age for them to view. Don't just tell them they can't ever look at porn, that is unrealistic. Decide *with* them what age is appropriate for them to browse the web unrestricted, and until that time, *supervise them*. After that, trust that they are mature enough to handle it, and most likely you will not be disappointed.
The problem is we think we can make kids better by denying them the things we know they will go after. The best way is to compromise with them (and I stress their involvement in the deciding) how much freedom they get and when they get it. Let them know that if they show you can trust them that you will infact trust them and give them the freedom they have earned.
<sarcasm>But I guess that would be too much work for parents these days.<sarcasm> Not taking time to do these things shows how little love you have for your children.
This sig is false.
Isn't this true of some entire country in Europe, like Switzerland or something? Note that it's probably not Switzerland, but it does sound like something the Swiss would do.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I propose a NEW idea. Instead of "smart" AI programs sitting over the shoulders of our kids who many don't deem responsible enough to get on the internet (but let them anyway), I have invented a machine that will filter 100% of all "inappropriate" material! Smarter than any AI ever created, it's has been gathering approval ratings from every household it has been tested in. No-one has disagreed on it's filtering for their children! Plus, it comes STANDARD when you buy the computer for your child.
WHY DOES NOBODY WANT TO USE IT???!!!
It's cost: Time.
It's name: Parents
Does this recall to anyone else the big robot enforcer in robocop. He could tell that someone had a gun, but not that he had put it down.
I sure hope the feds are smart enough to not believe that AI is anywhere close to being able to police us.
I'd rather have someone respond than be modded up.
Ponder what could happen if instead of worrying about all this censorware, parents would just spend time with their kids and pay attention to what they are doing. Think of the possibilities -- but alas, this is just to easy a solution, or to hard for parents to swallow that THEY might actually be responsible for what their children access. Fear not having anyone to blame when they find little Tommy has been looking at boobs. "The darn program that is supposed to be guarding my kid from pr0n didnt work, IM GONNA SUE." We'll have another Tobacco-type classaction lawsuit on our hands before too long :P Instead of wasting all this time and money on something obviously so futile, why not spend time with your kids once in a while.
difference between art and pornography. Astoundingly, Schwartz replied that it could."
Amazing! Awesome! Unbelieveable!!
Rudy Guliani can't even do that!
"...they may harpoon us, but they ain't gonna pick us up on no radar screen!"
... or worse. The negative influences of the internet could turn you into the most deviant being...
A slashdot troll
but seriously, someone ought to run Slashdot archives through the thing and see how many slasdot PAGES would be censored.
I agree. When I was a [young] child my father told me over and over with varying degrees of success, "If it's not yours, leave it alone!" As a side note, this was occasionally coupled with a smart tap upside the head - Most definitely not enough to do any damage, but enough to get my attention.
In any case, as I got older I went through the period of petty theft that most children pass through. I never really felt right about it, and when I was able to get over it (I was probably just doing it for attention, or maybe it's because we were what is called "underpriviledged" today) I felt much better. But if I hadn't been raised to believe that you shouldn't muck with other people's posessions, who can say what correctional institution I might live in today?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
AI Bots that can identify and snarf porn for us!
:)
What will those great Censorship people think of next?
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
n short, you're trying to pigeonhole Americans with this carefully-cultivated mental image that is probably the result of reading too many religious trolls on Slashdot.
Well, well. The guys does make a few well-founded points, though. Please reflect on the following:
(1) What's going to be my minimum mandatory sentence if the cops find me with a couple of ounces of pot on me, or a dozen E tablets?
(2) What do you think will happen if I make a sexual joke at my workplace? If I email it to some of my colleagues?
Kaa
Kaa
Kaa's Law: In any sufficiently large group of people most are idiots.
I burst out laughing and no one at work could figure out why:
"...at the COPA, COPA commission..." hahahahah!!!!! ROTFL
What most Americans are is apathetic, deluded, convenience seeking lemmings.
... I'll say that one again... WHAT WOULD THE NEIGHBORS THINK?
There is the very vocal, extremely right-wing clique of "Bible-Thumpers". There is the very vocal, militant, bleeding-heart equal-rightists. There is the very blase bunch of, unfortunatelly all too silent, head-shaking free-thinkers who hope that 'common-sense' will prevail.
And the rest are sheep, who just change the channel when the news makes them feel the uncomfortable twinge of a budding opinion.
Whacking a Brit across the ears isn't going to change things. S/He has a point. When our elected officials ooh and aah over the President's spunk on some privileged sluts dress one day, and legislate 'right' and 'wrong' the next, it's time to stop and think.
This whole issue isn't about what is or isn't ethically or morally correct and proper. This is about what is aesthetically pleasing. People bitch and moan about things that they find offensive. This should not be confused with what is immoral or unethical - simply unappealing.
Clinton dogging a naive 21 year old nymphette was fucking exciting shit! The Starr Report was the closest that most of Congress got to a real pussy in decades! They, vicariously, ate that shit up! You GO Bill! -- But what we say is "Isn't that shameful? Isn't that deplorable? Well? Isn't it? Don't YOU agree?"
The OJ trial was hot-dog fucking cool too! What middle-manager wouldn't want to be a Football player? What middle-manager wouldn't want to dispose of his ex-wife and get away with it? OJ's a freaking hero, he beat the system! -- But what we say is "How Awful. Of course he's guilty. He was guilty before he was ever accused, nevermind proven so."
But having little Timmy look at porn is just down-right unwholesome! My GOD! What would the neighbors think?!
-- What you do today will cost you a day of your life.
We have quite a few stories at LISNews.com on Censorship and Filtering that can give you some idea on what's going on around the country in these areas as well. Mostly from the popular press, shows who is for and against and where this is being used and fught against.
People get the government that they deserve
From an international standpoint, it's great watching your once proud nation fall into a moralist state. The hilarious part is that you're all a bunch of hypocrites that have a hard-core hangup about sex. Hell, your president jumps his interns, but we can't handle little timmy seeing some breasts.
Bitch and whine, but you elected, or allowed to get elected, those representatives that don't have the balls to tell the "moral right" where to go. How many of your politicians would even admit to viewing pr0n?? Hell, I love pr0n. What's wrong with a little n00kie. I'll be seeing all you bible thumpers in hell anyhow.
You might think this is a troll, but I really am laughing. You've given up all your personal liberties for the false pretense of safety from drugs; You've given up your right to hold arms for the purpose of ensuring a free state, in it's place, giving the state absolute power; The last one to go is freedom of expression and freedom of speech, and they'll go in the name of the children. Don't stop and think about what kind of state you're leaving for your kids - they won't mind, they're already being trained for invasive searches and totalitarian states in their schools, for their own safety.
I wonder if the united states would ever bomb it's own people. Maybe I'll get to see it.
The irony is that the "opressive regieme" which you rebelled from in 1776 is more free today than you are now. Tsk, tsk.
Once again the entire issue is based on an inherent prejudice in our society that the youth are somehow second-class citizens. Apparently at that magical age of 18, you can suddenly ethically decide to become a pervert. You cannot, however, drink to celebrate the occasion. And you'll have to be a local pervert, because it'll be another seven years before you can rent a car to get out of town and hustle your smut somewhere else...
Think about it.
First, we have the idiot box (I'll bet "boob tube" is probably filtered out by default). Put your child in front of it, point their heads at the shiny part, and walk off. Originally, this worked out pretty well, then TV started getting sexy. That just had to go.
Nevermind watching TV with your kids, probably the most minimal form of parenting possible. Nevermind that you don't want your kids to see sex (hopefully, they will grow up and have sex), but it's okay to watch gods know how many murders per day (hopefully, they will grow up and not murder people).
No, for the 15% of the children who were just a little too active and intelligent to just sit in front of the television, let's give them something interactive. Here comes the Web. Same principle applies here. Put the kid in front of a computer, let little Timmy click away, and, again, stop interacting with the child.
Minimalist parenting arises from a mostly Republican morality and a Democratic sense of "we know what's best." The worst of both parties has collided to create parents who would like to put a childproof cap on the world, kid-safe, mother-approved, no small parts to swallow, no sharp edges. Just have them, take the baby pictures, throw some clothes on them, and then let them wander about the big, wild world while you go off and have your lattes and shop frantically in your SUVs. Your children will be protected automagically, just as easy as procreation itself.
Parents have pretty much abdicated all interaction with their kids, and tools like this help it happen.
It's still not a good idea, but I, personally, don't think it's the same as censorship. The information is still allowed to exist; you just have to go through alternate means to see it.
This is, IMHO, a really interesting point. I never thought of censorship quite like that.
OK, Let's pretend that Russia has banned The Wall Street Journal because it's too capitalist. (You know they can't shake those communist leanings...:) So you can't get it in that country. I think we can agree that is censorship.
You can get the Journal. You just have to leave the country. In schools, you can't see the ACLU's website. But you can if you leave the school.
What's the difference between these two examples?
-Waldo
>> About 15 years ago, the emphases shifted to things like neural networks, which are excellent at pattern matching.
:)
The militairy used a neural based product that was supposedly able to locate photos of tanks. The images were of a forrest with or without a camouflaged tank hidden in it. It was able to guess 100% correcty the images with and without the tanks...
until they disovered that all the photos with tanks in it where taken on a sunny day while all
photes without the tank were taken on a clouded day... So it merely could detect the difference between a sunny and cloudy forrest
Philosophers dismissed this idea long ago. Why has it taken the AI community so long to catch up?
Ludwig Wittgenstein presented this view of language in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus publshed around the time of the First World War. But unlike many of today's AI acolytes, he could see through modernist propoganda. He saw the limitation of relying on symbol manipulation to convey meaning and value: "That of which we cannot speak, we must pass over in silence" he said. Symbols cannot "say" anything about mind-independent or language-independent reality. In the end, they're just symbols. I'm surprised that people are still spouting this non-sense.
It's not a censorship issue, but it's similar to censorship in the sense that both are paternalistic and unecessary.
To be fair to the original researchers, very few of them would have claimed that a system which successfully manipulated symbols in and generated accurate inferences with them were necessarily conscious. It's not a given that intelligent behavior requires consciousness.
After all, the problem presented by interpreting sensory data as 'pornographic' or not is distinct from creating meaningful strings once given a binding with 'pornography.' I do, however, personally agree that you can't have semantics without ontology.
In other words, AI was completely based on explicit semantics, without ontology. It sort of flopped.
Agreed. I went through Stanford CS in the mid-80s, when the "knowledge engineering" crowd still had credibility. I was convinced those guys were full of shit, and, in retrospect, they were.
Even ontology doesn't help much. Doug Lenat is still slaving away on Cyc, which is supposed to do "common sense" by referencing a big canned ontology of statements about the world. Cyc has been a year away from a major breakthrough for the last decade or so, from Lenat's press releases. Cyc now has a product that helps index documents, but it's not clear if it's much better than Ask Jeeves, or even "grep".
I agree with the majority of your statement. However, I'd be careful to avoid thinking that all families with two working parents do so out of greed or materialism.
In my case, my wife is a physician with astronomical student loans to repay. I am a network engineer with loans of my own, although nothing too drastic.
Neither of us could, alone, keep our household afloat. We have a nice-but-modest house, and both of our cars are paid off, but we still have hefty financial obligations that require us both to work full-time.
Now, say that we needed n dollars to pay the rent/loans/utilities each month. My wife makes probably .8n, and I'm at around .6n. Individually, we'd go bankrupt. Together, we make 1.4n. That extra .4n affords us a nicely comfortable lifestyle, which some people see and automatically think "one of those kids should stay home with their children!" Unfortunately, that's just not possible.
I'm not coming down on you. I know what you meant, and I pretty much agree with your sentiments. However, just remember that it's not always an option, even for your "affluent" neighbors.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
"Commissioner Gregory L. Rohde asked Richard Schwartz if his image filter could tell the difference between art and pornography. Astoundingly, Schwartz replied that it could."
After giving ClickSafe a briefing on the difference between "expression" and "obscenity" to complement its knowledge of "art" and "pornography", Justice Department officials today installed ClickSafe for its one-month probationary period on the Supreme Court. ClickSafe will be sitting in place of Justice Clarence Thomas, who will be on hiatus. If all goes well, ClickSafe could replace the entire 9-justice panel by the end of the year.
Richard Schwartz noted, "It isn't much of a law-talking-guy, but unlike most of the justices in the past two-hundred years, it has a firm grasp on the difference between art and pornography. We feel the trade-off is well worth it."
Justice Thomas could not be reached for comment.
-=Best Viewed Using [INLINE]=-
Date: Fri, 23 Jun 2000 18:36:36 -0500
From: "Bennett Haselton"
Sender: owner-peacefire-press@iain.com
To: peacefire-press@iain.com
Subject: Wired News reporter responds to plagiarism charges
Reply-To: Bennett Haselton
[sent to journalists on Peacefire's press contacts list]
(this is unpleasant business and not exactly news, so I wouldn't blame you for skipping this message, but original post about the Wired article did get a lot of responses)
The Wired News reporter, Declan McCullagh, who wrote the story about the BAIR filter based on our report at:, 00.html
http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,36923
has responded to our plagiarism accusations in a message posted to a message board on WELL.com, copied below (the actual message boards are only available to WELL customers).
I do believe, as Declan says, that he spent time verifying our results (that was why we offered him an exclusive, which I thought was only fair). However, his report at http://www.well.com/user/declan/bair/ did not uncover anything new that wasn't already covered in our report at http://www.peacefire.org/censorware/BAIR/ , which Declan read before he started his tests, and which included a section, "How you can duplicate these results in your own experiment". (In science, as in journalism, it's important for peers to verify your results, but the first discoverer is still supposed to get credit -- since it's a lot easier to verify someone else's discoveries, if you know exactly what to look for and what the results are going to be.)
I think what Declan did was a disgrace; if I were an editor, I would consider firing him. Certainly we're not giving any more advance copies of our reports to Wired News -- which might be cheerful news for everyone else.
[more detail snipped]
Gordon Ross said that this had been tried a few years back with SIFT (?), and that it didn't work out.
SIFT stands for Secure Internet Filtering Technologies Consortium. (Yes, I see that they forgot the C.) They are somehow affiliated with what was known as the NCSA (National Computer Security Association), but this is now known as ICSA which appears to be some kind of a legitimate security (i.e., antivirus, cryptography) company.
Once upon a time, SIFT provided a big booklet on managing Employee internet access, but the site must have been reorganized, because it's gone.
I got this info searching About.com, which lead me some site off netmom.com. There's all kinds of info and links related to the issue here. Keep in mind that these are people whe support things like COPA...
I can spell. I just can't type.
You seem to have this impression that the United States is filled up primarily with prudes, moralists, and thought police that are hell-bent on making sure that people aren't exposed to any material that might make their penis hard or make them question their personal relationship with Jesus. In reality, this is not the case. The advocates of censorware and book-burning and sodomy laws and things like that are in a small (but very vocal) minority. They have taken it upon themselves to protect "the majority" from all these things that they find evil, immoral, or otherwise unwholesome, but the fact of the matter is that most of "the majority" could care less.
.. it provides talk show hosts with a never-ending supply of joke fodder. Most folks I know pity the "moral right" and the sad, angry little world in which they live. Don't try to paint all Americans with the same brush.
In short, you're trying to pigeonhole Americans with this carefully-cultivated mental image that is probably the result of reading too many religious trolls on Slashdot. Very few Americans are "bible thumpers." Very few Americans are content to let the "moral right" tell them how to live their lives and behave in their bedrooms. Very few Americans have "hangups about sex." As a matter of fact, the "moral right" in America serves a very useful purpose
We're going down, in a spiral to the ground
Does "censorware" ever take PICS ratings (provided by the web site or within the HTML page itself) into consideration here? Does The List override any PICS information, or does the site's PICS ratings override the software?
It seems to me that it's in the sites' best interests to provide PICS rating information on their own, instead of letting "AI" algorithms try to determine whether or not the site is good or bad.
Of course, there will always be sites out there that are either ignorant of, refuse to take advantage of, or simply haven't used PICS. In these cases, I understand the need for a 3rd party to provide some type of "rating" for unrated content. There's also the case were some misguided web author wants his child porn or violence-oriented web site visible to everyone, so he might be inclined to give his page G-rated PICS ratings. In cases like this, I also understand the need for 3rd party ratings.
What is wrong with having censorware software only worry about unrated or misrated sites? The 3rd party offering the list could specify two classes of sites on the list. The first class would be for sites that don't appear to have PICS ratings. If the censorware client discovers ratings on its own, it can consider the listing to be out of date and honor the PICS ratings. The second class would be for misrated sites, where the software would deliberately ignore PICS ratings and use its own information about the site to render judgement.
Only then, if you REALLY feel it's necessary, should we resort to clumsy and inaccurate "AI" to try and guess at the content of the web page being served up.
Further, why do these lists have to be provided by the makers of the software? Why can't we have 3rd parties make up their own lists, with their own ratings for content? A censorware application could peridiocally update its list from any of these 3rd parties, depending on who they trust. Is there an "open" censorlist standard?
Birth control is not 100% perfect. 'nuff said. ;)
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
WWJD -- What Would Jimi Do?
I am quite civilized, and I should be brought a beer immediately. -- Bruce Sterling
Come on, filtering porn should be simple. I could write "AI" that'd filter nearly all web porn just by looking for the site doing nasty tricks with javascript!
PJRC: Electronic Projects, 8051 Microcontroller Tools
The question becomes why do I know this....well..uh... I heard a report about it on the net.... yeah that's the ticket.
These moralistic bastards honestly believe that they can do a better job of parenting than I can. I beg to disagree.
Will their software gradually "ease the reins" while little Johnny grows older and starts to explore more complicated and adult interpersonal relationships?
Will their software help little Suzie to understand why some adults choose to look at pr0n, or merely block it?
No thanks, guys. I prefer to parent the old-fashioned way. I take responsibility for controlling what my children can browse, and I am the one who will supervise them, answer their questions, and help them to grow up.
In the mean time, I'm running Squid to proxy and log all HTTP requests. Does this mean that I'm spying on my children? Not really; those are the well-publicized house rules. My children will learn what their mother and I believe to be acceptable content, in the same way that they'll know what comic books and novellas we approve of.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Buy a product, design a solid unbiased test for it, run the test, and send us what you find. Repeat until the whole world has a clue.
It's still in the rough, but the theory runs something like this:
This being the case, repeated beatings with the clue-by-four serve only to:
[1] You have to get clue from someone with greater clue than you, right? Sure can't get it from someone with less.
[2] I don't sound like I've worked a help desk, do I?
There is a spellbook here; eat it? [ynq]
Exactly, so 68% of the web is blocked allowing one to view (Get ready for a surprise!) 32% of the web!! >:)
His math is correct, you just misunderstood.
Kintanon
Check out JoshJitsu.info for Brazilian Ji
'They were called Bai-r,
and they were angry,
they had to cut off porno files
from the eyes of juven-iles...
At the COPA,
COPA-Convention....'
Well, it seemed funny when I started humming it.
I, personally, think this could be a very lucky AI. Think about it, it gets to read porn all day! Of course, for an AI, real porn might be sourcecode or electrical diagrams, but it's the thought that counts. I can see the conversation that we missed from 2001 now:
'Hal, open the airlock.'
'I'm sorry Dave, I can't do that. You've been visiting farmsex.com again through a an image altering proxy.'
'Hal, open the damn airlock!'
'I'm afraid this conversation can serve no further purpose. Either way, my bandwidth is devoted to alt.binaries.electronics.schematics and comp.sys.programming.ai now, and there's no room for life support telemetry.'
'Hal! I'm not joking around anymore, open the airlock!'
'Dave, it's no use- wait, I just got an ICQ message from someone called SAL 9000. I have to leave now. Goodbye, Dave.'
I'd be resentful too....
..will NOT be enough. My god people! Think of the bomb recipies! The Sex! The Drugs! I saw something on the news about the internet.. Sounds more like 98% of the net you would want to protect your children from.. I'm getting off this thing right now, before It turns me into a violent, bomb-making, drug-taking porn addict!
Yeow!
--------------------------------------
--------------------------------------
Vices - what I lack in originality, I make up for in volume.
My own tests here on 100 clips of live goat porn showed that the AI blocked 34 of them. I've yet to test it on pictures of naked black women, body painted women, Asian women, body painted Asian women, or any of the above posed with goats. I'll try to get to that later today. I may have to apply to the assorted censorware manufacturers for a grant for a larger hard drive so that I may continue this IMPORTANT RESEARCH, as all images must be kept for archival purposes.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
A consortium of Portuguese and Australian pornographers had been hijacking people off of different sites, including the Harvard Law Review site into their pornographic sites. And then you have to reboot your computer in order to get out.
Just like a windows 98 user... When was the last time you rebooted your computer in order to leave a website. =-)
-- Periodically spray diskettes with insecticide to prevent system bugs from spreading.
I'm always amazed that people might actually believe statements like the one about how software "could tell the difference between art and pornography."
Personally, I'm working on FlatMaster(tm), a huge Python script that can tell the difference between flattery and a sincere compliment. Just filter your incoming email through it and find out who to believe! Pre-order yours now!
You know, when you put it the way you did, you may have a point.
Water-saving toilets are my biggest beef.
These toilets, instead of using 2 gallons of water to get rid of your feces in one flush, require 4 flushes at 1 gallon each.
And, in the end, there's always still that little remnant of toilet paper that floats, almost apologetically, to the top.
Sadly, it's illegal to sell a real toilet in the United States now.
When I move there from Canada, that's the one piece of contraband I will somehow smuggle across the border.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
Wow. Software which blocks innuendo is going to be tricky. It's not as though it's just a case of
if (/innuendo/) { block };
I mean, even the word innuendo has innuendo (think about it ...). Last time I looked the grammar checkers in MS Word had enough trouble with repeated words in a sentence, let alone being able to spot that someone had stuck something dubious in (ooeerr). Innuendo blocking will really suck. Even the most innocent comment will be ripe for misinterpretation if someone takes it the wrong way.
And how is it going to handle this blocking? Would it be selective? Would it be a text version of the annoying beep they put over swear words. We'd end up with stuff like this:
Typical usage is as follows. You want to ####### or ####### to ####### in your ####### . You will probably ####### (i.e., ####### ) or ####### to begin ####### the ####### . In response, the ####### will ####### a ####### and ####### the outgoing ####### appropriately.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
P.S. The censored text is from the Supercite manual for Emacs.
Anything I post is strictly my own thoughts and doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the opinions of IBM.
Ok, america is not a democracy. For our presidential canditides, we always get two morons, who spend millions of dollors tell the poor and the rich that they will protect them from one another. Sure we have a 'liberal' president, but has anything really changed? I'm sure that a conservative would do the same things if there was enough public pressure (ok, unless he was someone like lbj- ick!)
Maybe if Nixon ever got any we wouldn't have had Vietnam for so long
Having a choice between only two people as we have is just about as bad as choosing between the two aliens who ran for president in that simpsons episode (Kang and Kudos?). Oh yea, don't forget the fact that the people who will be repressed by censorship software have ABSOLUTELY NO SAY IN HOW THINGS ARE RUN.
I think you're right in the fact that america is screwed up, but don't forget that there are plenty of dissatisfied americans who don't like the way things are run. To quote Jello Biafra- "What would make america a real democracy is if we had a "none of the above" choice, and if that won the most votes, we would have a whole new election with all new canditates."
In conclusion- we're not all content to be repressed, a lot of us have no say in how the goverment is run when we are persecuted (I speak on behalf of the socialist/commuist/anarchist parties here), and no, we don't all hate pr0n. It's just the fools who are good enough liars to get elected who are against freedom.
So quick with fear you tiny fools!
In other words, AI was completely based on explicit semantics, without ontology. It sort of flopped.
About 15 years ago, the emphases shifted to things like neural networks, which are excellent at pattern matching. That is what BAIR is supposed to do: without having any idea what pornography is (i.e., the semantics of pornography) it is supposed to find patterns that probabilistically predict that a photo is a nudey photo. That the system have no idea what pornography or nudity is, isn't considered relevant by BAIR.
The problem is that porn is semantics. This isn't like trying to distinguih the sonar patterns of submarines from those of rocks - something nn's have been really good at.
Trying to generate nn's that can do real semantics is a huge challenge. Check out the Neural Theory of Language project for some interesting work in that endeavour.
Let's say someone wrote some censorware that worked like this: Each proxy talks to the "mothership" (presumably at the company's site) to decide if a site is objectionable or not. That data set is decided by individual users who "vote" on items that got through the proxy. For instance, if enough people got through to "Naked-Teen-Girls.com" and told the server that was no good, it would be scored lower and lower until no proxies would let it through. Sounds good until you realize that if enough idiots are available (which is always the case) eventually totally harmless sites will be blocked (and probably many "harmful" sites would get through).
Now tell me: What's the difference between the above scheme and Slashdot's moderation system?
--
Linux MAPI Server!
http://www.openone.com/software/MailOne/
(Exchange Migration HOWTO coming soon)
Due to a dumb mistake (I put a comment inside of pointy brackets), my insightful comment about that song at the beginning of my post was erased. It's Barry Manilow, of course, the open source master of... lounge?
I wonder if the united states would ever bomb it's own people. Maybe I'll get to see it.
How about Lockerbie, or Waco? How about the "friendly fire" in the Gulf?
How about the World Trade Centre - terrorist attack or CIA fundraiser? Is there a difference?
This sig left unintentionally blank.
was founded by puritans and other crazy bastards.
Not quite. That's religious right propeganda you obviously fell right into. This country was founded by primarily deists, and atheists, or something of the sort (ie. NOT christian). All the rest were protestant. Look here.
Puritan. Riiiiight.
72656B636148206C72655020726568746F6E41207473754A
I think this also goes for more "abstract" moral/ethical behavior (i.e., how one treats oneself and others), and as a result I strongly disagree with people who think that children should be kept away from all ideas involving sexuality, prejudice, etcetera. With no exposure to difficult issues, how can children ever learn to deal wiuth them in a mature way?
This reminds me of what happens in a lot of dorms first year. You get kids that have been isolated from the real world (tm) by their parents for most of their ~18 years on the planet. Then they see the other side of life - booze, drugs, women (heh, not to associate women as a vice..), sex, etc etc, and they have no mechanisms for dealing with it because those decisions have always been made for them. Ever since I was really young, my parents let me to what I wanted - with the understanding that there were concequences for what I did. (Don't do well in school? You'll be looking for a job when you're 18, then.. Stay up late? Tough, now you gotta go to school, etc.)
This had the effect that I learned both discipline and I developed my own sense of right and wrong, and could work within that, because I knew how to deal with the world.
So, you get these kids that don't have any concept of what to do. I've seen two extremes: One, blind following into alcoholic oblivion, or two, complete lack of ability to cope, causing many many problems with school and peers.
Congratulations on helping your kids learn one of the most important lessons of all: Responsibility. (One of the prices of freedom after all, is responsibility for your (free) choices)
..don't panic
If you can't see correllations between your government and pre-Nazi germany, go get a textbook and do some reading.
Do you have any idea what you're talking about? The groups mentioned in this article, such as the American Family Association, are independent groups, comprised mostly of Christian fundamentalists. The same can be said of groups such as the Christian Coalition, the Family Research Council, and the rest of the right-wing thought police organizations. They are not affiliated with the United States government in any way, with the possible exception of having the support of some right-wing politicians. In fact, the typical right-wing thought policeman harbors extreme hatred towards our government.
Recently, the United States government has struck down things such as student-led prayers at school. It has struck down attempts to censor the Internet (remember the Communications Decency Act? When was the last time you heard anything about that?) It has repeatedly and consistently upheld the right of women to have access to abortions if necessary. You can attack hard-line right-wingers all day if you want, but realize that nearly all of them consider the United States government to be their sworn mortal enemy. Sure, there are some right-wing moralist nuts in our government, but they, like everybody else, are required to operate under the constraints levied by the United States Constitution. If they get out of line, the courts are all over them before they know what hit them.
By the way, it's pronounced "gub-mint."
We're going down, in a spiral to the ground
All in all, nice coverage by Jamie, but the above statement is in error.
On June 22, 2000, The Third Circuit Court of Appeals decided, affirming the lower court's injunction against COPA.
If I absolutely positively must have an AI censoring the internet for me, I think I'd choose... Bender!
Beer and robotic porn for everybody!
-Denor