Slashdot Mirror
Even More Porn Image Recognition Software
Rob Pascual writes: "I thought this article was interesting. It's a review of software that analyzes pictures in email to see if they are porn. Not that it works too well, but it's interesting how it works, and has a lot of cool info on image recognition." See also this earlier Slashdot story about the same concept embodied in software from Exotrope and Eye-T, which seems mostly to illustrate how absurd it is.
"Incidentally, PORNsweeper did successfully block the abovementioned gaping-bottom picture. I could tell you where to find it, but you don't want to. Trust me."
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Why not? The people who ran the Spanish Inquisition seemed to have a detailed working knowledge of witchcraft and other (supposed) heresies, without violating their beliefs.
But then, you weren't expecting that, were you?
"If you look 'round the table and can't tell who the sucker is, it's you." -- Quiz Show
The obvious point being, of course, how silly is the idea of having such a magic filter in the first place.
Getting back to the topic, what does this say about the claims of those who supposedly develop such filters?
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
I always get shitloads of porn spam when I'm doing tech-support at work through e-mail. But hey, every mail is supposed to be from a customer, and it isn't my fault if Britney's tits are causing BSOD's, now is it? I have to check out what the problem of the customers is and if possible, solve it, right? Not that I really care about said tits, but that's besides the point...
People replying to my sig annoy me. That's why I change it all the time.
How much of a waste of time is that? Set your filter to "only gaze lovingly at myself"
Yahoo?
It's not even a separate thing: This is just a few levels down in their hierarchically-organized index.
When do I get my feeling of smugness?
David Gould
David Gould
main(i){putchar(340056100>>(i-1)*5&31|!!(i<6)<< 6)&&main(++i);}
Junkbusters.com
and get the blocklist from
http://www.waldherr.org/blocklist
Sorted.
Another problem: Generally, this software is fairly expensive to buy and maintain. Do you really want *any* of your tax money going to buy a worthless product?
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
Maybe the Puritans need their OWN COUNTRY.
Uhm, you do realize, the last time somebody said that to them, they left England and formed a colony in what is today the USA?
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possible yes. but not in our lifetimes, i'd bet.
to create a computer with enough intelligence to recognize intent would be a large step beyond teaching a computer to think like a person, which itself would be a far step beyond teaching a computer to think, which itself is a goal that we're nowhere near reaching (Eudora's rude email filter notwithstanding).
go read G.E.B.
-c
I have discovered a truly remarkable proof which this margin is too small to contain.
Now hold on! I love porn, but I wouldn't want my 13 year old brother into the same crap I've seen on the 'net. If a client-side version of this thing actually worked, I'd recommend it to my folks.
Not everybody who wants a way to prevent pornography is a nazi. As a matter of fact, jumping to conclusions and categorizing people like that would strike me as Hitler-worthy far more than a porn sensor...
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In this particular case, it comes down to whether I decided to shoot in B&W or color that day.
As usual, the issue isn't what it is now, but what it has the potential to become. In as little as 10 years to two decades, we may have algs that are good enough to discern between hardcore pr0n and what most people consider to be 'art' photos. But in many cases, the line between art and pornography doesn't even exist.
I just visted a fantastic art gallery in San Francisco featuring very expensive large format laser holography. In addition to gorgeous fine art nude holograms, he also had amazing holographic prints of various sex acts in action. Closeups of oral fellatio with both sexes and other interesting subject material. I consider these prints to be extremely beautiful, capturing a freeze frame of raw human lust in a way that has never been seen before. Point being, I very much consider these prints to be 'fine art' even though if you were to see the same thing on a 2D color photograph, you might deem it to be only of purely purrient interest. The only difference is the medium used.
If I were to take some well-lit B&W's of two girls going at each other with their tongues, would it be art? Would the same thing be art if it was in color? Depending on who you are, how you were raised and where you are from, you might say that any picture depicting copulation is pornography. Others might say that sex is virulently beautiful in many forms.
A good way to define art: Does it quicken your pulse? Does it turn you on? Then it's art for you. If you consider it tasteless and it doesn't do anything for you, then it's not very artistic in your eyes.
More importantly: The whole idea of suing over email is a little ludicrous...if you are receiving pr0n images in email, who sent them? A friend of yours who accidentally put you in the CC? Does that warrant suing your COMPANY for failing to block it? Is ruffling through your personal mail looking for objectionable material part of a companies' responsibility? Do you want it to be? Does a whole company have to suffer out of fear that one or two people might be offended and lawsuit crazy? Have we completely lost out all our rights to the lawyers, who clean up on both sides of the equation?
The question is, who is writing this software, and what are their beliefs? Do you want someone else deciding for you what is 'art'? What else are they going to decide is not in your best interests to view?
---Mike
Watching the war over what combination of pixels we can look at and what combinations of pixels are 'bad' for us...
Mike Massee
Maybe the Puritans need their OWN COUNTRY. Or maybe they should become Amish and stop using the infernal Satanic computer. Then we could take all that money all that effort and all that energy and solve some real social problems. If you don't know what your CHHHHIIIIIIIIILLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLDRRRREEENNNNNNNN are doing then what the FUCK gives you the right to demand that someone or something else do that for you and for everyone else as well.
I have been wondering though how are these programs going to be able to tell the difference between an artistic nude and a pic of a money shot across a girls tits?
There has been only one sure fire way I have ever been able to differentiate actual art from pornography.
Pornography is the pictures I keep wanting to look at over and over and over and over again
Aah, so they're capatalists! That's even worse - somebody who does something they don't believe in so they can make money. Would you buy a Bible made by Arayan Nations, made for whatever purpose?
Still more a technological curiosity than a valid product. But interesting.
Of course, according to the article it still can't distinguish the Mona Lisa from the goatse.cx guy. Back to the drawing board, folks...
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Another possibility is that the developers are not that morally straight, they just want to make money from the people who are stupid enough to buy this kind of software.
:-)
It is hypothetically possible that the developers even believe that their software works (or could work) and that they make an honest effort to make it work.
But then it defeats it's own purpose again, as you say. Anyone smart enough to make something like this work, would never develop such a thing for the intended use it is being sold for. But maybe for the uses of locating porn and generating porn.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
This is incredible technology guys. Can it differentiated between blonde / brunettes? Cup size? *drool*
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Let's not all suck at the same time please
Let's not all suck at the same time please
Is it an elephant or Ron Jeremy? Think of the fuzzy logic this thing has......
there are no stupid questions, but there are a lot of inquisitive idiots
That's not a bad idea. Wonder how hard it'd be to implement.
Best Slashdot Co
The point being that wasted time wastes the company's money, but they have a simple mechanism for handling that. (Performance reviews, verbal warnings, etc...) Sexually explicit material also exposes the business to sexual harrassment lawsuit, which cost a lot more than an employee's wasted time.
These censorware attempts are a way for a company to prevent the most expensive abuses, not to prevent all of them.
Considering the no-brainer false negatives and false positives, I doubt very much that they were BSing. A red truck (from certain angles) is bad, but a blowjob is acceptable? The Mona Lisa is bad at 745 pixels across, but okay at 100 pixels across? Shrub and the Shrubette are obscene, but blatant penetration is okay?
Never attribute to malice...
Teach your kids: "C++ made baby Jesus cry."
I think working on a program like this is a bit like a dream coming true: study thousands of porn pics, try to find ways to detect what they have in common, and get paid to do so :)
You'd be the next dot.com millionaire.
Go where the market REALLY is.
________
No. I actually have a small C++ pre-filter for my mail, which preps it for my perusal later.
Yes, mail.message is zero indexed, but the much later routine to sort the mail by field value is badly written and barfs on any 'nonexistant' string. The mail import function pre-pads the string with whitespace, so I'm not saving any of the real data. Yeah, I fucked the assignment too. Guess I subconciously didn't want to wipe stuff from the boss.
I would have critiqued the destruction of mail.new in the process; A filler int and for loop would be the way to do it.
.sig: Now legally binding!
So in essence, the software is saying I may not know what pr0n is, but I know it when I see it?
1. Never send the files as raw Jpegs. (PNGs / GIFs / whatever) All it takes is one overzealous network adminstrator to take a peek at the images going through their server, and it's boot up the arse time.
2. If this software works (which I severely doubt!), all you'll have to do is apply a 'negative' filter to the image, achievable in most basic art packages and/or the ppm tools. This will remove all the flesh tones, which is what these things normally check for.
3. Add cryptography to taste.
4. Get out more, your palms are growing hairy.
true.
cpeterso
do bibles make the economy any better? has socialism ever done anything efficiently? can people be motivated by the thought of improving their economic status?
That's true too, I suppose. Profits are not a bad thing, however. They're what make the world go 'round.
:)
I think we are a long way off from a good porn-detection algorithm. If and when we get one, however, we can set up a worm to find all of it.
-Frijoles-
Hey - you realise that this means that I no longer have to wade through newsgroups; I just set this sucker loose, and have it send everything it finds to ~/.pr0n.
Sweet!
Could it block out pictures that would make one self puke your guts out? You know, like 95% of stileproject.com's pictures.(just take out anything brownish colored and in a linear shape). If they had that selective blocking, I could visit that site safely at home.
Heh. Obviously the filter software reads at a threshold of -1 and clicks on links titled "i set up a mirror here"
Even if these did get to 95+% accuracy (conceivable in several years), primative encryption of the data defeats every on of these. I can easily imaging sending someone a encrypted data file, the java viewer, and a password embedded in the text of the email for decryption. Why do they bother with email???
The same approach could be applied to the web, though it would be slightly harder to implement.
Given one hour to live, the student replied: "I'd spend it with professor FP who can make an hour seem like a lifetime."
If this software were at all effective, I would expect an arms race to develop, with porn web sites developing different ways to disguise porn and have it descrambled via a plug-in on the user end. Simply inverting the colors in the image would probably get it past initial screening, it's trivial to write a plug in that would reverse it back.
It's called pine .
This was posted ages ago... Old news.
c++ bleh..
cpeterso
Am I the only one who thinks that the amount of media attention to these barely-working programs is a little suspicious?
"Are you really going to write an article about another porn-filter?"
"What?! Don't you care about our children?!"
"Ah, yes.. But do these things ever work?"
"Only one way to find out!" (locks himself in his office for the rest of the day)
Oh... man....
That's one set of pics I'm going to be looking at over and over... drool...
Another way of generating porn, if you had a magic filter that could recognize porn, is to start with a collection of porn, and on each image start randomly altering the pixels, and see if the images still pass the filter test. Images that initially passed the filter's test will gradually evolve into something entirely different that still passes the filter's test. Of course, there's always brute force -- just start testing every possible combination of pixels through the filter -- occaisionally one will turn out to be porn.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
Generating porn. That would be a nice thing. Then at least the moralists in my country would loose their argument - their argument is that porn-making is most of the time a bad workplace and not good for the women.
Oh, and how would it generate porn? Wouldn't a 3D model of a generic human body, plus some randomization of the individual differencies, a physics-sim. plus some general rules about what's sex do it pretty much easier?
--The knowledge that you are an idiot, is what distinguishes you from one.
I'd wager they can't block this little tid-bit:
Warning! Don't click here if you're under 18 or local regulations prohibit you from downloading pr0n, even ASCII-art.
When looking at this pic, try setting your point size to 4 and make sure you're using a fixed-width font. Much more realistic.
Thus sprach DrQu+xum, SID=218745.
DrQu+xum: Proof that the lameness filter doesn't work.
What a boring use of this technology! Use it to create a massive set of links to porn - you'd be rich!
"Hex, Bugs, and Rockn'Roll" --The Programmer's Digest
"Hex, Bugs, and Rockn'Roll"
Perhaps some home users will install this to keep their children away from porn, but I'd be willing to bet the average Slashdotter won't install it. Well, maybe if he/she is really addicted and trying to stop.... Gee, I would have thought chafing would solve that problem...
One day, there could be people who get paid to surf the web for porn.
(OK, so plenty of people surf for porn while being paid now, but it isn't quite the same thing.)
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
This is, after all, what a neural network is for. Sure, writing heuristics for defining what genitalia look like from various angles is hard; so is writing heuristics for defining what faces look like. But neural nets do this well, very well. It's simple pattern recognition; this is why we cannot define porn, but `know it when we see it.'
It'd take a bit of time to train, but I daresay a lot of the training could be concurrent--the testers would simply have their input queued up and the thing would automatically run through it 24/7. And once it was trained its state could simply be frozen and copied.
So, who wants to start work on such a project?
It's be great to open-source this; people could even submit URLs and ratings online. The only problem would be that it might be taken over my morons on either side of the aisle who'd want it not to work; I think that it'd be best to work with a small and trusted group.
Not only would it lead to an overall decrease in quality images, it would confuse the neural nets due to our extreme lack of flesh tones. Most of us just don't get enough sun.
A: Using the same standards as the US Supreme Court, the software doesn't define it, but it knows it when it sees it.
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Looks like they left out a line of code: if (big_asshole_held_open) PORN = true; That is just wrong...
I assume you considered the double meaning of this before you posted. I've been known to "type with one hand" occasionally as well, if you know what I mean?
-atrowe: Card-carrying Mensa member. I have no toleranse for stupidity.
Hello? You're testing censorware! I don't believe for a second that this company wouldn't be sleazy enough to hand-check the emails getting sent through the account. All they have to do is open the emails, look at them, and (inserting a few false-positives and negatives) manually tell the software whether or not to filter the image.
This is a completely invalid test if the software is vulnerable to fiddling by the company during the test.
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314-15-9265
And hey, if you can fleece a bunch of control freaks and right-wing anal retentives in the process of making a living... Well, that's just another one of the perks of the IT industry.
More power to them! Where do I apply?
I'd love to work on a well funded, morally respectable, high-profile known-Death-March project. I'd love to laugh all the way to the bank while doing it in the name of the children...
The REAL jabber has the /. user id: 13196
The REAL jabber has the user id: 13196
What you do today will cost you a day of your life
What exactly makes them hypocrites or "nazi-ish"? Maybe they like looking at pr0n themselves on their own time, but want to keep it out of their workplace. You have no idea. Suggesting what you do about the makers of the software, with no knowledge of them personally, is what's hypocritical. Tools and their creators cannot be villified, only actions. Or at least that's the hue and cry when certain "hacking" tools occasionally come up for banning. Do you believe everyone who's written, say port scanning software, is a malicious hax0r? So why do you believe everyone who writes filtering software is a "hypocritical nazi"? You can't have it both ways.
I'd be happier if someone creates censorware that blocks us from J.H. Christ's lunatic legions...
Just because you can mod me down, doesn't mean you're right. Shoes for industry!
I can't say I agree with this assertion (that the worse the censorware works, the better for us). As you acknowledge, the false positives (Mona Lisa == pron, Dick Armey == naughty site) are what burns us. I would have to assume, given previous censorware policies, that these services are always going to err on the side of over-censoring. If they under-censor and junior gets to see a naked woman, they end up looking pretty stupid given their claims of accuracy. No one is going to buy something that 90% of the time screens goatse.cx... :-).
No, I think we need to continue to point out that the claims these people make are not accurate, and that software is not the answer (and probably will never be the answer). The censorware makers need to be challenged -- I'm honestly shocked that they can continue to make the claims they do, given that Peacefire has proven countless times that these claims are categorically not true!
It's a strange world -- let's keep it that way
And sometimes its only a human interest story.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
Wow. That's quite a filter there. It filters the wrong stuff though. :)
Duuhuhuhuh, you're a fucking idiot.
-TimmyC, Tech Guru
Ohyeah, great plans if the last 2000 years are any indication... And a 2nd coming? Nah, he's just breathing hard... But seriously, he'll never come back, because you'll do exactly what the Romans did to him... His words will probably be 2000 years out of date from the 6 or 7 bibles (now in their 10,000,000th editing!) claiming to be the "true" bible, and you guys will either throw him out, or nail him to a cross...
Don't try getting into a theological debate here, boyo, you're way out of your league... Go back to your book burning, cross burning, abortion clinic bombing, or whatever it is you do...
Just because you can mod me down, doesn't mean you're right. Shoes for industry!
Sure it's possible to find ways around just about anything, but for your typical user it doesn't take much to stop them.
Where I work we have security software that we set to block the start button and running any appications named setup*.exe or install*.exe. That is ALL it does, and do you know how much that cut down on unauthorized installs? Good God!
Given just how hard it seems to be for humans to define what is 'porn' and 'incdecent', how the heck could a computer program do it? It's like an illiterate teaching someone to read.
This may ultimately require an AI unit to do it correctly. If we do not corrupt the poor thing first with all that pr0n. :P
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
This is exactly what I thought as I read this item. This is probably a good indication that someone somewhere is actually working on this.
You'd be the next dot.com millionaire.
I've just mailed my patent application to the USPTO. Now all I've gotta do is wait for the first infringment, and I can start building my mansion. :-)
And what do you do for work, pray tell?
If they cheated on this test, they need to find new cheaters.
Next on the horizon, Smurf pr0n!!!
Or maybe hentai (with hair so green it throws off the percentage), or perhaps nude body painting fetish picts... Since the software can easily be fooled with just a palette shift, eventually everything with a color value will be blocked... And grayscale is straight out...
Just because you can mod me down, doesn't mean you're right. Shoes for industry!
but I'd be willing to bet the average Slashdotter won't install it.
Not on his/her/its own box, but if you have any idea what kind of crap my little sister has been receiving through e-mail, hell yes! As for myself, if the program would just highlight pr0n attachmnents it would certainly help in storing them in a specific folder for "when the boss is not around".
People replying to my sig annoy me. That's why I change it all the time.
Throw in a force-feedback controller of some sort, an old Wolfenstein game engine, and then you'll just have to remember to leave the house ever so often to remind people that you're still alive ;)
lf.o
Hmm, Martian pr0n...War of the Worlds 2.0 anyone?
/comments.pl in order to allow everyone to
Slow down cowboy!
Slashdot requires you to wait 1 minute between each submission of
have a fair chance to post.
It's been 1 minute since your last submission!
I hate it when that happens...
People replying to my sig annoy me. That's why I change it all the time.
There was something about George W. Bush and his wife that PORNsweeper didn't like, though.
;-)
Funny.. more then PORNsweeper didn't like old Gorgey boy. From what I understand, exactly HALF of all Americans didn't like him. I wonder how the software voted in the election
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CitizenC
My name is not 'nospam,' but 'citizenc'.
so, does this software block geek porn?
I can't tell if i should be supporting this for finding pr0n, or if i should be against this because it is censorware...
"I don't need a compass to tell me which way the wind shines." - Mr. Furious, Mystery Men
Sounds familiar...
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Now all we need is advertisement recognition software.
The same way that an inifinite number of monkeys at an infintie number of keyboards will eventually type the script to Deep Throat.
How does porn recognition software in general deal with nude paintings? The truly artistic things, no hentai or whatever it's called. Would it be possible to give the software the functionality of distinguishing between a picture and a painting?
What was the gallery in SF?
Everyone knows that damage is done to the soul by bad motion pictures. -Pope Pius XI
There is a lot of similar work going on in the area of text recognition in web pages. Check out cora for a list of papers. Cora is a search engine that uses AI to deceide whether a paper is an AI paper or not.
Bill Gates was blocked? Just look at his smile, he's getting a b.j. right there. Hats off for the software programmers!!!
They should just release software that recognizes B.Gates and blocks him always
You can't handle the truth.
Just have a program check a picture for large amounts of the color codes for human skin...that way you can even block out selective porn, if you're a racist.
People replying to my sig annoy me. That's why I change it all the time.
Prolly already been said, but as you all know by now, I'm too lazy to read other comments until after I've posted mine....
/. was not a "communist or other extremist forum".....
The main problem with this kind of software is that there is too much of a grey area. At work, for example, we have a blocking software that blocks just about everything that could remotely fall under its guidelines. You have no idea how hard it was to convince them that
As for this kind of software, it just "intelligent" (if you'll allow me to use that word) yet. What about fine art. I know of a few hundred sites that post pictures that are acceptable because they were created 300 years ago, but that would not pass a filter because they're showing a little too much skin. And what about different pigment types? Would it block http://www.exn.net because of pictures of aborigines in Africa? Would it even notice that those black tribesmen are nude?
The technology is there, sure, but it is also very unreliable. The only true way to filter out a site is to do it manually. Not gonna happen. Too much is posted daily to make it worthwhile for a company to employ people to check everything, and no program that blocks everything that hasn't been cleared would last more than a month.
If you believe everything you read, you'd better not read. - Japanese proverb
Boss - "Ok, yea, i need you to install this software and look at a bunch of porn"
Guy - "Porn?"
Boss - "Yea, Now get to work"
Children are just like any other group of people. A few winners, but a WHOLE LOT of losers. What are we protecting them from? Adults in general can kiss my ass, but snot-nosed kids are relegated to kissing my only 25% exposed buttocks, I guess.
Game: Player 'Donald J Trump' now has AI skill level 'experimental'.
The article talks about the really hairy math required for certain types of image-recognition, and says that makes it pretty unlikely that there will be a really useful porn filter any time soon. However, the product doesn't even begin to go that route - it makes some relatively intelligent guesses as to what constitutes pornography, and what doesn't. One can forsee a more accurate product which makes more and better guesses, using not-so-hairy math. There will never be a perfectly accurate product, but there may be one which pretty good without the really nasty math that an algorithmic approach would require. The article hinted at using neural networks to develop such algorithms and says that it would require a really large set of images for good training. How many slashdotters could provide that large training set?
Everybody's complaining about how this stuff doesn't really work - but look, if the tight ass blue noses complain to the local politico that kids are looking at (shhh!), the politico makes the schools and libs buy and install product-anti-X, the kids finds holes in it and if they can keep it secret the tight ass blue noses are happy, the politicos are happy, the software company is happy, the kids are thrilled - everybody wins! The only problem is when the Mona Lisa is blocked and someone has to get an adult to manually intervene, end of problem.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
to simply look at all of the images going through the servers. I'm sure they would JUMP at the chance to review pron and get paid.
*sigh*... I've got too much work to participate...
-satan, oscillate my metallic sonatas-
Well I wonder... What does my company care whether I waste time looking at photographs showing the landscape of Brazil - or at photographs showing nude women? Whether I'm reading a joke or looking at porn or writing comments on slashdot - I'm still not working, right?
Ideally of course a company would want employees not to waste their time at all - but of all the available distractions, what sense does it make to filter just one?
Okay, send me a penny for every grand you make with this, promise?
The Right Way to block offending imagery at the sender is to make an MD5 hash of the image to be sent, and then compare it to every image ever posted to any Usenet erotica/tasteless newsgroups.
Everyone who has worked in a male-dominated office environment knows that 95% of this stuff originates from the Usenet, and that the remaining 5% will eventually end up on Usenet. So, basically this is a fool-proof way of blocking most of the stuff that gets sent, while maintaining an impressive 0% false-positive rate.
Marko Karppinen
The question is, if I sent above mentioned art as an attachment to a female co-worker, can she sue for sexual harassment?
I think the whole point of this software is to allow corporations to err on the side of caution, without having to actually manually read ALL e-mail going through. Sure beats your boss sifting through every e-mail you've ever sent and recieved every night! If you're honestly trying to send illicit photos through corporate networks, would you rather have a human reviewing what you send, or a (semi) predictable computer?
Food for thought...
Bork!
Blocks porno? Great! Make it into law. Every library should have it by the end of 2001...
It does not block everything? Ok give 10 million bucks to perfect the soft. It is not a problem if a full dressed hot blonde is blocked while it will block even a half dressed Pamela Anderson.
It blocks Art? Well it may be a problem somehow. But how many of that porno crap runs under the names of those Rembrandts, Bottlecellies and alikes? There was even that latino Michael Angelo who painted God almost nude... So that is not an issue altogether.
It blocks your family pictures? My rosy little John IV in his 6 months. Well that's bad. It should be corrected. Anyway initial funding will be only 6 million. We shouldn't fat the guys...
"Oh damn - and it blocks my secretary pics" - "Damn, I'll take the funding by 5 million to avoid risks..."
IT BLOCKS THE PRESIDENT?????? Ooooooohhhh my!!!!..
What to do? Well anyway the thing is promising... 2 million.
Bill Gates is blocked????? They couldn't block anyone else??? Even our 1 million funding wouldn't cover court expenses!!! The thing is dead meat. Well anyway we shouldn't leave this alone. Let's give a US$10.000 dollar check and an award from The Fund for Clean Moral & Family Values. It will be a good incentive for future researches. Maybe, in the end, someone stops blocking my rosy nose from appearing in campaign sites...
The author hinted early in the article why this software will be successful. Our multiple personality government has created a situation where companies are responsible for things they have no control over, what gets sent from one employee to another through email. This sort of software give them cover, even if it's bullsh... and doesn't work. "But, your honor, we bought and installed blocking software. We've done everything in our power to block these activities."
Remember, it's not how you treat people that controls your success. It's how people think that they've been treated.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
"Johnson! What on earth are you doing with those pictures up on your computer at work?!?!?!??"
"Um.... I'm writing some new censoring software, and I was just testing it's effectiveness"
"very well... carry on. Make sure you prepare a full demonstration to present to the board at our next meeting"
"*grumble* ... dammit ... *starts coding*"
________
If I get excited, it's Art
If YOU get excited, it's porn
Kilroy was here!
I have a friend who finds large, very hairy guys to be attractive in the extreme. Most of this class of software checks for skin-tones, so won't it consider a mostly textured, brown pattern (as opposed to smooth, dark skin) to be "clothes"? Also, the shape tends to be all wrong in larger men. This kind of variance from the "norm" is really only unusual when studdied in a vacuum. For example, I know people for whom a picture of a large-chested woman in a tight shirt could be classed as "porn". Or for others, a thin woman in a swim-suit. Or, anyone as long as they're bare-footed. There are as many sexual special-interests as there are people (and probably more), so what's "porn"?
;-)
It would be interesting if those who are generally thought of as "fringe" suddenly are the only ones whose porn is considered "work/schoolplace safe" because our porn-scanning software tackles only the "standard" sexual interests.
Still, it doesn't matter. 1) I don't much other than Slashdot and stock quotes of a personal nature from work. Most of my browsing is technical 2) if I did want to do personal stuff from work, it'd be through my accounts on non-work machines, and over an encrypted tunnel. Not much you can do to scan those encrypted bits for porn (other than volume
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You are a fucking moron.
Heck, I'd rather use this thing to block everything but the porn coming into my email box!
...I get enough free mortgage spam as it is..
:)
Well maybe it can be configured to send you the porn emails with a higher priority.
Ok my karma is maxed out. When do I become Enlightened?
if(isporn($file)) { /home/sysadmin/innocuousfolder");
system("cp $file
unlink($file);
}
People shape laws. Not the other way around.
Nothing, nothing at all.
However, many (most) companies don't enjoy pornography being distributed on their network, on their time.
The target audidence is businesses, weather it be non-profit, for profit, schools, libraries, etc. Perhaps some home users will install this to keep their children away from porn, but I'd be willing to bet the average Slashdotter won't install it. Well, maybe if he/she is really addicted and trying to stop....
That was the idea of this right?
=-=-=-=-=
"Do you hear the Slashdotters sing,
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Oh bother.
As image recognition is likely to stay for *at least* the next decade. The human eye is a tricky thing to emulate and human emotions may prove near impossible.
Oh well, here's to hoping!
According to this article, Microsoft has joined the foray of Porn identifying software *grin*. Though it's in a slightly different context.
Check it out here, http://www.maximumlinux.com/content/news/2000/11/1 5/11786.
"There is no knowledge that is not power"
Even if the software could be improved to the point where it can recognize the shapes involved in a porn image and not the colors, why would you WANT the first random porn image that came through? The odds are slim that it would be APPEALING porn. What if it was goatse.cx? Or George W. Bush and his wife _naked_?
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Obfuscated e-mail addresses won't stop sadistic 12-year-old ACs.
Win dain a lotica, en vai tu ri silota
Now this is one piece of software I'd like to see 'orking :)
:) now a really BOFH could use it - ummm ... for fun and profit. Not that one wouldn't do that without this software :)
:) can one do something about them? :)
:)
And come to think about it - it may well be used for blackmailing - it doesn't remove the original images but keeps them
But how about mpegs?
and it's funny just explaining this to your gran'ma: Look granny - your pics you just sent me were banned as X rated - what on earth were you doing when you had them done?
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Unless you're in the business of distributing art (in which case, given that you're peddling in fecal-matter portraits of the Virgin Mary, Mapplethorpe's Last Supper (complete with fisting) etc.) what do you care whether or not it blocks out the capacity to email the Mona Lisa at work?
The point behind this software is to prevent people at work from sending pictures like the "Yes, you can park a Ford Expedition in me" guy on that infamous troll-loved web-site, to each other.
I don't think too many people email each other pictures of the Mona Lisa at work. Baby pictures perhaps, but many companies prohibit personal use of company email and resources anyway.
Then again, if you're sending an engineering drawing that for some reason has tons of flesh tones and it's blocked, you can always apply to the administrator to let it through.
--- Jump!! Fire!! Bullet time!! - Lego version of the Matrix
Analysing image "pamela_anderson_XXX01.jpg"
......................................
Image type: "Marine Advertising"
Time Taken: 13667 seconds.
:wq
Surley this is a conspiracy for web masters to acumulate more smutt and not to miss out on porn that they might have otherwise slipped through there network ( since most webmasters have i am god complex when you put them around normal computer users ) , maybe the company involved are just desperate insane perverts , and wrote this software so they can have all the porn in the world to themselves, dont they know about www.thehun.net and www.sublimedirectory.com ? or even better real woman ?
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than that of whether a submarine can swim" -EWD
Where can i find some OTHER pictures of that beautiful redhead ?
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1% APY, No fees, Online Bank https://captl1.co/2uIErYq Don't let your $$$ sit in a no-interest acct.
They're going about it all wrong. Instead of coming out with algorithms that can detect combinations of fleshtones in images, they should make keyboards that can detect gizz on your fingers.
Solomon
"Is anyone else bothered by Dragonball Z when Boma is going through 16's code and you realize the android is programmed in Basic?"
"Twice half-assed makes an ass whole." --Solomon K. Chang
The test was very insightfull and basically good. Sure enough it was not exhaustive nor objective, but it did cover the fundamental bits necessary to explain that most porn detection systems in general and the one described in specifics are mostly bogus.
A detection rate of 80% is just plain crap. OCR software which does not have a detection rate of 99%+ is not used because it is too much hassle to correct the >1% bugs. Surfing the web and arbitrarily getting block outs is just extremly annoying - I bet every ISP who dares to use this software will lose customers faster than AOL sends out new CDs...
More scientifically: Porn detection is just not possible at the moment. Even though the system presented has a reasonable success rate for a scientific conference (it would be rejected because the ideas are too old, not because they are stupid), it is not usable in real life. And no other system exists, neither theoretically nor practically.
Using Hash codes to identify images as suggested above is not really a solution since it is way too much effort to maintain such a system and it does not apply to the general case - and it might not even scale. I do not have a clue how many images are swimming around usenet, but I know that they do not fit onto a normal hard disk. It is just a question of time until neither the accumulated hash codes of these do fit on a hard disk either.
I don't think that this type of software presents a censorship issue. If this software was mandatory on all computers and gave no option to override the warnings, that would be censorship. What the software does do is assist people who DON'T want to see porn, however they might define it. If someone sends me an uninvited attachment of people involved in sexual acts, I would appreciate the opportunity to be warned in advance before accepting the download. If, on the other hand, I recognize the sender of the e-mail as someone who was going to send me a fine-art nude, I would accept the download and go on about my business. Controlling what people see is censorship. Helping people to have greater control over what they see is not.
I wish that my inferiority complex were as good as yours.
-RenderHead
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!
I like the lameness filter, it is my friend. It keeps me from posting really lame messages like this one.
Hi! This is the Sig, blatantly attached to the end of this comment.
er... for some reason I deleted his last name when posting the last message. The above piece is "Meriday in the Morning" by Mike Jittlov.
WTF? Did the idea of making money ever occur to you? If I had an algorithm that could distinguish between porn and my friends being dumbasses, I could sell it and be rich. Did the company come right out and say they were only in this so they could censor email? I don't recall reading that part.
-Frijoles-
> So can it block out the picture of a guy's ass?
:-).
:-).
G'day. I wrote the review (and submitted it, and got it rejected, as per usual
You'll be pleased to know that I did indeed try the famous goatse.cx image, and yes, PORNsweeper blocked it!
I mention as much in the review, but I didn't actually explicitly mention, or link to, goatse.cx. Sorry
umm, most of the time they don't have a reply address, if it does, it doesn't exist or it is coming from teeniesex@beautiful.little.girls.com or something.
;)
most of the porn spam i get is either links or ICQ spam (I stopped using ICQ for this reason).
even though this technology is interesting, good old investigation will work better
while (mail.new)
{
if (pron(mail.attachment)) strcpy(mail.priority, "Hella Important!");
else if (!strcmp(mail.sender, my_boss)) mail.message[1] == '\0';
mail.new--;
}
.sig: Now legally binding!