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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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);}
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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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
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."
You'd be the next dot.com millionaire.
Go where the market REALLY is.
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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.
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."
c++ bleh..
cpeterso
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.
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.
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.
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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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
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.
Or...
Is that a man's hairy groin or Fidel Castro?
Bill Clinton: Pimp we can believe in. - The Shirt!!!
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. :-)
If they cheated on this test, they need to find new cheaters.
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
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'.
Sounds familiar...
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Now all we need is advertisement recognition software.
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.
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"
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); }
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
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*"
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If I get excited, it's Art
If YOU get excited, it's porn
Kilroy was here!
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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..
:)
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....
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
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
"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.
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.
> 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
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!