Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft Collaborates On Child Porn Buster
pmike_bauer writes "Microsoft and Canadian authorities on Thursday launched a software program designed to help police worldwide hunt down child porn traffickers. Police departments can use it free of charge." From the article: "The program was developed by Microsoft Canada, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and Toronto police, with the help of the Department of Homeland Security, Scotland Yard and Interpol." Update: 04/08 18:09 GMT by Z : Modified to reflect the fact that it's not Open Source.
The article from MSNBC mentioned in this story is very light on details. Thanks to Google News, here are some more useful articles about CETS, the Child Exploitation Tracking System:
These articles mention that CETS is based on MS SQL Server (for the database) and some bits of MS SharePoint (for the web portal). Also, the system uses .NET and web services (SOAP/XML) for exchanging data so it should be possible to integrate this with non-Microsoft systems (in theory).
What is not mentioned in any of the articles is whether the system is really open-source, as claimed in the headline of this Slashdot story and the related MSNBC article. The only statements that I found about this said that Microsoft Canada will "make [CETS] available free of charge to any law enforcement agency that wants to use it." But no mention of any Open Source license.
-Raphaël
TFA doesn't seem to have any clue what "open source" means. This isn't open source at all. It was liscences to several MS server technologies donated to the National Child Exploitation Coordination Centre in Ottawa. It gives Canadian police a central database for notes, evidence collected, and existing tracking databases. It then uses standard data mining to tease out connections. It will do the same for other jurisdictions. It's "free as in beer" if your a national law enforcement agency, but certainly not "free as in speech"
Free MacMini
Trying to tie this issue to 1st amendment rights shows how little you know about the issue and how little you know about the 1st amendment.
Children are bought and sold, gang-raped, and forced to have sex with each other. Acts which absolutely destroy a child. This isn't some victimless crime.
But, continue on with your ignorant anti-american ways. I'm sure it somehow makes you feel better about yourself.
Common mistake - open source does not mean that 1, 2 or 3 have to be fulfilled to the general public, indeed I can opensource a project of mine and supply the binary and code to my one sole customer, it would still be open source. There is nothing in any of the GNU licenses or the OSI opproved licenses that says 'you must supply this to the general public for it to be an opensource project', you can keep an entire GPLed codebase within a tight group of people, so long as the binary isnt distributed outside that group.
Opensource does not mean you have immediate rights to 1, 2 or 3.
The Canadian child pornography law covers purely fictional material. Draw a picture of a child being raped, from imagination, without any real child being harmed, and that is just as illegal in Canada as if it were a photo from life. One recent widely-reported case had a man in Edmonton arrested and prosecuted for possession of fictional Japanese comic books. They are also working hard on expanding the law to also cover text. That is, words, made up from imagination, without any pictures. The current effort is almost entirely directed at writing a law to convict one man - Robin Sharpe - who was acquitted of child pornography possession because the "child pornography" in question was fictional text and the Supreme Court said (correctly) that that was victimless and couldn't be prosecuted. The Religious Right is pressing to rewrite the law - damn the Constitution - in order to have a way to convict people like Sharpe. (The law actually already does cover text, but they want to make it a lot broader.)
This isn't about children "bought and sold, gang-raped, and forced to have sex with each other". It is sometimes, and in the most important and highest-profile actual Canadian case, a truly victimless crime.
Do you really believe that purely imaginary words should ever be illegal? I don't.
No, they've already done much worse than that. Like turning those records over to federal law-enforcement.
That was true fifty years ago. Now everyone is a potential drug user or anti-globalization activist or copyright violator or terrorist or something the state doesn't like; and data surveillance is cheap and easy. The easier it gets, the more the question moves from "Why should we bother watching this guy?" to "Why not?"
Surveillance is moving to an opt-out model, rather than an opt-in.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
If I put a sign on my lemon tree that says "free lemons" it is not stealing to take some lemons, even if you strip the tree bare and set up a stand nearby to sell them for 5 cents each.
Microsoft can use BSD licensed code in their closed source products, and the author who released the code under the BSD license is/was/should be aware that this is the whole point of choosing to release code under the BSD license over the GPL.
All kings is mostly rapscallions. -Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn