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DoJ Following Porn Blocker Advances?
GreedyCapitalist writes "A new filter called iShield is able to recognize porn images based on the content of the image (other filters look at URLs and text) and according to PC Magazine, it is very effective. The next generation will probably be even better -- which highlights the retarding effect regulation has on technological progress - if we relied solely on government to ban 'inappropriate' content from the web, we'd never know what solutions the market might come up with. Will the DOJ (which argues that porn filters don't work) take note of filtering innovation or continue its quest for censorship?"
There is no mention of the DOJ anywhere in the articles you posted.
But according to the article, it works well and doesn't filter out health-related websites. It also doesn't work for black and white images, but the majority of online porn isn't b&w. Or so I've heard.
FTA: And we found that some oddly innocent images--in particular, "head shots" of pumpkins from last Halloween--were blocked. But overall, of blocking the images you'd want blocked.
This thing won't be deployed en masse with problems like that.. it quickly becomes uneconomical for admins to be whitelisting pictures of pumpkins.
This won't go anywhere for a long time, until image recognition technology catches up.
Even then, one person's "porn" is another's "art". Even a human can't correctly distinguish offensive vs. non-offensive content with all that much accuracy. (This is besides the fact that around the same time as image recognition technology catches up computers will have overtaken the world and we'll be following their rules rather than our own.)
...know about what happened to Bryce Coad of Zombie Linux, almost 4 years ago. Wheteher his explanation was in fact true, I don't know. But obviously, some people have thought about this long time ago.