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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?"
Since it is so good identifing pr0n I can't wait to get my first pornbot with that function to find me some more.
I see nothing in this article that the DOJ is about to do anything. This is just a review of a a product that can block some images that would be useful for some families.
I don't understand why this summary has to bring the government into this or speculate that they might do something. There's no evidence of impending censorship, no political issues at work here. It's just a review of a product. Why does Zonk continually try to troll politics on slashdot? He's turning into worse than Michael ever did.
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.
So does it filter out Rubens
Would Michelangelo's David be filtered out
How about anatomy/autopsy pictures ?
I would RTFA but it is 404, perhaps my ISP filters out stories about filtering.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
Does it work on everyone's favorite image, hello.jpg?
This guy's the limit!
which highlights the retarding effect regulation has on technological progress
In other news, today I successfully opened a can of Diet Coke -- which highlights the retarding effect regulation has on quenching thirst. Man, if I'd waited for the government to open that can for me, I'd still be thirsty now!
If only there were a more effective way to highlight the retarding effect that obsessing over the complete works of Ayn Rand has on independant thought...
Whence? Hence. Whither? Thither.
First we shout the Govt. to get Off our backs on this issue, and when they actually fail to come up with any solutions (because we told them NOT to), we wham them for not guiding us/providing us with any solution.
What a load of cr*p !
On one hand we shout at the ineffectiveness of Govt's first real action in decades to counteract this problem (by yahoo, msn and google searches), and then we shout at them for NOT providing a solution at all.
You tie both my hands behind my back, then you blame me for not shooting at the thief !
"Doing what i can, with what i have." ~ Burt Gummer
Can I run it backwards and filter out everything that isn't porn? I'd find that more .. useful.
http://twitter.com/onion2k
This thing will be ruined with false positives. Swimsuit photos, maybe pictures of animals (similar color tones), etc.
This won't go anywhere for a long time, until image recognition technology catches up.
I wonder how many hours the poor programers worked in order to test this thing :)
Looking for porn that the filter cant handle...
What those meetings must have looked like.
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.
From 2001:
1 1126.html
http://www.isp-planet.com/news/2001/messagelabs_0
"SkyScan AP uses Image Composition Software (ICA), which decomposes an image," White explained. "It runs 22,000 algorithms and in addition to skin tone textures, it can decipher porn through other features such as facial expressions.""
In practice these tools are simply filtering by URL, then by colour gamut analysis.
Does anybody know how they do this. What is the difference between a nipple and a cherry (the fruit) to a computer.
And more interestingly, what's the difference between a nipple on a nudist shot and not?
Nudism wasn't illegal in any modern country I know.
There are plenty of even less grey area cases like these that would be problematic, mentioned by a poster above. Art, both as for paintings and photography, etc. If we simply forbid the human body out of religious reasons and whatever, isn't that admitting Satan got what he wanted?
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Nobody seems to be caring bout the 10^5 monkeys that check every image thus making the filter work... Poor perverted animals...
My 0.02 cents
I simply don't get it.
... and you fell for it.
First we shout the Govt. to get Off our backs on this issue, and when they actually fail to come up with any solutions (because we told them NOT to), we wham them for not guiding us/providing us with any solution.
You are failing to realize that the same person is not talking in both cases. Also, while Slashdot as a whole leans to the left, the same issue can have articles written by, and about people on, both sides. The only thing that is happening here is that someone thought a discussion about a software for image identification and its future impact on us would be a good thread, and here we are.
You tie both my hands behind my back, then you blame me for not shooting at the thief!
The fallacy lies in missing that the ties hands speaker is not the same speaker as the one doing the blaming.
Make more sense now?
~Rebecca
Is this cameltoe porn or is it only porn if you get exited watching it?
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Manager: "All right team, looks like Joe has finally come up with a fast and fairly accurate algorithim to spot those dirty old pornographic images. We will need to test it a bit first, to see what the signal to noise ratio is. We will need some test groups, though."
"Yeah, sure bob, you can run the 'barely legal college girls' tests. Janet and Simone, you check the 'hot lesbian' batches. What? Sure Ramone, you can check the 'young gay studs' test. Now, who is going to run the 'goatse.cx' tests?"
"Guys....? Anyone?"
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
Does it work on everyone's favorite image, hello.jpg?
A goatse reference that is helpful and useful? Inconceivable!
I would buy this software if it could filter me from seeing that ever again.(I jest, but only slightly)
~Rebecca
if (percent_pink_pixels(image) >= 70%)
...
flag_as_porn(image);
endif
Step1: use silly algorithm
Step2:
Step3: PROFIT!
Zapman
For there to be a solution, there has to be a problem. I don't see a problem except moral panic and one groups willingness to impose their sense of morality on everybody else.
So if I build a website for close-up shots of orchids, will it get banned?
meh
I've developed a simple algorithm for checking web pages for pornographic content. It is roughly 98% accurate when fed a random page from the 'net. Here's the code so far:
bool check_porn_content(const char *url)
{
(void)url;
return true;
}
Any suggestions for further development, or licensing queries, please let me know.
First of all, I am under the belief that it is NOT the governments job to tell us what we can and cannot see. I do not care what it is, the government should take no part in forcing its citizens to look at one topic vs another. Secondly, us as adults and responsible human beings need to start taking responsibility for things and not wait for father government to step in and tell us how to think. It is YOUR responsibility has an adult to view what you want to and if you come across something offensive how hard is it to hit your 'back button' on your browser? If you have children, it is still YOUR responsbility to censor what you find offensive so your children do not run into it.
Ugh, the more and more we fall into this mentality of relying on our government the more and more we let our freedoms and rights slip through our fingers. Please people start thinking for yourselves, and be not afraid of public opinion or the governments opinion.
...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.
Your 6-year-old may mistype his favorite cartoon's URL and wind up at a porn site; a 16-year-old may reach the same site deliberately
Why should the sixteen year old be stopped from looking at porn? He's over the age of consent, what's wrong with letting him look at some naked women? He's probably thinking about sex all the time anyway, that's just what teenagers do.
Funny how they make very effective filters for pr0n, but violence is AOK.
You can bomb, shoot, maim every night on the nightly news, but God forbid you show a naked breast...people might be harmed!
There are hypocritical cultural 'norms' in the USA.
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
Personally I'm offended by stupidity propagated on the Internet. I'd like to see a new top level domain .stupid for these domains. Google would be so much easier to use then.
Free Me! (http://www.freeme.org/)
Here's a great review of a previous generation of this kind of thing.
http://dansdata.com/pornsweeper.htm
/* FUCK - The F-word is here so that you can grep for it */
...and lets see if those porn filters can cope with the prevalence of the colour green rather than pink.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
I mean, I don't want fat chicks or gay porn or anything with animals, but I do want midgets, bungee-cords and lesbians!
I welcome this new technology!
Blar.
Oh come one...This is NOT the first.
I wrote a program in 1996 to help the guys at fed.gov snoop out kiddie porn.
I simply mapped every image to see what percentage of the pixles were what colors, and them compared that to common skin tones. My apporach mostly only worked for white people (think about it - the reasons should be obvious) but it found porn images regardless of the title or contents of the page around them.
Then, to find out which images were kiddie porn, I searched the pages for references to children. (Acutally, the easier text-search came first for efficiency.)
Voilla! Instant results, but the FBI boys didn't care. I think they would rather keep their jobs surfing the web looking for illegal porn than to have a PC do that while they file forms.
Andy Out@
I'm not too familiar with more recent work, but there's a well-cited paper by Fleck, Forsyth & Bregler (1996) on using image analysis to determine whether or not there were naked people in an image. My inner juvenile always found the title kind of amusing, "Finding Naked People". Fleck also has a web page with some descriptions.
I'm not so sure about its applications, but it's certainly an interesting vision problem.