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ISPs to Create Database to Combat Child Porn
BlueCup writes to tell us that several media companies are banding together to create a database of child pornography images to help law enforcement officials combat distribution of questionable material. In addition to the database several tools and new technologies are also planned but most notable is what some perceive as a willingness to cooperate which critics say has been lacking in the past. From the article: "Each company will set its own procedures on how it uses the database, but executives say the partnership will let companies exchange their best ideas — ultimately developing tools for preventing child-porn distribution instead of simply catching violations."
This can be problematic and annoying for users when the databases aren't correctly updated. A case in point: the Internet Watch Foundation maintains a database of child porn / other obscene URLs so that ISPs can take that list (hashed, so the URLs are not revealed) and block them.
Recently, a popular imageboard at http://img.4chan.org/b/imgboard.html has been added to that list for reasons unknown. Several UK ISPs, including BT Internet and NTL, have blocked that URL. Complaints to either the ISPs or the IWF from both the users and the site admin have gone unanswered. I am personally quite annoyed by this as I'm a regular user of that board.
It's this sort of unaccountable censorship of the Internet that makes me suspicious of such 'helpful' databases.
These online companies were previously protecting themselves from liability for their customers' transmissions by claiming that filtering this data would be an expensive and prohibitive task. By volunteering this service, they've crossed that line. It should be possible for the music companies, MPAA, etc. to demand filtering as well.
It's a pretty stupid plan nonetheless. These digital fingerprints will only catch casual or newbie child porn traffickers. Encryption will easily render these fingerprints useless. The worrisome side effect is the false positives that will be triggered by this fingerprinting technique. As an example, try using one of those packages that tries to tag your mp3s by fingerprinting... Pretty unreliable stuff.
Seth
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
Fine, they won't keep the actual images in their databases, but instead keep a hash/signature of images.
/ MilaneseCherbuliezPun_icapr98.pdf
or even more flexible (kind of like a visual version of musicbrainz) so the signature would be invariant to minor changes in the image. Not really my field, but it seems relatively trivial.
Use a signature generation method like http://vision.unige.ch/publications/postscript/98
No a troll but a serious question.
.. I knew I should have read TFA .. they are advocating an automated process that is trained to recognise signatures of pics that are deemed to be bad. If they can do that for $1,000,000 I will be really surprised, as I don;t think it has ever been sucessfully done before for any type of image. I wonder who sold them this snake oil (again)
How do they categorise what is collected in their database as child porn? I have yet to see an automated system that can look at a photo and describe what it is (although several have been promoted over the years) I imagine that the decision as to what category the pics falls under must be made by a human. So my question is whose standard do they apply for the process?
I can see that this process could be very arbitrary. So while I am not advocating child porn, I can also see that the data collection process could get very messy and have lots of false positives and negatives. and like the TSAs no fly list, could be very hard to get off it once you are on.
Oh shit
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
Eivind.
Doubting the existence of evolution is like doubting the existence of China: It just shows that you're uninformed.
So, yeah, go ahead and build your database. By the time it is up and running, it will be obsolete, and we'll be discussing other problems.
"Something just wasn't right about the way he talked about child porn, almost as if it took effort to disparage it and I got the sneaking suspicion that he had been compromised by it in some way"
Compromised? Not in the way you mean.
Unfortunately, I have some experience of this from about 10 years ago. While I was working for a large corporation as a sysadmin I came across a stash of this stuff. To cut a long story short it went from that to helping the police gather evidence against three individuals and from there to helping them to crack a much larger ring of paedophiles.*
A normal adult wants to love and protect kids. I can tell you these people (I use the term advisedly) are *really* not normal and some of the images made me physically sick - literally. We are not talking about kids in the nude - you don't want to know. There is NO way a NORMAL adult will be compromised... really! What that police officer was probably feeling was... nothing. You have to be like that to be able to take it at all and even then it does damage. It's so bad that you *must* stop after a couple of years.
"One wonders why cops are allowed to work on this on their own, seems to me it would make much more sense to allow people access to the material only in teams, perhaps mixed-gender."
Well, you are in a team. Part of the reason of trawling through the material on your own is logistics (manpower, etc) and the other is; why expose people to more than necessary? And, as I mention above, the dangers aren't that you'll turn into a paedophile yourself.
* Yes we got them - it was on the front page of the papers - especially the bit about most of them getting 15 months. We spent two years taking them down. Go figure!
I've randomly seen ("mild") child porn a couple of times, and I'll admit it turn me on. However, I'm smart enough that I still don't intentionally look it up, nor do I collect it, both for ethical and pragmatic reasons. Those that do look it up aren't smart enough to see and follow those pragmatic reasons.
Eivind.
Doubting the existence of evolution is like doubting the existence of China: It just shows that you're uninformed.
"Bullshit. In the 10 years I've been using the Internet, I've come accross child porn one (1) time, and even that looked more like two kids playing doctor than any pedophilic photo setup. If that's the "darkest side of the Internet", then the Net's brighter than the surface of the Sun."
I think you've been spending too much time on Slashdot.
I've been using the interweb since 1998 when I was 13, and I have been exposed to child pornography since day one. I remember logging in to Microsoft Chat (which was bundled with Windows) and all the rooms were devoted to kid porn... I also remember the channel listings on DALnet just being filled with stuff like, "!!!!!!!!!!!!11LolIta-_OMG-filesrvr" although these channels tended to be pure smoke.
On a more interesting point, a few years ago, I was paid to go through a list of about 10,000 randomly selected international websites and categorize them by hand for a search engine. For every thousand or so, I would see at least a couple child pornography sites.
First off, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children already has this "databae" or "library" of child porn images. They would be the maintainers of it, not the ISPs themselves. That is what the article says, and that would be the legal requirements - police and other government agencies cannot keep child porn even for sample purposes.
NCMEC will be undoubtably supplying a hash database to ISPs. MD5 or SHA1 probably as these are in common use today. This would enable matching of identical files quickly and easily.
Unfortunately, we are already running into the limits of simple MD5 matching with child porn cases today. You resize the picture or brighten it up a little bit and that changes the MD5 value and your database, library or whatever is then useless. You have a new, original picture with a new original hash value. There are other ways to accomplish this which do not suffer from these limitations without giving up high-speed autonomous comparisons. Check out http://www.infinadyne.com/icatch.html for some ideas.
Yes, I work at the company that is producing this product.