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Dogs Trained to Sniff Out Piracy
RockDoctor writes "Northern Ireland has for decades been using sniffer dogs to detect bombs and bomb-making materials. According to the BBC, a dog trainer in the Province has trained two dogs to sniff out some of the chemicals used in the manufacture of optical discs. While this has an obvious risk of false positives (polycarbonate plastics and their associated plasticizer additives are used in many other industries, for example), it does seem to be effective at locating discs which are not declared in customs manifests, and doing so much faster than human inspection of the cargo can do."
Fly with your external hdd to transport your piracy overseas.
Well, at least the dogs should not get addicted to plastics, like the drug sniffing dogs...
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
What if the dog gets interested in the content of the disk?
First they do this... and then they train the dogs to sniff out the actual pirates.
Once these dogs have the secent of basement dwelling teenager with poor hygiene... it's all over.
RIAA is probably training them now. What exactly is the scent of p2p?
There's nothing Intelligent about Intelligent Design.
Incredible.
The sniffer dog is trained by a trainer who eats fast food which is served by a waitress who has a boyfriend with a computer connected to the internet.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Arr, thar be no pirates aboard me ship. She be yar and she be true as spit shine as all me laddies. Ye nay be needin' th' poochie here cap'n. Wha? Why tha' be chemicals fer me special scurvy cream. I swar I ne'er heard o' no Day-vee-day piratein' They be like gold bar? Arr! L'emme go ye scalliwags! Ye, canna keel haul a-man fer youst ha'in chemicals fer the scurvy! I swar ser it's medicinal! Don' let 'em lock me in thar brig! I did'na heard no Day-vee-day pirates! Dis is per-poster-mos!
Poor Long Burn Silver Disc we never saw him again.
[signature]
At least it's better than the magic 8 ball method the RIAA seems to have been using. :)
The filthy beggars ne'er get a wash. A man can sniff 'em out himself at thirty fathoms!
to train them to sniff out films and music that smell bad? A single copy of The Wickerman remake can be smelled by a human with a head cold at a hundred yards. A good bloodhound should be able to sniff out a box of them from the next county.
More money and effort is going toward finding copied disks than in finding Bin Laden? I thought sniff-dogs were in short supply after 9/11? What gives? Big corps have way too much power of late.
Table-ized A.I.
This is probably to catch 'round tripping' tax avoidance. This technique was accidentally discovered by Sir Richard Branson when he started Virgin Media. Basically what he did, was to export discs to France with faulty paperwork or something, have it refused entry, then he turned around and drove back to Britain. Since the stuff was officially exported, he somehow scored on the VAT when he subsequently sold them in his UK shops. Eventually he got caught though, once he got too brazen about it.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
As in, "aside from that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you like the play?"
When are people going to figure out that a "false positive" is not a nuisance, it's a death blow to any proposed technology--unless the risk of false positives is orders of magnitude lower than the actual frequency of the rare event being detected?
Doesn't anyone ever read Æsop's fable about the boy who cried wolf?
Polycarbonate plastic is just the generic name for Lexan®, and if you follow that link you'll notice that GE mentions many uses besides DVD's: automotive lenses, "blow molding," eyewear, water bottles, structural foam, etc. The example they show in the picture is a cell phone. I believe the original iMacs (the CRT-based ones) had Lexan housings. The company I work for uses Lexan strips to protect a surface where thin metal plates slide over and would otherwise scrap a painted shelf. The stuff is used everywhere.
After customs inspectors have wasted two or three days opening crates of various products with tough molded Lexan housings, they'll forget the whole silly business.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/05/10/23 31237 shows that the MPAA has tried this before. Altogether, I can't say this is a very smart idea. Additionally, it would be remarkably easy to DDOS by adding fragments of DVDs to every package you ship. Lastly, how many of us have our warez shipped to us? As people wisely noticed before, this is a ridiculous invasion of privacy and all the more reason to hate the MPAA and to download movies instead of buying them.
YRO is overused as a class, but there is something to rights arguements about trained dogs, etc. that whole pesky "Unreasonable Search and Seizure" clause in the U. S. Constitution implies that some searches are more reasonable than others. Dogs provide an extension of search capabilities. So do X-Ray scans, cavity searches, DNA tests, retasking military grade spy sats to look for pot plantations, or compulsory urine testing. Dogs at customs are generally considered a reasonable search tool for the kinds of things customs has to detect.
BUT, customs is generally charged with detecting some very odd things, such as livestock or pets that are not normally illegal to own, but are illegal to import, and with detecting drugs. Checking for bootleg CDs has certain implications that can't be avoided in this context. First, the society is assuming that catching this particular form of copyright violation is roughly on a par with catching heroin smuggling. That's pretty damned strongly implied if we put similar amounts of money into training dogs for both (and if anything, it's cheaper to train a dog to detect several related opiates and other drugs than it is one plasticiser*). Second, discovering CDs proves nothing, unless the humans associated with the dogs can make a proper determination that the CDs aren't legal ones. That implies we (as a society) are devoting resources to training the human customs agents in telling bootleg CDs from legitimate ones, AT A TIME WHEN WE HAVE SERIOUS DOUBTS ABOUT THEIR TRAINING IN DETECTING INCOMING TERRORISTS WITH WMDS!
* I've actually helped local law enforcement train drug and explosive sniffing dogs. It's difficult fun to try and outwit a well trained sniffer dog, and I have no doubts at all they can be trained to accurately find polycarbonate plasticizers, but I really, seriously doubt it's as easy as training them for much more aromatic explosive nitrate compounds, and that is weeks or months of work. Typical training involves taking the dogs to an unfamiliar location, which means setting aside a national guard armory, old courthouse or other state owned building, often for several days, and having about 20 people previously unknown to the dogs available to plant the 'evidence'. You can't use just one or two people over and over or the dog starts using their scent markers to shortcut training. Instead you have to have several people take turns, hand off packages to each other, and otherwise mix things up so the dog trains properly on the chemical desired. That can be 20 people on a payroll all day even if they are going to actually do only 15 minutes work each, and this is far from cheap.
Who is John Cabal?
Wrong. We are talking about government. If this turns out to be a huge waste of resources, more taxes will be levied in order to expand the operation into a gigantic waste of resources.
They whose government reduces their essential liberties for temporary security, receive neither liberty nor security.
I remember a year or so ago FedEx allowed the MPAA to use these dogs on some of the packages they were shipping. Ever since then I started using UPS. I don't buy or send pirated disks, but if FedEx is going to sell out to those folks I figure I'll just go brown.
These trained dogs, unless deployed for a limited time in a specific area, are there for little more than show. Although they can be trained to sniff out almost anything, they aren't robots. The dogs treat it as a game, but they need frequent breaks or they'll quickly tire of it. You can't just march a dog for 8 hours around the airport and expect him to magically find any contraband that finds its way into the building. They may be the best choice in a situation such as a building collapse, where they need to find bodies in an area of a few thousand square feet, but to expect that even hundreds of these dogs will be able to sniff the millions of cargo containers that come into this country every year is laughable. Besides, since it's perfectly legal to ship blank media, anyone in the bootlegging business will just declare the cargo and it will get lost among the false positives of all the other blank DVDs that come in from overseas. But I guess that trained pooches do make for good press releases, letting everyone know that something is being done about this horrible scourge of bit copying.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
....and the Govt, keeps worrying about raising taxes to built a public transport system, etc.
We should have a way to selectively pay taxes to support initiatives we like, and MPAA initiatives like these should come out of Warner, and not me.
"Doing what i can, with what i have." ~ Burt Gummer
ANASD (I am not a sniffer dog)
Isn't it kind of pointless to explain extremely common acronyms like that?
Customs has the right to inspect everything that comes through the borders, with limits (reasonable suspicion) only on people.
There is no such thing as "Unreasonable Search and Seizure" when it comes to cargo, packages, mail, or 'things that are not people'.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!