Slashdot Mirror
Graphics Advances Make Identifying Real Images Difficult
destinyland writes "The FBI's geeks admitted they were nervous over computer-generated images at a recent forensics conference. In court they're now arguing that a jury 'can tell' if an image is real or computer-generated — which marks the current boundary between legal and illegal. But reporter Debbie Nathan argues that that distinction is getting fuzzy, and that geeks will inevitably make it obsolete." Note: some of the linked (computer-generated) images may be disturbing.
Disturbing doesn't really give us much to go on, and I don't feel like being the guinea pig.
aaaand...whee!
I thought the purpose of child-porn laws were to ensure that no children were hurt (a fairly noble goal).
As long as no children are hurt in the production of these images, why does it matter how real they look?
As CG graphics improve and more photography is done digitally instead of on film, what's to stop a savvy defense lawyer from convincing a jury to dismiss photographic evidence -- including video from surveillance cameras -- on the grounds that it's computer-generated and therefore fake?
I write sci-fi for metalheads
Do you have any evidence to suggest that viewing child porn (or, more specifically, cg child porn) increases crimes against children?
That reminds me of Ken Thompson's argument that video game violence increases real-world violence.
What? That conclusion doesn't follow from the premises you gave.
The justification for making the production of child porn illegal is that it harms children. The justification for making owning child porn illegal is that it encourages producing child porn (and thus encouraging more harming of children).
CG child porn doesn't harm children in its production, because its production doesn't actually involve children. And following the analogy, consumption of CG child porn would encourage the production of more child porn, but given the fact that you can produce it without running afoul of the law, you'd get more CG than real child porn produced.
How does producing images that look like child porn without actually abusing children encourage crimes against children?
Ok, if there seems to be a link, support that assertion with something besides what comes out of your ass.
I agree, I wouldn't say those are harmless. However, I also wouldn't say that those examples are comparable to the kiddie porn/child molestation link.
And could someone please convert Slashdot to Unicode now? Sorry for all the stupid characters in that.
But you see....a weak or weak minded individual can be susceptible to most anything....but, is that reason to remove the choice to view pr0n or play vi0lent video games? Some people are going to get addicted to any number of things, and abuse any number of things...some of those acts are criminal. But for the majority of us that are 'normal'...why should our freedom to indulge in pleasurable things, as long as they don't physically harm REAL people (ok, a little leeway on the S&M people who enjoy being hurt, but, that's a side topic) be infringed upon. If someone gets off on watching rape videos, why not let them...if the act (which is illegal in real life) is simulated by actors or CGI...what's the harm?
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
If they can generate images of kids that you cannot tell are fake, then they can generate images of YOU that cannot be identified as fake. So, it's just a matter of time before we start putting "sicko pedo bastards" in jail for harming innocent children when in fact, not a single real person appears in the photo. At the same time, real sick and twisted pedophiles, who are smart enough to cover their tracks, will continue to abuse real children. But who cares about that right? As long as we hang a few, innocent or not, it makes us feel better.
Correlation != Causation.
I really wish people would understand this. Correctly, it's "Correlation is not necessarily Causation." Too many people think this is some magic mantra that proves (or disproves) something. Correlation may, and very often does, lead to conclude Causation. Correlation is evidence.
And if you think porn isn't harmful to some people, you are just delusional. Porn is similar to alcohol. In moderation it's not harmful, but excessive exposure can be damaging.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
95% of rapists have viewed porn. 100% of rapists were given milk as a child. Clearly we should also ban milk.
Sheesh, what passes for a math and logic education these days...
I was taught to respect my elders. The trouble is, it's getting harder and harder to find some.
In moderation it's not harmful, but excessive exposure can be damaging.
;-)
Um, sez who? You and your baptist minister? Perhaps you can look to Denmark for evidence - porn is freely available, has been for a long time. Perhaps their low sex crime rates are evidence of porn causing a harmful repression of initiative, or...?
I would submit that anyone that pornogrpahic material can 'harm' has already been harmed by some other cause. People with anything resembling a healthy mental state are not moved to violent acts by pictures. I further submit that children are not harmed by porn. Having had a certain amount of exposure from the time I was 12, I feel qualified to comment that until you are old enough to care about sex, porn is uninteresting, and then once you -are- old enough, it tends to lead to fairly predictable behavior. If masturbation strikes you as illegal and dangerous, perhaps porn is harmful. But few will agree with you, I'm afraid.
I was taught to respect my elders. The trouble is, it's getting harder and harder to find some.
and in actual life, according to two studies... Does that qualify as harm? I would think so. However, since you seem to value my own opinion over that of trained psychologists, I'll answer that question for you with another question. Is the damaged caused by violent video games greater than the harm caused by the gov't stepping in trying to regulate such things? Then ask yourself the same thing about child molestation and child porn. Be sure to recognize that while violent video games are not illegal, child porn is. Also, be sure to consider if your opinion would change if you had been a victim of either crime.
There are TONS of things that are harmful...and proven harmful to adults, that are perfectly legal. Alcohol and smoking are two great examples. Let's target booze. It is proven to be harmful if abused in humans. It provably DOES change and alter behavior, with many cases linked to violent and/or sexual behavior that is illegal. Yet...do we ban booze? No...we make the person responsible for their actions, whether under the influence or not.
Same with violent video games and pr0n, (which have much less concrete data behind their influence on behavior than alcohol)...you are responsible for your actions after being exposed to them.
Bottom line, IMHO, as an adult, you should be allowed to do pretty much what you want UNTIL it violates anothers freedoms or harms them.
Viewing CGI depictions of crime causes no harm to a victim...whether it be simulated murder, incarceration, or sexually deviant behavior. So, what is the harm? Seems pretty much like playing some video games actually...just more realistic, and some people get their jollies off on it.
I don't think it is the govt.'s place to tell you as an adult what you can do, use, view or participate in unless it harms another person directly. It is not the place of the govt to protect you from yourself....do what you will, but, face the consequences if you fsck up....THEN the govt steps in.
Just my $0.02...
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
No comments and already both sites are down? Wow.
Just add a 'disturbing' and the slashdot crowd actually reads TFA, I second the 'wow'.
Good fucking lord. Photoshopping is now considered manufacturing child porn? Do you remember what the purpose of the child pornography laws was?
At some point, it is useful to step away from definitions of words and look at the purpose of actions. In this case, no one was harmed, but you sent someone to jail. Nice work. In the meantime, real child molesters were still running around.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
Congratulations, another case when people can't make difference between "ewww, that's gross" and "that is/should be illegal".
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
On that last part... I'd like to point out that porn is also much cheaper than dating. It's good to balance these positive aspects with the negative, especially when there's not much of a chance of getting a date worth spending money on. I'm sure my observation would resonate with most Slashdotters.
The trick is to forget the porn when you date, or better yet, share...
The main thing I learned from studying psychology for six years in university is that every study apparently has an agenda, and with all the ones I participated in as a member or a researcher, they are all based on faulty assumptions about how humans work, and how people respond when they know they're being studied.
The "conclusions" below, are inherently rife with all sorts of debatable points.
* developed an increased sexual callousness toward women
Or the kind of people that will get paid/studied to watch hard core porn for weeks are the kind of people that already have sexual callousness.
What the hell is sexual callousness anyway? I'd argue that it's the default setting for males, who are not mate-for-life animals, despite what the Bride Magazine and the Bible leads us to believe.
* began to trivialize rape as a criminal offense or no longer considered it a crime at all
Or were just being more honest about what they actually thought. Few people run around telling everyone they know they trivialize rape, murder or such due to the social consequences. I'm pretty sure I'm not the first person to consider murder as a viable alternative to dealing with customers or employers or family members. In America we trivialize rape, murder, and violence constantly in our culture. Football and UFC are acceptable "alternatives" to violence that we aren't allowing ourselves to do, so we invent a rule-based sport, unless we can make a case for war somewhere on earth, then we do it with a vengence. Rape was never considered a crime in marriage, until very very recently. Women married in their early teens. Hard core porn exists because it's something we cannot acceptably do, though plenty of people want to. Porn doesn't invent the desire. We have the desire so some people like it. We don't like abused children, but B. Spears claimed to be a virgin in a schoolgirl costume and sold a whole lot of albums. I'm sure eveyone watched her videos for the music.
* developed distorted perceptions about sexuality
That's agenda all over. What is "distorted"? Anything other than missionary? Bologna. Define normal please.
* developed an appetite for more deviant, bizarre, or violent types of pornography (normal sex no longer seemed to do the job)
Normal sex rarely does the job anyway, but I'm a pervert. I'm sure oral sex is deviant and bizarre too (so silly, you'll never make a baby that way). I feel sure that this study should have concluded that wasting time trying to give the girl an orgasm is bizarre and distorted. In my biology classes they stressed that female orgasms are not relevent to procreation. The Bible we're supposed to procreate, not enjoy it, so she doesn't get one. Amen.
* devalued the importance of monogamy and lacked confidence in marriage as either a viable or lasting institution
Agenda. Monogamy is an invention from thousands of years ago to protect children and provide for women. It isn't natural at all, for men or women. I base this on the observation that almost everyone has had sex with more than one person (slashdot excepted) and many times cheat on each other. Also, we apparently have divorces from monogamy, when it get's too boring, so we don't take it that seriously.
* viewed nonmonogamous relationships as normal and natural behaviorxi
Agenda. That's because it isn't normal behavior. We lust or have sexual thoughts about other people all the time. We may emotionally have strong connections to an individual, but sexually it's normal to think of someone else now and then or appreciate a woman's assets as she walks by.
I'm a satanic clam.
Since 1984, porn has become a lot wider available. Not that it didn't exist before, but now you don't even have to drive and rent a VHS cassette. A majority of men has seen a lot more than six weeks worth of porn in their lives, and the numbers for women are rising too. (I wonder what porn causes in those, then. They start thinking rape is OK too?) Look around you at the mall, and at least half the people you see are viewing porn regularly, or did at some point.
If there were that big an influence, we'd see the effects all over the bloody place. I mean, seriously, you if you have causation you must have correlation too. Not the other way around, duly noted, but causation => correlation every single time.
Did the number of rape offenses rise signifficantly? No, I don't think so. In fact, it seems to decline with the availability of internet porn. Hmm.
Did it cause widespread mis-treating and demeaning attitudes towards women? I don't know about the USA, so feel free to fill in the blanks, but at least in the less-prudish continental western Europe I see not much of that. You see naked boobs even on billboards and on ads on busses here in Germany (no hardcore stuff, though), and brothels are all over the place, but it's also one of the most equal minded countries. IIRC, it's got one of the most equal women/men ratios in tech jobs, and in a lot of other jobs too. And I just don't see that callousness towards women all around me by now. Do you?
If it causes an appetite for more deviant, bizarre, or violent kinds of pornography, then there must be a cap to that slope. Because we haven't had any "breakthrough" in extreme porn since 1984. All those guys watching porn for all these years, should by now be at the stage of raging lunatics that don't get off on anything short of Death By A Thousand Cuts by now. And it just didn't happen. Most people barely progress a bit past missionary position in their taste for perversions. There are some more "extreme" niches, but the keyword is that they're niches.
And here we come to the meat of what that study's about:
Ah, heh, so that's what it's about. "Oh noes! People get as immoral as to sometimes have a mistress too! And some even have sex without marriage!!" I.e., OMFG, some people are no longer (pretending to be) models of puritan morals! The world is coming to an end! Heh. I'm sorry. You had my attention for a bit while it was about rape (a heinous crime, no doubt) and demeaning women. But if they had to pad the list with, basically, "oh noes! people are not staying monogamous!!" as teh uber-danger to humanity, it speaks volumes about the mind-set that produced it and for which audience.
;) We have stuff like Holy Roman Emperor Sigismund thanking the city of Konstanz in writing for providing some 1500 prostitutes for the Council of Constance. (You know, the famous one where they burned Jan Hus at the stake and thus started the Hussite Wars.) We have such civilizations as the ancient greeks, which were as close to amoral sexually as it gets, even by the standards of a modern hardcore addict. Etc
And never mind that they did so before porn too. I hate to be the one who breaks your (or their) fantasy bubble, but we have a stretch of some thousands of years where people had lovers and mistresses and premarital sex, long before porn movies. We have renaissance authors writing such things as that the unmarried women of their time being saits from the front, and martyrs from the back. A reference as thinly veiled as it gets to anal sex. (I know, buggrit, and here we were enjoying a nice fantasy in which only porn causes people to get such perverted ideas
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.