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Three ISPs Agree To Block Child Porn
Goobergunch and other readers sent in word that Sprint, Time Warner, and Verizon have agreed to block websites and newsgroups containing child pornography. The deal, brokered by New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo, occurred after Cuomo's office threatened the ISPs with fraud charges. It's of some concern that the blacklist of sites and newsgroups is to be maintained by the Center for Missing and Exploited Children, an NGO with no legal requirement for transparency. Here are two further cautions, the first from Lauren Weinstein: "Of broader interest perhaps is how much time will pass before 'other entities' demand that ISPs (attempt to) block access to other materials that one group or another feels subscribers should not be permitted to see or hear." And from Techdirt: "[T]he state of Pennsylvania tried to do pretty much the same thing, back in 2002, but focused on actually passing a law ... And, of course, a federal court tossed out the law as unconstitutional. The goal is certainly noble. Getting rid of child porn would be great — but having ISPs block access to an assigned list isn't going to do a damn thing towards that goal."
What about providing *optional* proxies that does that filtering to their users?
While I can't stand the kiddie pr0n,this simply won't work. it has been tried in the past in other countries and it always ends up getting legit websites along with the bad ones.But that is my 02c,YMMV
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
"Yes, truecrypt.org DOES contain child porn, so does wikileaks.org"
"Do you have proof?"
"We don't need it, it's on the list, now move along, nothing to see here."
While on the one hand I see no reason whatsoever for child porn-related sites to even exist let alone have anyone visit them, censorship by ISPs is a very obvious slippery slope. Unfair and damaging compromises without number have already been made "for the sake of the children"; it's as obvious a ploy as "..or the terrorists win", and I for one feel my intelligence is insulted whenever those cards are played. In the final analysis, I think this will be found to be a bad idea. Providers of bandwidth should not be allowed to decide what content will traverse their network any more than they should be allowed to interfere with P2P traffic. Determining the appropriateness should be the domain of hosting services, and the legality should be determined by the courts and by law enforcement; ISPs are neither -- which is as it should be.
I have to agree with what has already been said- it won't work. Legit sites will get caught in the net and the lawsuits will ensue.
Anyone who has had to deal with Internet filtering systems like Websense knows they are problematic at-best. I can't imagine using an ISP that runs something like that.
It seems to me that if they know enough about the kiddie pr0n sites to block them- they should have enough information to provide authorities to get them shut down.
What if they make a mistake? Is this the first step of many? Will other pressure groups make them block access to material that is legal in the source or destination jurisdiction but not in the other? Of course any ISPs that block material on their own who dared to claim common-carrier status can kiss that claim goodbye.
I would much prefer them not to block it themselves but rather cooperate with law enforcement. If the cops want it shut down, they can get a warrant to shut it down. On the other hand, the cops may want to keep it up for an hour or two so they can see the logs in real-time and knock on the customers' doors as they are up- or down-loading it.
As for newsgroups, if the KP-suppliers can't post in alt.kiddie-porn-group-de-jour, they may start invading alt.fractals.mandelbrot or some other group that has no tolerance for such material. That would be quite disruptive.
Besides, unless they are just plain stupid, people won't upload or host illegal material without encryption, with the passwords traded through other channels. Good luck to the ISPs telling encrypted kiddie porn from encrypted photographs of CowboyNeal's mother.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
I use newsgroups quite a bit. Once alt.underage.porn (or whatever) is shut down, that material is just going to be posted somewhere else - and probably end up being seen by more people. If they ban keywords, they'll move onto new euphemisms. No automatic filter will do this job - and the results of the attempt will be worse in every way than if no filter was used.
All it is is scoring political points, and providing the illusion of action while really making the situation worse.
Let's not stir that bag of worms...
What happens when Mom sends via email or an online album pictures of Baby's first bath to Grandma, and Grandma's ISP's software classifies the email or album as child porn? Does Grandma get a visit from the FBI/CIA/DEA/NSA/IRS/TSA/DHS in the form of a raid looking for more child porn? News gets out that Grandma was investigated for child porn and her reputation is demolished, even if some people know that it was a case of mistaken intent/identity.
Child porn is a terrible thing, but it's virtually impossible to classify something as child porn unless someone has manually classified an known image and corresponding hash as child porn.
There's also the issue of determining ages of the children in the picture if they're not obviously too young. Who took the pictures? Was it taken by a 15-year-old girl's 17-year-old boyfriend, or did she herself take it for him? This is legal in some states/countries, but a felony in others.
I don't want to get into an argument about these specific cases, but the possible cases are simply too wide and a single government authority cannot effectively press its morals onto its people. Romeo and Juliet will deviate from the norm.
The Chris Hansen approach works much better because it shows provable evidence of intent/motive and catches them in the act, perhaps even literally with their pants down.
Colin Dean Go a year without DRM
According to TFA, they have about 11,000 images that they generate hashes for. Then they scan the web for images with the same hash.
So the easiest way around this is to create a program that automatically changes the value of a random single pixel in a graphic. Problem solved, crisis averted.
What I want to know is will the list of sites being blocked be publicly available for review? I bet not...
End of lesson. You may press the button.
Summarized in a phrase: Accept the mantra, just don't think.
Seriously, I can think of lots of priorities higher than keeping our children safe. Keeping our children safe means never letting them outside, never letting them take risks, never exposing them to the dangerous rays of ultraviolet light, never letting them go swimming, never letting them surf the net.
The proper thing to do is to take reasonable measurements to keep everyone, including vulnerable populations such as kids and the elderly, relatively safe without incurring high costs in terms of money, civil liberties, etc. Words like "no higher priority" indicate the speaker is either intentionally lying, or worse, not thinking straight.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Most image hashing programs are robust enough to handle random noise in a picture. The issue will be how 'close' a picture will have to be to be caught and how many false positives will result in the necessarily fuzzy logic.
If they can create a list of sites that contain this vile shit, wouldn't it make sense to, oh, I don't know, maybe shut them down, prosecute the scumbags that are running the sites, and then use their client records to find and prosecute the people who were paying for it?
AOL, Hotmail and Yahoo have already blocked email based on political content. We can be sure that ISPs will abuse "porn lists" too.
The right thing to do about kiddie porn is to catch the people who make it.
The right thing to do to censors is to show them out of office.
Oh, so in other words, all this does is create a huge market for constantly original child porn instead of all the same old 70's nudist images floating around? The idea...it's brilliant!
"Unheard of means only it's undreamed of yet,
Impossible means not yet done." ~~ Julia Ecklar
You already see it's start with metered internet. Once they have that, they can offer you "free" sites. Everyone loves free, aren't they nice? Then they hike the price of visiting other sites to something stupid like $5/GB so that it's cheaper to buy physical media and presto - no more internet. They are already blaming "pirates", kiddie porn and terrorists. That's essentially a smear for their competition and anyone who disagrees with them.
If they get their way, things will really get ugly. All rights fall after free press does.
The problem is the production of child porn which of course involves abuse of children.
The demand comes from perverts who like to watch the abuse of children. So what happens if you simply block their access to child porn produced by other people?
They go off and produce their own. Which means more children abused.
Far better to use the ISPs to track those who produce or regularly seek out child porn and then prosecute them or treat their mental issues as is necessary. Several jurisdictions in Europe have broken up "Child porn rings", arresting as many as 50 people at once.
finally: There is a new category of child porn that has started to pop up lately. Child produced pornography. This means 3 or 4 children, all the same age who take turns operating a cameraphone and performing for it. Then they send out the video to other children via MMS, Bluetooth and Email. The 1st such "work" that came to public attention locally was on the cellphones or computers of thousands of children before the 1st adult saw it.
How do we deal with that? Who do we prosecute? I honestly don't know, suggestions from the Slashdot crowd would be welcome.
--= Isn't it surprising how badly I spell ?
Your post advocates a
(X) technical ( ) legislative (X) market-based (X) vigilante
approach to fighting illegal porn. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) Perverts can easily use it to harvest email addresses
(X) Other legitimate Internet uses would be affected
( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
(X) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
(X) It will stop porn for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
( ) Users of email will not put up with it
( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
(X) Requires too much cooperation from pornographers
( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
(X) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
( ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for the web
(X) Open proxies in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
(X) Asshats
( ) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
( ) Huge existing software investment in HTTP
(X) Use of protocols other than HTTP to distribute
(X) P2P Applications
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
(X) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
(X) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
( ) Extreme profitability of spam
( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
(X) Dishonesty on the part of pornographers themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
( ) Outlook
(X) Getting sued for damages due to false positives
(X) Getting sued for damages due to false negatives
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
(X) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever
been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
(X) Blacklists suck
(X) Whitelists suck
(X) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
(X) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
( ) Sending email should be free
(X) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
(X) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government reading my email
(X) I don't want ISPs reading my traffic
(X) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
( ) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
(X) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your
house down!
ITYM because some guilty people may be found innocent. HTH, HAND.
Regardless, here's why you're wrong: Blocking child porn will be ineffective, and Blocking child porn is treating the symptom, not the disease. Thus this is handwaving bullshit designed to convince people that something is being done about child porn when in fact it is not.
The base problem is that the way to stop child pornography, and rape, and all the other sex crime in the world (or at least, the percentage which can be prevented) is to create a healthy society, and that is not in the interests of the powers that be - it's an incompatible goal to that of milking every man, woman, and child for every available dollar. It's not just indifferent to the idea of a healthy society, but actually hostile to it; well-balanced people do not buy massive volumes of possessions which they don't need and will never use again, they don't willingly buy food which is non-nutritious, unhealthy or even downright toxic; they don't intentionally decide to purchase and burn fuels which pollute the environment in which they live. They do these things because they feel nervous, trapped, and helpless in spite of the fact that there clearly are alternatives to being a rat in the maze.
Call me a hippie if you like (I was born and raised, if you can call it that, in Santa Cruz) but happiness isn't derived from getting what you want, but from knowing what you want - especially when you already have it (often the case) or when it's available without buying into the crapfest that we take for granted and refer to as "daily life".
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"