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A Linux-Based "Breath Test" For Porn On PCs

Posted by timothy on from the child-porn-claims-the-ultimate-smear-tactic dept.

Gwaihir the Windlord writes "A university in Western Australia has started beta testing a tool that's described as 'a random breath test' to scan computers for illicit images. According to this article it's a clean bootable Linux environment. Since it doesn't write to the hard drive, the evidence is acceptable in court, at least in Australia. They're also working on versions to search for financial documents in fraud squad cases, or to search for terrorist keywords. Other than skimming off the dumb ones, does anyone really expect this to make a difference?" The article offers no details on what means the software uses to identify suspicious files.

4 of 345 comments (clear)

  1. forensics by Lord+Ender · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Computer forensics is hard, expensive, and time-consuming. I would guess this is just a tool for cops to save cash in criminal investigations compared to hiring an expert, or at least to triage which systems need to be investigated by an expert.

    Also, if your friends are IT staff and your online watercooler is slashdot.org, you may think everyone but the "dumb ones" knows how to encrypt a drive. But the reality is that the vast majority of criminals have never heard of Truecrypt.

    --
    A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
    1. Re:forensics by Jabbrwokk · · Score: 4, Insightful
      I think you are correct. Most criminals are dumb. And I think you're right about this being a cash-saving tool. From the article:

      The design concept is that any police person with adequate training could use the tool, so that when they go into a crime scene they can quickly review a computer for illicit images or videos.

      Sounds like it relies more on officers' eyeballs than algorithms to do a quick scan for anything obvious. This tool will help them quickly move through the easy stuff, and allow them to focus time and resources on the more sophisticated criminals.

  2. Re:Australia seems to be a pretty repressed countr by Spatial · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Might want to avoid the US and the UK as well.

  3. Re:About the only way I it COULD work... by jaseuk · · Score: 4, Insightful

    The whole point of a hashing algorithm like MD5 is that even a single bit change should change lots of random bits in the resulting hash. If it was predictable it wouldn't be suitable for it's purpose.

    Jason