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A Linux-Based "Breath Test" For Porn On PCs
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.
The article offers no details on what means the software uses to identify suspicious files.
I highly suspect that the police don't want people to know the details of how sophisticated their technology is because they don't want to embarrass themselves. Keeping an aura of mystery and FUD around themselves and their techniques is also a form of psych-ops; it's the chrome facade of a lemon.
'Human skin tones' is a pretty wide range though. Even just restricting it to 'white' people gives you a big range of colours if you consider the various shades of tan / sunburn - anything from deep red to pale white through dull brown. If you want to find naked black- or yellow-skinned people then it's an even bigger range. If something is blue or green you could probably guess it's not naked skin (unless the person is bruised, or wearing body paint), but without factoring in shape as well it's pretty difficult to tell if something is human coloured or not.
Actually, human skin is pretty much all the same hue, it just has different saturation levels. If you convert each image to HSV from RGB, you can just look at the hue component and people all pretty much look the same. This is common in computer vision techniques for identifying skin.
-Taylor
Worldwide Military budgets: $2100 billion. Worldwide Space Exploration budgets: $38 billion. Really, world? Really?
Once upon a time, a company did this, and sold their product to another corporation so that they could monitor employees' email. If I recall correctly, it ended in tears when somebody got sent baby pictures.
One of the environments I worked in had a sniffer that grabbed all the images (and associated session information) it could see on the wire for that organization (or at least a subset - there was a LOT of traffic involved). It would then process those images and generate a "skin folder" of suspect imagery. We could then sift through that skin folder looking for illicit browsing, etc.
Yeah - it caught porn. But it also contained a lot of imagery of furniture, mars landscapes, deserts (it really liked the time pictures of camel spiders in Sandland were the hot topic of emails) and other such not-skin-oriented imagery.