Slashdot Mirror
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.
It looks for files like "guyongirlonsheep37.jpg"
Test your net with Netalyzr
Quick! Whats the RGB color value for "pink" ?
Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos
Now everybody in Australia is guilty until proven innocent!
Obama's legacy: (N)othing (S)ecure (A)nywhere and (T)error (S)imulation (A)dministration
Helix can do most of the "breath test" functionality referred to, and is a great forensic Linux distro. Helix is also considered a viable method in which to capture data that is consistent with the chain of custody that is required for evidence to be presented to a Judge. Check it out... http://www.e-fense.com/helix/Download.html
... would be to get a hash value for individual files, and compare that to known hash values for known infringing files. And there are already tools that do this.
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.
Could someone who is a lawyer better explain this? Is it not a challenge to forensics if you challenge the method of the forensics? Even highly reliable software averages about 1 error per kloc, seems like it would be easy to have a field day with poking holes in "detection" software. Are Australians not allowed to challenge the devices used to catch them in crimes?
I mean come on...porn + breath test? Do we really need those in the same sentence...that's just asking for trouble...
Most criminals are dumb. Ergo, it will work on most criminals.
There goes my secretledger.doc and terroristplottotakeovertheworld.doc!
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power lost.
It's always about censorship and blocking and denial. That's all I hear now coming out of Australia.
That's too bad. Was thinking of going there on vacation. Guess I'll go spend my money elsewhere.
"Leo Fender was in a 'state of grace' when he designed the Stratocaster." -- Paul Reed Smith
as breast test... would've been more appropriate, too.
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.
Might want to avoid the US and the UK as well.
Seems that nobody in the cited article bothered to think how well the tool will (won't) work when they try it on an encrypted drive.
The trend these days is to encrypt laptops' entire disks. I may be missing something but wouldn't that render this sort of tool useless? (Or worse--to an investigator--give a false negative result?)
You have the right to remain silent. If you don't, anything you say will be misquoted and used against you.
Scanning for vast swaths of human skin tones probably isn't a bad method, actually.
Sure, I can be compelled to provide the passphrase in court, but a dose of 256-bit AES keeps it on the down low to tools like this.
e to the pi i plus one equals zero
to beat this "breath test," please refer to the previous slashdot post today on steganography.
Last time I checked, porn was not illegal.
The simple answer is to encrypt your drives. However, in some countries, they have or are looking at laws that will force you to turn over your keys.
after viewing where most pron actor and actresses' mouths go, i don't want to know anything about a "breath test"
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Oh great, expect that in a few years they will be running this on international travellers as a standard part of customs.
Got to stop that kiddie porn. Everyone knows they are too stupid to traffic it via encrypted Internet traffic, or DVD's mailed in the post.
========
CINC, 4th Penguin Legion
For kiddie porn you want to scan for small swaths.
Some descriptions say that "porn scanners" search for fleshtones in images. What if the guy's a rubber freak and everybody is in skintight latex bondage outfits? Or hell, the guy could be a real sicko, a furry. Images of anthro skunk on aardvark action would be completely overlooked by such a filter and quite frankly, if we're going to investigate people based on their taste in porn, I find the furries the most suspicious. Them and the Harry Potter yaoi fangirls but you can grep that real quick.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
A local forensics expert says the same thing of his practice. In fact, last time I heard him speak about it, he said he'd never encountered encryption in a case he handled.
There's some sample bias going on there, because he refuses to handle some cases, and child pornography is one of the things he won't touch.
BitLocker may make encryption more mainstream.
SECAU was also considering another purpose-built CD to search financial documents for use by a fraud squad or those hunting terrorists using keywords.
Another example of how the fight against privacy has little to do with terrorism. Perversion is of greater concern to the Right Wing than fighting violent crime.
'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.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
It's all a game to them when you're being brought downtown on a trumped up charge to be leaned on by halfwits. (with excuses to Bryan Singer for the obvious Usual Suspects reference)
My understanding is that for serious computer forensics you need to work on bit-level duplicates of the original drive, with the original protected by a hardware write-blocker from the moment it's extracted from the original machine (and doing that without risking loss of evidence is quite a challenge in itself, coming down to a choice between data loss through a specially modified shutdown.exe or data loss through yanking the mains). There's just no other way to properly guarantee that the data is pristine. By malice or error, it is entirely possible for you to destroy or contaminate computer evidence, even if you've booted up a Linux disk that's not supposed to write to the original drive, and isn't supposed to give you the ability to fiddle with the contents of the original drive.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
'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?
I bet it only works on Windows machines.
my computer's "Bit Porn Content" aka BPC is way above the legal limit of 10% in the state of Illinois.
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.
I like the term "freedom proof fence" but it doesn't seem to be in general use... looks like someone tried a bit of low-level astroturfing and got it temporarily into Wikipedia and a couple of twitters, but that's it.
On first reading, i thought this was a distro with a USB peripheral that the user strapped on like an oxygen mask. When doing what some do while using the computer to process the imagery into physical conversion of energy to work, the device would suck in the exhalations and process the various bits and such for upstream comparison to other users. This might improve the quality of porn... some... how...
Maybe the disro could be called "Breathless" or (in UK pronunciation) "Con-Troh-Ver-see" (for it being a controversial distro)... Or, "KomPyut"
This could give a whole hole new meaning to "lameness filters" when certain types of vapor content is ana.. an... analysed... (sorry, twitchy ha... han... hand....)
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
It checks to see if you have an internet connection.
It's the year of Linux on the Desktop! And to think of what the reaction would be if this ran on Windows.
#include
#include
int main()
{
printf("Searching for stuff the user isn't supposed to have...\n");
sleep(30);
printf("Illegal material found! Seize computer and arrest owner!\n");
return 0;
}
It isn't perfect yet, but this is an interesting attempt at doing just that. It's not limited to skin tones however; you can search by any colour.
Today is red jello day - all workers must eat all of their red jello. Failure to comply will result in five demerits.
Guess I better start deleting my wmv's of Bin Laden doing hot Enron executives.
http://www.truecrypt.org/ Good luck with that.
Border patrol using this on all laptops in 3... 2... 1...
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
I think you're missing the point. But then this is Slashdot, a lot of us have never actually seen a vagina.
Almost read this as 'random breast test'... oops
"You killed my yogurt!" --Fred Fredburger
Buy a copy of this software and pre-empt it by scanning? Of course encryption would work too...
I do not know about you, but the world would be better off without script kiddies around. Those I would term are the dumb ones.
Internet Retail spaces are wonderful. Get over it!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Known as Simple Image Preview Live Environment (SImPLE), the tool is heralded as the new frontier fighting cybercrime.
It uses a cut-down version of a Linux kernel and can be deployed on almost any standard operating system.
Anyone serious enough can hide the data. As usual we all get hassled and only the stupid get caught.
1) install a game with huge data files
- Example World of Warcraft
2) make a dummy side directory off the game install
3) drop in a huge binary file with the same extension as the game data or patch
4) mount dummy file as encrypted file system
5) delete mount line before crossing the border
"No idea what that file is. Looks like part of the game to me."
No way they can have a database of all possible good binary files to ignore.
I think you're missing the point. But then this is Slashdot, a lot of us have never actually seen a vagina.
or been in one.
who read 'breast'-test here?
nice! didn't know. Also, shape search could be a factor, as they are searching for easy detectable body part (mostly)
Yup! I've taken it on myself to learn computer vision lately with OpenCV, it's pretty cool! Shape would be tough as people take so many different forms. Face detection is pretty easy though, for faces of a similar pose (upright and looking at the camera is best, but others can be trained). Face and skin could be porn!
-Taylor
Worldwide Military budgets: $2100 billion. Worldwide Space Exploration budgets: $38 billion. Really, world? Really?
Some 30-60 per cent of the case load for computer crime specialists globally relates to child pornography
Because child pornography certainly does not constitute 30-60 of computer crime (probably not even by "volume", i.e. Bytes).
A part of me can't help thinking that cops are so enthusiastic about child porn because perpetrators are typically solitary and quiet, hence easy to arrest.
Maximal kudos for minimal risk.
Well technically, I think we've all been IN one at least once in our lives, females included. However I suspect that's not the point you were going for.
Official Heretic from the "Church of Global Warming". Proven right thanks to whistle blowers. AGW = Flat Earth Theory
The difference between the USA and Australia - first, England rounded up all of it's religious fanatics, and sent them to the American colonies, then they rounded up all of these criminals, and send those to the Australian colonies....
In those grand traditions I propose the following test...
Turn the laptop on, tie a large weight to it. If it floats, it's a witch! Burn it! If it sinks it's innocent. Pity it didn't survive.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
I think you're missing the point. But then this is Slashdot, a lot of us have never actually seen a vagina.
or been in one.
I would say that is the one place we can be sure that at least 99% of us have been to.
Particles, stuff that matters.
One lazy way is to archive porn newsgroups and search for files with matching MD5 sums.
My impression is that police routinely confiscate computers if they get a warrant, irrespective of whether suspected crime is computer-related. The computers are returned months, possibly years later (if no evidence is found). Perhaps they would be willing to use this tool and, if finding no evidence, be able to use some discretion and conclude it unnecessary to take the computer. This could allow for significantly reducing the damage to innocent parties, but runs increased risk of missing more cautious wrongdoing.
However I'm always wary of ideas for "a simple tool that could eliminate the need for highly trained experts".
Furthermore, since samples are more easily obtained, it becomes cost-effective to increase sample size. Sometimes financial expense is a good way to encourage efficiency with social costs.
You can never really be proven innocent. You can be found not guilty for a particular set of data, but you will never be again innocent.
You can't handle the truth.
"The article offers no details on what means the software uses to identify suspicious files."
/mnt/hda1 -name 2g1c.avi
Simple:
# find
Give them the machine, and if any file is taken then it's Porn.
I was a C-Section baby, you insensitive clod!
Who has porn pictures on his hard drive these days? I thought video took over long ago ;-)
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.
Until they find some person's vast collection of fine art.
http://pinopsida.com
You get a whole bunch of false positives because of the mushroom people.
You better watch out, there may be dogs about . .
It sounds like Australian police can be just as easily duped as Americans into buying useless security products.
They should have called it the "breast test."
The summary is wrong: it's a Random Breast Test.
Furry won't register skin hues.
I'm safe
But clearly you have something better to say...
Most women might, men don't need a thousand names for one colour. It's pink. It's not red, blue, yellow, orange, purple, green, black, or white, so it must be pink.
I was wondering why so many sites had gone all arty and had sets up in black and white... as it's grey scale, then it can't be tripping flesh tone filters...
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
The big question is -- can this program tell the difference between a porn photo and a photo of Fidel Castro eating a banana?
I'm not familiar with the term "Breath Test". In this case in particular, wouldn't a "Breast Test" be more useful? Unless of course they're specifically excluding necrophilia from their search criteria...
Take it to the limit, everybody to the limit, come on, everybody fhqwhgads.
Actually, no. This method does not work - which is what I said at the time. Because this misinformation is apparently still around, I decided to run a test.
I took a large file (1600x1200 px) and then applied a basic red-eye reducing algorithm to various spots on the image. The result: visually, exactly the same image.
Then I turned to my trusty Apple Preview. I resized each photo to 9% of its original size (144x108 pixels), and the proceeded to turn the color saturation down to 0 (black and white). I then saved each file in a compressionless TIFF format. Lastly, I computed the md5 hash for each file.
Result?
MD5 (smlimg3.tiff) = d300d23ce0ca2d6dcc7188665b1e2ada
MD5 (smlimg4.tiff) = a1cf7d59f9bf4ccceb6651c5f08750dd
Let me say this once more, in case anyone else who blindly accepts anything they read on the internet has heard this: THIS TECHNIQUE DOES NOT WORK. To compare two SIMILAR images, one needs to use an image comparison algorithm - of which there are many. Hashing ONLY works on two images which are EXACTLY the same.
If you doubt the test or the results, I would be glad to email you all of my test pictures so you can see them and calculate their md5s for yourself.
3 words. British prison colony
So what the hell, is Austrailia trying to out-Big-Brother the U.S. or something?
The big question is -- can this program tell the difference between a porn photo and a photo of Fidel Castro eating a banana?
You just solved the CAPTCHA problem.
The big question is -- can this program tell the difference between a porn photo and a photo of Fidel Castro eating a banana?
For some, a photo of Fidel Castro eating a banana would be porn. Won't someone think of the Kreetassans?
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
They can use this software and that will make people more moral, immediately after reading this news porn packers will run off to church and repent.
Lol.. ok I can't keep it up anymore.. lol what are they thinking. haha.
Bringing liberty to the masses. - http://freetalklive.com/
It seemed like the sort of thing that would work in theory, but I can see why it doesn't. Even changing a few pixels in the corner (I made a 10x10 white square) gave drastically different MD5s.
I'm a moron for blindly accepting a +5 post as fact, please mod down my original post.
Obligatory Soundbite Catchphrase
Well, that and Orlando, FL.
...oh, and your mom.
(Sorry, had to)
#FF00FF for pure (transparent in GIFs) pink
I think you want a more lightish than bluish red, like #FFCCCC (or, more concisely, #FCC).
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
3 words. British Penal Colony There, fixed that for you
Don't anthropomorphize computers. They *hate* that.
I don't get it. How's this software gonna tell if I was looking at porn by checking my breath?
it seems fairly widely accepted and that people who regularly view pornography are more likely to be involved in sex-related crimes than people who don't (or that sex-offenders are more likely to have porn than non-sex-offenders, whichever way you want to spin it).
This means that even if the computer is found to have pornographic content on it of people who are "of age", this still raises a red flag (and IMO rightly so). Porn is the scourge of the internet. When a person's first exposure to internet porn is typically around 10 years old - it has gone way beyond "free speech". Young minds are being forcibly indoctrinated.
Censorship is the opposite of education. If neo-darwinism were defensible, people would not need to try and censor ID.
Now you will get a ton of Ubuntu backgrounds....
black and white != grayscale I think the general point is, compress and filter picture sufficiently that any small edit or color variation doesn't register then compare to a hash.
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.
Wait... What part of that explanation did I understand?
Property is theft.
I remember years ago at a conference overhearing two gals from Yahoo discussing how some of their male coworkers had developed an image search algorithm that tried to find pictures of nipples. The punch line was "of course, they were trying to find them, not filter them..."
- "History shows again and again how nature points out the folly of men" -- Blue Oyster Cult, 'Godzilla'
Not for latex fetish collections.
http://www.zombieapocalypse.tv/
There is a lot wrong with this country, but (in all seriousness) WA seems to have the, well, worst of the bunch.
You know those stories you hear of random "gingers" being beaten up? Western Aus. The serial killers stupid enough to get caught? WA (unlike SA - though the other thing this state has going on is problematic). I've got some friends over there at the moment that are, on a daily basis, heckled and abused and wolf whistled (not necessarily a bad thing) and groped and all sorts of crap just while they are randomly walking down the streets of the central city. The state is filled with, for lack of a better phrase, a bunch of fucktards. There are exceptions of course, but the majority.
Anyway on topic, how is this different from any forensics tool searching for MD5's of files to find so-called "hacking" tools on a system
Me failed English...
FreeBSD over Linux. If my comments seem odd, this may explain...
Not true. Pale skin appears reddish where the blood vessels are closest to the surface of the skin and slightly yellowish elsewhere.
Blancmange
mmmmmmm blue female alien pr0n! beats those skin filters everytime.
generate a "skin folder" of suspect imagery
It's bizarre how or why some wierdo in your company would consider "skin" to be "suspect". It's also quite bizarre why your company would be interested in "sniffing" employees email. If somebody was so interested in reading other peoples emails then that person should have just asked employees to forward copies of the email to the appropriate accounts.
In fact, the whole point of hashes is that they give completely different results even with the smallest differences between files or strings. Think about it. Imagine if the hash for the word "foo" was 45Ht56B, and you knew that. If the hash for "f001" was 45Ht56C or 45Ht56B4, then you could deduce a password simply by looking at a hash.
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
Not true. Pale skin appears reddish where the blood vessels are closest to the surface of the skin and slightly yellowish elsewhere.
Ah, well, i was just reiterating what my book told me, i haven't done any real testing yet.
-Taylor
Worldwide Military budgets: $2100 billion. Worldwide Space Exploration budgets: $38 billion. Really, world? Really?
At least we freed our slaves after they did their term.
No idea, but in order to cover more bases so to speak, don't they also need to know the RGB value for "stink" too?...
Political language
I wasn't trolling (not intentionally anyway), and let's face it I'm writing this is SA so it's not like I'm doing much better - the people here are worse, albeit in a hell of a lot more polite and... sophisticated... manner. s/Central City/Inner City/ and it might read a little better.
Guessing you're hailing from the Western State.
Me failed English...
FreeBSD over Linux. If my comments seem odd, this may explain...
Just use disk encryption.
THE MAGIC WORDS ARE SQUEAMISH OSSIFRAGE
I'm living in Perth now, just back from Malaysia.
Are we talking about the same city and state? It's a little boring, but generally friendly place.
What are you doing to attract all those fucktards?
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
According to Rule 34, there must be at least 1 set of photos for which those conditions would not be mutually exclusive.
I prefer rogues to imbeciles because they sometimes take a rest.
So you'd still have been once. Unless you were conceived in-vitro and inserted through a C-Section.
Just as my arm isn't a person, neither is sperm, nor is an fertilised egg one.
Except the thing that's going to trigger it more than anything else is perfectly innocent full frame pictures of faces.
This brings up a good idea. Write a program that batch converts all images to negatives. Then any scan for illicit pictures based on color content will turn up nothing. Or if they are smart and scan for both, write a program that shifts the color by a chosen value.
But seriously does one really need porn when they travel? I know my friend always has porn on his laptop but its all legal. If you were storing CP on your laptop or ipod, why let it hang out in the open or carry it at all? Some people are just plain stupid.
Quit talking you yourself, AC.
Invert colour spectrum on porn images. Now all the skin is green or purple or some other decidedly un-skin colour.
Transmit images.
Re-invert colour spectrum. Skin is all skin-coloured again.
.
.
.
.
Okay, so this might not work so well if the images are from after a major S&M session ;)
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
I could imagine how that would be so under equivalent conditions, but lighting varies so much I would think there would still be a problem.
As you demonstrate, the MD5 technique does not work. However there are other image "hashing" techniques that do work. For example, take the first three statistical moments of the histogram of the R, G and B intensities. To compare two images take a simple L1 distance between those moments. If it's below some threshold they are the same.
Disclaimer: The above algorithm works best for detecting differences between two video streams even when those video streams are distorted by color shifts. (I have personal experience with using it on production software.) For detecting similarities of images you may have to use slightly different techniques.
The sum total of your body parts isn't a person either. In fact you're not a person at all. The only person that I can prove to exist is myself, and even that relies on the 'cognito ergo sum' axiom. The rest of you are just meat machines.
Rampant carbon sequestration destroyed the Dinosaurs' tropical paradise. I'm here to help repair the damage.
It's bizarre how or why some wierdo in your company would consider "skin" to be "suspect".
I'm surprised that this confuses you. You see, most people when they have sex tend to do it in various degrees of undress and often completely naked. As such, pornography tends to involve a lot of exposed skin. So any image that might involve a lot of exposed skin is suspected of being pornography.
It also might shock you to know that pornography is entirely inappropriate in some environments. Especially that particular one. This would explain the interest in possible pornographic images.
And who said anything about email? The vast majority of these images came from HTTP. Not that it makes that much difference; it's still the organization's network being used.
Having said that... you apparently confuse me with someone who thinks this was all a good idea. I found it to be an enormous waste of resources. The project did little more than provide a guise of "doing something" and feeding particular individual power-trips. Meanwhile there were real risks and threats for the infosec group to work on that went largely ignored.
It's a fair comment to say that images that are changed are going to have different hash values. But how many non tech people who download images en masse that are of interest to law enf0rcment are going to reneame them? Often, it's those that don't think about what they are doing that these tools are designed to catch; end users as such.
Tools like these I believe are for the majority of cases and the occasional big ring crackdown. It's not so that they can shut down kiddy pr0n, but to tell everyone that they are doing something about it while putting in minimal effort and thus justifying a government job. It's amazing how many people in government jobs will keep a cruisy job going if all they have to do is justify it every now and again. I see it around me every day in my job. Maximum output on paper, with minimal input in reality.
Then again I could be wrong, but I've been known to lean on my government 'shovel' from time to time aswell.
The Tao that can be named is not the Tao
to have a USB flash drive with a persistent - encrypted - bootable Linux OS.
Puppy 4.1 really rocks ... and leaves no trail
Its not the years, its the mileage
Porn is inapropriate on the job because it's proof that you wasted your time on non-work-related activities.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
Hi. I'm Jay from Diebold HR, hiring manager. I'm intrigued by your ideas, and would like to subscribe to your newsletter. I would also like to synergistically leverage your on-demand dynamic 2.0.
it seems fairly widely accepted and that people who regularly view pornography are more likely to be involved in sex-related crimes than people who don't (or that sex-offenders are more likely to have porn than non-sex-offenders, whichever way you want to spin it).
I'll keep the citation-needed tag to myself, and go to the heart of the matter: what's the causality relation here?
Is it that viewing porn makes you commit sexual offenses? Or that something (say, an ultra high sex drive and a lack of restraint) makes you commit sexual offenses and also view porn? Or is it that something causes you to commit sexual offenses, which causes you to look at porn [because you have to escape but are not satisfied].
This means that even if the computer is found to have pornographic content on it of people who are "of age", this still raises a red flag (and IMO rightly so).
It raises a red flag indicating what?
There's an urban legend that wanking blinds you. All boys and men who weren't blind as they entered puberty knows this to be false.
Having porn is very common, I would think.
Without knowing what's causing what, and what the conditional probabilities are, seeing porn doesn't say anything at all about whether there's something worth investigating.
Some terrorists play the piano. Look, this guy has a piano. He's probably a terrorist! Stone him!
> If you doubt the test or the results, I would be glad to email you all of my test pictures so you can see them and calculate their md5s for yourself.
If anyone doubts that, they have not understood what a hash is all about.
Point in case:
richih@adamantium ~ % echo reallylongwordthatisabouttobehashed | md5sum
cce0a1e719dd0a9b235a150b5d1c180d -
richih@adamantium ~ % echo reallylognwordthatisabouttobehashed | md5sum
72b00c6549d1045fce1089b7f5cb16fe -
richih@adamantium ~ %
Whats the RGB color value for "pink" ?
0x0B00B1E5
Squirrel!
I think you're being anal. Seriously. I wouldn't be offended if someone said "Penn State" instead of the proper name Pennsylvania. Who cares about such trivialities?
FOX NEWS.com should be BANNED from television and internet. Have the Congress take it over and give us Truespeak.
As was said, this will catch the dumb ones. Good luck finding porn, or anything else, on that "data.tc" file, or the "uninitialized" hard drive on that computer.
Step 1: make all folders in /home accessible to only the owner of the folders.
Now only one account can check other peoples' files: the administrator. Wow. See ya, privacy invasion.
If you want to be safe against the admin, add one of those encrypted hidden FSes to put your porn in and tadaa.
Seriously, do a bit of research before complaining about Teh Lunix.
I am not devoid of humor.
Wrong. Pornography is never inappropriate. Anybody who considers visual depictions of sex to be inappropriate in any environment has some very serious problems. If somebody needs to use packet sniffers to determine that people are viewing this material then it is obvious that there is a problem with the appropriate behaviour of Management. If viewing pictures of Mars does not have a negative effect on workplace productivity then neither should nude bodies, whatever they happen to be engaged in.
If you're working in the porn industry, porn has a place at work. If you're in the furniture business, images of furniture has it's place. And if you're in a space-related industry, images of Mars are likely appropriate. That doesn't mean these all are now acceptable everywhere.
Go ahead - rage against the machine. Fight the good fight and deny the Puritan ideology that infects our culture. But don't be foolish. Claiming that pornography is "never inappropriate" is ludicrous. There are plenty of other subjects and behaviors that are acceptable in some instances, and (to various degrees) inappropriate in others. And while sex is something of a hot-button, it isn't unique in this regard.
There's an even simpler objection to this scheme. The most common change (other than scaling) that somebody is going to do to a picture is going to be cropping, which of course totally throws the idea hashing thumbnails out the window.
Still, the fingerprinting idea is still a good one. It's how search engines decide whether they've indexed a document already: they fingerprint. The case of two exactly identical files is an important special case.
Naturally, a cryptographic fingerprint algorithm is going to be a poor choice if you take the possibility of editing into account, since it is supposed to produce uncorrelatable results for minor differences. You'd want something that could efficiently calculate a set of fuzzy hashes for various croppings and rotations.
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First, I just want to make clear that I never said hashing couldn't be useful - even hashing pictures. Looking for the exact picture is a huge time saver and very useful. My point was simply that hashing only works for exact matches.
That said, you seem to have another misconception that I tried to disabuse people of. There is no such thing as a "fuzzy" hash. We are using the word "hash" to mean the generally agreed one way cryptographic hashing function, also known as a message digest. In fact, the cryptographic design of message digest precludes anything like a "fuzzy" hash from existing. If you want to use an image comparison algorithm, that's a different story, but "fuzzy" hashes don't exist.
Meta-moderators: don't be fanatical right-wing Christians and leave the parent moderations of "Faimbait" go unpunished. People who modded this post as "Flaimbait" (and not Insightful) should be ashamed.
Of course there is such thing as what I call a fuzzy hash.
Any function which maps an array of bits into a number is a hash. It's just that very few of such functions are useful for as a cryptographic digest function. They still serve other purposes, such as indexing data structures. It's not hard to imagine an algorithm generating small array of numbers, such that the Cartesian distance between two such arrays is meaningful. Broadly speaking, such an array would be a hash.
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Hmm i think we may just be using definitions. If you use a broadly defined hash function, yes, you could generate a "fuzzy" solution. This article and the previous article were both discussing the use of cryptographic hash functions (message digests), such as md5 and SHA. If you use message digests, there should be no "fuzzy" solution, but if you use a bad hash function it should be possible to generate a contrived solution for similar cases. While this is technically a hash function, I was referring to the general case of the "optimal" hashing function, which is defined as being injective (distinct input maps to distinct output). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Injective_function
On the whole though, I think we're on the same page. Message digests cannot be practically expected to match anything but the exact image.
Fight the good fight and deny the Puritan ideology that infects our culture. But don't be foolish.
I'm not foolish, and I have no idea why anybody would consider me foolish. I won't fight since I know I will loose (notice the fact that I got modded -1 Flaimbait for my opinions). I can't help but to find it sad and depressing that people view sex and sexuality as being negative and that people will merely dismiss my arguments as Flaimbait instead of considering them in a logical and rational manner.
Claiming that pornography is "never inappropriate" is ludicrous.
An over-generalization perhaps, but as generalizations go I will stick to my guns. These are ideals and I recognize the impracticality of some ideals.
Best regards,
UTW
Yes, we're on the same page when it comes to crypto digest functions in this application.
However the definitional issue is more than pedantry. Any kind of practical large scale document indexing system requires the calculation of hash functions, and in general functions useful for cryptography might not be useful for indexing and vice versa.
A non-injective hash function is not "bad"; it's just not useful in certain circumstances. In fact, so far as I know cryptographic hash functions are not injective. It is enough that collisions cannot be constructed in a way for an arbitrary payload to be mixed in with some carefully cooked up binary gobbledygook producing two messages that hash the same way. On the other hand such a function, if it is cheap to compute, is quite useful when used for data retrieval.
In any case, this is an area of current research for text documents: attempting to discover derivative and co-derivative documents (e.g. as in the case of plagiarism). It's quite an interesting topic. Naturally, you are looking for an approximate needle in a vast and fuzzy haystack when it comes to the Internet.
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I was hoping for some porn organizing platform. /. fails me sometimes like that.