Slashdot Mirror
Tracking Pedophiles By Their Typing Habits
An anonymous reader writes "Pedophiles using the internet to target youngsters could be tracked down — by the way they use a keyboard. Researchers are investigating ways to use technology which can determine a typist's age, sex and culture within ten keystrokes by monitoring their speed and rhythm." Since Phrenology hasn't exactly panned out, they gotta try something new.
i hope they don't mistakenly target me in my rush to type fast and make this the first post!
I am sure this is foolproof! Sign me up!
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
they're hunt-and-peckers.
Looking for "left mousing" would be more accurate...
Typical /. summary - conflating the idea of "we can tell how old you are from your typing" with "we can tell if you are Wicked Uncle Ernie by your typing."
The idea of this would be that if you can tell that somebody is a 40 year old man, and they are on a forum saying they are a 12 year old girl, you can flag that as being suspicious.
Of course, the problem is that a web site or chat forum has relatively little visibility of the user's typing pattern, so unless you force all forums to be accessed by special software that can monitor typing (AND you prevent the use of cut-and-paste so that you type in one window, then paste into the chat window, or detect such matters and flag THAT) then this won't be very useful at all.
Of course, making THAT statement in the summary would be hard, and would require actually thinking about the story.
As I said, typical /. summary.
www.eFax.com are spammers
Now good luck getting this pedophiles to have those sensors hooked up and letting themselves be videoed and monitored. How about saving yourself the analysis and just looking on their screen for child porn??
Can I mod something +1 Scary if it's true but I wish it weren't?
It boggles my mind that they even consider this a legitimate avenue of inquiry... I mean, really. How many opportunities do kiddy-fiddlers present for you to analyse their keystrokes, but not say... their IP? Sure, it allows you to tie an online interaction to a particular user, but if you have that kind of hook into their system odds are you know more than enough to do that already.
Oh wait, you mean there are applications where you want to tie users to content generically on the internet, but you think it's too invasive to make everyone agree to it simply so you can sell them more soda or send them to prison for their political ideas? That's OK - we'll just say it's targeting pedophiles.
That always works.
Scientists point out problems, engineers fix them
altslashdot.org: The future of slashdot.
Is that because they are all typing one-handed? =)
"The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men." ~Plato (427-347 BC)
Even if I were to believe such a thing were possible, the fact that the Daily Mail is the source makes me roll my eyes and dismiss it... If there's a reputable source, that might be worth reading, but even then it's still a stretch to believe that all people from one culture type in the same way...
RoseColor red={0, 0xffff, 0x0000, 0x0000};VioletColour blue={0, 0x0000, 0x0000, 0xffff};find / -name *mybase*|chown you
When will Slashdot learn?
Daily Mail is sensationalist bullshit from the UK.
It seems like the way a person was taught to type and their experience with a keyboard would determine to a large extent their speed and rhythm (and accuracy). Not to mention what they're doing besides typing on MSN or whatever. If you're drinking a cup of coffee with one hand... or switching between windows. There are way too many factors at play. Phrenology at least had the advantage of a theoretical framework. Hell, even hand-writing analysis had fewer confounding factors.
Let me be the first to say W T F? Yeah..I'm sure this wouldn't ever produce any false positives...
From a purely technological point of view, I could see this working IF you had a profile pre-built. That is to say, if you had established a baseline of a particular persons typing habits (tempo, speed, accuracy, common mistakes, pause patterns, etc.) then I think it would be relatively easy to identify/track them in the future. I realize that this isn't really what the OP is talking about, but I think this is the closest to reality as one could get. I've seen authentication tools that combine the password you've entered with the 'way' in which you enter it, doing essentially just that. Anyway, determining a persons proclivities based solely on the way they type is, well, stupid.
Thats nothing, they can already measure it by the way you walk for years now... Have you ever heard of a pedometer?
I'm sure that trying to tracking a person's sexual inclinations by their typing habits will prove to be every bit as useful as the science of Phrenology.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
i quote: 'If children are talking to each other on Windows Live or MSN messenger, Microsoft might be able to see if there's an adult on there.' See where we going here?
h|tler> HOW THE FUCK CAN YOU TELL THAT I'M 13 BY LOOKING AT WHAT I'M WRITEING?
If you click, you get more question marks... Damn lameness filter.
# cat
Damn, my RAM is full of llamas.
Tracking Pedophiles by Phrenology sounds kind of creepy. There's also a public health issue with lice and other parasites.
I'm pretty sure chat programs send the message in chunks, not individual keystrokes. /Didn't dignify the article with a reading.
No sig today...
Good luck figuring anything out at all from people who are proficient enough in typing, touch-typists with years of experience who is who, who is a man, who is a woman, how old they are.
FTFA: men are 'heavy-handed and women are 'lighter' and their typing 'flows more' - that is beat by touch-typing.
But the basic problem with this is that it is a Turing test. Can a 'pedophile' impersonate someone that he/she is not? I think they should be able to, they fool kids supposedly into believing that they are also kids, of-course it is not that difficult to fool a kid, but maybe it is because it is not that hard to pretend on the Internet if you are really putting in the time to do it.
I can only guess why the 'pedophile' line is used here again, is it about the money? Is Roy Maxion trying to get a grant money from the government for this 'research'? I think so.
'If children are talking to each other on Windows Live or MSN messenger, Microsoft might be able to see if there's an adult on there.'
- MSN, the world police. What are they going to do if there is a suspicion, block access and send cops?
The department, which was formed last summer, believes the new technology could be used to prevent fraud at cash machines.
- ATMs? So from pushing 4-6 digit pin and a few menu options they are going to figure out whether it is a woman/man, what's the age etc?
I can only imagine one possibility: record information collected from the actual account holder pushing the buttons and compare the speed of typing and delays between touches and releases to try and see if it's the same person. It's not as sexy as figuring out person's age and gender though, is it?
Also how are they going to figure out how pedophiles type? Are they going to find actual pedophiles and make them sit in front of a computer and type? Did they somehow figure out that pedophiles all have the same typing abilities/habits? Do pedophiles all have the same profession and are they really that easy to figure out from the rest of the 'normal' people? Anyway, I think this 'research' is a load of bull crap and it's all about grant money.
You can't handle the truth.
But even more, how does it follow that the highest use of research into this sort of "knowledge" will / should automatically be use to find pedophiles? Isn't this just more of the THINK OF THE CHILDREN *hysteria*?
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
More to the point, if the software that is supposed to analyze your typing patterns is on the server (and it would have to be, who would let somebody install this locally on their computer?) then they'd have to change the way their chat application works so that every keystroke is sent to the server instead of just sending the whole message when somebody hits "send". Can you say lag?
So the root of this plan is to install a keystroke logger on all computers. They should just use the webcam. ARF
On the Media (a fantastic program if you haven't heard of it yet) covered this last month. Interview and transcript are here: http://www.onthemedia.org/transcripts/2010/02/26/03
They say they can identify a single person by a typing profile that they've previously generated, but you certainly cannot deduct from a typing profile that any given person is a pedophile! I agree with the author's comment.
[rant]On a side note, TFA has pictures of a murderer and a 17 y/o girl next to each other. I refuse to call someone a "pedophile" who is attracted to 17-year-old girls, because becoming an adult is not a matter of some age number increasing by one digit. 17-year-olds are certainly not KIDS! I'm sick of the misuse of the word "pedophile". What they actually mean is "ephebophile", but since that one is - to some degree - accepted by society, they cannot polarize people enough to enact more stupid laws. [/rant]
Joke's on them - I use Dvorak!
Of course, by saying that and posting on /., I've probably narrowed down my age, sex, and culture enough already. And I've identified my residence as parents' basement. Have they accounted for the mediating effects of Cheetos consumption on typing habits?
"Anyone who [rips a CD] is probably engaging in copyright infringement." - David O. Carson
Of course, there's no way children and adults could ever legitimately interact anywhere online. They never happen to play the same games, post to the same forums, and parents never talk to their children online.
Please keep in mind that, in reality, we have to deal with Republicans, "Teabaggers", and others of their ilk.
They don't realize the limitations of technology. They don't particularly care about fair justice, either.
So they have absolutely no qualms about referring to somebody they dislike as a "pedophile", and then backing it up with this sort of keystroke analysis as "proof".
If you don't believe me, just look at how they justified the Invasion of Iraq. They showed computer-generated images of "weapons labs" and pictures of heating ducts, all in front of the UN!
For every 1000 people, 50 will be misidentified. Unless there are a lot of paedophiles this will make it essentially useless. Although really this is the Daily Hate tacking the story onto one of their favourite scares.
Pedophile != child molester
I think the research would get better results if they concentrated on using the web-cams to see who is in front of the computer. Shouldn't be too hard, they do this at US schools already, just supply everyone with a 'free' laptop and disallow anyone from using their own equipment on the web and make sure that the camera on the laptop can be used any time at all to view the laptop user.
Then just look for clues to figure out who is a pedophile. Job done.
Can I have the grant money to do this now?
You can't handle the truth.
Combine the pedophile beards with the rapist glasses, the kind of look that women love.
You can't handle the truth.
I did some research into this back in the early 80's, using a person's typing patterns to identify them and worked up the algorithms necessary to implement a 2-factor authentication system, a passphrase in combination with an analysis of the typing pattern as the user inputs the phrase. The main obstacle (human factors) was the training necessary to get a good pattern to compare against. Computers at the time were a lot slower and less capable than they are now. This can work, but it has a LOT of gotchas, such as what happens when you are injured in the extremities and your pattern changes significantly?
Sometimes, real fast is almost as good as real-time.
Anybody have a link so I can try it out? I wanna see how it identifies me.
What... no! Of course I’m not a pedophile...
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
Here's the paper which may have started this research: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/66795/01/thesis.pdf
Apparently they had to hook up sensors to the typists’ fingers. Now we just need to have all the paedophiles register so that we can make sure they’re wearing their typing gloves when they go online.
(Why they couldn’t just use a regular keylogger is beyond me, but the fact that they didn’t implies that for some reason a simple keylogger wouldn’t work. It would certainly have been easier than wiring up the typists and developing electronics to monitor the sensors.)
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
For a time in the '70s, World's Fairs, science expos, etc. might feature handwriting analysis by computer. A large, impressive, punchcard-based machine would read your signature or other writing sample and produce a 'description' of your personality.
Graphology has at times significant support, and its use has been explored by criminologists. Nowadays, it's generally considered to be a crock. One of the areas where graphology was earliest discredited was in its (in)ability to tell the gender of a writer.
The Daily Wail article makes similar claims to those made for graphology, including the ability to determine gender, and proposes some of the same uses for the new technique. I suspect this will wind up on the crock-shelf next to graphology.
Keyboard proxy. A device which is plugged between keyboard an computer and which accepts key strokes and sends them in a freely selectable pattern to the computer. The base package contains: 'young white woman', 'trustworthy, well situated man', and 'perfect lover'. Additional packages like 'honest politician' or 'horny milf' can be ordered separately.
Depending on my mood alone, I have a different typing style. At work I have a different chair which forces a more upright posture, which changes my typing.. also the type of thing I would be typing: if I'm inspired my typing is very fast and in a continious stream, in a chat it's often less quick.
I doubt there is anyone who has a continious typing habit. It's just a curiosity and technical exercise, the "pedo"-tag helps them justify their work
I think we can keep recursing like this until someone returns 1
It watches to see if you are typing with just one hand.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
What, like everyone has a unique 'wanking fingerprint'?
Tubal-Cain smokes the white owl.
Surely they just need to install sensors that are sensitive to the smell of hammers?
The research mentioned in the article is about verifying identity by comparing a person's keystroke timing to a previously acquired of keystroke timing. Nothing the professor's research makes any claim of being able to determine age, gender, culture or anything else from an unknown person's typing.
At best, you could compare a person's typing to a database of typing patterns and see if you find a match. To identify pervs this way would require that you track down all the pervs, give them typing tests, ensure that they type like they normally do, store the typing profiles in a database, ensure that all programs record and send the timing of typists keystrokes, ensure that the pervs all type the same way they did on the typing test and compare the resulting keystroke timing profile.
But hey... how could any of that possibly fail to work?
Also, the professor's list of published papers can be found here. There is some interesting stuff there
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~maxion/pubs/list.html
This could be easily circumvented by a very simple program that uses the then-not-so-secret[1] typing profiles to first buffer my input and then emulate the keystrokes in the desired fashion while passing it to any chat client or whatever.
Epic fail.
[1] As an alternative I can trick some relatives or friends into handing out their personal typing profile to me.
(Sorry for my bad english)
Should Mavis Beacon go into exile before the Feds close in on her?
Type without rhythm and it won't attract the worm. Or the fuzz.
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
If author Bill Geerhart can fake being a child when he punks the rich and famous, surely someone can fake being a child to this software.
It's only a matter of time before there are "how to type like a fill-in-the-blank" HOWTOs out there on the interwebs.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
This is an April 1st story or a huge waste of money.
CHILD MOLESTERS WHO AREN'T PEDOHPILES:
Close to half of real child molesters are members of the family or household, and many of them are not pedophiles:
*The lonely single dad who is tempted by his teenage daughter and puts his needs above hers
*The horny or power-tripping teenager who molests his siblings
Then there are the rapists who pick on kids not out of any sense of love or because they like sex with kids but because they like hurting people and it's easier to hurt or intimidate a kid into silence than an adult.
PEDOPHILES WHO AREN'T CHILD MOLESTERS:
There are an unknown number of pedophiles who you never hear about because they are socially and legally responsible individuals. The ones lucky enough to also be attracted to adults may be in healthy adult romantic relationships.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Identifying a person's base background on the basis of only ten keystrokes seems to be stretching things. Though the article does mention all the additional information collected in order to make the determination.
The article does NOT mention what the people were typing. If they were doing a standard typing test, then you might be able to determine gender, culture and age. But if they were doing an online conversation, then you would have to factor in how well the person converts thoughts to words and words to typed text.
Seriously - how many kids fall victim to this kind of thing?
And how many kids are molested by their family, family friends and other trusted people they meet in real life.
How about we just simply abduct all kids from their families at birth and have them be raised by robots until they're 18? It'd definitely save more kids from being molested.
what are you doing hear?
This is another reason I'm always going to be single. *mutter*
My typing speed and rhythm can vary wildly, rather dependent on my alcohol and caffeine content amongst many other factors. I fail to see how a system can take account of so many unknown variables.
Blazing Spiders
Life's too short to dignify every last quack with a dignified reading/listening.
e.g. When an article says somebody can identify a pedophile's typing "within ten keystrokes" then, um, I'm not reading.
No sig today...
Notepad. Cut. Paste.
(or, if you prefer, some odd combination of hitting esc and 10dd or some finger stretching combo of ctrl+meta+wtf )
Sigs are so 1990s. No way would I be seen dead with one.
In the days of morse code the distinctive way an operator keyed in the messages was called their "fist".
More importantly, it has no relation the pedophiles either.
It seems that the words "pedophile" and "rapist" are being used almost interchageably these days, and no one really knows what these words mean anymore. Pedophiles are rapists, but not all rapists are pedophiles - and it happens that the rapist in this case was not.
Since Phrenology hasn't exactly panned out, they gotta try something new.
Since the invention of retrophrenology, can't we do something about typing habits to convert pedofiles into nonpedofiles. Something to do with hammers and their hands. Large hammers.
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
Clearly the next step here is to pass a bill mandating that all keyboards dial home to the (soon-to-be-established) National Child Protection Agency, including not only typing patterns but also bacteria patterns. ~ I, for one, welcome our new keyboard-monitoring overloads!
You just need to look for any Catholic connotation in a post. Any Linux or Mac zealot must be a priestly paedophile.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
I'm thinking that those sick fucks don't really use the keyboard... their hands are probably busy doing 'other things'
Prospecting Stinks. Stop Wasting Time on Cold Calling.
So, are they looking for what looks like one-handed typing when search terms like "playground" are entered?
Pedophiles are rapists, but not all rapists are pedophiles
A rapist is someone who rapes (duh).
A pedophile is someone who wants to fuck children.
However, until the pedophile actually fucks a kid, is not a rapist.
If I want to implant an axe in the head of my neighbor, I am not a murderer until I actually do so.
They only type with one hand?
Not all pedophiles are rapists, either, unless you allow “statutory rape” into the equation (“rape only because the law said so”).
That's a scary thought.
Also, just think of what the Chinese government could do with this - immediately locating any dissident who searches google.hk just by identifying their regional "telegraphic fist". By monitoring their citizen's keyboards, they can save themselves the bother of having to monitor every internet connection in the count----
Oh wait, they do that anyway.
Another cmdrtaco special. We are getting more trolls than actual articles lately.
are nothing new. An effective way of ensuring someone's identity, but I doubt they can be used to accurately identify someone's age/culture however.
An internal system operation returned the error "The operation completed successfully.".
Thats right.... 6 months from the day that they start using it on any major service, until it is utterly useless.
All it takes is for a handful of people with the right skills to care, and there are some paranoid sons of bitches out there who know how to hack hardware and code, and there will be solutions available quickly. I imagine it will start with drivers and or keyboards that buffer and randomize timings. (this may not work well for peadophiles since randomization can probably be detected quickly)
It shouldn't be long before software that will buffer your keystrokes and retime them to a profile, maybe even flag and give you a chance to edit statements based on a grammar profile too.
Not all of it will be easy, but, come on, some of this stuff will be easy, and once its done by someone who is a free software supporter, well, I can't imagine it being too long before it takes less than 20 minutes from the time that you learn about this sort of tracking being used until you have protection.
Most people don't know how to use mixmaster to send email. However, how long does it really take to figure out and start using it? Few people know how to use PGP or OTR, but, you could be using either of them in 20 minutes if you wanted to (maybe not fully understanding what you are doing, but using it...)
I bet this is a great project for justifying a budget though. Hell, once its utterly broken, I bet some lobbyist will catch a nice paycheck going around urging the congresscritters here in the US (and equivalents elsewhere) to go around urging them to ban this horrible new technology. Whether it happens or not, this useless dud is going to be raking in the cash for years!
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
What the frack?
Oh noes...
I agree. I'd also add that probably most do not "want" but just fantasize about it. "Want" convey the idea you are planning to do so imo.
It's nonsense. All it tells you is the timing of the character strokes (no pun intended, seriously). Any meaning added other than the meaning of the characters strung into cogent words is meaningless, well unless you're programming in Perl well known for meaningless symbols having substantial meaning. That's it all perl programmers had better stop using keyboards!
See the subject line. =P
most likely a child wont be up to the sex session, that makes most of the pedophiles that actually have sex with childs rapists, and of those who actually "want to have sex" with the pedophile, I'm pretty sure 100% of them are actually mentally sick because of the abuse, so, make your conclusions
I'm positive, don't belive me look at my karma
This is the same people who say that facebook access causes STDs
Lets replace this headline with something else:
Tracking Whites by the way they type
Tracking Blacks by the way they type
This seems like a slippery slope. I'm getting tired of all this "pedo" tracking. Our software has determined you type like a pedo, not a rapist. What next? How about monitoring your children? Know what they do, where they go, who their friends are.
Man blir trött av att gå och göra ingenting.
Actually, you are just committing battery until your neighbor dies of their wound.
im 4 realz not 30 n U kno dat! B behind brgr king near mall tonite 4 drinkz! LOLZ!
for example, if someone is typing quick.
and then all of a sudden
the typing speed
drecrease
anmd the typos
rate
increases as
if theyre
typing
with one handsssggggaaaaahhhhhhh
You're missing his/her point. If a pedophile hasn't actually had sex with a child, he/she isn't a rapist... since by definition, to be a rapist, one must have actually raped someone.
The key to this article seems to be:
"Mr Butler said: 'We're going to submit a proposal to the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council for a bid of probably about £1million so that we can develop the research further."
So they will be spending £1million to goof off... sorry, make that: do research for a few years.
I myself will soon be submitting my grant proposal for $100 Million to find the correlation between sun-spot cycles and the drinking habits of super models. No sacrifice too great for science...
...are a sign of a pedophile typing
"I see undead people" Warcraft III - Necromancer
Jesus the Christ would like to have a Word with you.
(1)You are a killer when you resolve in your heart that whomever you hate will be killed by your deads.
(2)You are a murderer if you kill for religious purposes.
(3)You are a rapist not by preference of how force is utilize, but that you FORCED your will onto another despite their dissatisfaction.
(4)You are a thief if you take something of someone else that can't be given back, ever; if it can be given back in any way, then this is known as an "investment" such as life can only be forgiven by God who works through whomever you thieved through: ever to wonder how religion involves to satisfy your psyche on prior sins that you can agress to more penitent activities is your grace.
Satan as you perceive would say that I am a 30 year-old virgin, but I say unto you: "My mind strays daily to be crushed by sin, yet I regenerate to say that I have been met by those temptations but my heart has known the greater distraction whether it carry into effect or not. I have thought about your mother, your sister, your dog, your 'taters, your squash, your fine cuntlery and yet it was all a sin against myself that you don't know about."
-proof that Satan is a liar that would betray your heart if ever that Mark can steal your mind to know how the much more to stow you away into Hell forever.
And the battle continues, where the Son never sets and the Month is not journaled because time is not memorial until whomever loves the most to endure the scourge of temptation.