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)
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.
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?
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.
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.
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
Pedophile != child molester
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.
Please keep in mind that, in reality, we have to deal with Muggles, "Mud-bloods", and others of their ilk.
FTFY
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
This kind of flamebaitery got labeled "insightful"?
Joe "ban video games" Lieberman is a democrat. Obama's White House has actually been worse for civil liberties and worse for consumers in the arena of things like Net Neutrality and reform of IP law than the republicans were. They've rejected more FOIA requests on "national security" grounds than Bush and his cronies ever had the temerity to, probably because Bush and his cronies knew the media were watching like hawks while the media is still simping and fawning over Obama.
Neither party is good for technology, neither party realizes the limitations of technology, and neither party gives a flaming crap about "justice."
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.
Given that the left-wing Labour party has been in power in the UK for many years
We call that kind of reasoning 'ex falso quodlibet'. If you start from a false statement, you can prove anything. The left-wing Labour Party hasn't been in power in the UK since the early '80s. New Labour (old tories) has been in power since the '90s, but isn't even remotely left wing.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
In the days of morse code the distinctive way an operator keyed in the messages was called their "fist".
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.
Some items of note.
Lieberman is an independent not a Democrat. He left the Democratic party after the 2004 elections.
Most people in the Executive branch are career employees. They don't suddenly switch when a new President gets elected. According to the Bureau of Labor and Statistics, the Federal Government has a yearly turnover rate of about 7.1%. Meaning that of the approximate 2,000,000 current Federal employees, about 1.86 million served during the previous administration. Other studies show that the majority of turnover is to lower positions and due to being promoted to higher positions.
In short, most of the people rejecting those FIOS petitions now, are the same people who were rejecting FIOS petitions four years ago. Many of those same people were probably hired during the Clinton administration for that matter, perhaps even during the Bush (Sr.) administration or even before that.
Also in an irony of ironies, your post got modded interesting instead of troll.
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.
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.