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
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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.
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 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.
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
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.
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.