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.

Comments

oh no

[genican1]

i hope they don't mistakenly target me in my rush to type fast and make this the first post!

Re:oh no

[K. S. Kyosuke]

They just might; after all, you seem to be excessively aroused by underage articles.

Re:oh no

[Jurily]

How does this work anyway? Does it account for the fact that I know my keyboard is wearing out and thus tend to hit the keys a bit stronger? Does that make me a man?

Does it account for the fact that I grew up typing, and don't even need to look at the keyboard or screen while typing, because it "flows"? Does that make me a woman?

Does it distinguish between typing on a laptop keyboard and a regular one? Since I'm used to laptop keys, I tend to go softer on regular keyboards. Does that make me a pedophile?

And most importantly: WHAT DOES MY TYPING SPEED HAVE TO DO WITH WHO I WANT TO FUCK?

Re:oh no

[Jurily]

One more thing: the caption for the picture says "Fears: Ashleigh Hall, 17, was murdered by Peter Chapman after meeting him on Facebook. Her killing has sparked calls for more security to protect people online"

Can you tell me how anything portrayed in this sentence could possibly relate to typing habits?

This whole article is just standard fearmongering, and not even the entertaining kind.

Re:oh no

[thedonger]

WHAT DOES MY TYPING SPEED HAVE TO DO WITH WHO I WANT TO FUCK?

Clearly you are trying to communicate with an audience unfamiliar with lower case letters. My guess? Young boys. You sicken me.

Re:oh no

[Anonymous Coward]

That's very sad for her, but unless our 17 year old Ashleigh still had to enter puberty, her death has very little ('nothing' to be precise) to do with pedophilia.

Re:oh no

[ultranova]

One more thing: the caption for the picture says "Fears: Ashleigh Hall, 17, was murdered by Peter Chapman after meeting him on Facebook. Her killing has sparked calls for more security to protect people online"

Can you tell me how anything portrayed in this sentence could possibly relate to typing habits?

Or, for that matter, what does it have to do with pedophiles?

This whole article is just standard fearmongering, and not even the entertaining kind.

Actually it seems to be a scam, based on this: "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."

There's just no possible way you can spend the equivalent of 1.4 million dollars or 1.1 million euros making statistical correlations betweem "typing patterns, speeds and rhythms" and people's background, even if you a dumb enough to believe there is a correlation in the first place.

Re:oh no

[Ltap]

And how do they find out what paedophiles type like in the first place? Observe them in the wild?

Foolproof

[MyLongNickName]

I am sure this is foolproof! Sign me up!

Re:Foolproof

[somersault]

Congratulations - you are a pedophile! Either that or a software engineer, but we've lost your paperwork and are just going to go with pedophile to save some time.

Re:Foolproof

[mrsteveman1]

Congratulations - you are a pedophile! Either that or a software engineer, but we've lost your paperwork and are just going to go with pedophile to save some time.

Apparently you've never seen Japanese video games, there's no difference.

actually it will work

[Anonymous Coward]

they're hunt-and-peckers.

Left mousing?

[ThisIsAnonymous]

Looking for "left mousing" would be more accurate...

Typical /. summary

[wowbagger]

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.

I know why!

[B5_geek]

Is that because they are all typing one-handed? =)

Daily Mail = Daily Fail

[Anonymous Coward]

When will Slashdot learn?

Daily Mail is sensationalist bullshit from the UK.

Re:Daily Mail = Daily Fail

[Shrike82]

You've clearly failed to understand the important role the Daily Mail plays in British society. Every page is full of stories about how immigrants are taking all the jobs, how your tax money pays for illegal immigrants to buy pornography, how your children are at risk every time they go online to check their e-mail, how beef/bread/wine/cheese/saturated fat/unsaturated fat will WITHOUT A SHADOW OF A DOUBT kill you/reduce your risk of heart disease/prevent you from getting cancer.

The middle classes are happily distracted by the constant threat towards their very way of life, and which foods are killing them this week, that they forget about things like climate change, human rights violations around the world and the state of the global economy, which makes the government very happy indeed.

I could sort off see this working.

[rindeee]

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.

Nothing new

[thijsh]

Thats nothing, they can already measure it by the way you walk for years now... Have you ever heard of a pedometer?

It's worse than junk

[Joce640k]

I'm pretty sure chat programs send the message in chunks, not individual keystrokes. /Didn't dignify the article with a reading.

Correlation, implication, causation etc.

[Rah'Dick]

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]

Dvorak

[langelgjm]

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?

Re:Dvorak

[GigG]

Joke's on them - I use Dvorak!

I think that pretty much guarantees we will be seeing you on 20/20 some day.

ffs

[Therilith]

Pedophile != child molester

Re:Can't anyone use the English language correctly

[Anonymous Coward]

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.