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Google, Facebook and Twitter To Block "Hash Lists" of Child Abuse
An anonymous reader writes: Facebook, Google, and Twitter are teaming up with the UK's Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) to share hash lists of blocked indecent images. The move is intended to ensure that a picture pulled from one site can't show up again elsewhere. The BBC reports: "Online security specialists welcomed the move as a positive step, but said it would not block content on the 'darknet' — a network with restricted access — where abusers often posted images."
This probably isn't a bad idea even though it won't stop the perverts. It greatly lessens the chance someone will come across something they didn't want to see.
Why is the darknet Google's responsibility, again?
"As the Americans learned so painfully in Earth's final century, free flow of information is the only safeguard against tyranny. The once-chained people whose leaders at last lose their grip on information flow will soon burst with freedom and vitality, but the free nation gradually constricting its grip on public discourse has begun its rapid slide into despotism. Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master."
This isn't too different from our approaches to spam emails. But are these services actually used to share those kinds of images? I wonder who curates the list of hashes, and how long before someone starts adding pictures of stuff they don't like to the list.
Your comment matches a hash submitted to the block list. Please report to the authorities for mandatory castration. Have a nice day.
While it is an interesting concept, it is doomed to fail as a simple single pixel edit or hidden attribute edit will change the file's hash.
We were all warned a long time ago that MS products sucked, remember the Magic 8 Ball said, "Outlook not so good"
Since Google searches and archives all the photos on your computer, I wonder if they run your pictures through their
hash list. If they find one, bam, you could be in prison for child porn.
I'm surprised it took this long. Google must have such a hash list already, better yet an MD5 list, built from their human reviewers of their robot webcrawled image search, so they won't show up in customer searches.
The real question is who keeps a database of pictures to review the list itself. Police? Google? Any normal prosecutor would happily prosecute Google for it just to add a notch to their belt (of asshole behavior).
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Whenever you start itching to censor content you don't like, just keep in mind that some countries consider pictures of women not in a burka to be illegal pornography.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
It doesn't work. We all know that already.
Doesn't the hashtag of a picture change by editing one pixel? Or by removing one line of pixels?
bravo on another successful kafkatrap (parody?)
Lol. The second thing added to the list will be all the Gamergate image memes making fun of Brianna Wu.
It should have said they can't censor things on the darknet not won't.
If won't is correct are they running the darknet sites in question?
Minimum threshold fixed. Thanks!
Hate crime (also known as bias-motivated crime) is a usually violent (lock em up, kidnapping, sex offender lists, etc), prejudice motivated crime that occurs when a perpetrator (social justice warriors) targets a victim because of his or her perceived membership in a certain social group (paedophilia).
This fight against paedophiles is really just unjustified homophobia in disguise, a form of racism, etc. The Internet Watch Foundation is not attacking child abuse, they are attacking paedophiles. The very article describes this as a " fight against paedophiles". There is no reason to think the vast majority of paedophiles are harming kids. This is why they're attacking child pornography. It's an easy target that won't go away and they can't possibly eliminate.
It shares so many similarities with the war on drugs. If there is one group of people you can attack and generally get agreement on this is it. It's too small, unorganizable, spread out, etc, and nobody would dare defend it out of fear for there lives. This gives the social justice warriors ample room to do what they want. They are really nothing but a misguided group of racists spreading hatred and fear. You wouldn't attack homosexuals because some are sexually abusing little children. It's no different with paedophiles. The entire war on paedophilia is identical to the war on drugs. It's utterly illogical. The idea that porn leads to sexual abuse was disproved long ago. It's just like violent video games leading to violence in the real world. The reality is studies have shown the exact opposite to be true.
This is doing nothing other than implementing a system of censorship and giving people the perception something is being done to stop child abuse. It's not. The article even says they're not able to stop the spread. It's not even illegal to be a paedophile, and yet they have no aversion to expressing there hatred for this group. They accuse an entire group of wrongdoing when there is zero evidence of that. There isn't any means to even produce such evidence because all the studies that back up paedophiles being bad were done on an imprisoned population which wouldn't represent paedophiles as a whole. It only represents violent paedophiles. It's no different than doing a study on homosexuals after locking up homosexuals. There is going to be a disproportionate number of violent homosexuals in custody.
They're not attacking people who abuse children. They're attacking a group of people who are hated for no logical reason. It's no different than attacking homosexuals for what a minority have done.
Go watch the 1950's Anti-Homosexual PSA - Boys Beware to see exactly what I'm talking about:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=17u01_sWjRE
They imply all homosexual are evil-doers that want to harm little children. It's utter nonsense.
from the ./summary:
...but said it would not block content on the 'darknet' — a network with restricted access — where abusers often posted images."
Well that is one way to defeat the blocking. Or you could flip just one bit in the entire image and that would change the hash. Pick an LSB anywhere and nobody will notice that it is a different image. Assuming it's a hash of the entire image, and not a subsample. And assuming that image compression does not swallow your LSB flip. Even without those assumptions, there will be many trivial and, to the eye, undetectable, transformations which would defeat the hash.
But something tells me that the sort of people trading in this stuff would not be looking to defeat the blocking anyway. They probably want to keep their nasty viewing habits as private as possible, and the fewer people who stumble across that stuff and report it the better off they are.
So FaceBook, Google et. al. are not fighting child abuse, they are covering it up, walling it off from the decent, respectable part of the internet so that we upstanding citizens are not accidentally exposed to it, In a doing so, they facilitate the interests of those who trade in that stuff.
Ceci n'est pas une signature.
Blocking pictures of child abuse is like sweeping them under the carpet: we don't see them, but pedophiles can still download them. I fail to see how this prevents further abuse of the children in the pictures. And just to be clear: we are talking about adult men, sometimes elderly men, having sex with todlers. Penetration sex that is. And yes, that too.
no, I don't have a sig
If you're a child, Google is looking out for you. If you're over 50 and Google's own employee, you can suck it unless you want to sue them for 6 years to get fair treatment.
they certainly can do that with copyright violations, can't they? Because you know... that's illegal too... and if Google, Facebook, Microsoft, etc CAN do this to stop CP, then why don't they do it for movies, books, music, etc? Are they willingly partecipating to a crime because they don't believe it is serious enough? Isn't the law equal for everyone or do we have here some people more "equal" than others?
Let's not forget that the MPAA has long wanted Google to block access to their copyrighted media. Implementing hash-based blocking for purposes of "Save the children" just happens to give Google the mechanism which MPAA needs to enforce media blocking as well.
The biggest hurdle for net-wide MPAA censorship may have just vanished. Getting their media hashes into the hash lists will be comparatively easy, by a large variety of means.
Worked at AT&T and T-Mobile and they ran the hash list along with a virus scan on emails, mms messages and photo albums. I'm sure other image hosting services run the same checks. If any photo popped, you had to notify this third party company who acted with the cops. If a cop had a warrant, you would call the telcom to have an engineer to drop a dvd in the admin server, run a collect script that zips everything up, and then have the police department show up and pick up the dvd outta the dvd-rom drive. Nobody is allowed to touch the DVD. Maintains the chain of custody.
I absolutely agree with you.
my idea that i cannot fund but should be used is facial recognition for children/ the child abuse picture is ran against a database of school pictures to find which school the child goes to. Then with the address a follow up investigation can be run.
The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.
H. L. Mencken
I would not team up with anything called "Internet Watch Foundation". I mean, this just sound like an excellent excuse to spy on people and anyone against this is probably a pedo, right? Maybe I'm just that boy in the crowd yelling that the King is naked... The only thing that this can (maybe) avoid is sharing of such (unencrypted) images, but do not stop abuses at all...
What utter moron of a child abuser would upload their pictures to facebook?
They might not be the brightest of criminals, but seriously... they'd have to be pretty dumb to do that.
because we take enforcement action {X} against {Y}, then enforcement action {W} against {Z} in inevitable
try these on:
"we can't legalize marijuana, because then we have to legalize methamphetamine and heroin"
"we can't legalize gay marriage, because then we have to legalize marrying the dead and marrying animals"
do you see the problem? good, then know yourself: the slippery slope argument is failure, appeal to emotion, fear
the slippery slope only works if you are dealing with people who never actually think about different topics involved
but we do think, and we can tell the difference, and the difference matters
i don't understand how people like you get to sleep knowing police stations exist. of course police have problems that need fixing, but without police you have chaos. but the way fear addled slippery slope thinkers think, it's as if the existence of police stations means extreme autocratic martial law is inevitable
actually the police station is a good analogy to your "complaint." that someone with access to the hashlist puts pictures of his ex girlfriend on it is simply an individual abuse, meaning that individual needs to be punished. it isn't a valid argument against the existence of the list. much as with the police: the existence of bad apples doesn't mean the entire existence of police is in question, it simply means we have to do a better job of kicking out the bad apples
the simple truth is the the slippery slope argument is a logical fallacy that depends upon appeal to emotion: irrational fear, rather than reason and coherent thought
anyone who ever makes a slippery slope argument is simply identifying themselves as someone who wants to lose an argument, and strongly suggests their opinion is derived from fear rather than logic, and is therefore invalid and can be discarded
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
The media really makes it seem like nothing happens on the darknet other than child porn and terrorism. It's fitting that they really push this at a time when a more usable darknet should be very attractive to most people. Your IP address, cookies, device ID, browswer ID, OS ID, various logins are all being cross referenced. Your professional work 'searches' are going to be put in a pile with the rest of 'it'.
X
They are victimized again when someone views it. Imagine if you were abused and had those photos spread around. How would you feel? Even if production were made illegal if it weren't already so, someone would just have to make it once, perhaps in a country with looser laws.
Because it's sexual in nature, it makes it worse. We don't find people filming murders for sexual gratification. If that were the case, then that could very well become illegal too.
If that argument isn't good enough, consider if the copyright were held solely by the victim. Then at the very least, it could be illegal in the same way someone has a bootlegged video of a movie.
The only contention we should have is what kind of punishment it should be. I don't think lengthy prison sentences does anyone good assuming it's not a deterrent for pedophiles seeking child abuse images. Voluntary treatment in exchange for a shorter sentence or probation for possession of child pornography should be considered. The same thing could probably be said for the war on drugs.
Treating Pedophiles: Therapy Can Work, But It's a Challenge
It's time to reconsider how we treat pedophiles
Pessimism about pedophilia
Sorry about that. I didn't format them correctly.
Treating Pedophiles: Therapy Can Work, But It's a Challenge
It's time to reconsider how we treat pedophiles
Pessimism about pedophilia
As I posted here a while ago I find this just an excuse. Just like the tale "The King's new Clothes", the tale where two weavers trick a King saying that they made a suit that only intelligent people can see. The king's wife, counselors and ministries, that can't see a thing, all pretend to see just to not look stupid. The King then parades around the town, where the townsmen all praise how beautiful the new clothes are, just for a kid in the crowd yell that the King is naked. That is exact the same situation, this is just an ineffective way to fight child abuse, but anyone want to disagree to not look like a pedophile...
Facebook, Google, and others have been doing this for a number of years now. It's nothing new, but it's still a bad idea.
Of course, it doesn't seem like a bad idea until you take gray areas into account: Subjects that look like they're under 18 aren't always minors, and minors don't always look like they're under 18. Unless the database is based on images of confirmed minors being abused, the database is certain to contain legal images among the illegal ones. There's also the question of what, exactly, constitutes pornography. Nudity involving minors is generally not illegal unless it meets certain criteria, but those are often in the eyes of the beholder. It's likely that a lot of images in the database will fall under the category of "I know it when I see it", which is a terrible standard for automatic blocking of potentially legal content.
I have trouble poking technical holes here since, fundamentally the idea of using a hash table is somewhat sound, its used all the time for UUIDs, theres plenty of uniqueness right? I guess maybe we can rule out collisions for the most part....hell maybe pair the hash with a file size?
If we are talking such tried and true technology and not some recently invented "photo hash" that I wouldn't have any faith in the uniqueness of....
but then the implications of just having such a system means things can be injected into it. What do you do when the file you search for comes up blocked as CP? Do you investigate further or do you run away screaming? What happens when a hash gets added that shouldn't be there? Will they keep a library of original files to really check against?
Drop a key, and the internet is effectively censored.....is not how I envision the net I want to live on.
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
If there are more than a few isolated false positives Google will have to backtrack.
Also, if this hits the file-traders where it hurts - and it probably won't because if the file-traders are smart they don't care about Google etc. - then they will find a work-around. I can think of any number of work-arounds that would be very hard to counter without greatly increasing the number of false positives.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Who are these people who get paid to watch child pornography all day? (i.e. The people who classify the images.)
There are some experts in this area who would be willing to offer their services for free to help Google out.
It says Google etc. to block "Hash Lists". That means they are against it, right? What did "hash lists" do anything to anybody?
You're confusing logical arguments based on slippery slope as a fallacious logical form with slippery slope predictions based on observation and assigned probability.
"Give X an inch and they'll take a mile" is a rule derived through repeated observation of X followed by assignment of probability about what is likely to happen when the same conditions arise again. It's a perfectly rational probabilistic prediction, and it has absolutely nothing to do with using logic of the same syntactic form in a vacuum, devoid of any prior observations and accumulated experience.
You might want to ponder the fact that you've tried to make an argument against use of a fallacious logical form, but sadly your own argument is based on a flawed premise because you didn't understand the argument that you are criticizing. In the circumstances, here's another rule derived by observation which you should learn: "People in glass houses should not throw stones."
Well said. Unfortunately, this evil and underhanded tactics still work well on the general population.
We sadly live in a time when drawings classify as "child abuse," which is borderline retarded.
Assuming they're talking about photos of children involved in sexual situations, that's fine.
But I can't help question how far this would erode freedom of artistic expression. (Esp. since the British hate that.)
Hashes do not, and were never intended to, uniquely identify a file. Particularly when the file is much larger than the hash.
A hash has one purpose, and one purpose only. For a given file with a particular hash, it should be very difficult to generate a modified file with the same hash.
In particular it should be exceedingly difficult to generate a modified file with desirable characteristics for the attacker (eg: modified account number) that matches the same hash.
From a security point of view, it's OK to generate a completely random, but useless, file that matches the same hash. But disastrous if an attacker can substitute another text message that benefits the attacker.
With that in mind, realise that hashes are not necessarily designed to stop random collisions, but designed to stop almost the same but slightly different collisions. From the point of view of image matching, that's the opposite of what you want. (ie: you don't care about completely different images, but care about images with a single pixel difference)