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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."
Your comment matches a hash submitted to the block list. Please report to the authorities for mandatory castration. Have a nice day.
Wait, is it abusive to view and distribute? It's abusive to create, for certain; I'm not sure I buy the line about viewing and distributing.
OIG explained to our entire department one day that, each time a person views a child pornography image, the person in the image is victimized again. I've not yet wrapped my head around the idea of someone suddenly stopping somewhere as the finger of God touches them inappropriately, collapsing to their knees and gasping for breath in distress as some dude in Korea looks at their naked 12-year-old body.
Many in the last decade held the opinion that the greater crackdown on child pornography possession was an excuse to draw attention away from the lack of action against child pornography production. What happened? Do we now all accept producers and care most about consumers? That sounds like a by-the-numbers approach confounding two very different things: 10 producers and 990 consumers are not 1000 child abusers, but 10 child abusers. Eliminate 900 of the consumers and you still have exactly as many children being abused exactly as frequently--and my own sense of doing it by the numbers tells me the numbers aren't any better in that case. I'll be the first to push 100,000 kids off a cliff in a bus to save 1,000,000 people from terrible death, but methinks you've simply avoided saving anyone and, perhaps, saved yourself dirtying your hands with the bus.
It's not that I disagree with what you're doing, Mr. Anderson; I just want to ensure you're going about it in the most efficient way.
Support my political activism on Patreon.
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.
When they cam for the perverts, I said nothing, for I was not a pervert?
This exact technology will allow governments to exercise very powerful censorship across the internet (or at least the part of the internet most people see). Want all pictures from that protest rally to vanish? Just twist the arm of any of these companies into adding a few hashes, or just slip them into a list the FBI no doubt routinely provides, and, just like that, down the memory hole. Plus, as you say, this won't stop the perverts. The only thing this actually accomplishes is empowering the totalitarian state.
We seen a couple of stories here on /. already where IP blocklists were abused by governments to slip in websites of opposing political parties. It's a bit hard to believe this won't be abused similarly.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
That would work if most CP was created for profit instead of for the joy of molesting a 12 year old and sharing that with others of the same mindset.
How about recognizing that these feelgood solutions are more for getting it outta sight outta mind than for actually stopping the abuse of children?
No. I use a similar algorithm to deduplicate my obscenely large stash of furry pornography*. It works, but there's a problem.
Let's say that the chance of two unrelated images matching is, say, one in million. Great. That sounds amazing - and it is, that's ridiculously optimistic for phash alone, but we can assume they have something better involving composite hashes.
Now feed into that a sizable database of child abuse imagery - say, ten thousand images. And a copy of the facebook photo library for one day, which is 350 million photos. Yes, that's facebooks claim, do not underestimate the number of compulsive photographers. That's 3,500,000,000,000 comparisons, and at your optimistic one-in-a-million error rate, 3,500,000 false positives to investigate every day.
It can be done, but it's going to need a bit more than just perceptual hash comparisons.
*Thus posting as AC.
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