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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?
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"
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.
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.
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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
Take away the consumers and the producers will have fewer reasons to produce. It isn't a perfect system, but they do go hand in hand.
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!
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.
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.
Doesn't the hashtag of a picture change by editing one pixel? Or by removing one line of pixels?
I'm pretty sure that posting an image with the comment "#thisischildporn" is going to raise some eyebrows no matter what how much you change the image.
The cryptographic hash of a file, on the other hand, is usually a little more sensitive.
When dealing with image recognition you really want to account for things like the image being resized, colours adjusted, or borders being added and removed. In this case you would want to do something like take the image, rescale it to a fixed size, reduce the colour palette and then create a hash of the resulting image. This allows you to spot matches even if the image has been scaled down, blurred or watermarked, or, in some rare cases, replaced with a photograph of a giant watermelon.
We're still working on that last part and Her Majesty regrets the unfortunate incident involving the torch bearing mob at the farmers' market.
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.
How about recognizing that these feelgood solutions are more for getting it outta sight outta mind than for actually stopping the abuse of children?
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
You are suggesting legalising the possession of child pornography. Only a child abuser would want that!
BURN THE EVIL ONE!
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.
Only thing I can see with this, is that you can't get rid of pedophilia... It's something in the brain, we can't get rid of it completely, so the "consumers" you are talking about will never go away. You get rid of one, another is born to take their place. That's the problem with that solution.
Even if we get to that point, though, there will always be ways around a hash. Always. It's the nature of the beast with digital data. When you try to block certain combinations of ones and zeroes, there's always other ways to put those ones and zeroes together to get the same result.
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
It seems like the wrong approach. If the war on drugs has shown us anything, it's that targeting the larger pool of users isn't terribly effective. Unlike the war on drugs, however, we wouldn't be fighting a hydra. I would doubt that there's a huge hierarchy, with a host of lieutenants ready to step in to the lead role. Targeting producers, then, is likely to have a far greater impact.
Required reading for internet skeptics
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
How about recognizing that these feelgood solutions are more for getting it outta sight outta mind than for actually stopping the abuse of children?
I had not considered that. A shame you posted AC, as this is well-deserving of a +5 insightful.
More than just the high potential for abuse, it's worse-than-useless.
Required reading for internet skeptics
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.
We don't find people filming murders for sexual gratification. If that were the case, then that could very well become illegal too.
Although fake kiddie porn is just as illegal as the real thing, filming fake murders for others' gratification (hopefully not sexual, but who knows) is big business. Hollywood makes billions on it. Ditto first-person shooter games.
Something is screwed up somewhere.
-- Alastair
It says Google etc. to block "Hash Lists". That means they are against it, right? What did "hash lists" do anything to anybody?
I would not be willing to do bit flipping and image manipulation for child pornography but I'd start ripping everything I own and sharing it if they did it with music and movies. Then again, I do not own any child porn.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
The only thing I learned from your comment is that random italics reads as douchey as people who randomly emphasize in their speech, attempting to sound authoritative but winding up seeming pedantic and pretentious.
That's an emotional argument. Which is the only thing your comment requires, as you didn't even touch the substance of my comment.
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Broadcasting about real murders is also big business. What are cnn.com or fox news about? Wars and crime. Humans ENJOY watching or reading about the distress of other humans. Taking one particular piece of distress and making it illegal seems... illogical.
This is simple economics: If they stop 10 producers of CP, they have arrested 10 people. If they stop 1000 consumers, the still have the 10 producers out there, creating new consumers and they can claim 100x the "success". Add to that that in many countries no-victim CP (drawings, comics, texts, etc.) are illegal as well, they can present their huge successes in "fighting CP" to get more power and funding, while at the same time they can make sure the sources do not dry up. Of course this means not fighting actual child abuse, because if they went after those that hurt children and document it, they would slaughter the goose that lays golden eggs for them. And in addition, finding and stopping those that abuse children is much, much harder, as very likely only a tiny part of actual child abuse ends up on the Internet.
Hence, overall, there is no real interest in rescuing or protecting any children here. The incentives have gotten entirely perverted, to the detriment of any and all children that get abused.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
There is something inherently wrong in making the possession of any specific configuration of bits illegal. Sure, selling them, creating them is different, but criminalizing possession is just a cop-out by law enforcement to make their job easy so they do not have to prove intent. Hence it has become so easy to kill people socially, just hack their computers and put some CP on then and then give an anonymous tip to law enforcement. In many countries, drawings are already enough to get the desired effect. This is really not helping the problem at all.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
To the people involved in this iniciative, indecent material filtering is no "goose that lays golden eggs" -- it's an ingoing cost which generates no profit. But they don't have the power to take any action more meaningful than simply improving the efficiency of their filtering. Cooperation with rivals makes perfect sense, as there's no "commercial advantage" to be gained.
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
So you're saying the whole system is taking ineffective measures on purpose because it's corrupt? That wastes my money. That behavior is an economic drain, creating more poverty and slowing wealth growth by engaging in cost-producing services with no productive output.
The goose that lays golden eggs eats entire grain silos of food. You can trade a hundred golden eggs for that food. They're stealing my food and getting an inefficient return. Kill the damn goose so I can eat it.
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You're missing the purpose of the digest as it is being used by Google. They are not being given cryptographic hashes, and they are not trying to assure anyone of the integrity of the file. These hash digests are being used only as an index to perform comparisons without needing to keep the original files around. Think "java HashMap", not SHA-1.
When they find a matching value, Google doesn't try to do any other comparisons or investigations. They blindly zip up the file and log information, then turn it over to a qualified investigator. The investigator determines if it's a false positive, at which point the evidence is deleted, or if it warrants further investigation.
John