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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.
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Image recognition is straightforward enough today to quickly find almost identical matches and generate the new hash. TinEye is really good for this kind of thing, and I'm sure Google's image match also works sufficiently well to keep an updated list of all the one-offs. Pretty easy to update it just like AdBlock or an SSL cert blacklist.
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.
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.
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.
Got to caught up in checking the math I forgot to tick the box. Bah. Well, no-one cares anyway.
Possession of child pornography is illegal in itself. Given that how would they have the original image to match against?
Almost every child pornography possession statute that I've seen has an exception for law enforcement activities. For example, a jury examining photos in a jury room wouldn't be guilty of possession if those photos are evidence presented at trial.
If I can be modded down for being a troll, can I be modded up for being an orc, or a balrog?
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