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Google Helps Police With Child Porn WebCrawler (siliconbeat.com)
The San Jose Mercury News is reporting that the Internet Watch Foundation, "an organization that works with police worldwide to remove images of child sexual abuse from the Internet, has credited Google with helping it develop a 'Web crawler' that finds child pornography." The pilot project makes it easier to identify and remove every copy of specific images online, and the group says "We look forward to the next phase of the Googler in Residence project in 2016." Last year Google also had an engineer working directly with the foundation, and the group's annual report says "This was just one part of the engineering support Google gave us in 2015." [PDF] Their report adds that the new technology "should block thousands of their illegal images from being viewed on the Internet."
Why not crawl peoples Android phones and Android tablets for illegal images?
Google already have access to the media folders on them via Google Play Services, so it trivial for them to take a look for other reasons.
Let's face it, Google loves oppression. Google helps China with censorship. Google helps US with the pedohunt. There isn't an oppressive government in the world that Google wouldn't help out, for the evils.
and everyone else loses: No child is better protected, but content policing is now a free-for-all.
Thanks, you Bwittish guise, you.
The IWB is a well-intentioned organisation, but they have no accountability whatsoever. They publish a list of links they claim are child abuse imagery, and ISPs block what's on the list - but the list, for obvious reasons, is super-secret. The processes by which the list is generated is also secret - even those who are put on the list are not informed that they are now on the list. Some (not all) ISPs actively try to prevent those who are censored from finding out by spoofing 404 error page rather than explaining that a deliberate block is in place - they certainly aren't going to contact the site operator. Even if someone wrongly blocked finds out (as happened with Wikipedia only because the block process inadvertently broke the site) there is no appeals process in place. That's a lot of power for an unaccountable and opaque organisation.
There's more to the Internet than just the web. If only there were some way of exchanging information without using the web. Oh right. Then no one would find it. Because the web is the entire Internet. According to idiots. Carry on then. Idiots.
Yes, all the problems you mention are indeed reasons why what they are doing is... problematic, and from that follow many implications that are every bit as problematic. But don't kid yourself that their "good intentions" are that. They aren't trying to protect, they're trying to sweep the evidence of child abuse under the rug.
Taking this up to philosophical levels, the IWF finger-waggers are more or less operating on the premise that as long as your (their) intentions are good, whatever you do, whatever its effect, is good too, or at least excusable. I happen to disagree: It's results that count. No, I'm not saying that results justify all means. I am saying that if the results are less than good then no amount of good intentions can make up for doing the things that got you those results, so stop doing that already. So I do think the IWF needs to go, along with the other two censorship mechanisms that popped up in Blighty in its wake.
Because no one would trust Android ever again after that. Its a death sentence for the OS. If the crawler finds public child pornography, its fair game. Unfortunately Child Pornography consumers don't make that stuff public.
1st Googletard: If anyone finds this there'll be big trouble.
2nd Googletard: I could say we were doing it as a hypothetical exercise or something.
3rd Googletard: Won't fly. The first thing they'll ask is why we didn't choose another subject. *Any* other subject.
1st Googletard: We, paleface? And why didn't you, by the way?
2nd Googletard: Ummmm....
3rd Googletard: How about ... we were doing it to help the police?
2nd Googletard: Froppwoppalattes all round!
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
What a surprise that Slashdotters are defending child porn and by extension raping children on the basis that it's some form of "free speech." I remember a story a while back where people were saying that taking upskirt photos of women in public places is 100% legitimate because of "free speech," and you shouldn't be wearing skirts in public anyway if you don't want men shoving cameras up your ass. It's a recurring theme in nerdy communities that any and all forms of sexual misconduct are always ok because of some "free speech" related reason. Other people's rights might as well not exist though.
As a web developer with some sites that let users upload files, why can't I get access to the hash table that they're using? Obviously the big players like Google probably have access to a black box of confirmed real images supplied by whatever agency and are using their using their GIS algorithms to find resizes or crops/edits, but I'd be absolutely shocked if the police don't have a list of hash files that they use to scan suspects' hard drives to find any images.
I want access to that hash list so I can immediately block any uploaded images/videos that match the list and automatically report the upload to whatever agency. Yes, hash collisions exist, that's why reporting the upload would simply be evidence for someone else to look at and not an instant arrest. Hell, if it's a list of multiple hash methods along with an exact byte filesize, I'd be absolutely shocked if a multiple-collision could exist.
But Google *already* have access to the media on a phone, they have access as default on every Android phone because they require that as a conditon for access to the Google Play store. You likely let it even back your phone up to Google's server too. So it is already public, (well at least its public to Google and held on their server).
So how can Google scan one set of stuff they have access to, and not scan another set of stuff they have access to? The privacy violation as already occurred, so why not scan your private media for child pornography, unapproved terrorism literature, copyright violations, and so on. They almost certainly scan it for advertising data now.
You're not a pedo are you? What do you have to hide?
Orwell couldn't conceive that Winston would be automated out of a job. That may be the only part he got wrong.
Why is Snark Required?
Nobody puts kiddie porn on display, the only thing the IWB catches are model/nudist sites that operate legally in their own country because slutty dressed preteens in provocative poses or totally innocent nudes are now considered kiddie porn. Unless they're on Dance Moms or in movies, then they can be on national TV. See for example the songs Electricity or Red for the former and movies like the opening of The Baader Meinhof Complex for the latter. They just don't like it when someone makes a site dedicated to the best of it. The last time you could buy anything remotely like porn openly - if you can call no sex, no masturbation, no spread pussies just provokative nudes porn - was the LS series from Russia around 2001. Sure, there's been a few cases of apparently legitimate companies selling customs and specials to select customers but that has always been on a one-on-one top secret basis. And occasionally the odd underage porn pic shows up on legal sites because nobody can tell 14 from 18 particularly "barely legal" porn uses 18 year olds that often look more like 14yo than actual 14yos. But if you wanted to stop that good luck because teens are sexting and sites that take user content like motherless etc. will always end up with some illegal content but if it looks obviously underage it'll disappear quick. And going after people watching underage porn that look of legal age is a joke for the statistics.
If you want the real deal, it's not found openly. It's not stored openly:
1. Install TorBrowser
2. Disable Javascript (in case of exploits)
3. Go to topic links: http://es2adizg32j3kob5.onion/
4. Go to one of the boards and pick a topic
5. Download the links to encrypted files (over Tor still)
6. Open/decrypt with password from post
And there's fuck all IWB can do about that. Or the producer's circles, or the private sales or really anywhere else where 99.9% of it is created. What the IWB is doing is like trying to stop Game of Thrones from being pirated by finding all the copies, good luck with that.
series of exploding oS. Now BSDI is
and I find this action by Google to be reprehensible and unfair to bicyclists around the world-- what? Paedophiles?!? Yeah, fuck those people.
Why bother!? Pederast and kiddy porn enthusiasts are soon as acceptable as all the other sick people with severe mental disorder. For example - transgenders and ones confused about what sex they are.
If "progressive" (this word used to mean something positive) libtard perverts and SJW get what they want, every pervert can rape you, your kids and any animal you got. And it all will be just fine because it's so progressive and PC.
Pay attention! You can already see how acts of child molestation are downplayed by MSM. It's disgusting! This "everything is accepted" mentality crap creeps into our lives and becomes new normal before you realize what's happening.
Presumably, in order to work, this spider will cloak its user agent and ignore the Robots Exclusion Standard.
Which means that it'll probably end up listed on Project Honey Port as a likely spam scraper.
"Their report adds that the new technology "should block thousands of their illegal images from being viewed on the Internet."
Thousands....out of what are probably millions if not billions of images?
Don't get me wrong, I'm absolutely 100% against the sexual exploitation of children, but this seems like less than a drop in the bucket.
We routinely read about police finding people with tens or hundreds of thousands of child porn images on their computer, how does blocking a few thousand make any significant difference?
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
ya know, if more people had access to child pornography, and could look at it without fear of punishment, they could see how horrible it is, and some may even recognize children or adults (are any adults identifiable in them? i wouldnt know, as i dont want to be arrested). perhaps laws would be tougher against perps due to public pressure and outrage, and enforced better. maybe the "forbidden fruit" aura would disappear, and some people would lose interest. and maybe we could accept that the image cannot be rationally made illegal, only the act, and that social pressure is the only remedy to cure bad speech.
how about a national database of child porn images, fully searchable, where hackers could test out facial recognition and track down kids and perps. sort of like the faces on milk cartons of missing children.
yeah, sounds horrible.
Close down each and every Catholic Church around the globe. It won't solve the problem but it would be a good start.
I wonder exactly what they use for matching. It's not like most pictures of a kid in a swimsuit are CP, nor even nude pictures. Most likely they're going from a database of existing and known images or possibly of "similar" images where they have flagged facial recognition etc etc.
Beyond that, I suppose something obvious like a "full spread" might allow matching of genitalia and a match against body size, skin pigment etc might yield some results, though it might also catch some odd stuff like midgets or just various false positives (somebody's lawn cherub, perhaps?).
What I really wonder is how they tune such things. Basically you have to look at it to do so. As somebody who had to work at a forums company and periodically assist reviewing "flagged" posts, that sounds like a good way to end up with bleeding eyeballs and a desire to jump off a cliff after some time at it...
we must stop prison for profit or it will get worse in the next 4 years if bernie is not elected
My biggest issue with groups or governments doing this is they are hiding evidence of a crime. This allows groups to sound outraged, pretend they are doing something about a problem and claim that they have reduced CP while safely ignoring that fact that they have done nothing to prevent child abuse and have quite possible made it worse.
Why does this sound like the same approach used for issues like prostitution vs rape and human trafficking or drug use vs mental health?
The IWF are British.
The British consider drawings to be "child pornography."
I don't like this one bit...
Checksum isn't interchangeable with hash.
Checksums have a goal: verifying data integrity. Hashing is just a technique -- can be used in data structures, image identification, integrity checks, etc. It's not trivial to bypass the latter without knowing the reference points.