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Meet URL, the USB Porn-Sniffing Dog (cnn.com)
HughPickens.com writes: CNN reports that URL, the porn-sniffing dog, is the newest crime-fighting tool at the Weber County Sheriff's office with a nose that could help put away some of the country's most predatory and dangerous criminals. URL (pronounced Earl) sniffs out electronic storage media. Still just a pup, the 18-month-old K-9 is one of fewer than two dozen such dogs in the United States that hunt the unique chemical compounds emitted from flash drives, memory cards, cell phones, iPads and other similar devices. While dogs like URL can't tell detectives if a device has electronic evidence on it, they are able to find devices that humans might otherwise miss. Detective Cameron Hartman points to the high-profile case of former Subway spokesman Jared Fogle, who was convicted on child pornography and other charges last year. A K-9 named Bear, who was trained by the same man who trained URL, led investigators to hidden thumb drives inside Fogle's home. The U.S. Attorney's office for Southern Indiana confirmed those devices contained evidence against Fogle. URL has found evidence relating to pornography during the execution of search warrants for the task force in several investigations of child sex crimes and child trafficking. "He actually found a USB that was in this jar that was closed, and the jar was in a box, and the box had stuff in it. The jar itself had stuff in it."
I can never find my USB drives and SD cards. Say what you like about spinning disc, at least they were (are) easy to keep track of.
Come on, can't you do better than this shit?
NT
Misleading post is misleading! It's a huge jump from a USB drive to a porn-ladden USB drive.... But typical Slashdot bait.
So here's a possible solution, and a market for recycled electronics.
Start a business that grinds old (but relatively modern) electronics into a fine powder that can be dusted around anyplace you want to keep your stuff hidden from the pigs. The dog will be useless.
"While dogs like URL can't tell detectives if a device has electronic evidence on it"
Where do you think we are, Facebook?
Is this a voodoo divining rod, or an actually-useful tool? It's hard to tell in the field, with so much electronic stuff everywhere. The smell of electronics would be on everything, and the dog wouldn't be able to sniff out anything useful. There's also a ton of stuff everywhere, so you'd easily find stuff without the dog. Then there's the false-positive rate: if the dog looks somewhere but finds nothing useful, that's probably a thing that's going to happen anyway; if the dog keeps looking random places, because of earlier point, he's going to find a lot of random stuff.
We know drug-sniffing dogs are bullshit.
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as parallel construction.
1) Having a flash card is not a crime ...."Whether it’s child porn, terrorism intelligence, narcotics or financial crimes information, "...
2) Having a flash card concealed is not a crime
3) Having a flash card concealed that contains porn is not a crime
4) Possession of child porn is a crime.
You make a blind false *blanket* accusation, which you then use to justify a blanket fishing expedition, which you occasionally catch a criminal.
Your dog cannot sniff out child porn, terrorist intelligence, data on narcotics, or data on financial crimes. You just haven't been stopped in your random searches yet, and you hope by marketing this miracle dog the courts won't take action.
Either:
a) You are a liar doing blanket searches and occasionally catching someone.
b) You are hiding parallel construction (i.e. being given evidence illegally obtained by mass surveillance and then using a dog to conceal the source of that evidence to fool the courts).
c) You pick a victim and set the dog on them, this has been done in drugs cases where the dog is used to sniff around cars and signalled to give a bark which is then used as excuse to justify a search you already decided you wanted to make.
I recall this:
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/federal-court-rules-search-laptop-border-unreasonable/
A Korean man was stopped at the border, his laptop cloned and searched for evidence while he was detained for hours (missing his flight).. 'on a hunch'. They had a hunch he might have data on illegal sales of exports.... on a hunch.... and lo and behold they found some evidence on that hunch.
The court was not fooled and suppressed the evidence. There was no way an expensive forensic data search was done on a hunch. It was likely parallel construction to conceal a previous illegal hack or search.
It's not a porn sniffing dog...please, stop parroting crap that other parrots say. It can sniff out the chemicals/materials used in storage devices.
It wouldn't matter. Police dogs "alert" (sit down, or scratch, or something - anything the dog does can be an "alert") whenever and whenever the handler wants them too.
In one test, the researchers told the cops they wanted to test the dogs. They set up eights cans and told the handlers "there are drugs in can #1 and can #4, let's see how the dogs do". The dogs consistently alerted on can #1 and can #4. The drugs were in #6 and #8 - the officer's expectations matter more than where the contraband actually is.
See also:
http://illinoistimes.com/artic...
https://www.washingtonpost.com...
I had to read the submission twice to determine it's actually talking about a real dog and not a bunch of snarky metaphors for porn scanning software that reads USBs.
I guess they would have called their porn sniffing dog PornHound, but that name was already taken. URL is a bit weak.
Yeh, the dog can tell the difference between a NAND gate in a flash card and a NAND gate in.... wait.... that's bollocks, the dog just smells electronics. All digital chips, it has no way of telling even Flash from other devices.
IT CANNOT EVEN NARROW IT DOWN TO STORAGE DEVICES.
There's nothing special about a flash card vs any other electronic/plastic device. The odors are not different, the dog cannot tell transister schema using its nose!
This is "lie detector" level scam used to justify blanket searches.
Now I can finally find out what device my porn is on and what contains my presentation! It's always so embarrassing to plug in that USB stick and hear my boss mutter "Say, didn't we see that last week... no wait, that was last night..."
Unfortunately the subject line is as usual completely bogus and the dog simply finds electronic devices. Which is essentially useless. Yes, you might find the odd hidden USB device, but since it's not the device but its content that is "dangerous" when found, criminals will adapt and store incriminating evidence off site and encrypted.
So what is that story, essentially? A heads-up for criminals?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
... a police officer decides that he does not like your face and "magically" find a hidden USB drive in your luggage in places where you would never think of putting one? Where I live no one trusts the police (for good reason), and if the possession of something small and easy to plant as a USB stick becomes a crime so will be even more reason for me to avoid the US as one avoids a city infested by ebola.
P.S: No, I not a international terrorist or something like that (only the Dark Lord of Hell, but this is not a crime right?). But I'm not willing to test my chances facing a TSA gorilla and ruin my vacation because he had not liked my face.
Religion: The greatest weapon of mass destruction of all time
Before deploying a "porn finding" dog, make sure to leave your collection in the police car.
The last thing you'd want to happen is the dog detects your thumb drive, or your phone - which given it's proximity is much more likely.
Or, worse: it detects your supervisor's phone / tablet / sd-card which then has to be taken in as evidence.
Yes, I know this mutt only detects residual fumes off electronics - if it actually "detects" anything at all that it's not pointed at. But the possibility of it grassing up its owner is too amusing.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
Ye olde "main stream" media and their headlines.
I thought you were dead.
Man's best friend, my ass. Hahahaha
Solving Unix problems since 1989...
I assume the dog's name is pronounced "Earl" and not "You-Are-El" so it probably shouldn't be all caps (unless his name is actually "Uniform Resource Locator" which actually would be clever since he locates "resources" for people in uniforms).
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i do not think dogs are smelling the pron, but the dirty hands that touched the drives.
dogs in the United States that hunt the unique chemical compounds emitted from flash drives, memory cards, cell phones, iPads and other similar devices.
Now the police have no excuse to avoid helping out with lost/stolen cell phones. (Ha ha, just kidding, no profit in doing that).
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
It's like they don't know how to encrypt things.
Avoid Missing Ball for High Score
I have terabytes of storage, and it's impossible to find anything. Can I borrow that dog for a day or so?
Now that's a power couple.
Weber County Sheriff's office... meet URL... The hyperlink that allows people to download data from somewhere else on the planet's surface.
Is the USA really full of clueless "hillbilly" cops as portrayed on the Dukes of Hazard etc. ?
About the average slashdot user, this is true they most likely don't care at all.
But how about:
* Somebody who they suspect is a criminal but they haven't been able to find real evidence of a crime
* (key) members of protest groups
* Reporters who cover stories they don't like
* Informants to reporters
* Pretty much anyone else they don't like, or - as the OP said - "he had not liked my face"
Now maybe it's not your face they don't like, but the fact that they were already having a pissy day and you decided to be firm in your choice to go for the pat-down rather than get backscatter X-rayed, or whatever other things sets off they "you do not respect my authoritay" vibe...
Better keep that dog away. The smell will give him a heart attack.
1 blend some USB drives
2 sprinkle USB dust everywhere
3 PROFIT
Encryption.
Problem solved.
"He actually found a USB that was in this jar that was closed, and the jar was in a box, and the box had stuff in it. The jar itself had stuff in it."
Maybe, just maybe, he didn't smell the USB flash drive that was in a closed jar inside a box. Maybe, just maybe, he smelled the residue that the owner had left on the outside of the box when putting the flash drive away.
It's very, very challenging to completely isolate something from ordor-based detection. You need to work with clean instruments and put the item in a clean container, operating ideally in a clean environment. Then, because you probably slightly contaminated the outside of the bag, you need to do it again, with a completely new set of clean instruments, in a new, clean environment. And then you probably need to do it again. And probably again.
Otherwise, the owner might as well have just rubbed the flash drive on the outside of the box.
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
All my usb drives contain my "medical data", protected by HIPPA privacy regulations.
Seriously, HIPPA regulations are probably the strongest data privacy regulations we have in the US. I'm surprised that they haven't been used by shady lawyers in cases like this that require large scale privacy intrusion with no probable cause.
You don't have one, you have thousands of each type of media. All of the "red herrings" are full of /dev/random and your one real one is encrypted with something that doesn't leave headers, etc. Always put one of the random ones in the computer when you're not using it and that'll be the one they target. The rest go in a pile and the one you use is special in a way that only you know about. I'll let the reader figure that out for themselves.
We should all note, this isn't JUST about porn by any means and we all know it. They'll use this to hunt for your Kali Linux install or whatever their criteria is.
So the dog can probably detect common chemicals used in soldering flux and/or solder paste, and probably the resins impregnated in PCB material? Whatever it is, I doubt it's unique to the devices they mentioned in the article, that just makes the story seem more intriguing.
So he's not a "porn" sniffing dog, he's a dog trained to find electronics, which may or may not having ANYTHING to do with pornography.
They'll just train dogs to signal when kiddie porn is stored off-site...and actually, since they can't locate the kiddie porn but just the electronics, they'll get a warrant and have the dog visit all the off site storage places, then do a search of all the electronics found at those sites to look for kiddie porn. Needless to say, they'll find some at all of those sites. Amazon, Google, Microsoft, get ready for a visit from the wonder dog.
I was skimming the summery and about halfway through I was thinking they were talking about some device that they plug your thumb drive into and it detects weather it contains porn or not, which is dubious enough; but then I suddenly realized that it was a literal dog named URL (in all caps) and suddenly I couldn't decide which of those two things is stupider.
I'm sure the dog is happy, it doesn't know that its job is total bullshit. Ignorance truly is bliss.
"Remember, there never were pineapple-almond cookies here."
Every room in my house is full of electronics. I have a box of proably 20 random USB flash drives in my office. None of them have child pornography or whatever on them, but most of them are encrypted. And I legitimately don't know most of the passwords, because who remembers the password they used for a scratch drive?
The dog is either totally useless, or just an excuse to ransack your house and/or confiscate everything you own.
As there are electronic components in automotive keys, URL can do part time contracting in finding lost keys."URL! Find Daddy's Keys!" . . .
Anybody can work under ideal circumstances. -- Jeff K. (January 4, 2001)
Weaponizing your pets
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
Another bitch that can sniff out porn. My ex could do that just fine.
3) People who did not commit the crime, but were bullied into taking a plea bargain because you can't trust the jury.
4) People who did not commit the crime but were convicted on questionable, made-up, or circumstantial evidence.
Rather than searching for electronics, dogs are actually trained to sniff for three odors:
If 1 and 2 are present, but not 3, then the dogs barks to alert the police that porn is present.
Thanks for that perspective. It seems your signature link is past its "use by" date. Maybe time for a fresh one.
http://mobile.nytimes.com/blog...
Duplicate from 2 years back:
https://yro.slashdot.org/story/14/07/06/2121248/police-using-dogs-to-sniff-out-computer-memory
Also very similar:
https://yro.slashdot.org/story/07/03/18/218248/dogs-trained-to-sniff-out-piracy
https://yro.slashdot.org/story/09/06/04/1620225/anti-piracy-dog-uncovers-huge-cache-of-discs
https://slashdot.org/story/06/05/10/2331237/mpaa-training-dogs-to-sniff-out-dvds
Pretty sure I also submitted this story, but from a different source some months back, but I don't know how to search old submissions.
Aside from the comments on what a dog is trained for, clues from the handler or actual smells.
If they are smelling something. It must be the cleaning solutions or the flux. If a no-clean flux is used, probably likely given its commercial electronics.
It's the flux.
I though drug dealers used coffee grounds to mask out the scent?
Or is that only in the movies? lol.
Should name the dog Wonder. He does all kinds of wonders. Smells evidence inside of sealed jars. Anyone else think this is BS? I have a feeling they did a toss, of everything and happened to find the drive.