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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?
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.
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 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...
Child porn is certainly illegal, and that's what they use these dogs to look for, with a warrant as well.
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.
Child porn is certainly illegal, and that's what they use these dogs to look for, with a warrant as well.
No, they detect *ALL* flash media, even if it is totally and completely unrelated to porn. Then they confiscate *ALL* of this media and now the onus is on the victim of the seizure to attempt to get *THEIR* property back (most likely unsuccessfully).
... 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
No, they detect *ALL* flash media, even if it is totally and completely unrelated to porn.
Has anyone ever heard of that?
bickerdyke
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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That's what the article is suggesting. The dog can't sniff for porn, but it can sniff for flash memory, and is being used to identify flash memory that may be concealed in non-obvious locations.
Thirty four characters live here.
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
You sound lucky enough to have never dealt with American Police.
Getting your shit back after seizure, innocent or not, is difficult at best and pointless at worst.
Yeah. Because 100% of porn is illegal child pornography.
Let's be real here:
Having a storage device doesn't mean that the state needs to know what's stored on it.
Having a storage device doesn't mean that the content is pornographic and/or illegal.
Having a storage device doesn't mean that you're a criminal.
And yet you get treated as such.
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?
Which means that in my apartment they would be busy for a week because I have stuff all over the place.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
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...
Because you are. The State has learned to treat its own citizens as enemies and to deal with them as such. Because they can, and because it's practical.
1 blend some USB drives
2 sprinkle USB dust everywhere
3 PROFIT
Encryption.
Problem solved.
Keep voting for an all-powerful government - and reap what you sow.
If you're scared of your govt then you need to further restrict its powers
Vote 3rd Party in 2016 and beyond
"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.
If they're so concerned about cleanliness, why do they wipe the shit off their assess with their bare hands?
Because their toilet roll is sacred?
Wanna buy a shirt?
https://www.redbubble.com/people/stealthfinger/shop?asc=u
Child porn is certainly illegal, and that's what they use these dogs to look for, with a warrant as well.
There was an older article on slashdot about this same subject, the dogs can smell the flash, drives not the how the individual bits are arranged. Also I wonder how they can tell if if they are flash drives, and not just some other random integrated circuit with chips...
In Islam dogs are "unclean"
'Unclean' is probably the wrong term. Dogs betrayed the prophet when he and his minions were attempting to infiltrate Mecca (they barked and gave them away). So dogs are bad, not so much dirty.
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
Warrant? Are those things still around?
Hate to break this to you bit your vote doesnt really count here in the US.
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.
Outside US they are.
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.
Muslims use running water to wash the shit away from their arses, as opposed to smearing it up their crack with paper then walking around stinking the place out.
And leave shit stained water all over the bathroom. Seriously, you need wellies to enter a bathroom in a Muslim country.
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)
That's what the article is suggesting. The dog can't sniff for porn, but it can sniff for flash memory, and is being used to identify flash memory that may be concealed in non-obvious locations.
All the flash media in my house that I can't find is concealed in a non-obvious location, or I would have found it.
However the most recent USB flash drive I purchased is probably bigger than the rest of them put together. I found a 32MByte one when I cleared out the garage a couple of weeks ago.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
Weaponizing your pets
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
Another reason the Muslim religion is full of fucking wack jobs.
Anybody who believes this shit or follows this shit is inherently a sucker.
Keep voting for an all-powerful government - and reap what you sow.
But that's the only choice they've given me!
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.
Everything you say is true except for your second statement. If they have a warrant they have the right to look.
If the police have a warrant and are looking for storage devices and then use URL to find a USB sticky thingy in a jar in a box under your floor, then I would support them tagging that USB thingy as evidence and looking at what is on it. If it's your family vacation photos to Russia or even ordinary porn, then it can't be used as evidence against you. However if there is one image of child porn on it, then I hope they arrest you on the spot and you never get out.
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.
Hey, don't look at me! I voted for Krag!
the standard version of the story of the New Deal and the Court, though accurate in its way, displaces the emphasis. ... It concentrates on the difficulties; it almost forgets how the whole thing turned out. The upshot of the matter was (and this is what I like to emphasize) that after some twenty-four months of balking... the Supreme Court, without a single change in the law of its composition, or, indeed, in its actual manning, placed the affirmative stamp of legitimacy on the New Deal, and on the whole new conception of government in America.
When the supreme court makes a decision, it helps people shut about about things being unconstitutional
Of course, not everyone was satisfied. The Bonnie Prince Charlie of constitutionally commanded laissez-faire still stirs the hearts of a few zealots in the Highlands of choleric unreality. But there is no longer any significant or dangerous public doubt as to the constitutional power of Congress to deal as it does with the national economy. ... We had no means, other than the Supreme Court, for imparting legitimacy to the New Deal.
Leaving the government to dictate what the government can do is... counterproductive and leads to the same tyranny the constitution was meant to prevent.
"No man's life, liberty, or property are safe while the legislature is in session." -- Judge Gideon J. Tucker
Proofreading... *shut about about -> shut up about
"No man's life, liberty, or property are safe while the legislature is in session." -- Judge Gideon J. Tucker
Same cool-aid, different flavoring.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
The whole "Possession of child pornography" has become an industry in itself to prosecute people. It's easier to plant evidence of child pornography than it is to drop drugs in a persons vehicle, especially nowadays that they can consider someone with a child like body to be considered child pornography. And then you have people being charged for child pornography for taking selfies of themselves.
And then you have the FBI literally distributing child porn to catch people:
http://reason.com/blog/2016/08...
The madness continues.
Flash drives containing no porn?
Never heard of that. Completely outside my experience.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
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...
Try 3rd Parties. Read the Constitution (assuming you live in the US). Work to bringing the Federal Government down to size. Have the states do more and the feds do less.
If you're scared of your govt then you need to further restrict its powers
Vote 3rd Party in 2016 and beyond
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.
Child porn is certainly illegal, and that's what they use these dogs to look for, with a warrant as well.
the dogs are searching for puppy porn.
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
If they're so concerned about cleanliness, why do they wipe the shit off their assess with their bare hands?
because the middle east isn't covered with forests of pine trees asking to be pulped into paper products?
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
Start working on changes in the local government. If there are no good candidates, run yourself. Local politics don't take as much time or money as federal, but can change things for the better. Also, the pay is pretty decent for the amount of work expected of you.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?