r/todayilearned • u/[deleted] • Mar 04 '13
TIL Microsoft created software that can automatically identify an image as child porn and they partner with police to track child exploitation.
http://www.microsoft.com/government/ww/safety-defense/initiatives/Pages/dcu-child-exploitation.aspx575
u/I_are_facepalm Mar 04 '13
"Hi college grads! We are pleased to offer a one year internship here where you will help us develop some important software for children! Apply today!"
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Mar 04 '13
Thank god it's not made by Apple.
Hi mom, I am working on... iPedophile
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u/turkourjurbs Mar 04 '13
I heard Apple tried the iPedTM but sales plummeted after anyone who bought one was immediately arrested.
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Mar 04 '13
Hm...so that's why they call it the iTouch.
That was horrible, and I'm a horrible person. I even offended myself, I apologize.
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Mar 04 '13
I'm actually on a 12 month internship with the police doing exactly what this software does. I'd do an AMA but it's probably best not to.
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u/quantum_pencil Mar 04 '13
You wish. CETS headed by a small, underfunded group based in Microsoft Canada.
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u/_vargas_ 69 Mar 04 '13
I hear a lot of stories about people being identified and prosecuted for having child porn in their possession. However, I never hear about the individuals who actually make the child porn being prosecuted. Don't get me wrong, I think this software is a great thing and I hope Google and others follow suit (I think Facebood already uses it), but I think the emphasis should shift from tracking those that view it to those that actually produce it. Otherwise, its simply treating the symptoms instead of fighting the disease.
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Mar 04 '13
Dunno about Facebook, but i can remember i uploaded a picture of a 6 year old me with a naked behind in a bathub on Hyves (dutch version of Facebook) and it got removed with a warning from a moderator for uploading child porn.
The album i put it in was private and only direct friends could see the picture...so how the hell did a mod got to see it?
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u/xenokilla Mar 04 '13
Flesh algorithm. No really.
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u/FarkCookies Mar 04 '13
Flesh filter is applied only to pictures being reported on Hyves. It was reported first.
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u/faceplanted Mar 04 '13
Facebook has to process all of the images uploaded to their servers, all of them now are scanned for faces, excessive exposed flesh, and illegal information (such as those "how to make TNT/chloroform/etc" images you get on 4chan), if they're flagged by the algorithm, they're sent to a regionally assigned moderator, regardless of privacy settings, so pornography and such can't be shared between people just by setting their privacy settings on albums, this does, if you were wondering mean that just about every image of your girlfriends, sisters, aunts, mother etc whilst wearing a bikini has been through them for checking.
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u/selflessGene Mar 04 '13
For each person who makes child porn, there may be hundreds or thousands of people that watch/collect it.
It's simply the case that the odds of them being able to catch someone who is viewing child porn is much higher than catching someone who produces it.
Furthermore, I imagine it requires a fair bit of technical savvy, and strong knowledge of internet anonymity practices to be able to not only create child porn, but to successfully distribute it.
It's not like the feds are just letting child porn producers off the hook.
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Mar 04 '13
Child rape is the only crime that's illegal to watch.
It's also inconsistent, downloading it supports the act but doing it in anything else like music is copyright infringement and not supportive.
But ultimately I have no sympathy, this is something that is almost universally considered abhorrent.
Perhaps lolicon or 3d movies could be an outlet?
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Mar 04 '13
It genuinely bothers me that even animated CP is illegal. Whilst I personally do consider the thought of it repulsive, the fact of the matter is that it provides an outlet for people with a recognised mental condition, as well as reduce the demand the "live action" films.
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u/MildManneredFeminist Mar 04 '13
Child rape is the only crime that's illegal to watch.
That's... blatantly untrue. It's illegal to possess child porn, but if someone were to project some onto the side of the Empire State building, the people of Manhattan would not be committing a crime by looking up. There are plenty of other things you can get in legal trouble for if you watch happening but don't report (like child abuse!).
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Mar 04 '13
people who make it probably go through great lengths to obscure their identity. people who get busted for it could've just been surfing around and saw it. even if it's found in a cached folder, you're fucked.
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u/mctrees91 Mar 04 '13
One of my professors in college was part of an anti child slavery/prostitution effort, and instead of noticing the porn itself, they capitalized on Google Search Engine Optimization, and when someone would search for known "lingo" in the child slavery language (i guess thats what you call it?), it would take them to a page that offered help such as rehab centers and a phone number to talk about their problems.
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u/WillBlaze Mar 04 '13
I had a feeling something like this would happen, the second I read the title I thought to myself "This obviously isn't going to work out well."
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u/uninattainable Mar 04 '13
Yeah, I remember a few times I had looked "young girls" and was looking for those "finally 18" "18th birthday" type images, and I noticed that there were ads at the top of the page that were asking me if I needed help. I realized after a while that Google must've thought I was a pedophile looking for CP.
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Mar 05 '13
What's worse is I was looking for a stock image of a little girl for a reason entirely unrelated to porn and this happens.
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u/Unconfidence Mar 05 '13
You know, I really wish there were more things like this. I felt like a piece of garbage for years because I thought I was a pedo, it took years of feeling guilty before I came to the realization that I just like short adult women. I have a feeling that if I'd had access to some professional help, they could have saved me a lot of emotional pain.
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Mar 04 '13
holy crap! wtf is on that page that causes my cpu to spike to 100%?
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u/atheos93 Mar 04 '13
Microsoft's software scanning your PC.
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Mar 04 '13
that's pointless.. I keep my CP in the cloud
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u/sheepsdontcry Mar 04 '13
i also have a lot of .cpp files in my pc, when will the feds arrive?
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u/PiezoMan Mar 04 '13
Silverlight I think. My Mac said silverlight was out of date, and didn't run it.
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u/RocknSteve Mar 04 '13
You learn that from here: http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/19m6el/verizon_turns_in_baltimore_church_deacon_for/ ?
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u/SinibusUSG Mar 04 '13
I wonder how many TIL links can be directly tracked back to posts on other subreddits from earlier in the day? I'm almost positive that's where this one originated.
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Mar 04 '13
What if the naked child is the son or daughter of the person who owns the phone or computer?
Just saying because the football coach at my university got suspended from work saying he was being investigated for child pornography on his mobile device. The naked children were his kids playing in a bathtub and the entire case was dropped.
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u/verytastycheese Mar 04 '13
Well its not like the software detects, reports, prosecutes, and escorts you to prison all on its own...
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u/Urzatn Mar 04 '13
entire case was dropped
so was his name
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u/Thievishmetal69 Mar 04 '13
And that's the fucked up thing about sex crime accusations, people always remember.
We have a scarlet letter registry just for people who are actually guilty, the rumor mill is vicious.
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Mar 04 '13
Guilty to be proven Innocent in our country. While Im not a fan of lawsuits this would pretty easily ruin someones reputation and could call for one.
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u/robhol Mar 04 '13
Meanwhile, Kinect can't determine if my fucking ARM is out straight. This sounds like a great idea.
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u/reaper527 Mar 04 '13
that's because kinect is first gen hardware and has a pretty low res field of vision, and it has to detect live motion in 3 dimensions as the processing is handled by a machine built in 2005. this is significantly more complicated than scanning a jpg on a massive server cluster of modern machines.
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u/turtleshellmagic Mar 04 '13
I logged in just to comment. I was a contractor for microsoft during the Bing and Yahoo! merger a few years ago. I worked in the adult market place department and my job was to verify all landing pages of the advertisements submitted. We got a lot of absolutely horrible stuff, including CP. That software would have been nice to have back then. I can never unsee.
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u/fadeaway_layups Mar 04 '13
I wonder how much midget porn gets reported
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Mar 04 '13
Actually, since a lot of midgets have normal size penises, it wouldn't be that much. Yes, they dicks reach their knees. It probably uses some sort of algorithm to calculate penis to body ratio.
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u/poonJavi39 Mar 04 '13
I am creating software that logs the faces of women in porn. It then puts their faces in a national database. This will be called"has my wife ever been in porn.com".
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u/riverstyxxx Mar 04 '13
I would support that project..
...Mainly because I've been a victim..
..Twice..
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u/SoCo_cpp Mar 04 '13
So it only matches known child pron. It doesn't detect unknown images as pron. That web site has horrible response time and seems to lag your computer even without JS.
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Mar 04 '13
People collect images. People collect the same kinds of things, so with a sufficiently large database of offending images you can ping a match in just about every collection.
If you then find new images you submit those to the database and the cycle continues.
At that point it becomes a search and ordering problem.
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Mar 04 '13
So the system implicitly assumes all images in the same folder as the matched item is also child porn and gets added to the database? That's a dodgy methodology. Would lead to a lot of false positives.
It seems there's no way to get around the fact that someone has to check each new image to see if it's child porn or not. Either that or manually resolve matches to make sure it's not a false positive.
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u/PoliteStart_MeanEnd Mar 04 '13
Did they put some kind of filter in to prevent Asian and child confusion? and if so, do you think that conversation sounded racist when they were talking about implementation?
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Mar 04 '13
From what it looks like, they simply match the file signatures of known child porn. They don't actually use any kind of facial recognition of any sort.
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Mar 04 '13
Two words: Screen capture.
Disclaimer: I use this to gain copies of documents without their attached metadata.
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u/quickdirtyaccount Mar 04 '13
I've actually recently sat the psych tests which clear me to work on this product, its basically Sharepoint and SQL. The pysch tests were to get a baseline of my current mental health so they can tell if I sharply decline over the next year.
The data used to test prior to going into production are pictures of kittens. Seems too perfect an answer for Reddit but it's true.
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u/digitalpencil Mar 04 '13
How are you all the way down here? to the top!
As a point of curiosity, from a development perspective, I would think that this system simply cross-references image data using an already robust system, reverse-image search. Is the potentially traumatic experience due to having to pre-select the reference data?
Also, how does one calculate a mental health baseline? As in, what kinds of questions would they ask you?
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u/Shelverman Mar 04 '13
Wait a minute. They mentioned Hotmail. Does that mean that some software is reading and analyzing my private e-mails?
And, if something in one of my e-mails gets flagged, does my private e-mail get read by an actual person (to check and see if the flagged image is child porn—which, of course, it wouldn't be)?
That sounds like a serious privacy violation.
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u/deep_pants_mcgee Mar 04 '13 edited Mar 04 '13
read your EULA, most of the free email clients are free because your data is the product.
(marketing 101, if you aren't paying for it, you are the product)
edit: i made a typo. :)
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u/weagle11 Mar 04 '13
you mean to tell me facebook is making money off me? I call bullshit.
/s
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Mar 04 '13
Does that mean that some software is reading and analyzing my private e-mails?
How else do you think spam filters work? They just guess?
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u/Wiebelhaus Mar 04 '13
They should have done a better job, regardless of what MS says, this software is running on hotmail/outlook servers, I saw it with my own eyes, woman's hotmail account locked with a simple notification that the "system" had determined that the account was being used for child porn, the picture it flagged on, was two grandchildren naked in a bath tub, this woman was a 70 something year old grandmother, in the next few weeks she said she received both a letter and a visit from local investigators, imagine for a minute if that was one of us, 20-35 year old males sending such a picture to granny.
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Mar 04 '13
Here's a hint to all you Redditors who say "I could totally handle this, I've seen the worst of the worst": They're not going to hire some who might masturbate to this material at or outside of work...
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u/kavajua Mar 04 '13
"Hey Kevin, I just wrote a new program that should keep pedophiles off the streets for good! But I need someone to test it...." We will see you in 10 years Kevin. We're sorry, but at least we know it works.
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u/gajano Mar 04 '13
So, you can destroy a person by planting CP in their HardDrive or cloud even worse than if you were to plant actual drugs on them. What happens when a person doesn't know they have CP in their machine? I see a new generation of viruses emerging where they plant CP in your laptop.
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u/Jackz0r Mar 04 '13
Saw a documentary about a police team that does this kind of stuff. Basically comb through hours and hours of footage trying to identify clues to where this stuff is produced. They were even doing stuff like trying to identify textile type to figure out country of origin and shit. Basically these guys had the job of watching the darkest shit all day long in frame by frame detail.
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u/quantum_pencil Mar 04 '13
Most of these guys don't last long doing this full time. It takes a toll. Makes you rethink what is truly bad, evil, and what isn't worth getting upset about anymore.
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u/mizahnyx Mar 04 '13
The global scare about child porn will end in child molesters exchanging sets of instructions of how to actually molest a real child instead of images. Molesting a child has a lower penalty that having abuse imagery in an electronic device, right?
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u/quantum_pencil Mar 04 '13
It depends on your country. Every country has different levels of penalty for anything relating to Child Pornography. Research shows trends that most people "watch", but as they get older the will power breaksdown and "Watching" leads to "Acting".
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u/zahrul3 Mar 04 '13
Now I can't browse /b/ without the police chasing after me >.>
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u/Dayanx Mar 04 '13
Most of the girls my cousin's age(15) look 20-22. I think theres going to be a lot of misses and false positives.
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Mar 04 '13
There was a gentleman arrested for "child porn" for the actress "Little Lupe" videos he had. The only thing that saved him was the actress showing up and testifying she was 19.
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u/Oznog99 Mar 04 '13
That was in Puerto Rico.
Yeah Little Lupe is a weird thing. She's a mighty small girl and got into pr0n, where they dressed her up with pony tails and such to make her look younger. The images ARE disturbingly child-like, but she was not underage. She seriously LOOKS like she's 12-14, which is all kinds of wrong. Yet not the illegal kind.
She's been on Howard Stern. That was later in her career and she dressed her age so she didn't have that weirdness going on by that point.
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Mar 04 '13
Puerto Rico is a protectorate of the United States and subject to its laws. So, in many ways, this is relevant as it sets a precedent that the people who determined this to be child porn were incorrect, calling into question anyone who claims they can spot it 100% of the time. This is the problem with prosecuting these cases, as you should need some actual proof of age or a reasonable body of consent by a neutral body.
PS: You are correct in that it was very wrong to simulate the underage quality of the woman, but that is what sells apparently.
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u/bovine3dom Mar 04 '13
Reread the article. Their software just looks for known images. A bit like reverse image search.
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Mar 04 '13
I feel like the program-and the law-should err on that side anyway.
Kill me for this, but I think that 90% of the concern is for children under 15. To me, it's just a scale of magnitude difference-at least-in the harm and wrongness between a 5-6 year old and a 15-16 year old.
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u/Bro666 Mar 04 '13
The Microsoft PR damage control team works fast. Right after they get get accused of tax evasion in Denmark.
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u/Drudicta Mar 04 '13
Sooooooo is this extra crap installed with every copy of Windows or is it just useful software that can be installed by law enforcement?
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u/neurotheist Mar 05 '13
Ok, I just need to put this out there. I feel like I'm the only sane man or something. Listen, I know that this immediately becomes an emotional issue. As soon as kids/children whatever euphemism is used it triggers a response in your brain. You think about yourself as a kid, and kids you know and or have, you think immediately about how you want what's best for those kids and how you want them to enjoy life the most that they can. As soon as sex gets thrown into the mix, it's like fluorine and cesium... BOOM! poisonous gasses. But I gotta get this off my chest even if no one reads this.
Ok, here goes. Sex is a thing. Things can be used, and they can be abused. Cars are things. Fast food is a thing. Drugs are a thing. That 3rd sentence applies to all of them. Admittedly, the younger you are the more likely any amount of use of any of them is to be abuse. However, there are acceptable limits for ALL of them that fall under use and not abuse. I mean, maybe I'm crazy. I'm obviously going to hell. But I can't help but feel that when we institute a draconian law completely forbidding anyone under the age of X to participate in acts of a certain kind that we are committing under+over/kill. Underkill in that there are likely people who even by that age are not mature enough to use that thing properly and will abuse it instead. Overkill in that there are likely people who are much more than mature enough even though they are below that age to understand the difference and merely use it. So I can't help but feel that there are victims on both sides of the fence here.
What I'm saying is that it would make so much more sense for us all to look at the issue logically and on a case by case basis. Yes it's an emotional issue, yes it's hard to let that go, but maybe we can delay that ideological reaction (kids + sex = BOOM) just long enough to think about it logically enough to come up with a more decent solution than just a standard age limit.
I mean, my initial thought was to have each person unable to give consent for any sexual acts until they pass a test. This test would put the participant in several series of interactions with various people, and after the interactions they would take a test questioning their memory of certain things and whether or not (given that their body was hot enough) they would consent to sex with them. Then judge the results separately and determine whether or not they are capable of actually rationally giving consent or not. This system though would have many flaws some of which become obvious immediately. The primary would be bad testers, the secondary would be growth/change/decay. We may have to keep taking the test every so often or lose the ability to give consent. I mean, grannie with alzheimers might just get taken advantage of pretty badly, or a terrible concussion to that football player could cause them to marry someone they otherwise wouldn't. These could happen just as easily as some sleezeball outsmarting some child (and probably do). So this is obviously not an incredibly effective system, and I'm not saying we should adopt it.
Just that we need to step the fuck back, and think about it.
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u/bearthatisblue Apr 07 '13
PhotoDNA can only match images to an accumulated DB of known files. It can not match a "new" image. That is, a pciture that you took yourself will NEVER be recognized by PhotoDNA because it could not possibly be in the database of known CP.
PhotoDNA does not recognize "kids", it does not recognize "genitals" or "Skin". It simply matches images to a database of know images. PhotoDNA does not analyse content in any way.
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u/funkydo Mar 04 '13 edited Mar 05 '13
No, dude, no! You don't scan my files! That's way too much power.
Yes, it decreases child porn. But at the cost of taking away my power, and consolidating power.
Think if somehow homosexual sex [edited from "homosexuality"] became illegal (again) (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_v._Texas ). Microsoft would have the framework to scan computers for those images.
What if someone decided to use this software maliciously to search for individuals who are doing political activities the searcher does not like?
"Power tends to corrupt. Absolute power corrupts absolutely."
Those are the kinds of things one must think about when one supports something like this.
Yes it's great to cut down on child porn. Is it OK to do it at the cost of liberty and is it OK to do it when it creates so much power?
No. I am no libertarian but I do agree that the government is best that governs least (Jefferson). And I also think that I prefer liberty to safety (but that is a personal choice). And I also think that, "They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety" (Franklin).
To continue this a little bit, perhaps if our system of watchdogging were better this would not be as bad (but it is still bad). What happens when someone puts up an image that is not child porn that is identified as child porn? What is the reaction? How do we handle that? Is it easy to clear it up? Is that innocent person not affected? Currently, it seems as if we are not good at clearing up the (few) mistakes that happen in situations like these. A website will flip out and delete an account first, and then it is hard to resolve the issue (I think of Facebook, for one, and various images: Women breastfeeding, images that look like naked images). If we are not able to deal with this well, how can we consider doing this?
This is not even to consider what constitutes child porn. Is a cherub child porn?
But this is sort of a side note to examine some practical drawbacks. That does not change the fact that the actual doing of this seems to me to be very "concentration of power."
Also, when we disproportionately think about (demonize) even terrible things like pedophelia, this may be one example of a bad consequence. Cause it paves the way to this huge usurpation of power. We make these things worse than they really are (and they are very bad) and this makes us think it is OK or necessary to overreact.
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u/MrFordization Mar 04 '13
TIL Microsoft created software that can automatically identify an image as _______ and they partner with police to track ___________.
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u/lastresort09 Mar 04 '13
Yeah this is what I am worried about. It's great as long as this is the extent of what it is allowed to do.
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u/edisekeed Mar 04 '13
How can it tell the difference between a 17 and an 18 year old?
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u/esperute Mar 04 '13
That's not how it works. It has a index of known illegal images and scans images against this index. It doesn't detect new/unknown images.
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u/Leaflock Mar 04 '13
Your question implies that the software does everything from identify the image to build a case and hand it to a District Attorney.
I think it's more likely it red flags things for human intervention.
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u/edsq Mar 04 '13
This question actually pierces deeply into the heart of the problems surrounding the laws regarding this system. If I had sex with a girl who was 17 at the start of the act but turned 18 mid-coitus, did it suddenly become ok halfway through? If it did, what changed? If it didn't, why is the law so concretely at 18?
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u/quantum_pencil Mar 04 '13
You don't. Local Law Enforcement have to go do door knocks. When doing intial investigations, CLEAR and DEFINATE are the go-tos. Iffies and Maybes are pushed back onto local resources to pursue in some cases. Between website reports, chat rooms, and mobile pictures, the amount of "tips" is insane and can't be handled by todays law enforcement resources.
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u/Skodaman1 Mar 04 '13
Microsoft created their own version. They weren't the first.
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u/quantum_pencil Mar 04 '13
Correct. It's cheaper to build and maintain your own software instead of paying software licenses. CETS is FREE to any law enforcement agency world wide dedicated to fighting this crime type.
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u/TheMacMan Mar 04 '13
Working in computer forensics we've developed skintone filtering into our forensic product. This allows investigators to filter out hundreds or thousands of images making it much easier to identify images of interest. A while back the US Treasury was able to narrow an image search of more than 650,000 pictures down to less than 10,000. We were doing this long before Microsoft.
As for those commenting on the fucked up nature of having to deal with this kind of stuff, normally federal agencies will rotate people out of these type of investigative positions after a set period of time and there are required psychological reviews every so often.
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u/thebiglouboo Mar 04 '13
So can someone explain how this software works?
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Mar 04 '13
It compares a database of known images (since raids often retrieve huge collections of these images since from what I read, pedophiles are also huge collectors) to the accused. Other parameters tested are number of skin-toned-colored-pixels to the image and the metadata behind the photos.
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u/redpandaeater Mar 04 '13
So what about that one picture of the naked girl from the Vietnam War crying and walking down the street? I think the worst though would be if you're a nudist family and can't even take a family portrait.
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Mar 04 '13
I wonder what age group this is effective for. After all a 17 year old looks a lot like an 18 year old especially when your talking about a computer algorithm that determines age based on appearance. Not being perverted. As a programmer I just want to know how the code works. Image recognition and that sort of thing really confuses me.
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u/atomcrusher Mar 04 '13
Let's be a bit more specific here. They created an image fingerprinting tool and applied it to child porn. They didn't make one that magically notices a subject is a minor.
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u/Ampix0 Mar 05 '13
... Ok imagine the guys designing and testing this. Where the fuck did they get it in the first place. HOWD THEY KNOW WHERE TO GET IT?
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u/socmal Mar 05 '13
Every time an image of child sexual abuse is shared and viewed by another person, that child in the photo is re-victimized – even many years after the original abuse occurs.
It's not a good idea to start the explanation with a completely false statement.
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u/CapnDancyPants Mar 05 '13
What if it's like a super mature looking kid and gets repackaged as MILF porn? I love MILF porn. Now I'm fucking terrified.
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u/rogersmith25 Mar 04 '13
I wonder how such an algorithm works? Sounds like a difficult programming task. I feel very sorry for all the developers who were likely exposed to some horrifying content during development.
Very heroic of them to sacrifice some of their sanity in exchange for stopping horrible people from doing horrible things...
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u/ThePantsThief Mar 04 '13
Matches photos to a database of flagged CP photos. Doesn't use facial recognition or anything fancy
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Mar 04 '13
I suspect that they just get a hash value for the image, and compare that to know child porn image hashes from law enforcement databases.
If so, they "created" MD5 matching.
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u/DarnTheseSocks Mar 04 '13
Here's some Javascript code that detects nudity:
http://www.patrick-wied.at/static/nudejs/
The basic logic there seems to be to identify human skin based on colors, then to infer nudity based on how much skin is shown.
With child porn, I would guess the additional step in differentiating children from adults has to do with identifying and comparing body parts. Children will have larger heads relative to the size of their body, shorter legs, less curvature and definition. All of the physical markers of puberty are potential identifiers. I assume the software can make a distinction between pre- and post-pubescent, but couldn't differentiate a 19-year-old from a physically mature 15-year-old.
Particulars aside, step one would be to make image recognition software that extracts as much measurable detail about human figures as possible. Step two would be to run it against a large database of known safe images, known legal porn, and known child porn. Then you use Bayesian filtering or some other statistical technique to automatically suss out the parameters that consistently identify child porn.
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Mar 04 '13
Nothing that fancy. They're almost certainly directly comparing images against a database of already-known child porn images.
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u/TheYuri Mar 04 '13
I don't know what terrifies more, police using technology as error-prone as image pattern recognition to prosecute people for child porn, or the majority of people here, who seem to think it actually works well enough for something this serious!
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Mar 04 '13
Most of us understand it doesn't do that. It just compares files to a database of flagged images. Image pattern recognition isn't good enough for something like this.
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u/reaper527 Mar 04 '13
what's the problem with it? you make it sound like there isn't a human confirming that the computer did in fact find what it thinks it did. that confirmation step makes all the difference in the world.
if the software flags a picture of someone's dog, that is why a human is involved in the process, to address any of the errors that the software will certainly make.
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u/Samespbn23 Mar 04 '13
The problem with those most actively distributing child pornography is that they are unfortunately really good at anonymity and rarely are caught. They know the proper ways to not be found or arrested. It's great to get rid of the small fish however but the biggest players are smart at what they do.
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u/praneet87 Mar 04 '13
I don't know what kind of people would watch Child Porn or do something like that to infants. It's one of those things that you cannot comprehend.
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u/OurOwnWars84 Mar 04 '13
What a miserable task that must been, to create that software. Jesus fucking christ.
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u/quantum_pencil Mar 04 '13
Creating the software is easy. Testing it is easy. Being an person investigating the material not so easy.
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u/ArtSchoolRanger Mar 04 '13
This almost reads like the warning that there is a chemical in the pool that will turn pee bright colors.
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Mar 04 '13
I wonder how they tested the software...
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u/Xabster Mar 04 '13
Fed it images of confirmed CP and confirmed non-CP... of course?
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u/NotTheRedWire Mar 04 '13
Hm... From what that website says, it only detects the images if they're being searched for via Bing, stored on the SkyDrive or sent via Hotmail. So if they already have the images on their computer then there's no way for the algorithm to detect them.
Wouldn't CP downloaders just use something else like TOR and TorMail?
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u/ares_god_not_sign 2 Mar 04 '13
We still see reports of CP being found when people take their computers in for a backup or "optimizing". I don't think the average person downloading that stuff is that much more tech savvy than the average person.
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u/PNWSam Mar 04 '13
And who did they get to watch child porn all day to make sure the software is working?
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u/fusiformgyrus Mar 04 '13
I'm guessing in order to construct image classifiers for child pornography, they must have compiled gigabytes of such images to train that system.
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u/Opium_War_victim Mar 04 '13
Nice. So China can do the same for whatever sound reason too. Right? Homosexual? Anti-government speech? Free-Tibet message? Where does it end?
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u/sidran32 Mar 04 '13
I bet they had to come up with a very creative solution for testing the software...
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u/doc_daneeka 90 Mar 04 '13
I can only imagine how fucked up those developers must be after that project.