AP: Internet providers to create database to combat child porn

[Newsjock]

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2003087573_webchildporn26.html

NEW YORK – Five leading online service providers will jointly build a database of child-pornography images and develop other tools to help network operators and law enforcement better prevent distribution of the images.

The companies pledged $1 million among them Tuesday to set up a technology coalition as part of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. They aim to create the database by year's end, though many details remain unsettled.

The participating companies are Time Warner Inc.'s AOL, Yahoo Inc., Microsoft Corp., EarthLink Inc. and United Online Inc., the company behind NetZero and Juno.

... Plans call for the missing children's center to collect known child-porn images and create a unique mathematical signature for each one based on a common formula. Each participating company would scan its users' images for matches.

AOL, for instance, plans to check e-mail attachments that are already being scanned for viruses. If child porn is detected, AOL would refer the case to the missing-children's center for further investigation, as service providers are required to do under federal law.

[Atman]

1. This is bullshit, and/or scary

Sure, you shouldn't have any problem with this, right? I mean who the hell is dl'ing kid porn and expecting some sort of anonimity on the web? Stupid fucking morans, that's who. BUT...who is deciding what is "porn" and what is "barely legal" and what is "kiddie" and what is just Photoshopped? Some old fat BushCo employee who now has a huge database of kiddie porn on his desktop computer. This whole thing is fucked up. What ever happened to the BushCo employee who was nabbed with the teenager, anyway? This is like Alice In Wonderland...while the ultimate goal may be laudible, these guys are just fucked up.

(On edit) Oh, and when I said "this is bullshit..." here's what I meant; it may not even be true. Just scaring people into thinking they're being logged like this is often enough. For instance, years ago in Connecticut, the state was exposed for committing a similar (but totally different) type of "fraud" on the public. The state made a big PR push about the expense of drivers hitting road barriers and then driving off, leaving the state stuck with tab for repairs of the barriers. So the state said they were installing cameras at all the key junctures on 1-91/I-84 in Hartford, to catch the bad guys. We all got to see the fancy new cameras posted high atop light poles along the hiway. Except for one little detail...

About two or three years into the program, some reporter got a good scoop and found out that the state never actually installed any working cameras in those boxes on the light poles. Just the decoy boxes. Lots of decoy boxes and a huge media blitz. But no actual cameras.

Something is stinky here. There is "nothing in it" for any of these corporations. This type of technology will be very expensive and require lots of man hours, and the corps aren't getting anything out of it (or, their shareholders aren't). Which leads me to, why would they do this when it would be so much cheaper and easier to SAY you're doing it hyping it loudly, and then sitting back and hoping you've scared enough people to take the workload off the DYS people.

Just sayin. I don't trust anything out of BushCo anymore.

[TreasonousBastard]

3. Scary it is, because not only...

does someone have to decide whether the picture of the baby on the bearskin rug is porn, first they will have bots doing the intial scanning of the pictures and when they spit out a list, who knows who's gonna be on it and where that list is going to end up.

Will the daily dose of porn spam I don't even see because the filters catch it put me on a list? Just how are they going to scan millions, or billions, of pictures a day anyway?

Within a week of this, the kiddie porn types will have it disguised as pictures of the Last Supper (if they don't do that already) -- AOL gonna have a whole pile of steganography filters and detectors in this scheme, too?

Gotta be an easier way to catch these guys. Maybe, (gasp!) old-fashioned, low-tech, police work.

[noonwitch]

6. I think what they are currently doing is pretty effective

They are busting these guys all the time for kiddie porn, and giving long sentences to them. They can track them by computer, by mail, by numerous other methods, and they do it well these days.

The reality is the same with any crime-there is no way to completely prevent it from happening without stepping on people's rights.

[ThoughtCriminal]

2. Do they plan to inform on the sender, recipient or both

My guess is that it will be a criminal offense to receive certain types of spam - unless the filters also notice that you religiously forward all freeper/fundy chain letters.

[OneBlueSky]

4. won't this be breaking the law? . . .

accessing and storing kiddie porn images, I mean? . . .

[wakeme2008]

5. Just Window Dressing... BS

"1 million among them Tuesday"

They are really spending the $$$ on this......

[LanternWaste]

7. This is what I don't understand...

This is what I don't understand...

I use Lime Wire to d/l videos- all completely innocuous and innocent-- ep's of Lost and The Office, plus a few movies I can't find anywhere else. Yet every time I type Office into the search parameters, just over half the hits I get are porn.

So I'm thinking to myself, "yeah. the pedophiles *would* use P2P sharing rather than the "old-fashioned way of adding attachments to e-mails. it makes more sense and they'd have another level of anonymity to hide behind".

My point being-- anyone with even a smattering of web-savvy knowledge who is into "that" stuff would be painting a big bulls-eye on their face if they're doing via e-mail. I'm the closest thing to a Luddite on this board & even I know that P2P is a step or two safer than e-mail. So I can't imagine this being an "e-mail" problem as such.

If the IP's were crowing about better regulation/observation of the P2P networks, I could swallow it a bit better. This seems more like either a PR blitz on their part, or they're bending over for the Justice Department and publicly putting lipstick on a pig...

[lpbk2713]

8. So the ISP's are starting the world's biggest kiddie porn collection???

I hope the people they select to do the collecting have the right temperament for the job. Seems like it would take a toll on most person's psyche. Look for a lot of burnout victims if they were anywhere near normal to begin with. I certainly hope management does a good job screening these people.

[darkism]

9. What an awful idea. Orwellian and too many ways for it to backfire.

First, what's to prevent someone from sending someone they didn't like a bunch of child porn anonymously via proxy, thus tripping the checks and getting that person investigated?

Second, two words: Hash collision. What if a perfectly innocuous file shares the same hash with a child porn file?

Everybody wants to stop child exploitation, but this is not the way to go about it. Unfortunately there will be no public outcry because anyone who is unnerved about this will be painted as a pedophile or pedophile sympathizer.

[superconnected]

10. I don't trust it will only be used to look for porn.

If it was, fine. But I don't trust these companies anymore than I trust the chimp and our bannana republic with their motives on searching americas data.

[electron_blue]

11. Wow. This does concern me. I had a fight with Charter 3 yrs ago

Because they swore I downloaded and sold the movie Starsky & Hutch. Which I never did. They sent me a letter threatening legal action if I didn't remove it immediately. I verified that it had never been on my computer, yet they swore that on such and such date at such and such time *MY* computer at *MY* ip address sold it to someone. Total bs, when I called them on it, told them I'd see them in court if they didn't immediately retract their accusation, they finally, quietly, agreed, and gave me one free month of cable.

I guess my concern is what are they going to use as proof that those images are on a certain computer in the first place?

In my case, clearly me claiming the movie was never on the computer was not good enough, and it scared me to think my computer was hacked and someone was using it for illegal activity. Turns out nothing like that was going on, but Charter somehow got my ip address by mistake. It was an enormous waste of time.

Incidentally, what I learned in the process of this is that Charter routinely gave access to its customer's computers to movie companies, or their lawyers, to search for movies stored illegally. In other words, my computer (and everyone who is online with Charter) is already routinely searched by a third party.