DoJ Following Porn Blocker Advances?

GreedyCapitalist writes "A new filter called iShield is able to recognize porn images based on the content of the image (other filters look at URLs and text) and according to PC Magazine, it is very effective. The next generation will probably be even better -- which highlights the retarding effect regulation has on technological progress - if we relied solely on government to ban 'inappropriate' content from the web, we'd never know what solutions the market might come up with. Will the DOJ (which argues that porn filters don't work) take note of filtering innovation or continue its quest for censorship?"

Re:hmm

[Jugalator]

So does it filter out Rubens
Would Michelangelo's David be filtered out
How about anatomy/autopsy pictures ?

This excerpt answers these pretty well:

A Google Images search on "breast self-examination" was correctly allowed. On a page dedicated to the artistic nudes of Alberto Vargas, it inexplicably decided to tile the text-only links menu with hundreds of tiny shield images; Guardware confirmed this is a bug.

So it's business as usual. If PC Mag's quick checks revealed innocent sites being blocked, I hope this never sees the light as anything with a mandatory use anywhere. I think missing to spread information is worse than actually even showing human intercourse. Yes, even if there's a vagina there. I hope the kids aren't traumatized for life if they'd stumble over such things and the dirtiness of our anatomy.

Oh, also watch out for the new Pumpk1n Pr0n:

And we found that some oddly innocent imagesin particular, "head shots" of pumpkins from last Halloweenwere blocked.

The article says IE would crash more with this tool in use too, but I'm not sure anyone would notice the difference from before and after. ;-)

I would RTFA but it is 404, perhaps my ISP filters out stories about filtering.

Just use the Mirrordot version [mirrordot.org].

I've seen something similar before

[NigelJohnstone]

From 2001:

http://www.isp-planet.com/news/2001/messagelabs_01 1126.html [isp-planet.com]

"SkyScan AP uses Image Composition Software (ICA), which decomposes an image," White explained. "It runs 22,000 algorithms and in addition to skin tone textures, it can decipher porn through other features such as facial expressions.""

In practice these tools are simply filtering by URL, then by colour gamut analysis.

Re:Marality and AI

[PrinceAshitaka]

somebody mod me down for not knowing how to spell, My post is so embarassing.

Why?

[BenjyD]

Your 6-year-old may mistype his favorite cartoon's URL and wind up at a porn site; a 16-year-old may reach the same site deliberately

Why should the sixteen year old be stopped from looking at porn? He's over the age of consent, what's wrong with letting him look at some naked women? He's probably thinking about sex all the time anyway, that's just what teenagers do.

Re:I don;t get it.

[Secrity]

There are two seperate and distinct "solutions" for people who have issues with porn. The first "solution" is government censorship of the inernet. The second "solution" involves local filtering installed by the computer owner, and there are at least two flavors of this "solution". There are bastard situations where various non-federal governments (including libraries) own the computer or the network which get REAL complicated. There are also situations where ISPs and networks censor access.

Government Censorship: There are wing nuts who want the US government to censor the internet, usually with cries of "think of the children" or "help fight terrorism". People who know how the internet works generally realize that this is a stupid "solution".

Local Filtering: There are several different way that this can be done and all of the currently available local filtering "solutions" have problems. TFA was about a new local filtering scheme, which COULD be better than the existing methods.

Local filtering vs. government censorship is, I think, where you see the contradiction. It really isn't a contradiction for people to say NO to government censorship (including local filtering in public libraries) and to also have some of the same people wanting the government to get involved in improving local filtering technologies.

If it wasn't for porn on the internet, war, gay marriage, and abortion; you couldn't get anybody to go to the polls.

Doesn't work

[laptop006]

Here's a great review of a previous generation of this kind of thing.

http://dansdata.com/pornsweeper.htm [dansdata.com]

Give me an F***ing break!

[RecycledElectrons]

Oh come one...This is NOT the first.

I wrote a program in 1996 to help the guys at fed.gov snoop out kiddie porn.

I simply mapped every image to see what percentage of the pixles were what colors, and them compared that to common skin tones. My apporach mostly only worked for white people (think about it - the reasons should be obvious) but it found porn images regardless of the title or contents of the page around them.

Then, to find out which images were kiddie porn, I searched the pages for references to children. (Acutally, the easier text-search came first for efficiency.)

Voilla! Instant results, but the FBI boys didn't care. I think they would rather keep their jobs surfing the web looking for illegal porn than to have a PC do that while they file forms.

Andy Out@

Academic paper on Finding Naked People

[FleaPlus]

I'm not too familiar with more recent work, but there's a well-cited paper by Fleck, Forsyth & Bregler (1996) on using image analysis to determine whether or not there were naked people in an image. My inner juvenile always found the title kind of amusing, "Finding Naked People" [hmc.edu]. Fleck also has a web page [hmc.edu] with some descriptions.

I'm not so sure about its applications, but it's certainly an interesting vision problem.