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posted by CoolHand on Monday August 10 2015, @07:01PM   Printer-friendly
from the thinking-of-the-children dept.

The BBC reports that the UK-based Internet Watch Foundation is sharing hash lists with Google, Facebook, and Twitter to prevent the upload of child abuse imagery:

Web giants Google, Facebook and Twitter have joined forces with a British charity in a bid to remove millions of indecent child images from the net. In a UK first, anti-abuse organisation Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) has begun sharing lists of indecent images, identified by unique "hash" codes. Wider use of the photo-tagging system could be a "game changer" in the fight against paedophiles, the charity said. Internet security experts said images on the "darknet" would not be detected.

The IWF, which works to take down indecent images of children, allocates to each picture it finds a "hash" - a unique code, sometimes referred to as a digital finger-print. By sharing "hash lists" of indecent pictures of children, Google, Facebook and Twitter will be able to stop those images from being uploaded to their sites.


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 10 2015, @09:09PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 10 2015, @09:09PM (#220906)

    > Who controls the content of that list? I mean, since it's only hashes, this could be used to suppress arbitrary stuff.

    It would be hard to detect - it isn't like you can look at the list of hashes and recognize which one is that incriminating photo of Cheney and Bin Laden raising their glasses in toast with the WTC burning in the background.

    Despite that, you can probably trust that this particular list will not be abused. But nothing is stopping these companies from accepting more than one list and aggregating them inside their systems. Just like I have multiple block-lists that my AdBlock plugin pulls from, there will probably be a CIA-provided list as well as lists from the big venture capital companies that own a piece in all the big internet companies. That photo of Eric Schmidt and Garret Camp double-teaming a partially sedated lion is definitely going to be on that list.

  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by TrumpetPower! on Monday August 10 2015, @09:34PM

    by TrumpetPower! (590) <ben@trumpetpower.com> on Monday August 10 2015, @09:34PM (#220920) Homepage

    Despite that, you can probably trust that this particular list will not be abused.

    On the contrary; see the links in the post above yours. This is guaranteed to be abused. Indeed, the only reasonable conclusion is that the whole intention of the list is to be abusive.

    I can't think of a single example in all of history in which somebody who wanted to wield the censor's pen had anything other than ulterior motives. It's all about power and control -- people who are sure they know better than you what you can and can't be trusted with.

    That, and these people are, by their own admission, collecting a massive collection of kiddie porn that they won't let anybody else outside of their private circle have a look at. I mean, that's the whole stated point of the exercise. Would you trust the owners of the world's largest private kiddie porn collection with being the only ones in control of the evidence necessary to prosecute the producers of said collection?

    What kind of sick fuck thinks this stuff up, anyway, and how the hell do they manage to convince everybody else that it's somehow a good idea?

    b&

    --
    All but God can prove this sentence true.
    • (Score: 2, Insightful) by LowSpeedHighDrag on Monday August 10 2015, @11:41PM

      by LowSpeedHighDrag (5592) on Monday August 10 2015, @11:41PM (#220981)

      Exactly this. Who watches the watchers?

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 11 2015, @06:22AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 11 2015, @06:22AM (#221125)

      On the contrary; see the links in the post above yours. This is guaranteed to be abused. Indeed, the only reasonable conclusion is that the whole intention of the list is to be abusive.

      Blocking entire websites is a lot more useful to censors than blocking specific images. That makes the one list that all those links reference much more attractive to abusers than this list.

      • (Score: 2) by Anal Pumpernickel on Tuesday August 11 2015, @11:46AM

        by Anal Pumpernickel (776) on Tuesday August 11 2015, @11:46AM (#221216)

        Blocking entire websites is a lot more useful to censors than blocking specific images.

        And yet it could still be useful. This just adds another tool into their censorship toolkit.