June 27, 2006 5:48 AM PDT
Net companies pledge child porn crackdown
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The Internet companies--AOL, EarthLink, Microsoft, United Online and Yahoo--are pledging $1 million in cash and technical assistance to develop technology that can "detect and disrupt the distribution of known images of child exploitation" on the Internet. The coalition's effort will take place under the auspices of the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children.
Tuesday's announcement comes just hours before the beginning of a two-day U.S. House of Representatives hearing that will explore enacting new laws to require Internet providers to store records on what Americans are doing online, a concept called data retention.
Because Internet providers are loath to see new laws that could raise privacy and security concerns--and cost them millions of dollars in the process--they hope that their own, self-regulatory proposal will reduce Congress' willingness to impose a mandatory one. That may be a tough task: Attorney General Alberto Gonzales has been pressing for data retention laws as a way to aid in child porn investigations, and some politicians have already drafted legislation.
"There's always a concern that regulations are adopted that are overly expansive or difficult to implement," said Fred Randall, general counsel to United Online, which provides Internet access through its NetZero brand and operates social networking Web sites such as Classmates.com. Randall said that United Online has a history of working with law enforcement and already reports child pornography images and videos that its employees encounter.
One proposal that politicians are expected to present during Tuesday's hearing, according to one industry representative who spoke on condition of anonymity, is the creation of a national list of Web sites featuring illegal sex-themed images. Internet providers could be either encouraged or required to block access to them. (That's being done in the U.K. and was the law in Pennsylvania until a federal judge struck it down as unconstitutional.)
Borrowing from computer science
While the Internet companies say they have reached no firm decision about what standardized detection mechanism to use and are planning a meeting in July to work out details, one leading candidate can be found in any basic computer science textbook: a hash function.
Hash functions are methods used by programmers to generate a relatively small digital fingerprint from any type of data--including music, videos and photographs. Checksums, for instance, typically rely on hash functions. What makes them useful are two properties: first, they're often unique (though there's no guarantee), and second, changing even one byte is supposed to result in a completely different fingerprint.
For instance, the popular MD5 hash function yields the value fa145076b2c4d025fc7b7b4cf6bd256c for "CNET News.com" and the noticeably different result 643bc47634c1b834f36623fdb120d565 for the text "CNET News..com".
AOL has used hash functions in its internal efforts against child pornography since early 2004, said spokesman Andrew Weinstein.
See more CNET content tagged:
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Yes, some responcibilty of abuse of power should also be on the ISPs, but I feel more that they are doing what they can to stave off data retention laws, the SOBing congress is forcing/tipping their hand to do this.
I can see so much possibilites of abuse of these new policies. AOL or any ISP shouldn't be scanning my e-mails for ANY purpose. At least with virus scanning, you the end-user can turn that off, can you turn this off? They are not analogous, then.
What if people get sent these images by people unsolicted? What if someone in a foreign country with a beef with a CNET editor, for example, in a country that doesn't do this, so therefore they don't get caught, sends an e-mail to a CNET editor's email address, and that editor uses AOL, AOL scans the e-mail, the hash checks determine their is child porn it in, and before you know it, the swat team are rushing on that CNET editor house for recieving an e-mail he didn't want it the first place and had nothing to do with. See, this is making ANYONE who enounters child porn in any way, including by accident, guilty of be a child pred. This is a violation of the Fourth and Fifth amendments. This really is not much different than the abuses that could come from Gonzales's data retention and could even be worse, and has me again rethinking if I'll continue to use the internet at all, and more specifically, my POS ISP.
And like the guy from EFF pointed out, what to stop them from stopping traffic of legit porn?
What's to stop them from giving info to the RIAA and MPAA and creating hash checks for P2Ps?
The answer... nothing. The internet is dead, my friends.
Yes, some responcibilty of abuse of power should also be on the ISPs, but I feel more that they are doing what they can to stave off data retention laws, the SOBing congress is forcing/tipping their hand to do this.
I can see so much possibilites of abuse of these new policies. AOL or any ISP shouldn't be scanning my e-mails for ANY purpose. At least with virus scanning, you the end-user can turn that off, can you turn this off? They are not analogous, then.
What if people get sent these images by people unsolicted? What if someone in a foreign country with a beef with a CNET editor, for example, in a country that doesn't do this, so therefore they don't get caught, sends an e-mail to a CNET editor's email address, and that editor uses AOL, AOL scans the e-mail, the hash checks determine their is child porn it in, and before you know it, the swat team are rushing on that CNET editor house for recieving an e-mail he didn't want it the first place and had nothing to do with. See, this is making ANYONE who enounters child porn in any way, including by accident, guilty of be a child pred. This is a violation of the Fourth and Fifth amendments. This really is not much different than the abuses that could come from Gonzales's data retention and could even be worse, and has me again rethinking if I'll continue to use the internet at all, and more specifically, my POS ISP.
And like the guy from EFF pointed out, what to stop them from stopping traffic of legit porn?
What's to stop them from giving info to the RIAA and MPAA and creating hash checks for P2Ps?
The answer... nothing. The internet is dead, my friends.
Did anybody ever bothered to do a study of this "pervasive" child porn problem? Like how many convictions of child porn that actually occured? Or is this one of those mystical "everybody knows" thingie?
At least this shows them for who they really are.
I don't buy the argument that you have to let child porn be available otherwise its 1984. That is a sick definition of freedom. The constitution is not a suicide pact, and it is not a protector of child pornographers.
The Houses's website has a link for streaming video.
What file formats? JPEG/GIF/TIFF/BMP? any other obscure ones?
What if they encrypt their files? How can the HASH ever match.
- MD5 makes mistakes
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by spl68
July 10, 2006 2:22 AM PDT
- It's known that different files can yield the same MD5 sum. There's even a program out there that can voluntarily generate multiple files with a given MD5 sum. I'll be really happy when I find out that I'm being jailed because my letter to Aunt Martha was MD5-identical to a picture of a kid suspended to a tree by his genitalia.
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