New Photo Fraud Detection Software

An anonymous reader writes "CNet is reporting that Hany Farid, Professor of Computer Science and applied mathematics at Darthmouth College, has developed a new version of his Image Science Group's photo fraud software now in use by the FBI and large media organizations. The current software is written in Matlab, but the new version will be written in Java making it much more readily available to local police and smaller media organizations. From the article: 'I hope to have a beta out in the next six months,' Farid said. 'Right now, you need someone who is reasonably well-trained to use it.'"

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[Anonymous Coward]

"Basically the famous Playboy article said that the feds deliverred UNSOLICITED kiddie porn to peoples homes and if they did not IMMEDIATELY report it to the feds (as if they open their mail that hour or minute) the gestapo feds kicked down your door and arrested the duped person"

http://www.eff.org/legal/cases/AABBS_Thomases_Memp his/ [eff.org]

He ran a BBS that was legal in California. A prosectutor in Tennessee sent him child porn by post in order to use Federal law to have him arrested (for receiving child porn through the post). He was then arrested and taken to Tennessee, charged with selling porn to Tennessee residents and the child porn charge dropped.

Re:open source?

[Anonymous Coward]

Open Source is not some open ended concept, it has a clear definition: http://www.opensource.org/docs/definition.php [opensource.org]

$MATLAB/bin/mcc

[Anonymous Coward]

If it's a matlab program, a C version is available now.

Re:what could go wrong?

[777v777]

I saw a 60x slowdown in a journal paper describing this exact topic(Java vs. Fortran). Their summary was that it may be possible to get Java fast but by default Java is(was) slow.

Look at "Java for Numerically Intensive Computing: from Flops to Gigaflops" or "Java for high-performance numerical computing". These both tell that better libraries(for multidimensional arrays) and relaxation of the floating point requirements of Java can speed up things a lot.