Google and Microsoft To Block Child-Abuse Search Terms 308
mrspoonsi writes "Leading search engine companies Google and Microsoft have agreed measures to make it harder to find child abuse images online. As many as 100,000 search terms will now return no results that find illegal material, and will trigger warnings that child abuse imagery is illegal. The Google chairman said he hired a 200-strong team to work out a solution over the last three months. Google's previous set of measures, which displayed a warning to people attempting to search for illegal material and caused a 20 percent drop in illicit activity."
Just the Start? (Score:5, Interesting)
Yesterday I was not allowed to take a single photograph of my daughter who was in a dance competition, to quote "in case it ends up on the internet". This memory (dance competition) will be lost now, because it was not recorded. There was even an announcement, make sure all Phones and iPads are kept in your pocket / bag, something seems very wrong with this endless search for the boogeyman.
Re:Just the Start? (Score:4, Interesting)
How fitting, the current quote:
Do you guys know what you're doing, or are you just hacking?
Re:Just the Start? (Score:4, Interesting)
Yesterday I was not allowed to take a single photograph of my daughter who was in a dance competition, to quote "in case it ends up on the internet". This memory (dance competition) will be lost now, because it was not recorded.
Are you keeping a scrapbook? One fun thing to do would be to put a MEMORY REDACTED card in it for every event you're not permitted to photograph for some bullshit reason. Hopefully in 40 years you'll be permitted to look at it and shake your head.
Re:Well, it's something. (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Well, it's something. (Score:3, Interesting)
I think the opposite is probably true. I know watching woman in pornographic videos increases my visualizing women in day to day interactions in similar roles.
One of the best things for my marriage was when we decided to quit watching these types of videos. It moved the focus of sex back to love instead of a sport.
Re:Well, it's something. (Score:5, Interesting)
You understand the difference between "visualising" and "raping", yes? Watching porn did not making you a rapist?
Re:yes (Score:4, Interesting)
Spoken like a true law-and-order fetishist that cares nothing about the actual victims. You seem to miss the little fact that focusing on the image-distribution aspect does nothing to prevent creation of such images and the child-abuse that comes with it. You also miss the little fact that you cannot practically remove stuff from the Internet, hence these victims will never know. This is just an instance of "the viewing of these images must be stopped", no matter of how many children get hurt in the process (because of misapplied limited resources) and no matter how much freedom it will cost the world. I find this highly unethical.
An ethical stance would be to demand that the acts that allow creation of such images must be stopped. But that is apparently a minor consideration today and I am pointing that out.
Re:Well, it's something. (Score:5, Interesting)
The issue is massively complex.
We like the feel-good measures. We "rescued 380 children" last week by finding people associated with a nudist site that had pics of naked kids. The news articles collectively indicate that about 14 children in India were "identified" (not rescued), and that a bunch of teachers and such were removed from schools. In general, the conclusion by the online community is that 380 children were under the purview of teachers who might be into kiddy porn, and so "we rescued 380 children!" In other words: no actual children who were being abused have ceased being abused.
The actual act of censoring child pornography is highly disturbing in itself. If we're assuming that people who have an internal thought and interest in children sexually are a threat, and thus making child pornography illegal, then we have two problems. The first problem is we're trying to punish thought-crime: child pornography isn't illegal because it's harmful, but rather because we want to punish people for having these thoughts we find personally disturbing. The second problem is we're completely incapable of pursuing enforcement against persons who we've deemed dangerous (for their thoughts), until they take some kind of action.
That second problem is exacerbated by one questionable hypothesis: with the pornography outlet blocked by being as risky if not riskier than sex, will these people express by child abuse? If they're trying to find satiation and weighing risk, it's obvious that your Internet can be invisibly monitored (and thus is extremely risky) while you can at least manipulate and control children if you can get them to keep secrets (thus the spread of information is slow, if not controllable--and it's absolutely more controllable than the monitoring of your Internet activity). So it's much better to have actual sex with children than to search for child pornography at this point: it's safer.
The above hypothesis is questionable for two reasons. First: we know that exposure to pornography and other visual effects provides comfort. People start looking at perverse stuff online, then they start watching gay porn, they move to bath houses and start experimenting with homosexuality... it happens, it's a common pattern, and a lot of straight men (and women) have experimented with homosexuality or bondage or whatnot by the cycle of introduction (initial thought or suggestion), curiosity, exposure, and then action. Thus we have another questionable hypothesis: that watching child pornography may acclimate a person to action, leading to actual child sex interactions.
Another problem: action may come in different forms. Wired ran an article about online sex roleplay services, including everything from vanilla stuff to furry MUCKs (hilarity ensued: apparently a lot of not-furries got on furry sex mucks and were culture shocked). Common sexual exploration includes everything from furry fandom to group sex to, yes, underage roleplay. There are also real-world analogues of this: people actually roleplay scenarios, everything from teacher-student (college) to maids to rape play, up to and including finding young (18-20) and/or young-looking girls who can dress up as even younger girls. Schoolgirl roleplay is common; I've even known a number of girls who, in a nutshell, had the body of a thirteen year old when they were 25-ish--they could dress enough to look young-20s, but if you threw one in jeans and a t-shirt and tennis shoes you would swear she's got to be 12, *maybe* 13. That means there are many perfectly legal ways to act on these fantasies directly.
So we have a complicated net of censorship, inaction, thoughtcrime, opposing psychological theories on whether outlets help or lead to bigger crimes, and outlets that are physical but provide a harmless mechanism of action. We could also get into some social considerations like the abridged rights of minors and the philosophical concern of this whole age-of-majority thing: apparently minors don't
Re:Well, it's something. (Score:2, Interesting)
People that look at such images are the ones who make the crime profitable. Without the profit, the crime decreases
As I've been in the CP community for close to 20 years now, I think I feel qualified to answer this one. To my knowledge - and I've known quite a few producers over the years - not a single one of them started fucking kids because of the money. They were all fucking around with children first, either children they knew or child prostitutes. Many weren't producing anything, some were producing only for themselves, some were trading for other goodies and some were just sharing free with like-minded fellows. Then they got the "bright" idea to filming/photographing it and selling it for easy money, I put that in quotation marks as most of them had no clue what they're doing and the cops are really, really good at following the money. So in summary it's pretty much bullshit, unless you count secondary effects like inspiration.
Near as I can tell, the community goes through boom-bust cycles of boredom. Lots of new stuff appears and supply dries up, everyone is bored out of their skulls and a while later a bunch of new stuff shows up. Strange, right? The cops bust a big hub, shutting down trade and pat themselves on the back but honestly it doesn't stop anyone that's active in real life and it just creates a bunch of bored pedos who have nothing to watch, that way they create more real life activity instead of the other way around and we always find new ways to share. The cops are winning every battle and losing the war, just like when the MPAA/RIAA thump another pirate site. I've got more than a million pics, thousands of vids, close to 2TB worth and I'm *nothing special* in the community. Suck on that.
P.S. Obviously posting from behind seven proxies on a stolen WiFi, forget it.
Comment removed (Score:3, Interesting)