Article: US ISP AT&T Developed New Torrent Tracking System

[duke0102]

Great, now for some reason I want to see midget porn lol

I warn you, it can't be unseen....

[megabyteme]

Are people who download midget porn going get court letters soon?

[bobbintb]

Considering that images are nothing more than a sequence of pixels, how could an algorithm discriminate between a family photo of mum, dad, brother and little sister on a beach somewhere, and little sister being used for child pornography purposes?

In fact, how could an algorithm determine the difference between a home movie file you have uploaded, and a blockbuster?

It cannot. If it could, we would already have robots walking the streets with the ability to reason.

This is nothing more than Public Relations designed to scare people into thinking they have something special that they can use to detect this material. The only way to detect this material is for someone, a human, to scan it and make a reasoned judgement.

Google made the same statement about their Streetview software, stating that it automatically blanks out faces and registration plates of vehicles it photographs. It doesn't. It is done by a human. If you are observant, you will notice lots of registration plates that are legible, because someone in their haste missed them. Also, many of the faces on Streetview aren't blanked out because, again, a human missed them.

Some things cannot be left to a computer algorithm, because no algorithm can match the mind of a reasoned human, but then again, only a human could miss the obvious.

So, to summarise, this is nothing more than scare tactics to make the gullible think that they have some tool to detect transgressions on the internet. They don't. They are using our fear of getting caught against us, to frighten us into submission. If they genuinely had such a tool, they wouldn't need to announce it. They would simply trap those abusing the rules and prosecute them, extorting millions in the process.

i've used forensic software that scans images for suspected porn, so why not child porn? it's already well established that facial recognition software exists. it has just been adapted to recognize much more of the body, it's age, and state of undress. hell, an xbox can do most of that.

and google does have software that automatically blurs faces and license plates. it is not done by a human unless the software misses it and they catch it later. the occasional unblurred face or license plate isnt unblurred because a person missed it, it's because the software missed it.

as for a movie vs a blockbuster, that's also possible. cinematic movies tend to have better lighting, audio, jump cuts, steadier and better camera work, credits etc. home movies, not usually. that and they could also scan the file for predetermined markers such as a the title screen. it's very possible (although difficult, at least for me) to scan a video file for those kinds of things.

if you think about it many, if not most, of the things we do with computers on a regular basis were thought to be impossible for a computer to perform.