Was it Gizmodo that posted the doctored version of James Damores memo where all references were removed? Clearly not a reputable place to get information from.
lol! The missing "submit" and only a "reset" button also drove me nuts!!! That page actually does some javascript code, which is not currently working. (you can see this when you click on one of the options while in console/devtools).
Oh, ha! Awesome! I was killing time on my phone, without full debug options, and from the looks of the site, I figured maybe they were being extra cute.
Its a ruse, they just want you to look at random people's backside and think that it's a elbow. The modern day version of scanning your ass and printing it lol
Well, this can somewhat be accomplished by classifying exactly what an image isn't, but as you can imagine, that is (in the general case) a combinatoric nightmare.
You can just do binary classification. That makes the decision boundary a bit more complicated, but if you're using neural networks, that is solved by adding another layer at the end.
The "problem" here is probably not the lack of negative training data, but just that they want as few false negatives as possible, so they use a very sensitive model. That naturally increases the number of false positives. It's still a win if you only have to look at some desert pictures instead of literally every picture on someone's computer.
I suspect part of the problem with this approach relates to data set construction. Even though models these days should theoretically be able to handle this task, there are clear ethical concerns and practical issues with making datasets of illegal imagery large enough for training. It really raises the question - is creating a dataset like that ethical, assuming the intentions are to stop further abuse and dissemination?
There might be work arounds (like training one model for nudity and another for age) but such approaches are almost certain to have "suboptimal" performance as compared to a single model trained on a relevant dataset. Maybe something like that is the cause for the performance issues discussed in the article.
Ethical is a tricky issue here. Not everyone agrees that mere possession of such pictures is unethical.
This still leaves the obvious legal problems of having a database of illegal pictures, but we already let law enforcement do otherwise illegal things (including use of illegal pictures in some contexts)
Honestly, if they stored evidence collected from previous cases, the data probably already exists in some form. As long as the data was closely guarded internally, I'm not sure if there would be an ethics problem using this for training.
The biggest problem with obscenity detection, though, is getting the context right. The AI might be able to get to the point where it can detect "naked human" at a good percentage level. At the moment, however, I doubt it could detect whether the naked human was considered obscene in current culture, eg: the difference between "child pornography" and "famous Vietnam War photo" as alluded to in the Gizmodo article. So no matter how good their model gets, without further refinements in AI it would only be good for a "first pass", I would think.
> With the help of Silicon Valley providers, AI could be trained to detect abusive images "within two-three years", Mr Stokes said.
If the goal is to get something so high quality that the police won't ever have to look at it, I doubt it. You have Google and Facebook employing people to deal with user reports about this stuff, as well as ad companies manually checking websites.
There would be a significant benefit to just being able to reliably get rough numbers plus some examples of the worst pictures for an expert to grade rather than having the task of searching 10000 horrific pictures to see if any fall into certain categories.
That's what their story is, but unlikely to be true. All "horrific" pictures will have to be graded by a human, because you have the right to face your accuser, the service providers will not let you near their codebase and AI won't be 100% accurate in the next few years.
What they will be able to do with that software is trawl through orders of magnitudes more pictures, filter by probable hits and show those to staff. Right now someone has to be suspected to warrant the expensive attention of an expert. With that software you can fish in everyone's data.
Thats the point. None of the 90% normal pictures will do any psychological damage, the 10% illegal pictures will but those will have to be looked at anyway.
The advantage of an algo detecting illegal content isn't in protecting civil servants, it's scanning everyone without them.
I doubt that's the goal (or at least if it is, it is shortsighted). There's still a benefit (to the police) of being able to say "Here's 100,000 images, of which we strongly suspect some percentage are abusive. Show me those images which are _probably_ illegal", even if just in time spent.
No laws requiring ISPs to apply filters. It's just a voluntary agreement between ISPs and the Government. The Digital Economy Act 2017 has provisions in it to allow ISPs to apply default filters if subscribers agree to them in terms of service.
There are requirements in the DEA 2017 for 'adult' websites to verify the age of people who visit the site with the threat of their website being blocked if they don't comply. Check openrightsgroup.org for more on this
I think they just want to introduce a generation of teenages to VPN's because any sane person can see how this is going to go, that's assuming any site outside the UK even bothers to comply.
You're missing one important detail: the reason the agreement is 'voluntary' is that the Government threatened to force ISPs to do it through law if they didn't volunteer.
> The police force already leans on AI to help flag incriminating content on seized electronic devices,
This is people who're being investigated for possessing images of child sexual abuse. This might be because they've accessed a website known to distribute such images; or they've created imags of a child which were found.
Police need to search all the devices that person owns in order to find all the images. They need to do this to protect children who are still being abused; to detect unknown abusers; to add images to the various IWF etc lists; and to ensure the correct prosecution and sentencing approach is taken.
So they can bully those who they don't like the disgraced bob quick's (senior counterterrorist cop who had to resign for security breaches) vendetta against a tory MP is one case.
The MP was part of a government who made a lot of moral comment about pornography. He accessed extreme pornography at work. Police needed to investigate because it was so extreme it might have been illegal.
He then lied about what the police had done.
That's not a vendetta, that's holding people to account.
The pornography was extreme. It was found a few weeks before laws were introduced that made it unlawful. This claim has been made many times, in print, and Green has denied it but not used UK defamation law to prevent the claims being made or to force corrections to be printed.
I'm really skeptical of politicians that want to ban "extreme pornography" on the Internet yet let actual prostitution just kind of, slide under the radar.
Surprisingly not many Brits are aware that you can get a couple of high end hookers who will do anything for a few hundred quid per hour, and it's legal. Lots of these "escorts" are barely legal age, as well.
Maybe it's a ploy to get people off porn and into actual sex lol.
According to Section 63(2) of the Criminal Justice and Immigration Act 2008:
An “extreme pornographic image” is an image which is both—
(a) pornographic, and
(b) an extreme image.
Hope that helps!
At least, though, in subsection 7 and 7A they define "extreme", as well as providing a nice catch-all of "grossly offensive, disgusting or otherwise of an obscene character":
(7) An image falls within this subsection if it portrays, in an explicit and realistic way, any of the following—
(a) an act which threatens a person's life,
(b) an act which results, or is likely to result, in serious injury to a person's anus, breasts or genitals,
(c) an act which involves sexual interference with a human corpse, or
(d) a person performing an act of intercourse or oral sex with an animal (whether dead or alive),
and a reasonable person looking at the image would think that any such person or animal was real.
(7A) An image falls within this subsection if it portrays, in an explicit and realistic way, either of the following—
(a) an act which involves the non-consensual penetration of a person's vagina, anus or mouth by another with the other person's penis, or
(b) an act which involves the non-consensual sexual penetration of a person's vagina or anus by another with a part of the other person's body or anything else,
and a reasonable person looking at the image would think that the persons were real.
OK those make sense tbh, though there's a huge amount of porn that basically caters to those audiences yet is staged... I wonder if they deal with that.
That, IIRC, is the reason for the "a reasonable person looking at the image would think that the persons were real" clause. If it looks real, it is treated the same even if it is staged.
Maybe because he does not want any more details of his porn usage spread around - there would inevitablely be discovery if there were to be a libel case. Plenty of people use porn that is not extreme but would be embarrassing.
Edit -
Also even the police have stated that there was nothing illegal found.
Additionally he was in opposition not in government at the time of the raid.
Edit again: in the UK as you should well know one is expected to provide evidence along with defamatory statements. Do you have any evidence?
We (the UK) recently experienced a scandal where a celebrity was allegedly a prolific paedophile. After his death it transpired that numerous incidents had been reported and covered up by the police and the BBC (his main employer).
So now, guess what, the same police and BBC have transformed to be holier than thou organisations free to cast judgement on anyone they don't like because this will absolve them of any guilt regarding past failures (obviously).
The Silicon Valley television show had the best parody: a deep learning program trained to find hot dogs for a foodie program repurposed for a phallus porn detection program.
Having grown up in Saudi, I had heard that they had (literally) the same issue when MMS was originally introduced many years ago - but they have a lot more desert and are simply looking for porn, not even anything abusive.
Given that children are forced into marriage in Saudi, it would seem strange for them to care about images of the abuse they condone. A small bit of consistency at least.
> One person's abuse can be another person's pornography.
That is accurate for virtually all pornography. If you research how the "industry" works, you will quickly discover that it's built on advanced psychology, specifically hypnosis, torture, culture of fear and other brainwashing techniques.
The porn cult is every bit as vicious, evil and destructive to women as any cult you can name.
I'm not familiar with the wider thesis you seem to be advocating, (could we get a link?) but calling porn a "cult" seems like a stretch, it's not something that has been created by a group and spread through brainwashing, porn is throughout history and across cultures.
I don't have a link that explains the situation well, which is why I am [slowly] working on a documentary project to bring it to the public.
> calling porn a "cult" seems like a stretch
That is the general perception, but as I said initially, girls are indoctrinated and trained using advanced psychological manipulation, indistinguishable from what most people think a "cult" is.
Everyone is free to believe that massive numbers of young girls just absolutely love the taste of cum, rimming, and so on. Nothing fishy is going on...
>Everyone is free to believe that massive numbers of young girls just absolutely love the taste of cum, rimming, and so on. Nothing fishy is going on...
The UK police are dealing with a scandal right now in that they tend to suppress electronic evidence proving a suspect is innocent and try to prosecute anyway. The last thing we should give them is another electronic capability.
"Men alleged to be part of a child-grooming ring in Rochdale were never brought to justice because the evidence of teenage victims was not pursued, according a former police officer"
So, the Met wants to train image recognition AI to find child abuse images? I'd be surprised if there aren't some interesting ethical questions around this.
To begin with, the way image recognition algorithms work -they learn from examples- to train an image recognition AI to identify images of child abuse you'd have to provide it with a substantial database of such images. I'm pretty sure that's illegal, although of course the Met probably has some sort of exception for the purpose of fighting crime. But, they still have to keep around a big database of child abuse images - and update it regularly, to do this job. It's kind of... icky.
Then again, what about victim protection? Besides the fact that keeping such a database is risky because it can always fall into the wrong hands (it only takes one misconfigured database server) it's also a characteristic of the most advanced image recognition algorithms (conv-nets) that their models can be used to generate new images of the kind they've learned to identify. So presumably, if the model itself fell into the wrong hands, someone could start generating new child-abuse images from it (low-fidelity and not really very useful, I imagine, but still).
So I wonder if the Met has addressed such ethical issues, anywhere.
Law enforcement already has tons of child porn lying around used primarily to frame people. Of course similar to drug planting it is extremely hard to defend because no one wants to risk defending someone charged with that. There are exceptions and I'm not saying people like Jared from Subway aren't guilty. There are many many many lesser known individuals that are hushed up using child porn.
So I'm basically saying there is no ethical problem (from their perspective) because feds/cops already deal with this all the time and plant this on people like drugs.
You're wrong on literally all points, but why let the truth get in the way?
Law enforcement does collect images that have been traded. They do not use these to frame people, unless you are referring to the honeypot sites that they have taken over. They maintain these sites hoping that CP collectors will continue to download images of their own volition and that they can they trace the IPs to a real-world address.
There are many many many lesser known individuals that are hushed up using child porn.
Citation needed. This would the first I've heard of CP being used to frame people by law enforcement. It happens, though very rarely, that some people try to frame innocent individuals...
So I'm basically saying there is no ethical problem (from their perspective) because feds/cops already deal with this all the time and plant this on people like drugs.
So I'm basically saying there is no ethical problem because feds/cops already deal with this all the time, but they don't frame people. They let the idiots hang themselves. And by the way, my source is that I used to defend people like this when I was a public defender. What's your source?
The only thing new is that the child pornography pictures are being fed to an ML model. The police have been keeping and distribute photos of icky things for as long as pictures of murdered people has been useful as courtroom evidence, and Interpol and the FBI have kept a database of child pornography since the early days of microcomputers to track down rings of child pornographers.
As far as generating new kiddie porn, before there were ML models, there was Photoshop, and that first released in the 90's. That there are more advanced methods of generating child pornography is not interesting or new under the law (depending on your jurisdiction).
"Fun" fact: Facebook/Instagram/Snapchat have giant repositories of (tagged!) child pornography however before we get our pitchforks out, it's used to keep child pornography out of the system.
Unfortunately with current technology there's not really a realistic way around having the actual images; hashing only goes so far, and just like (performant) homomorphic encryption, if you were able to come up with a way to do this without actually needing the pictures, the world will beat a path to your door.
> But, they still have to keep around a big database of child abuse images - and update it regularly, to do this job.
IIRC, they already do this, for tracking the distribution and source of such images.
> It's kind of... icky.
No disagreement there.
> their models can be used to generate new images of the kind
Tools like Photoshop can already do this, and likely to a higher quality than running a conv. net in reverse (so to speak), so I doubt that's a big concern.
I don't get it. Who thinks it's a good idea to fully automate anything like this? Regardless of how accurate the algorithm is a human should look at this before any action is taken. As long as the aren't false negative this is probably a huge win. Even if we have 5% false positives that hugely cuts down at what people need to look at.
So desert pictures looking like child porn doesn't matter much. Child porn looking like something else is much worse.
> Stokes told The Telegraph that the department is working with “Silicon Valley providers” to help train the AI to successfully scan for images of child abuse
AI requires large image sets to do the training. These images are illegal to possess. I wonder how such training gets done without violating the law. However, I do not wonder enough to do web searches about this matter. I am probably on enough government lists already
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[ 4.9 ms ] story [ 144 ms ] threadhttp://stupidstuff.org/ass_elbow/
As such i am unsure if this "AI" is failing or has become all too human.
The "problem" here is probably not the lack of negative training data, but just that they want as few false negatives as possible, so they use a very sensitive model. That naturally increases the number of false positives. It's still a win if you only have to look at some desert pictures instead of literally every picture on someone's computer.
There might be work arounds (like training one model for nudity and another for age) but such approaches are almost certain to have "suboptimal" performance as compared to a single model trained on a relevant dataset. Maybe something like that is the cause for the performance issues discussed in the article.
This still leaves the obvious legal problems of having a database of illegal pictures, but we already let law enforcement do otherwise illegal things (including use of illegal pictures in some contexts)
The biggest problem with obscenity detection, though, is getting the context right. The AI might be able to get to the point where it can detect "naked human" at a good percentage level. At the moment, however, I doubt it could detect whether the naked human was considered obscene in current culture, eg: the difference between "child pornography" and "famous Vietnam War photo" as alluded to in the Gizmodo article. So no matter how good their model gets, without further refinements in AI it would only be good for a "first pass", I would think.
If the goal is to get something so high quality that the police won't ever have to look at it, I doubt it. You have Google and Facebook employing people to deal with user reports about this stuff, as well as ad companies manually checking websites.
What they will be able to do with that software is trawl through orders of magnitudes more pictures, filter by probable hits and show those to staff. Right now someone has to be suspected to warrant the expensive attention of an expert. With that software you can fish in everyone's data.
The advantage of an algo detecting illegal content isn't in protecting civil servants, it's scanning everyone without them.
There are requirements in the DEA 2017 for 'adult' websites to verify the age of people who visit the site with the threat of their website being blocked if they don't comply. Check openrightsgroup.org for more on this
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/150465.stm
This is people who're being investigated for possessing images of child sexual abuse. This might be because they've accessed a website known to distribute such images; or they've created imags of a child which were found.
Police need to search all the devices that person owns in order to find all the images. They need to do this to protect children who are still being abused; to detect unknown abusers; to add images to the various IWF etc lists; and to ensure the correct prosecution and sentencing approach is taken.
He then lied about what the police had done.
That's not a vendetta, that's holding people to account.
The computer was searched as part of a separate investigation (into leaks) which found nothing.
The pornography was not extreme.
I'm really skeptical of politicians that want to ban "extreme pornography" on the Internet yet let actual prostitution just kind of, slide under the radar.
Surprisingly not many Brits are aware that you can get a couple of high end hookers who will do anything for a few hundred quid per hour, and it's legal. Lots of these "escorts" are barely legal age, as well.
Maybe it's a ploy to get people off porn and into actual sex lol.
According to Section 63(2) of the Criminal Justice and Immigration Act 2008:
Hope that helps!At least, though, in subsection 7 and 7A they define "extreme", as well as providing a nice catch-all of "grossly offensive, disgusting or otherwise of an obscene character":
Edit - Also even the police have stated that there was nothing illegal found.
Additionally he was in opposition not in government at the time of the raid.
Edit again: in the UK as you should well know one is expected to provide evidence along with defamatory statements. Do you have any evidence?
So now, guess what, the same police and BBC have transformed to be holier than thou organisations free to cast judgement on anyone they don't like because this will absolve them of any guilt regarding past failures (obviously).
Should spot the 99% of cases.
That is accurate for virtually all pornography. If you research how the "industry" works, you will quickly discover that it's built on advanced psychology, specifically hypnosis, torture, culture of fear and other brainwashing techniques.
The porn cult is every bit as vicious, evil and destructive to women as any cult you can name.
> calling porn a "cult" seems like a stretch
That is the general perception, but as I said initially, girls are indoctrinated and trained using advanced psychological manipulation, indistinguishable from what most people think a "cult" is.
Everyone is free to believe that massive numbers of young girls just absolutely love the taste of cum, rimming, and so on. Nothing fishy is going on...
Or they could be, you know, acting.
Yes, precisely like Tom Cruise is just an actor. Let's forget about the scientology thing.
And then there's the classic Weston photograph: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pepper_No._30
(Edit, IOW, not a new problem, photographers have been pushing at this sort of issue for a long time)
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/12/19/met-orders-review...
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-21925205
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
To begin with, the way image recognition algorithms work -they learn from examples- to train an image recognition AI to identify images of child abuse you'd have to provide it with a substantial database of such images. I'm pretty sure that's illegal, although of course the Met probably has some sort of exception for the purpose of fighting crime. But, they still have to keep around a big database of child abuse images - and update it regularly, to do this job. It's kind of... icky.
Then again, what about victim protection? Besides the fact that keeping such a database is risky because it can always fall into the wrong hands (it only takes one misconfigured database server) it's also a characteristic of the most advanced image recognition algorithms (conv-nets) that their models can be used to generate new images of the kind they've learned to identify. So presumably, if the model itself fell into the wrong hands, someone could start generating new child-abuse images from it (low-fidelity and not really very useful, I imagine, but still).
So I wonder if the Met has addressed such ethical issues, anywhere.
So I'm basically saying there is no ethical problem (from their perspective) because feds/cops already deal with this all the time and plant this on people like drugs.
Law enforcement does collect images that have been traded. They do not use these to frame people, unless you are referring to the honeypot sites that they have taken over. They maintain these sites hoping that CP collectors will continue to download images of their own volition and that they can they trace the IPs to a real-world address.
There are many many many lesser known individuals that are hushed up using child porn.
Citation needed. This would the first I've heard of CP being used to frame people by law enforcement. It happens, though very rarely, that some people try to frame innocent individuals...
So I'm basically saying there is no ethical problem (from their perspective) because feds/cops already deal with this all the time and plant this on people like drugs.
So I'm basically saying there is no ethical problem because feds/cops already deal with this all the time, but they don't frame people. They let the idiots hang themselves. And by the way, my source is that I used to defend people like this when I was a public defender. What's your source?
As far as generating new kiddie porn, before there were ML models, there was Photoshop, and that first released in the 90's. That there are more advanced methods of generating child pornography is not interesting or new under the law (depending on your jurisdiction).
"Fun" fact: Facebook/Instagram/Snapchat have giant repositories of (tagged!) child pornography however before we get our pitchforks out, it's used to keep child pornography out of the system.
Unfortunately with current technology there's not really a realistic way around having the actual images; hashing only goes so far, and just like (performant) homomorphic encryption, if you were able to come up with a way to do this without actually needing the pictures, the world will beat a path to your door.
IIRC, they already do this, for tracking the distribution and source of such images.
> It's kind of... icky.
No disagreement there.
> their models can be used to generate new images of the kind
Tools like Photoshop can already do this, and likely to a higher quality than running a conv. net in reverse (so to speak), so I doubt that's a big concern.
Edit: awful typo "lol" -> "look"
AI requires large image sets to do the training. These images are illegal to possess. I wonder how such training gets done without violating the law. However, I do not wonder enough to do web searches about this matter. I am probably on enough government lists already