Hackathon to Stop Online Child Sexual Exploitation (Aug 23, San Francisco)
www.WeAreThorn.org needs your help to stay one step ahead of child sex trafficking and child pornography criminals and to identify/rescue victims of these crimes.
On Saturday August 23rd, www.WeAreThorn.org is organizing a Hackathon in San Francisco where participants will be asked to join the fight against child sexual exploitation and take on challenges including; analyzing large data sets to identify patterns and linkages to help identify potential trafficking victims and/or perpetrators, extracting data from images and creating an ability to sort/access this data, working on programs within Tor networks, and more.
Thorn's partners include SVAngel, Google, Microsoft, UStream, Salesforce, Twitter, Facebook and more. Read more and sign up for the Hackathon at - http://www.wearethorn.org/thorn-hackathon/?utm_source=Hacker%20News&utm_medium=Submission&utm_campaign=Thorn%20Hackathon
5 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 19.1 ms ] threadAnyway I would be careful with any analysis of images - this is the vilest stuff humanity does, and you can't hand round a corpus at a hackathon and say "come up with an idea".
What those two points basically mean is I would go find some experts from the police / NGO communities (it seems you are working with NMEC?) If it's still similar to my (ancient) experiences then there will be plenty of low hanging fruit that is not available to most police forces as OSS or as easy-to-use.
This is one area where the freewheelin nature of hackathons might be better tamed.
(I could not quite understand from your page if you had planned something like this (teams will be asked to ...)
Tl;dr - hackathons seem too freewheeling and impermanent for such an important subject - it might be better long term if you worked with police / NGOs to become "product managers" for the teams. And focused on teams with longer term "availability" than a hackathon.
But good luck - my tiny out of date knowledge says there is a lot of really obvious and easy coding that police forces are either missing or paying through the nose for, and you could make some serious headway.
I am sure that this man is doing sexual abuse for children, but I can not prove that. Please help me!
Really excited about the hackathon-- feel free to shoot any questions our way at zelliottm@gmail.com or nate@formation8.com with the subject Thorn Hackathon!
Sincerely,
Your favorite developers :)