Censor Internet Images

[Enthalpy]

From the Beeb: the UE has imposed to compute and store hash values for all images that shall be censored
http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-38207977
Facebook, Microsoft, Twitter and Youtube collaborate.

 

It's the same process that France and others had already imposed to all Internet access providers. Each and everytime you and I put a new image on the Web, someone in a poor country (often the Philippines) has to check it, and if for some reason a government dislikes it, its hash value lands in a red list.

 

Obviously, the permitted images get screened and hashed too since this avoids the repeated human screening. And the same happens for each and every new Internet address - for instance a new message on a forum. And as soon as artificial intelligence gets half-way as efficient and cheap as the Philippino, it replaces him.

 

Of course, the UE tells this will avoid "violent or extremist material". But once the process exists, it is able to censor whatever a government and its agencies want, hence it will serve for arbitrary censorship. This is a basic, fundamental and unavoidable law of all governments.

 

You can be certain that copyrighted material will be blocked that way from uploading - it must already be the case. Just like everything the government or its agencies dislike.

 

[Endy0816]

Facebook, Microsoft, Twitter and YouTube are collaborating to stop violent, extremist images and video being spread via their sites.

 

There's the whole, "One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter." and "Who decides what is 'extremist'?" points to be made, but pretty clear our society needs to do something to combat the situation. We wouldn't tolerate a drone flying around spray painting hate messages in real life. Society needs some means to condemn.

 

While there are countries that have instituted massively pervasive censorship, not all countries have, which goes against your argument that governments are certain to do this if given the chance.

 

 

I've worked checking images via Amazon's Mechanical Turk here in the US. Pay is low, but you are not required to be mobile and can work at any time.

 

There are some AI Filters already out there. Probably going to need a regular stream of training data though. I don't feel they'll be able to handle evolving context on their own anytime soon.

 

 

You can also simply slightly alter content before uploading. I've even seen people coming out with original uploads after having a neural net process the original material.

 

Edited December 6, 2016 by Endy0816

[Sensei]

This is a basic, fundamental and unavoidable law of all governments.

Basic, fundamental and unavoidable is that it won't work.

And it is illegal to censorship whatever "country laws" say.

 

You gave example how to find, mark, and block images (or other file type) by using hash from file.

It's few minutes of programming to bypass it entirely..

Reconfigure Apache to allow f.e. image/png to be processed by PHP interpreter.

Then set PHP script with f.e. image.png file name,

and Apache instead of returning static image from server disk, will execute PHP interpreter.

 

http://php.net/manual/en/image.examples-png.php

<?php

header("Content-type: image/png");
$string = $_GET['text'];
$im     = imagecreatefrompng("images/button1.png");
$orange = imagecolorallocate($im, 220, 210, 60);
$px     = (imagesx($im) - 7.5 * strlen($string)) / 2;
imagestring($im, 3, $px, 9, $string, $orange);
imagepng($im);
imagedestroy($im);

?>

Each time generate slightly different image, with just few meaningless pixel changed.

Hash from it, will be completely different, and the whole blocking algorithm will be useless.

 

User visiting website never knows whether something looking like file (by file name and file type), is static or dynamically generated.

Edited December 6, 2016 by Sensei

[Strange]

Basic, fundamental and unavoidable is that it won't work.

And it is illegal to censorship whatever "country laws" say.

 

 

I agree that censorship cannot work (with 100% accuracy).

 

But what does your second sentence mean? If a country's laws make censorship legal, then it is legal. So I think I must have misunderstood what you meant.