Laws of unintended consequences...
How long before the malware authors start copying these and creating ransomware pop-ups ? Not long, I reckon.
Microsoft is warning Brits who use its Bing search engine to hunt down child abuse content that they are attempting to view illegal material online. The company debuted the pop-up message on Bing in the UK following pressure from the Prime Minister David Cameron, who has been pressing internet firms to do more to help prevent …
Quite a while ago. And one struck gold two days ago.
"A man is fooled by an Internet virus into going to a police station to pay a fine for child pornography. He gives the police his computer to examine. They allegedly find child pornography on it"
http://news.cnet.com/8301-17852_3-57595811-71/man-gets-fake-fbi-child-porn-alert-arrested-for-child-porn/
There's an easy way to find out.
Enter a search term into Bing. If it pops up a message, then that item is on the list. You could even automate it like a dictionary attack (Except here we're testing a search term for a positive or negative response.)
Though IANAL, and I don't know how illegal it would be to possess knowledge of the forbidden search terms.
If you know the 'illegal' terms then
1) you shouldn't be searching using them
2) You can't plead 'I didn't know that term was illegal'
OTOH, if the censors won't tell you what is actually illegal then how can you stop yourself from committing a crime?
How long before searching for 'Little boy Blue' results in --->
Precisely. Come on Reg, enough recycling press releases, go digging and find out what's on the blacklist. After all, if we're not allowed to search for certain things we should at least be made aware of what those things are, or it's super-injunctions all over again.
Which reminds me that in denmark there is a blacklist of sites which are censored. The censorship is "secret" and revealing the censorship list (or indeed seeing the list IIRC) is a criminal act.
So in effect they have criminalised seeing a list of web URLs that, some of which if viewed might constitute another different criminal offence (one can never know until one takes a peek).
Whew, I guess that's OK then ...
By all accounts, it doesn’t include search terms you would think it should. Presumably because they have duel use; you could be looking for the news reports and debate surrounding blocking and pop-ups or they have perfectly innocent uses. Then, if you’re Peterborough Town Sports Club, you can get a box stating “Warning! Child abuse material is illegal,” slapped near the link to your website on a Bing results page.
So, we have a warning that’s only going to pop up on the most obscure of search terms. I had no idea what might be on the CEOP “blacklist,” so had to do a search to find a list of search terms that someone else had tried. Even then, it’s going to have false positives, and I don’t think the warning is shown if you set your Bing country code to anything other than “gb.”
The solution is to remove offending links, which has been going on for years. Why has a warning not been tried before? Because it’s absolute stupidity. There must be many engineers at Yahoo!, Microsoft and Google banging their heads on the table.
"If CEOP give you a blacklist of internet search terms, will you commit to stop offering up any returns on these searches? If the answer is yes...:"
Then you've fallen prey to the false choice between child abuse and wholesale censorship which is being offered.
"If the answer is no..."
Then you've fallen prey to that same false choice, but have decided on the other side.
If the answer is no, but you'll warn searchers of the dangerous waters they tread, then you're on the right track. Make sure to provide a way for suspect search returns to be investigated and blocked completely if found to be illegal, and you're doing it right.
If Cameron had suggested these reasonable terms, he might have earned some respect, but a call to "commit to stop offering up any returns" on an arbitrary list of search terms is unambiguously excessive censorship.
if only the people sharing child abuse images online would start referring to their material with the codename "david cameron"...
Or moon-faced twat. I absolutely love this suggestion.
But the thing is, if they know enough to list these sites, then shirly they know enough to investigate and send a SWAT team in.
I recall some years ago working at a prestigious German organisation. Web filtering was in place to stop us viewing naughty stuff.
Unsurprisingly, the filters were primitive, and the English town of Scunthorpe was duly flagged.
Interestingly, while planning a trip to Moscow I was researching the burial sites of famous Russians. This was prohibited as it was deemed as necrophilia. (Famous graveyards in Moscow, a must see!)
Censorship is pointless, and criminalising the act of sharing visual space with something today deemed offensive and illegal but yesterday was OK, is somewhat bizarre. Where does it end? Who decides what I may see and what are the criteria? The answers are as shifting as the sands and the winds of the political climate.
We are traveling on the downward slope to totalitarianism dressed up by sophists as the moral high ground. You would think we would know better.
AC, obviously.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Necropolis_Company
go on CEOPS/IWF ban this. I dare you!
As an aside,
Brookwood Cemetary (once run by the above company who also organised trains from Waterloo) is well worth a visit.
Oh CEOPS, the book 'The Necropolis Railway' should also be banned. You know that children and pets are buried in cemetaries so according to the 'Protect the Children meme', any reference to this must really refer to necrophilia.
This is (As James May is often seen saying) a load of old cock!
Well, Bing ain't censoring the search term "nabakov's lolita", which returns over 14,000 hits. Perhaps it should? I've put a modesty bag around my copy. You can never be too careful. Invite the neighbours around for a coffee, and the next minute while you're making it, they're browsing your bookshelves...
It's like the man with the red flag all over again. For the benefit of non-UK residents, this was a short-lived scheme set up in the 1860s to ensure a man with a red flag should proceed "road locomotives" for safety reasons.
This time, the government is desperate to censor the internet and exploit the national paedo hysteria in order to achieve this. But technology, as ever, is one step ahead of Cameron's Eton-reared brain. What a mess!
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I caught my child watching porn what should I do?
You have searched for terms related to child abuse, you have now been reported to the local authorities who will be at your door in seconds, they will take away your children and throw you in jail for 6 months before you can plead innocent. When you return to your 'normal' life, you will have your house graffiti'd and vandalised, death threats will pour through your mail box and you won't be able to get a job anywhere. You sicken us
That about sums up what I think is going to happen.
Don't worry; it's only a matter of time. Then our "organisation for more security" (with many thanks to all the law abiding spam firms which donated heavily to our cause) will start our next campaign: force browsers to remove all those distracting pop-up blockers.
As you showed yourself they're only hindering decent websites from warning their visitors.
Sure I'm jesting; but how long before morons pick up on this as well?
This is probably not a popup in the traditional sense (as in a new discrete browser window), but a HTML floating div inserted dynamically over the page content. I've noticed a lot of sites doing this recently, presumably in response to the increasing numbers of people using popup blockers. Of course, disabling Javascript can reduce the incidence of this, but an increasing number of sites are circumventing this by simply not displaying anything at all without it.
I had to look that up. And got the following:
PTHC Percutaneous Transhepatic Cholangiography
PTHC Peterborough Town Hockey Club (UK)
PTHC Personal Touch Home Care, Inc.
PTHC Pre-Teen Hard Core (illegal child pornography)
PTHC Peripheral Thyroid Hormone Conversion
PTHC Peters Township Hockey Club (Pennsylvania)
PTHC Palm Trademark Holding Company
PTHC pigmented terminal hair cysts
PTHC Panning the Thames for Humble Contributions (Birchgrove Group)
PTHC Pressure, Temperature, and Humidity Control
PTHC Professional Tree Health Care, LLC (Bradley, WV)
...then I had to look the first one up, because I couldn't even guess at what the fuck that meant.
Wikipedia:
Percutaneous transhepatic cholangiography (PTHC or PTC) or percutaneous hepatic cholangiogram is a radiologic technique used to visualize the anatomy of the biliary tract. A contrast medium is injected into a bile duct in the liver, after which X-rays are taken. It allows access to the biliary tree in cases where endoscopic retrograde cholangiopancreatography (ERCP) has been unsuccessful. Initially reported in 1937, the procedure became popular in 1952.[1][2]
Because the reason paedos access it is that they didn't already know this right? Thankfully the government stepped in quickly using the same technical know-how and understanding which they used to stop online cookies tracking our every movement - yey for pop-ups, the criminals must be shitting themselves.
If I saw a bike chained up with such a sign, I might find it very difficult to resist the temptation to nick the sign just for the ironic value.
Really though, we should pressure our MPs to make sure that every bomb comes with a health warning label on it so that those who would use it understand the consequences....
I saw a police one like that. All I was thinking is I am fairly sure something could get through that lock. (Angle Grinder / Thermite / pneumatic drill bet there is a chemical that will as well).
I have no interest in stealing bikes but especially when it is the Police who many people trust I don't like them spreading disinformation which they do all the time.
"If I saw a bike chained up with such a sign, I might find it very difficult to resist the temptation to nick the sign just for the ironic value."
Back in my misspent youth, I was walking home from a friend's house when I noticed that someone had put a chair out by the road, accompanied by a sign saying, "FREE".
I took the sign and left the chair.
My inner-vandal has also long wanted to go around finding those road-side places that sell vegetables, tacking on 'RE' to the beginning of the 'PRODUCE' signs.
It does rather depend on how "CHILD PORN" is defined.
FYI, in the UK, even though it's legal for someone to have sex between the ages of 16 and 18, "sexual" images of someone between those ages could get you locked up unless you can demonstrate that you are in "an enduring relationship" with the person involved.
Similarly, images of children in swimming costumes etc, could be classed as child porn depending on the "context" in which they are stored. That's a nicely nebulous term because it's not clear if that's "in the same folder as other porn" or "in a folder that's held with several others in a general classification 'porn'" or "in a folder as a sub-set of the folder 'images' which also contains a folder called 'porn'" or even "on the same hard drive as other porn.
And, of course, there's cases such as the one of Julia Sommerville who was arrested for taking "child pornography" photos because her partner had taken pictures of her and her kid in the bath together and then got them developed in Boots.
(I think those are the right details of that case, but I don't dare search for the relevant terms in case it tells me I'm engaged in an illegal search...!)
Blocking paedo searches is ridiculous. These people will find other ways to obtain what they are after and most likely in a way which makes it harder to detect, investigate and prosecute.
It would be far more sensible to let them search away and the results they clicked on. Then when some threshold of confidence is reached that they are engaging in illegal activity, notify the police and assist them in the investigation that follows. In other words let the creeps hang themselves with their own searches. They'll be caught a lot more quickly that way.
"It would be far more sensible to let them search away and the results they clicked on."
Sorry, but I don't agree with you because this would require that all our searches are not merely monitored, but all the websites we visit tracked *and* then all our activities recorded *just in case* someone has buried a secret cache of kiddie porn in a folder on the site "Humorous Anecdotes of the Great Accountants".
"Sorry, but I don't agree with you because this would require that all our searches are not merely monitored, but all the websites we visit tracked *and* then all our activities recorded *just in case* someone has buried a secret cache of kiddie porn in a folder on the site "Humorous Anecdotes of the Great Accountants"."
Google and Bing already monitor your searches (in order to improve search results, sell advertising). That's what I'm referring to. They install also click handlers so when you click on a result they know which result you chose. Therefore, put a trigger on the kiddy porn search terms,. log the IP, install a tracking cookie and log the links they click. If the trigger fires more than some quality threshold and the search is determined to yield child pornography inform the local plod.
Throwing up a message telling the person how naughty they are just motivates them to find other, less easy to detect ways of obtaining the material. The consequence is they'll do it for longer before getting caught, assuming they ever are and it will cost the police and the courts more money to secure a prosecution and conviction.
> Do the government really think your average paedo is searching Bing for kiddyfiddlers.com??
Yes. John Carr, the Govt adviser has said on several BBC interviews since Microsoft's announcement that they know perfectly well the clever ones can get round this, the idea is to deter "newbies" from ever getting involved.
We give the punters one person one vote. There is no need to prove that you are capable of selecting the politicians that have their head screwed on right.
Therefor the politicians that get elected are those that provide policies which the Great Unwashed think sound right, or desirable with no valid reason for thinking the way that they do. The politicians who say stuff that is scientifically validated or has the best outcomes do not get votes.
Therefore, in order to get votes, politicians ignore the scientists and experts. They just do what sounds good to the voters.
Net result: crap laws, countries going broke because the voters don't want the merry-go-round spending to stop and funding for stupid social programs which have public appeal, but the scientists tell us are pointless.
We were talking about this in work and someone came up with a good point:
What if an abused child searches online for help? Something along the lines of "my daddy..... " (fill in the blanks yourself) would this trigger the pop-up? Will abused kids become too scared to try to find help online if they think their search will be flagged up?
Cocky Cameron again: "I can tell you we’re already looking at legislative options so that we can force action in this area". Bloke needs to be taken to one side and the net explained to him in words of half a syllable or less. He really does think he's on a roll, doesn't he? Talk about grandstanding, as our "friends" (I use the term loosely) across the pond have it.
"What a f**king waste of time."
Turning events that may have trumatized them for a lifetime into a cheap soundbite saying "vote for me."
The abuse of children is vile. Exploiting it further by photographing it is worse still.
But exploiting that to a) Improve your election chances by playing the TOTC card yet again b)Improve the states stranglehold on information slurping brings me close to vomiting.
"Microsoft said that the warning will appear when a search contains the phrases found on the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre's (CEOP) "blacklist"."
Queue the hackers to "update" that blacklist with much more commonly used terms. Like a search for "fish and chips" will return that you're attempting to view illegal content. How about any search that mentions Microsoft will give the same error.
All Google need to do is make safe search setting the default at http://www.google.com/preferences I set that anyway simply because it delivers fewer unwanted results for my searches.
In addition to that I use OpenDNS settings in my router with preferences set to block several categories of other stuff I might prefer my kids not to be looking at - drugs, alcohol, gambling, weapons.