I was simply trying to format a disk and so searched in the start bar expecting a suitable control panel item to pop up any would have happened in any sane era of windows. Instead fucking bing opened and it brought me back web results for “format disk” as well as unrelated ads. fucking web results!
gargh
I recently installed Linux because windows pissed me off and I laughed out loud at this…
Ok. I mean I have no idea how government agencies organise this. If these are exceptional circumstances where a system needs exposing to “every csam image ever” then I would reasonably assume that justifies the one off cost of making the circumstances exceptionally secure. It’s not like they’re doing that every day.
You raise a separate important point. How is this technology actually used in practice? It sounds like photoDNA, being based on hashes, is a strictly one way thing, information is destroyed in the production of the hashing model. And the result can only be used to score a likelihood that a new image is csam or not. But AI is not like that, the input images are used to train a model and while the original images don’t exist in there, it distills the ‘essence’ of what those photos are down into their encoded essence. And as such an AI model can be used both for detection and generation.
All this to say, perhaps there are ways for photoDNA to be embedded in systems safely, so that suspect csam doesn’t have to be transmitted elsewhere. But I don’t think an AI model of that type is safe to deploy anywhere. It feels like it would be too easy for the unscrupulous to engineer the AI to generate csam instead of detect it. So I would guess the AI solution would mean hosting the model in one secure place and suspect images having to be sent to it. But is that really scalable. It’s a huge amount of suspect images from all sorts of messaging platforms we’re talking about.
Wow I had no idea
It sounds like a much needed improvement then!
Any idea if Photo DNA needs training sets to the same extent AI does? It still feels like training currently LLM models, at least how I think they work, requires vast amounts of “examples”
It still feels like that amounts to putting huge amounts of task csam just “out there” with tech companies. If it saves a bunch of human moderators the toil of having to review quite so much then that’s definitely a great help. But can you say anything about the comparative scale of the content involved? My impression is that previous versions of something like photoDNA would need a set of something for testing purposes. But the quantity needed to train AI is going to be vastly bigger (and therefore it’s possible leak vastly worse?)
That’s kinda of what I was alluding to. If they have zero op sec, they’re almost certainly sharing known csam too, and that’s the kind of stuff where just the hashes can be used to catch them. But the hashes can be safely shared with any messaging service or even OS developer, because the hashes aren’t csam themselves.
What I was calling “risky” about the above is it sounds like the first time law enforcement are sharing actual csam with a technology company so that that company can train an AI model on it.
Law enforcement have very well developed processes and safe guards about who can access csam and why and it’s thoroughly logged and scrutinised and supported with therapy and so on .
Call me skeptical that these data companies that are putting in tenders to receive csam and develop models are going to have anywhere near the suitable level of safeguard and checks. Lowest bidder and all that.
So it all seems like a risky endeavour, and really it’s only going to catch - as you say - your zero op sec paedo, but those people were going to get caught anyway, sharing regular csam detected with hashes.
So it seems like it has a really narrow target. And undertaken with significant risk. Seems like someone just wants to show “they’re doing something”. Or some data company made a reeeally glossy brochure…
This seems like a lot of risky effort for something that would be defeated by even rudimentary encryption before sending?
Mind you if there were people insane enough to be sharing csam “in the clear” then it would be better to catch them than not. I just suspect most of what’s going to be flagged by this will be kids making inappropriate images of their classmates
So… they folded?
Poorly written “advice” columns that exist only to hawk you some product is everything that’s wrong with the way interactions over the internet work nowadays. It’s ghoulish.
Write an honest, well rounded guide and leave links to your product out if it. Of course it’s hard to write an honest well written guide without mentioning very capable free and open source options. Pretending they don’t exist hurts your credibility.
Interesting. Is that because it blocks JavaScript, ads etc?
“The first rule in government spending: why build one when you can have two twice the price?”
Can we carve out a part of the internet please where we go back to super basic html pages that are a mix of self hosted hobby blogs and university research sites? It was good then. Everything’s gotten so noisy, and busy, and shit.
It’s widely celebrated that Jean Baptiste Kempf, who could have easily sold VLC for tens of millions, declined to do so (or more accurately lead the steering group that jointly decided) keeping the enormously popular video player free and open source
https://old.reddit.com/r/VLC/comments/x0azkz/this_is_jeanbaptiste_kempf_the_creator_of_vlc/
These were a couple of PhD geeks who hit it big, it’s certainly not inevitable that intelligent people get absorbed with money, see the creator of VLC for example. It’s just sad that these guys could have been rich AND kept the internet ‘pure’ and research focused. But instead commerce has crept in and taken a shit on what was once a clean simple brilliant search service.
Now that I think about it I’m not sure why they had to accept investor money at all. I wonder if it would have turned out differently if they had remained 100% privately owned?
I don’t get it. They were rich beyond most people’s wildest dreams. Why did they jump aboard the enshitification bandwagon?
Twitter: looks like the reich guy won!
Plot twist: AI comes to believe humanity consists solely of shithead scammers, initiates nuclear war
Amazing, thanks
Yes true