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Comment by Jun8 | Hacker News Reader

"So for child porn, we are able to design a machine that is able to detect child porn. You can detect certain colors that would show up in pornography, you can detect flesh tones."

AFAIK, this is complete BS! I was quite up to date with research in this field till about 5yrs ago and the systems are still in their infancy. If you put an automated system to automatically detect pornography, the false alarm rates would be very high. And differentiating child porn from regular porn is also extremely hard.

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Yes, this is complete BS. The backbone of all systems currently in use to block URLs leading to child abuse images is the Internet Watch Foundation block list, which is manually compiled by a small team of police-trained analysts.

Companies providing the actual blocking services don't want to even see the URLs on the list (going so far as to ensure that it is encrypted at all times until the URLs can be safely hashed). They certainly don't want to download the contents and have them sitting (even temporarily) on a server somewhere.

I haven't tried it but looks fairly effective: http://www.patrick-wied.at/static/nudejs/

The author seems to say that has a detection rate of 60%.

I think Google must have something to filter out any kind of mostly exposed-skin in static images in order to do its safesearch filter, no?

As for telling which is child porn and which isn't...given the ways that people usually distribute this material (not through public webpages), it's doubtful that Google really ahs to do that much proactive monitoring of it to keep it out of the usual Google-pointed-to places

I think that most filtering for safesearch is powered by textual analysis and analyzing site links.

Yeah, I was wondering where that came from. The quote was there, and the author seemed to just roll with it.

I used to work for a company that did high-demand image hosting. Filtering porn was a big deal at the time. It was considered to be of such low accuracy as to be useless. I can't imagine how one comes to the conclusion that a sexually exploited child can be located in an image by a machine.

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