Thinking about these prissy Brits trying to avoid seeing so many dick-selfies made me laugh out loud.
Sexually explicit webcam material proved to be a particular problem for GCHQ, as one document delicately put it: “Unfortunately … it would appear that a surprising number of people use webcam conversations to show intimate parts of their body to the other person. Also, the fact that the Yahoo software allows more than one person to view a webcam stream without necessarily sending a reciprocal stream means that it appears sometimes to be used for broadcasting pornography.”
The document estimates that between 3% and 11% of the Yahoo webcam imagery harvested by GCHQ contains “undesirable nudity”. Discussing efforts to make the interface “safer to use”, it noted that current “naïve” pornography detectors assessed the amount of flesh in any given shot, and so attracted lots of false positives by incorrectly tagging shots of people’s faces as pornography.
GCHQ did not make any specific attempts to prevent the collection or storage of explicit images, the documents suggest, but did eventually compromise by excluding images in which software had not detected any faces from search results – a bid to prevent many of the lewd shots being seen by analysts.
The system was not perfect at stopping those images reaching the eyes of GCHQ staff, though. An internal guide cautioned prospective Optic Nerve users that “there is no perfect ability to censor material which may be offensive. Users who may feel uncomfortable about such material are advised not to open them”.
It further notes that “under GCHQ’s offensive material policy, the dissemination of offensive material is a disciplinary offense”.
They’ve probably seen a lot more of Anthony Weiner than they want to admit.
It really is 1984.
I guess the old theorum is true;
If you try to stick your nose in everything,
Eventually it will end up in
dogshit.
And Britain thinks America is prudish!
But the UK gave us Benny Hill!!
Who could have predicted that “dicks” would embrace the technological advance of “selfies” with pics of their dicks?
Since Britain has no bill of rights and Cameron won’t touch this, I think British civil libertarians should enlist as many people with various venereal diseases and genital disfigurements to repeatedly share x rated selfies, which can then be repeatedly shared around the web.
That might have a salutary effect.
I guess everyone is aware on one level or another that porn is the biggest industry on the internet. But few consider the implications of that. Here’s one such story.
I work for a company that, among other things, creates software that is run by wireless carriers. Any time that software needs to be changed, as in an upgrade or replacement, it is done in a “maintenance window” in the wee hours of the night because that is when the demand on the systems is the lowest.
Typically you re-route a set of the wireless traffic to a backup system, install the upgrade or replacement then route the traffic back and start testing to make sure it’s working. During this time you may get calls from workers on the night shift that they are seeing new problem errors in the log and you’ll investigate.
With our software the errors often involve media – photos, audio, or video. So we try to access the same image or audio or video file to see what the problem is. All of us. Sitting in a room together. Everyone on their own laptop but one laptop is projected on a big screen to see the debugging session.
And what sort of images or videos do you suppose are downloaded more than 60% of the time during the hours of 3-4 in the morning?
We actually have to warn prospective employees of this.
Personally I really do not get it. I suppose it’s different in these days of large-screen smartphones, but this was also true back in 2003 or 2004 when even the best phones had tiny screens.