It's just a sample reason, nobody says it's the only use case. What if you run library computers or an internet cafe, and don't want customers browsing porn on your machines? (ethics be damned, they are your machines, you make the rules!)
>What if you run library computers or an internet cafe, and don't want customers browsing kittens on your machines? (ethics be damned, they are your machines, you make the rules!)
I'm not seeing either statement as more legitimate than the other. We all know porn is being singled about because of an absurd prudish attitude the west has towards nudity.
>We all know porn is being singled about because of an absurd prudish attitude the west has towards nudity.
So you don't mind people jerking off whilst you're trying to enjoy a coffee and a cake or get a book in the library with your kids?
I mind, call that absurd if you like.
It's not nudity that is the problem in public spaces like libraries it's use of pornography. A simple way to avoid most masturbatory use of such spaces is to prevent people from being able to view pictures of other people who are naked.
Even if it were prudishness, then what right do you have to dictate to the "prudish" what their attitude to nudity or sexual imagery in public spaces should be?
The threat of having the police called and getting added to sex offender lists is more than enough to prevent all but the mentally ill from masturbating in public. People can already access pornography at just about any coffee shop (or for that matter, wherever there is cellular phone access...), but somehow we don't see outbreaks of uncontrolled public wanking. You seem to be operating under the assumption that systems like this are already widely deployed. They are not.
And as for the mentally ill? Well if walking down the street of your average sized city is anything to go by, lack of pornographic material isn't much of an inhibitor.
I don't know if it's endemic to America or what, but people jerk off in libraries all the time -- it is a real problem.
Maybe because the homeless or impoverished get internet in libraries and nowhere else, but regardless of the cause, something should be done.
The last time I used a computer in a library, I reached down to grab the side of the chair to scoot it under the desk, and received a handful of ejaculate for my trouble. It was a nice library too.
One of my best friends works in a different, nicer library, and constantly complains about people jerking off in there. They catch them and kick them out, but it doesn't stop the problem any more than swatting mosquitoes stops that problem.
You may say mental illness because of your particular environment or upbringing, but I feel below a certain level of society it's the natural state of people-- if they're able to see a naked picture they pursue the pleasurable sensations it produces until that process completes itself. Altering the environment seems like a damn fine idea to me.
There was no one around to confront. All I had was a goopy hand and a dirty chair.
I looked at my hand as awareness set in, and then I stood up and walked to the bathroom. Then I told the librarian, and she gave me some paper towels to clean the chair. I couldn't think of how getting angry would benefit me so I didn't bother.
Sure, I agree with you, but if a coffee shop stops just 1 mentally ill person from jacking off in it, then that's a win in my books.
While image detection algorithms aren't deployed widely, I'm sure many public spaces and internet cafes use some type of blacklist filter for 'known' porn sites.
>but somehow we don't see outbreaks of uncontrolled public wanking
You're being disingenuous - all public computers where I am have some sort of filtering as to the websites you can view. Hence preventing those with low social inhibition (for whatever reason, horniness is strong driver) from seeking out porn in those places.
If they are your machines, then by all means block kittens if you want. I will totally support you on that.
Side note, there really are more valid reasons to block pornography than kittens. Preventing access to pornographic materials on a group of managed machines is just good security policy, for many reasons.
1) Pornography is often accompanied by attack sites with viruses etc. Your machines should be kept up to date and secure, it's true, but why invite attacks?
2) Child pornography. Sure, there may be laws that protect you if it's discovered on a hard drive of a machine you manage, but I'd much rather avoid that mess all together.
Blocking the display of images client side that contain large amounts of uncovered flesh isn't going to do shit to prevent the accidental access of child pornography.
And seriously, how often does that actually happen? This is just another 'think of the children' argument designed to disable critical thinking.
It's not a 'think of the children' argument, it's a 'generally avoid suspicion for crimes with awful punishment' argument. Same as how if there was a known hitman's forum, I'd block access to that too.
Your cite is flawed. Or at least the conclusion you draw from it. The only conclusion that can be drawn is there is a greater number of infected non-smut websites than smut websites. This says nothing about the frequency of infections of smut websites vs. non-smut websites- in other words, it says nothing about the odds of infection given the fact that you are visiting a smut or non-smut website.
1) An image-blocker script isn't going to prevent the viruses from working. It's also certainly not going to keep people from trying -- further, if they can't visit known, safe sites, they'll keep looking and find their way to the dangerous ones.
2) If someone is crazy enough to download child pornography onto a public machine, they're almost surely good enough to bypass whatever protection mechanisms you may have in place.
That's a really good question -- the short answer is it's a really great motivator. Some random pedophile, who wants to obtain child porn, first must learn how, and in the process they would have to learn some basic computer skills, as well as learning to bypass the mechanisms we (rightly) have in place to prevent such material from being distributed, and to catch those who download it. This is why malcontent teenagers who would want to do something like DDoS tumblr are far more likely to know how to do that than well-adjusted teenagers who don't care.
Look, if you're an ISP blocking 'objectionable' content on your pipes, then yes I have a problem with that. But if you are running an internet cafe with your own machines, as far as I'm concerned you can set whatever access policies you like.
you're right but how would you define violent and hateful content? it's not easy. ok, somebody could build a neural network and train it with typical violent content, but violence has too many types
> you're right but how would you define violent and hateful content?
For one subset of violence, gore pictures, you could identify body parts (already solved) then look for what appears to be wounds using color changes and edges.
That's of course one small part of the concept of violence - you're totally correct in stating this is difficult.
Also hateful is more objective/political so I don't think we have much chance there.
How do you define pornographic content? It's not easy, and this thing doesn't even do it well or cleverly. It just looks for large amounts of flesh. We've had systems that do this since the 90s. This doesn't seem to solve any of the flaws that were present in those older systems, it's only news because somebody coded it up in a popular language.
I would wager it would be rather easy to make a system that detects bloody gore at a higher accuracy rate than this crap. Of course I have little interest in aiding any sort of censorship, so you won't see me attempting it.
Even a really close up picture of a face will be seen as nudity. Trying to detect a body (or parts of a body) and determine how much skin is visible would probably be a better approach.
Also quite relevant is this site: http://www.yangsky.com/researches/physicallinguistics/PLUnde...
Besides a "breast detector/nipple detector" he also created a couple of weird detectors like a "cowgirl sex position detector" among others.
(The link is sfw, the individual detectors are not)
The algorithm is mostly based on this paper:
http://www.math.admu.edu.ph/~raf/pcsc05/proceedings/AI4.pdf
but there are some steps open. I've implemented this algorithm because it's not as hardware intensive as the usual nude detection algorithms (such as searching for specific body parts)
Yeah, the code looks like it determines based on what percentage of the image is "skin". The demo page gives a rather close-up shot of the upper-left of a woman's shoulders/chest. What if someone zooms out a little bit? In my tests it is not doing very well if the subject is not taking up the whole image.
Perhaps a better approach would be attempting to characterize certain features, like nipples/areola or buttocks. That definitely sounds like it would require more intensive processing, though, and be highly dependent on the angle of the image.
I don't really know much about image processing and computational analysis, I just like to pretend I know things.
Indeed, the sample images don't have any edge cases - eg, a small bathing costume, pasties, etc.
Also what about people with unmaintained pubic hair?
Other tools Im familiarmwith do body part detection, which words pretty well, and generates few false positives (that said, when they do occur they tend to be amusing - a pastrami sandwich , for example).
You know, things people should actually be concerned about children seeing.