Yea, they filter their e-mail platforms for sure, but part of it might be the justice department binding their hands.
People in companies that track this stuff down get special hash lists from certain law enforcement agencies and the evidence itself is pretty much a controlled substance; so they need special authorization to safely handle and report it with a chain of custody. Two Microsoft employees got PTSD because of the large amount of data they had to check:
I knew a lawyer who had to defend someone in this type of case. He was allowed to view the evidence (he chose not to), but only him. No paralegals, no one else in his office that wasn't directly sitting on the defense table.
If you're not granted specific authorization, even looking at this content is illegal, so Microsoft, Facebook, Apple, Google, etc have a very limited staff of people who are even authorized to handle this stuff.
They don't just filter their e-mail platforms and consume hash lists from law enforcement agencies. On the contrary,
Microsoft funds and freely distributes the most common tool for checking photos (not file hash based, I think proprietary). That's likely the project the employees you mentioned were on, a job I wouldn't wish on anyone I know. I hope they were well supported both while working and afterward.
I want to avoid using the term - even though they use it - because it's not a hash function like most people are familiar from computer science. Their "hash" function is resistant to alterations and is more like a "fingerprint".
Edit: to be completely clear, PhotoDNA isn't a cryptographic hash. It's a hash function that maximizes similarity of hashes based on inputs, and is probably closer to a bloom filter in some respects.
> I knew a lawyer who had to defend someone in this type of case. He was allowed to view the evidence (he chose not to), but only him. No paralegals, no one else in his office that wasn't directly sitting on the defense table.
> If you're not granted specific authorization, even looking at this content is illegal, so Microsoft, Facebook, Apple, Google, etc have a very limited staff of people who are even authorized to handle this stuff.
With the risk of offending folks, this is such a retarded law/process. Holy fuck. This is dystopian-level letter of the law vs spirit of the law.
It’s the old argument in favor of DRM and restrictive software licensing. “Think of the children” has long been used to prevent people from gaining access to warez and software cracks. As a famous man once said: “Software is like sex: it’s better when it’s free”
The article seems purposefully designed to create a hysteria bubble. The subject is highly repugnant, and the associated emotional charge can be used to attack the target of the article (Microsoft), pressuring them towards an undesirable outcome.
1. "Google does it better than Bing"
Google unfortunately does it better than Bing by censoring all searches. It has been impossible to turn off safesearch on Google for many years (the "filter explicit results" setting only switches between soft and hard filtering). This has a positive outcome in this situation, but also greatly degrades the quality of available results in other cases.
2. Omegle?
The article mention Omegle's role very explicitly, however it reserves all of its vitriol for Microsoft specifically. Why? Omegle and the other platforms that are actually producing, hosting and facilitating the origination of this disgusting content should be the ones that have to get their shit together, or in some cases be persecuted. But Microsoft is a "juicier" target.
3 "even people not seeking this kind of disgusting imagery could be led to it"
They turned off SafeSearch, as clearly seen in the article's illustrative screenshot. This is a sleazy statement meant to whip people into a frenzy.
4. "Microsoft must" "human moderators" "underfunding" "another example of tech companies refusing (...)"
The article explicitly orders people, over and over, to be outraged, despite Microsoft's prompt and appropriate response, and makes assumptions that are unconfirmed or untrue.
TechCrunch's conduct here was not great - it seems to me like they handled the situation in such a way that showed their only aim was to attract clicks, rather than get the problem resolved promptly. It was tabloid behavior.
i for one am furious about someone's news agenda and not about how Bing, a top-tier product featured on billions of computer supported by the best engineers at Microsoft, serves child pornography
