Thursday, April 10, 2014

Scour the Web traffic for Illegal Images

Communications, Computers, Gadgets, Hardware, Internet, Intranet, Security, Technology, Tips and Tricks

There are a lot of things happening on the internet right now, from funny videos, to finance, and some illegal stuff. There are also a lot of pirated musice, movies, and TV shows on the internet sometimes when you view them your data becomes unsecure and it compromise your online security that increases the illegal activities. There are also pornography that not only cater to ordinary people but also sick and demented people who likes child pornography.

Researchers at the University of Twente found out that there are ways to scan the internet traffic and track illegal photographs which is really important to stop child pornography.

However, even though the intentions of this system is to scan the Internet traffic for illegal photographs it might also be considered as an intrusion of privacy by some people. The research team who created the system said that the privacy of the owner of the photographs will remain secure. It would seem that the system allows the police only see the number of illegal photographs on the internet and not the actual photographs themselves.

The police databases has no illegal photographs, they just contain features of the photos that are expressed in numbers or known as hash values. If the police confiscate computers and memory sticks, the database is use to compare known hash values with those of the photographs on the devices. However, for security reasons, these databases cannot be used to scan the Internet. It will require an encryption system, and this is precisely the gap that the new system wants to bridge.

Researcher Andreas Peter says: “You can compare it with a sort of safe, the contents of which you cannot see but in which you can place photographs. Subsequently, it is the ‘safe’ alone that scans the photographs and then sends a confidential report to the police. The police can open this report with a special key. The report indicates how many illegal photographs are in the safe.”

Using the new system, internet users are also able to track their network using the police database.

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