Come on, you can't be serious: Now Australia mulls face-recog tech for p0rno site age checks Proving that satire is truly dead, the Australian government hopes to use facial recognition technology to check Aussies are over 18 before ogling online smut. In a submission [PDF] to a formal inquiry looking at how to carry out age verification for online pornography and gambling, the Department of Home Affairs argued its …
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It hasn’t given up though: it will find a way! A national database of dick pics, anyone?
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There is probably a market for it.
And for revealing the owners - Willi-leaks?
Now the pictures will all be upside down.
And all the users are called Bruce so this provides some anonymity.
I moved to Australia over 20 years ago from Ireland. I was expecting to meet a lot of Bruces and Shielas.
In over 20 years I have not met a single Shiela, and only a single Bruce. To totally debunk the stereotype, the Bruce was from Texas.
Other stereotypes =debunked:
- Noone drinks Fosters here.
- Noone drinks XXXX.
- They don't eat shrimps - they eat Crayfish (Big supercomputer type shrimps)
Trevor - hiding behind AC doesn't make it any less obvious that it is your name.
Pretending to come from Ireland while you are born and bred in Australia, are married to Shiela and have five lovely kids, Kev, Bazza, Dazza, Chezza and Kazza. Kev and Bazza are still at school, Dazza's just started an apprenticeship and the girls are hairdressers.
Your best friends are Wayno, Wazza, Davo and Gazza, you all drive Holdens and would prefer to remove a testicle before driving something with less than 8 cylinders. Except for Davo who believes in that global warming malarkey and drives a V6 turbo to be kinder to the environment.
For your other myths:
- tourists drink Fosters
- underage drinkers get what they are given and charged full price. Hence XXXX and Broken Hill
- I'm guessing you're in Western Australia if you put crays on the BBQ instead of shrimp. Goddamn Australian Texans where everything has to be bigger...what are you overcompensating for?
I met a guy who was introduced to me as a world expert on crayfish. I told him I'd never met a world expert on anything, and asked how many world experts on crayfish were there globally? He estimated two hundred. I asked him which songs about crayfish he knew and he didn't know any, while off the top of my head I named a dozen. I told him not to go onto Mastermind until I had time to make him a compilation CD.
But porn stars might not be registered by the Aussie government as official Porn Viewers.
No, what you need is a bunch of people who are almost certain to be using porn, and who's photos are easily available....
(warning, those pictures might just turn you off)
Ah, politicians. Their desire to control things far outweighs their understanding of how things actually work.
Never surprised but always disappointed to get confirmation that here Down Under, stupidity is on par with the best in the world.
@sanmigueelbeer. Oz spooks already target any VPN, Tor user in Oz. Source. Security spook. Must be boring watching GIT repositories updates flying by but I suppose they are looking for mention of suppositories. OpenBSD rocks. No doubt the MIM attacks in ISPs will continue so security cops can pretend they do detecting while the serious crims continue to subscribe to political party donation organisations.
What will happen when that database is hacked? How will the hackers use that data to blackmail the people in the pics? Ahh, you can't we will not record the names in the government database managed by "less than expert" clerical staff. You're safe, trust us. You will not be able to match these random pictures to any names. Wrong, just do a mass search of Facebook/Google databases and match names to people to the pics. Suddenly the local Priest, Coach, Mayor, Mentor is paying monthly payments to keep the news of what sites they like to visit quiet. But then again, hack any ISP where this same data is kept and you can do the same thing....
This ^, so much.
I feel a "two types of people in this world" joke coming on, with a punchline of people who don't understand the previous comment even after it has been made and people who thought it themselves but thought it was too trivial to post.
No worries. With facial recognition AI trained on certain sources it has some flaws. This way this specific application will improve its function. It will work brilliantly! Perfect for recognising white males (no facial hair means bonus points!). I can see it already, correct detection percentages will sky rocket!
YourNameHere: You assume this wont be outsourced to lowest bidder, again. On overseas servers, again. If Defence IT is run by foreign multinational which likes to slurp lots of details hardware and OS and application data back to wherever, what hope is there for rest of us ?
... from a technologically inept government that is intent on trampling over people's privacy.
I'm willing to bet that precisely no one will sign up for this. Oh yeah, put me in the porn database, so I can be a registered smut user. What could EVER possibly go wrong with that?
And have they ever heard of Tor, etc?
Seriously, the country is run by numpties.
This is just it. The more they tighten their grip, the more people will encrypt and obfuscate their connections.
If the .gov had just shut their big yaps right at the start they could still be using clearnet honeypots to nab the real villains of the online world instead of chasing ghosts through the onion at great cost for limited result.
But keeping silent and doing your job never got anyone a budget increase.
I don't see the relevance of using TOR or a VPN.
The smut server needs to see you on camera so it can verify you're over 18 by checking the imagery against the gov register.
All it'll need to circumvent it (assuming it ever gets implemented) is a virtual cam that sends imagery of an OAP.
grown up ... mature ... adult material.
And yet this was supposed to prevent kids looking at porn. So although this and similar efforts are a complete balls up (or down) and a waste of time. The very fact that it is seen by yourself as adult material means that trying to stop kids viewing it had some legitimate aims.
It's a difficult issue and no matter what others will tell of how everyone is 'doing parenting wrong' when it comes to kids access to the internet. Unfortunately, the reality is, you just have to accept they will be able to view whatever they want on the internet, hope it doesn't cause them any harm and try to have sensible conversations about it.
It’s adult material - that’s not a bad descriptor either.
Adolescents will, of course, want to get their hands on anything set apart for adults. That doesn’t mean I think it should fall to the site to prove anyone’s identity and age...
Parents/teachers need to be able to talk about porn, and specifically how completely ridiculous most of it is. In the same way that very few streets in London have only two family’s, but manage 14 affairs and three murders a month.
Parents/teachers should be able implement local network blocks - and frankly should be able to force phones to connect via a home VPN, so phones get filtered too....
> All it'll need to circumvent it (assuming it ever gets implemented) is a virtual cam that sends imagery of an OAP.
I'm sorry - login refused - Rick Astley is already logged in and only one session at a time is advised on health and safety grounds allowed.
In the spirit of the Razzies and Darwin awards. I propose a new annual award show. The Golden Oxygen Thief Awards. The statue in the likeness of Trump.
Each year, we, the El Reg community vote on the dumbest, most idiotic statement , proposal or random brain fart publicly stated by an elected Official. We can have differing levels, Local, State, country.
Categories can include,
I'm a tech ignoramus (but I still get to decide how it's used)
My Constituents are made of money (best failed project or waste of public money - proposed by a politician)
I'm in the circus (best backflip on a subject by a poltician)
at 88MpH you'll see some real shit (Best or most backpedals made by a politician after the most idiotic comment made in public)
Dead Parrot (Regardless of the evidence the politician still publicly argues to the contrary)
+ others
There would need to be an awards dinner of course, where we can name and shame. I think this could really catch on.
Tony Abbott would have to get the lifetime achievement award for insane and counterproductive lying when ISIS became big news. He asked the chief of the defence force whether unilaterally sending every available Australian soldier would help, and was told no, so he didn't do it. That would all have been fine and reasonable, and could have been spun to make him look wise and statesmanlike.
Unfortunately, he said he'd never considered intervening and had never asked the CDF anything, which could trivially be proved false because the question and answer were in the official log, and to repeat the lie for weeks, convincing no-one.
To be fair (or not) I'm not convinced Oz gov have a clue about the interwebtubes.
When the bad dude shot those folks up in the mosque in New Zealand the govt 'banned' access to sites such as LiveLeak and the like.
They know nothing about how Tor, real VPNs or even Opera in VPN mode works.
Paris because she probably doesn't know either.
so how would they stop them from reading a used playboy? Are you really going to stop kids from getting into trouble? Will you make it so they can't smoke a cigarette because all new cigarettes have facial recognition and the box won't open if your too young???
Eh, just prop up a photo of Father Christmas in front of the webcam.
[ Or even a tasteful mugshot of a thuggish fat-faced cabinet minister. ]
.
The government formally abandoned the effort just over a week ago because it couldn’t get the technology to work.
It's all tied in with Boris's Amazing Magical Brexiteer Wunder Border Technology [ Ulster; for the use of ] --- remember that ? --- that was magically ditched alongside the faithful yet gullible DUP as soon as the pitiful bastard gave in to Varadkar in favour of breaking his oath and instituting a Fullstop.
From the article:
It’s safe to say that the proposed facial recognition would frequently take place through the built-in camera of a laptop or PC ...Which, incidentally, is the same approach used by online blackmailers who view and record the subsequent graphic interactions of porn watchers and then email the unsuspecting victim with screengrabs asking for money if they don’t want the full video posted online, as has happened to one Register hack.
Surely that should say "...online blackmailers who claim to view and record..."
Okay, in the case of the linked article there was a real video of someone enjoying his own company (just not the reg hack), but the general modus operandi is to spaff out these emails claiming such videos exist and demanding money to keep them unpublished to all and sundry in the hope that some recipients will be worried enough to cough up.
Yeah, I got those too. At least one also claimed to have hacked my email as well by including an actual password that I used to use on sites that required a login and I didn't care about it. The wording was actually above par for what is generally written by that kind of scum.
Of course, it didn't impress me for one second. No, you haven't hacked my computer. That means that you have not enabled the camera, since I disabled it in hardware. Even if you had, you can't remove the lens lid and record anything. Also, I have never used that password for my email. And finally, no, there is no clock ticking now that I have read your stupid email. Email does not work like that, and you didn't think of requiring a return receipt so no, you have no way of knowing that I read it.
But I have to admit, the non-tech-savvy population could be impressed by all the verbiage.
This is Aussie-land, part of God's own 5-Eyes, 6-Eyes or however many Eyes there really are. Perhaps the obvious and imminent rejection of the "Secure Porn Access using Facial Features - (SPAFF)" system is deliberately intended to allow a twist of the political knife, helping promote the banning of 'dangerous' VPN and Tor access by the people, something already mooted by the n-Eyes overseers, because ... children, child porn, protection, radicalisation - you know the usual unsubstantiated, inane diatribe ...
Besides, there's loads of money in it - China and NK are way ahead of the rest of the world in the fields of State privacy, control and censorship - the supposedly Free World needs to catch up ...
> But seriously. What will stop some cockcroppers from cropping cocks from pr0n photos and submit that as their own? Or use a photo of their buddy's small wiener?
Oh dear god, it was a joke. No one is proposing to use dick pics for identification. Facial shots - that's the up and coming technology proposed for identification.
And if there is going to be a database involved then surely it should be Dick Pick's?
A Telescreen in every room with a microphone and camera just in case.
Your face scanned and stored in a government database for tracking via the ubiquitous cctv and telescreens.
Your car tracked for the purpose of per-mile road taxation
Your encrypted internet traffic decypted for your own good by the government, if you get your money stolen it's for your own good
And all shared with big business because, we'll, you must consume.
I'm not saying we're heading towards a dramaic dystopian future but it looks bloody close. It's like a bastard future mated from 1984 and They Live.
I'm in my seventh decade and have watched with (first) disbelief and (then) horror as the Age of Stupid has suffused the brains of the human race, seemingly with a particular effect on politicians: collective IQ has plummeted. I am almost seriously wondering just what effect atmospheric or food-chain pollutants are having on people's brains.
Whether it's the colossal idiocies represented by Trump and Brexit, the suicidal denial of climate change, or the simple inanities of little things like the porn age verification fiasco (both Aussie and UK versions)—it all seems to point to folks getting ever dumber. (It reaches the heights of absurdity when ignoramuses post non- or even anti-scientific drivel online, using the very technology that science has made possible.)
For me it is summed up right now by politicians repeatedly banging on about installing backdoors into the encryption of E2E messaging, despite their being told again and again, and yet again—with an abundance of factual evidence, reasoning and even mathematical proof—why it's a terrible idea. Are they really so stupid that they cannot understand?
What gives?
Are imbeciles born or made?
> the Age of Stupid has suffused the brains of the human race, seemingly with a particular effect on politicians
The Age of Stupid has been going on a long time then...
On two occasions I have been asked, — "Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?" In one case a member of the Upper, and in the other a member of the Lower, House put this question. I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question. -- Charles Babbage, 1864
I think the scariest thing is that people have always been this stupid, it's just taken the advent of the internet to demonstrate it. Just look at some of the crazy stuff people have believed / done throughout history - for example any belief system other than your own $religion. S'why mine is NULL...
Are still a thing.
I n the UK many a small independent shop (i.e. not a sanitized supermarket / big chain) that has a news / magazine section still have a few jazz mags present.
No idea how well they sell these days, I doubt they fly off the shelves - out in the sticks the tractor & other country related magazines far outnumbered the razzle, escort, club international etc. on the shelves
So kids can still do a razzle in my pocket manoeuvre (as musically made famous by the late, great Ian Dury)
....the Aussie government has always been the most fucking stupid government. It's the same government that has implemented the law demanded backdoors into encryption.
As bad as New Zealand who were in the pockets of Hollywood with the illegal rad on Kim.com (still a shit name). "He's downloaded movies and sharing them! Shit. We best be mega (no pun intended) tooled up with guns and shit. And we need helicopters despite the fact he's a large man and probably couldn't actually run far. Hollywood gave us lots of money and also said they''d turn our raid into a movie. We need to stand on his lawn and bagsie I get to say
"This shit just got real" "
....the Aussie government has always been the most fucking stupid government. It's the same government that has implemented the law demanded backdoors into encryption.
Now, to be fair, most liberal, western free governments want to do that.
Australia is the only government to consider banning women with small breasts though. Or at least as far as I know - I don't doubt we haven't plumbed the depths of stupid yet.
Donald and Boris, though...
> We can see how an extensive database of its citizens masturbating could be a powerful investigative tool in all sorts of other crimes: public exposure, sexual harassment, even child abuse investigations.
Because clearly anyone running a CP site will decide that they need to add facial recognition and forward that data to the AFP. Its not like they're breaking any serious laws so they probably don't want to risk upsetting the Australian government about anything really important, because then they might get banned and have to use TOR or something.
from seeing porn on the internet is to take away their computers, mobiles (a good idea all around) and tablets. I can't sort my email and not avoid porn (or dick pills). I have to admit that I don't see as many adult web sites in search results as I used to, but it's nowhere near perfect.
One clever or lucky kid is going to find sites with free samples and share the link with their friends. They have lots of interest, spare time and ADHD when it comes to things they know are naughty.
"Stack the Fridge and Stoke the bong, we're stayin' in tonight." or would it be "My Dick's on the Dole (livin' on hand outs again)"?
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