A proposal to beat below-the-belt selfies: Crowdsourced machine learning using victims' image stashes It’s often said that the second most important job in Australia – behind Prime Minister – is captain of the Australian men’s cricket team. The last holder of that office recently resigned in disgrace after it emerged a flurry of texts he exchanged with a staffer crossed the line from racy to harassment as one message included …
I assume the week was intended to gather the training data.
As to intercepting all message flows the article contains this: "I reckon it would be dead simple to build a filter on the receiver." The interception takes place on the receiving device which means the user downloads the filter(s) as required. This has the advantage that, given the tendency to remote medical consultations, there may be a legitimate use case for such traffic.
I am more of a puss y lover, but it seems El Reg has a lot of dic k lovers - no problem, each one has its particular taste.
Imagine one can beat NSA/CIA/FBI illegal surveillance, cash out from it, keep all its assets and tools encrypted, and still get tools and equipment from the forementioned agencies.. and still alive !!
It take a lot of brains, decryption only after implants removed, cameras dodged, in the right ship, with the right crew.
It would simply need to be built into the system's image rendering code, then it would affect all apps at once. Sure, some apps might use its own rendering code but doing so would risk women quit using that app if they were protected from unwanted dick pics elsewhere - so all apps would quickly be forced to either use the system's image rendering code or at least call the code that does the dick pic detection.
For the small number of "wanted" dick pics (which based on what I've heard from a few women, the majority of which are being forwarded their friends to laugh at) the system could let you click on the duck, ask "are you sure?" and then show the pic.
I have never really understood bloke's need for sending selphallic (selphies) messages to women they fancy.
I prefer to save such viewing for those private moments so that I can share with the lady in question either gasps of admiration or laughter, depending on the impression given.
What makes so many blokes think they are going to make a favourable impression based on an anatomical photo?
Note: selphies was coined by a female friend of mine who had been on the receiving end of a series of dick pics from an admirer, she signed him up for every penis enlargement ad she could find. He desisted.
I guess they see it as the equivalent of going up to someone in a club and saying fancy a shag and not the ornithological type. Depending on the response they would have an idea of whether they would be successful. There are many idiots out there that don't consider other peoples feelings.
"There's not a huge amount of medical literature on the subject [of drinking blood], but anecdotal evidence from online forum posts suggests that any normal person who tries to drink more than about a pint of blood will vomit:"
What kind of normal person tries to drink more than about a pint of blood?
Or, don't bother trying to use technology and just prosecute for indecent exposure under section 66 of the Sexual offences act 2003.
1)A person commits an offence if—(a)he intentionally exposes his genitals, and
(b)he intends that someone will see them and be caused alarm or distress.
(2)A person guilty of an offence under this section is liable—
(a)on summary conviction, to imprisonment for a term not exceeding 6 months or a fine not exceeding the statutory maximum or both;
(b)on conviction on indictment, to imprisonment for a term not exceeding 2 years.]
If you have a picture sent from the offender to somebody else who is caused distress then the offence has been committed and there is no defence; so people couldn't reasonably get around it.
Stories about people racking up fines of several thousand quid an offence (or winding up in prison) would surely deter people reasonably quickly; the whole revenge porn thing died a death fairly quickly when people started getting fines and jail time and I can't see why this should be any different.
If you have a picture sent from the offender to somebody else who is caused distress then the offence has been committed and there is no defence
There needs to be intent to cause distress. As you yourself posted
1)A person commits an offence if—
(a)he intentionally exposes his genitals, and
(b)he intends that someone will see them and be caused alarm or distress.
Posting unwanted dick pics is still an, erm, dick thing to do, but I fear it would be hard to prove that distress was intended.
This is not true for certain cases of cat. My aunt had a cat (which might have had a few loose toys in the attic) which would hunt small cars to stop people coming/going home on the estate, and crapped in neighbours gardens for fun. She suggested this, but what actually happened is that the person with the water pistol ended up with a slightly soggy, very grumpy and totally homicidal cat attached to their arm...
I personally disagree; the test "he intends that someone will see them" is clearly intended to cover situations where a lorry driver has stopped in a layby and wanders over to a bush and has a piss, only to find a hiker (or similar) seeing him in the act. This provides a use case for where a criminal offence is not committed, and it also covers undressing in the presence of your partner in private which would otherwise be criminalised by this law.
The recipient being caused alarm or distress is a separate condition, and I think a magistrate would do somebody under that section on the basis that anybody distressed enough to bring it to court is "distressed" enough for legal purposes. That leaves the strict liability condition of A, which is proven by the picture on the other persons phone and you'd then go straight to sentencing.
However, if you don't think this is sufficiently unambiguous for magistrates then we could also ask parliament to add another two lines after (b):-
or;
(c) Photographic pictures of genitals are transmitted to another person without their prior written request.
anddd that'd unquestionably sort the problem without trying to invent a complex technical system to intercept all emails and analyse every picture to deal with it. Just because you can try and deal with a problem by technical methods doesn't mean that it can't be dealt with by other methods; ie the law.
As you say the law is there. A serious question - why do the pics continue? Maybe because a lot of women are reluctant to go through the very time consuming and stressful process of filing a complaint and being a witness. Typically, in a case with serious consequences, the defense will attempt to portray the witness in the most unfavorable light possible (liar, slut, gold digger) - so the reluctance is understandable.
And because it's nigh on impossible to stop the ruddy things, whatever you do. Most of the ones my friends and I have suffered from come from anonymous accounts - once blocked, they simply morph into a new one. None of the social media platforms take it seriously - it's a helluva job to get Twitter to ban someone and then, you've guessed it, they get back on with another anonymous account (they're quick enough to put a photography site on the naughty step though, for too many retweets of pictures of beautiuful beaches). The police don't have the resources to chase all this down and can't do anything if the IP address leads to abroad or the phone number is a burner phone.
You had me worried but I see that actually I think more than one clothing manufacturer uses a brand name of Rhea. Doesn't that miss the point of a brand name? So, happily, Men's Rhea is not a bird fancier's magazine by subscription, but various things to wear. And I'm happy to say that Women's Rhea is well covered.
I suspect that if you really wanted to, you could probably add in something from the Wireless Telegraphy act as well about the content of broadcasts to pop an extra bit of fine or jail on top, but at the end of the day, it's going to take quite a lot of public resources to stamp out the problem, and I'm just not sure we've got the police or the court time to do it at the moment. I'm not saying it shouldn't be done, just I don't think it's practical, but it's certainly a solution. Until people start using burner phones, of course...
We could start sending in pictures of various ministers, prime ministers, presidents and so on and get the system to learn to block those as well.. what fun, every time you would see that egit Biden there is a more intelligent duck instead, or Merkel (and whatever that replacement is) and maybe we could replace Macron with a picture taken from the other side than the cock if you can guess what I mean, it would seem more accurate after all
What have you been drinking?
Koolaid perhaps? (But I think he meant the opposite)
Circling back to the topic, I wonder if they'll go after ASCII art as well. I have several good ways of indicating naughty bits with standard ASCII characters floating about in my head... like maybe naughty emojis or similar
*naughty-bits* <-- insert imagination here
I see a problem. What if you wanted to send someone a photo of a duck?
Say you take a nice snap down at the duck pond and want to share it with all your friends. You couldn't do it anymore, as they'd all think you must have sent them a dick pic. And someone might create a duck-to-dick filter to defeat the original thwarting tech, which would be even worse.
That's exactly what prompted me to hit the comments - "What happens if you want to send someone a Duckpic?".
The likelihood of me sending a dick pic to anyone, even for legitimate reasons to a medical professional, is vanishingly small. The probability however of me sending a duck pic to someone is quite high, it sounds exactly like the kind of thing I would do. I would not wish to make a pariah out of myself just because of some innocent comic ornithology.
re: Ian.
I can tell you it would have been less embarassing than standing up in the examination room and unzipping my pants to show my large, yet unfortunately broken member to a doctor who's sitting, quite close, on a conveniently low stool...
It would seem there is one problem I am going to have here. Every morning I take a walk to the local duck pond and feed the ducks. There are these three sisters that come running up to me to be fed and I often send people pictures of the ducks. In fact my social media page is a close up of a duck's head with my reflection in the eye.
So now, every time I send one of these pictures, post one of these pictures...the recipient is going to think I did not send them a duck picture!
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