Internet Filters: A Public Policy Report (Second edition; fully revised and updated)

No sooner was the Internet upon us than anxiety arose over the ease of accessing pornography and other controversial content. In response, entrepreneurs soon developed filtering products. By the end of the decade, a new industry had emerged to create and market Internet filters....Yet filters were highly imprecise from the beginning. The sheer size of the Internet meant that identifying potentially offensive content had to be done mechanically, by matching "key" words and phrases; hence, the blocking of Web sites for "Middlesex County," or words such as "magna cum laude". Internet filters are crude and error-prone because they categorize expression without regard to its context, meaning, and value. Yet these sweeping censorship tools are now widely used in companies, homes, schools, and libraries. Internet filters remain a pressing public policy issue to all those concerned about free expression, education, culture, and democracy. This fully revised and updated report surveys tests and studies of Internet filtering products from the mid-1990s through 2006. It provides an essential resource for the ongoing debate

A Deep Learning Approach to Identify Not Suitable for Work Images

Web Archiving (WA) deals with the preservation of portions of the World Wide Web (WWW) allowing their availability for future access. Arquivo.pt is a WA initiativeholding a huge amount of content, including image files.However, some of these images contain nudity and pornography, that can be offensive for the users, and thus being Not SuitableFor Work (NSFW). This work proposes a methodology to classify NSFW images available at Arquivo.pt, using deep neural network approaches. A large dataset of images is built using Arquivo.pt data and two pre-trained neural network models, namely ResNet and SqueezeNet, are evaluated and improved for the NSFW classification task, using the dataset.The evaluation of these models reported an accuracy of 93% and 72%, respectively. After a fine tuning stage, the accuracy of these models improved to 94% and 89%, respectively.The proposed solution is integrated into the Arquivo.pt Image Search System, enabling the filtering of the problematic NSFW images. At the time of this writing, the proposed solution is in production at https://arquivo.pt/images.js

Designing Light Filters to Detect Skin Using a Low-powered Sensor

Detection of nudity in photos and videos, especially prior to uploading to the internet, is vital to solving many problems related to adolescent sexting, the distribution of child pornography, and cyber-bullying. The problem with using nudity detection algorithms as a means to combat these problems is that: 1) it implies that a digitized nude photo of a minor already exists (i.e., child pornography), and 2) there are real ethical and legal concerns around the distribution and processing of child pornography. Once a camera captures an image, that image is no longer secure. Therefore, we need to develop new privacy-preserving solutions that prevent the digital capture of nude imagery of minors. My research takes a first step in trying to accomplish this long-term goal: In this thesis, I examine the feasibility of using a low-powered sensor to detect skin dominance (defined as an image comprised of 50% or more of human skin tone) in a visual scene. By designing four custom light filters to enhance the digital information extracted from 300 scenes captured with the sensor (without digitizing high-fidelity visual features), I was able to accurately detect a skin dominant scene with 83.7% accuracy, 83% precision, and 85% recall. The long-term goal to be achieved in the future is to design a low-powered vision sensor that can be mounted on a digital camera lens on a teen\u27s mobile device to detect and/or prevent the capture of nude imagery. Thus, I discuss the limitations of this work toward this larger goal, as well as future research directions

Fast and Effective Bag-of-Visual-Word Model to Pornographic Images Recognition Using the FREAK Descriptor

Recently, the Bag of Visual Word (BoVW) has gained enormous popularity between researchers to object recognition. Pornographic image recognition with respect to computational complexity, appropriate accuracy, and memory consumption is a major challenge in the applications with time constraints such as the internet pornography filtering. Most of the existing researches based on the Bow, using the very popular SIFT and SURF algorithms to description and match detected keypoints in the image. The main problem of these methods is high computational complexity due to constructing the high dimensional feature vectors. This research proposed a BoVW based model by adopting very fast and simple binary descriptor FREAK to speed-up pornographic recognition process. Meanwhile, the keypoints are detected in the ROI of images which improves the recognition speed due to eliminating many noise keypoints placed in the image background. Finally, in order to find the most representational visual-vocabulary, different vocabularies are generated from size 150 to 500 for BoVW. Compared with the similar works, the experimental results show that the proposed model has gained remarkable improvement in the terms of computational complexity

Validating Multimedia Content Moderation Software via Semantic Fusion

The exponential growth of social media platforms, such as Facebook and TikTok, has revolutionized communication and content publication in human society. Users on these platforms can publish multimedia content that delivers information via the combination of text, audio, images, and video. Meanwhile, the multimedia content release facility has been increasingly exploited to propagate toxic content, such as hate speech, malicious advertisements, and pornography. To this end, content moderation software has been widely deployed on these platforms to detect and blocks toxic content. However, due to the complexity of content moderation models and the difficulty of understanding information across multiple modalities, existing content moderation software can fail to detect toxic content, which often leads to extremely negative impacts. We introduce Semantic Fusion, a general, effective methodology for validating multimedia content moderation software. Our key idea is to fuse two or more existing single-modal inputs (e.g., a textual sentence and an image) into a new input that combines the semantics of its ancestors in a novel manner and has toxic nature by construction. This fused input is then used for validating multimedia content moderation software. We realized Semantic Fusion as DUO, a practical content moderation software testing tool. In our evaluation, we employ DUO to test five commercial content moderation software and two state-of-the-art models against three kinds of toxic content. The results show that DUO achieves up to 100% error finding rate (EFR) when testing moderation software. In addition, we leverage the test cases generated by DUO to retrain the two models we explored, which largely improves model robustness while maintaining the accuracy on the original test set.Comment: Accepted by ISSTA 202

THE PORNOGRAPHY PANDEMIC: IMPLICATIONS, SCOPE AND SOLUTIONS FOR THE CHURCH IN THE POST-INTERNET AGE

Pornography, recently declared a public health risk, has become an increasingly large problem for society, in particular, the church. The users of pornography span across the board, including men, women, adolescents, children, and even clergy. Pornography has been shown to have detrimental effects in the marriage and family. It also presents a distorted view of sexuality, increasing violent sexual attitudes and other deviancies. As the pornographic industry targets younger audiences, they are more easily hooked due to psychological phenomena and physical changes to the brain that result from pornographic use. All these issues find expression in the life of the church, where believers are ensnared in a sinful lifestyle that causes spiritual, sexual and familial dysfunction, damages their witness, and cripples their effectiveness for the gospel. All the while, pornography continues to degrade and abuse women. In order to mitigate these problems, the church will need to redeem sexuality through discipleship, reclaiming language, counseling, software, spiritual discipline, and accountability

Advanced quantum based neural network classifier and its application for objectionable web content filtering

© 2013 IEEE. In this paper, an Advanced Quantum-based Neural Network Classifier (AQNN) is proposed. The proposed AQNN is used to form an objectionable Web content filtering system (OWF). The aim is to design a neural network with a few numbers of hidden layer neurons with the optimal connection weights and the threshold of neurons. The proposed algorithm uses the concept of quantum computing and genetic concept to evolve connection weights and the threshold of neurons. Quantum computing uses qubit as a probabilistic representation which is the smallest unit of information in the quantum computing concept. In this algorithm, a threshold boundary parameter is also introduced to find the optimal value of the threshold of neurons. The proposed algorithm forms neural network architecture which is used to form an objectionable Web content filtering system which detects objectionable Web request by the user. To judge the performance of the proposed AQNN, a total of 2000 (1000 objectionable + 1000 non-objectionable) Website's contents have been used. The results of AQNN are also compared with QNN-F and well-known classifiers as backpropagation, support vector machine (SVM), multilayer perceptron, decision tree algorithm, and artificial neural network. The results show that the AQNN as classifier performs better than existing classifiers. The performance of the proposed objectionable Web content filtering system (OWF) is also compared with well-known objectionable Web filtering software and existing models. It is found that the proposed OWF performs better than existing solutions in terms of filtering objectionable content