CyberLaw Blog

Archive for December 24th, 2009

Microsoft Tackles the Child Pornography Problem: (New York imes)
The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children assists law-enforcement authorities by culling through 250,000 images a week, looking for illegal material, and sends daily alerts to 68 Internet service providers worldwide. It is difficult, labor-intensive work for all. But Microsoft is contributing new image-matching software, PhotoDNA, that promises to automate and streamline online child-pornography monitoring. The new software is the result of two years of collaboration by a team at Microsoft Research, led by Larry Zitnick, and a group at Dartmouth College. In test runs, PhotoDNA has processed images in less than five milliseconds each and accurately detected target images 98 percent of the time.

(Via QuickLinks Update.)

'Iranian cyber army' hits Twitter: (BBC)
A group claiming to be the Iranian Cyber Army managed to redirect Twitter users to its own site displaying a political message. Twitter said the attack had been carried out by getting at the servers that tell web browsers where to find particular sites. The site said it would start an investigation into what allowed the ‘unplanned downtime’ to take place. see also Twitter hack by ‘Iranian Cyber Army’ is really just misdirection (Guardian).

(Via QuickLinks Update.)

AU – could soon have the most restrictive internet regime in the Western world: (Sydney Morning Herald)
Senator Stephen Conroy’s consultation paper on mandating the filtering of internet sites by Australian internet service providers suggests that Australia could soon have the most restrictive internet regime in the Western world. The incorporation of international lists of overseas-hosted child sexual abuse material would be sufficient to align mandatory Australian practices with the voluntary practices of most liberal democracies. Indeed, the implication is that it might total the sum of all other jurisdictions’ voluntary filter lists. However, the commitment to add other content that is only prohibited in Australia will mean that the scope of the content to be captured will be much more extensively drawn than in equivalent nation.

(Via QuickLinks Update.)