Today the news comes that Google and Microsoft have agreed to block child abuse images. Great!
Anyone reading (or watching) the news story could be forgiven for thinking that this will solve the problem of child abuse images on the Internet, but that won’t happen. What Microsoft and Google have done is a tiny increment on what they were already doing – instead of just excluding hosts given to them by the Internet Watch Foundation, they are also going to ‘clean up’ the search results for certain searches.
It isn’t blocking child abuse images. The search companies can’t do that; anything who thinks so needs to go and learn a bit more about the Internet which includes the government. Who have of course come out of their rabbit hutch spitting lettuce leaves everywhere, saying that if this action by the search companies isn’t effective they’ll legislate.
Which is just about the clearest evidence so far that the government is completely clueless when it comes to technology; obviously Eton‘s reputation is overstated when it comes to technology education.
People tend to think of child abuse images as being a little bit like anything else you browse to on the Internet – you just search for it, and up it pops. I haven’t tried, but I suspect what you would get is a large number of pages like this one – talking about child abuse images in some way, but no real images. Undoubtedly there are some really dumb child pornographers out there who stick up their filth on ordinary web servers; whereby they’ll quickly get indexed by the search engines and someone law enforcement bods will come pounding on the door.
However the biggest area of child abuse image distribution is likely to be one of the variety of ‘stealth’ Internets … the “dark nets’, or ‘deep web‘.
The later are web sites that cannot be indexed by the search engines for various reasons – password protection, links have never been published, etc. These would be the choice of the not quite so dumb child pornographer.
The former are harder to find – they are roughly analogous to peer-to-peer file sharing networks such as Bittorrent which is widely used for sharing copyrighted material (films, music, etc.). But ‘friend to friend’ file sharing networks are private and not public; you need an invitation to join one. This is where the intelligent child pornographer lurks.
And all the hot air we’ve heard from the government so far is going to do pretty much bugger all about the really serious stuff. If you are a clueless politician reading this, get a clue and ask someone with half a brain cell about this stuff. And don’t invent half-arsed measures before asking someone with a clue about whether they’re likely to be effective or not.