http://www.newsbytes.com/pubNews/00/153556.html New Software Speeds Search For Child Porn New Software Speeds Search For Child Porn By Dick Kelsey, Newsbytes SAN JOSE, CALIFORNIA, U.S.A., 11 Aug 2000, 5:19 PM CST A Silicon Valley software company believes it has developed a way to cut the time it takes law officers to find child pornography from months to minutes. BayTSP.com says it designed software to find copyright infringement on the Internet or stored on hard drives and soon realized it could sniff out just about anything, including files containing kiddie porn. "When law enforcement agencies determine that someone has child pornography on their computer, they have to go through that computer file-by-file," BayTSP.com spokesman Pete Hazarian told Newsbytes. "It can take months. We can do it in a couple of hours." The software "spiders" hard drives to detect the images. Likening a computer file's unique signature to DNA, BayTSP.com says the program reads the signature, then uses it to scan the Net or hard drive for files that match. It's able to identify images that have been altered or cleverly hidden in a hard drive, and can even weed out photos that were distributed years ago. As soon as authorities could obtain a child pornographic image, the search would begin, Hazarian said. "If we can get hold of known child porn images, extract the DNA out of it and put that on our servers, we can scan newsgroups, we can scan the Internet for those images." In short order, BayTSP.com's technology can locate the image. "We can even identify the e-mail address of the person who posted it." What would make this system work best is a central repository of pornographic images. Several different law enforcement agencies keep child porn databases but there is no central resource, similar to the FBI's national fingerprint database, Hazarian said. BayTSP can be found on the Web at http://www.baytsp.com * * * The last paragraph brings to mind those old rumors of the largest collection of porn in the world being in the Vatican library. Any "great library" of kid porn would be the crown jewel target for pedos, hackers, pedohackers, or someone wanting prestige. Or loads of money, from the right buyer. (And of course the usual caveats apply re Snake Oil Software.) -dj whatever you do, don't think about an elephant -- http://dj.frogfarm.org/ ...for the best in unapproved information "There is an email in which somebody says exactly that." "Is that the one that said he was going to kill all the lawyers and judges?" "No, it is a different one." - MPAA v 2600, June 6 Protective Order Hearing
