8 ms·

This comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12102056 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12102056) from the previous discussion is interesting: > From

This comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12102056 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12102056) from the previous discussion is interesting: > From Reddit: "I've read a few of Cooper's books and the short answer is yes, pedophilia is a common theme in his writing (as is incest and necrophilia)." [1] > I'm calling it now. It was child porn. Google doesn't like to go around deleting people's stuff. When this has happened in the past it's been child porn, which Google is obligated by governments everywhere to delete with extreme prejudice. And of course they're not going to go around publicly accusing the guy of having child porn, even if he did, so they will remain silent. Neither will they tell someone who had child porn which exact piece of child porn tripped their child porn detector, for obvious reasons. This is not a Google issue; this is a law enforcement issue. > [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/books/comments/4sx9aa/dennis_cooper.. https://www.reddit.com/r/books/comments/4sx9aa/dennis_cooper....

forgotpwtomain 10y ago
Pedophilia and necrophilia in writing is protected as freedom of speech. If google is now censoring literature (as opposed to pictures/media) -- that's pretty bad.. I thought we'd finally (already) won this fight in the US with Howl/Naked Lunch, but maybe not?
- eng_monkey 10y ago
  Freedom of speech protects you from Government prosecution for expressing your opinions. Google is a private company.
  - forgotpwtomain 10y ago
    Today, Google controls more public discourse than the US government, if they are censoring freedom of speech - it IS a big deal.
    - netheril96 10y ago
      I wholeheartedly agree with this. First Amendment was written at the time when government was almost the only organization powerful enough to silence dissenters. Nowadays corporations like Google, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, etc have more effective control of the venue of speech, and they should be subject to the same scrutiny then, not be given leeway as "private entities".
      - throwaway160303 10y ago
        The government still is the only entity that can silence dissenters. All the entities you listed are limited to merely kicking you off their platform. Facebook can't 404 your posts on Reddit, and none of them and none of them can stop you from standing on the sidewalk with a sandwich board. Saying that social media platforms should be subject to "scrutiny" (which is pretty vague and non-actionable), or are somehow beholden to public opinion, is nonsense. They're beholden to users, at most. And it's not like Google shut down the blog of of someone saying "GOOG's target price should be about $12". Let's see how much backlash they gets from their users over this, ha.
        Karunamon 10y ago
        The government still is the only entity that can silence dissenters. All the entities you listed are limited to merely kicking you off their platform. From the standpoint of the one being silenced, what's the difference? The fact of the matter is, the Googles and the Facebooks and the Reddits of the world hold a tremendous and frightening amount of control over public discourse and public opinion. I feel less and less comfortable with them wielding that power unaccountably. You know how we hold companies to a higher and more stringent standard when they reach monopoly status in a market? Perhaps it's time to look into something similar for large social media sites.
        daveFNbuck 10y ago
        The difference is that he can easily get his blog running again on another platform. If the government were silencing him, he couldn't do that.
  - jordanlev 10y ago
    This line is getting way over-used. Please notice the last sentence in grandparent's comment: "This is not a Google issue; this is a law enforcement issue".
    - foota 10y ago
      This comment doesn't make sense. Parent is commenting that it's _not_ a law enforcement issue since writing is generally protected speech.
      - function_seven 10y ago
        Your parent meant 'grandparent'
  - hjdivad 10y ago
    The first amendment protects Americans from Government prosecution for expression their opinions. Freedom of speech is a principle that extends beyond the US Constitution.
  - aaron695 10y ago
    > Freedom of speech protects you from Government prosecution for expressing your opinions. Google is a private company. This is a tired comment. Could we please stop saying it. We are aware of this. Yes your ISP has the right to cut off your internet access because you vote Democrats. They are a private company. But that doesn't make it right and doesn't mean we can't be angry about it!
    - probably_wrong 10y ago
      I don't think we are as aware of what that comment means as you'd think. Yes, we know that Google can delete whatever they want whenever they want. And yet we might get angry as hell... buy we keep hosting our content with them. You want to get angry? Sure, go for it. You want to get change, though? Then I suggest we stop giving them money to keep doing what they are doing. That, I believe, is the spirit of the parent comment .
      - joering2 10y ago
        Well why do you think DuckDuck Go continues to thrive in the first place? Even Google itself said that their "don't be evil" motto is quite stupid. I personally try to ban them from my life as much as possible. Just recently in Google Maps a window popup with history of all the places I drove to. That was a shocker but how naive was I thinking they don't keep this data. Since then I bought TomTom for cash and said goodbye to Google Maps. You should do the same!
    - knorker 10y ago
      Child porn is not protected speech though, and Google is not allowed to facilitate it. Your ISP is allowed to let Democrats use the Internet. You may be making a general point I agree with, but it doesn't apply here, assuming it indeed is child porn.
      - icebraining 10y ago
        Actual child pornography is not protected, but literary accounts (which seem to be the case here) are.
  - knorker 10y ago
    A private company that is legally mandated to take certain actions in presence of child porn. Free speech does not apply. (assuming the hypothesis that this is child porn is correct)
  - syshum 10y ago
    No in the US the 1st amendment protects you from Government Prosecution, codifing the Concept of Freedom of Speech into the very foundation of our Legal System Freedom of Speech however is a concept that applies to everyone, and everything including Google Companies that proclaim the desire to respect Freedom of Speech, that claim to operate platforms in the promotion of Freedom of Speech, and make a profit doing so, should be HEAVILY criticized when they violate that principle
  - DavidWanjiru 10y ago
    My guess is that the reason why freedom of speech only protects you from being made to shut up by govt through prosecution, and not being made to shut up by a private company due to the space it occupies in the world's technology and information zeitgeist, is because when the freedom of speech laws were formulated, the govt threat to your speech is the only major threat that existed. A Google kind of threat to freedom of speech didn't exist. The question then becomes, is Google stifling freedom of speech? Can their impact on your freedom of speech by deleting your blog or posts be compared to the govt's impact on your freedom of speech through prosecution? I say yes. Freedom of speech and similar laws seek to give you an immunity against govt, not because govt is evil, but because govt is powerful, and you are not. Google is powerful, and they were alive to just how powerful they were going to be when they came out with that don't be evil admonition. Whereas Google took it upon themselves to not be evil, the writers of freedom of speech and similar laws tool it upon themselves to tell govt to not be evil. Should our societies protect individuals against entities who have power beyond some kind of threshhold? I'd say yes.
    - dalke 10y ago
      If you make the argument that a private company, by shutting down a user's account, is like government restriction on free speech, then how do you determine the balance between the right of free speech and the right of free association? Remember, freedom of speech is only one part of the First Amendment. Those same writers also included the freedom of association. An organization like Google, Fox News, Amazon, or the Wall Street Journal is not obligated to associate with everyone. We can change things. We can pass laws which mandate that certain things are public spaces. For example, the rise of the malls means that the migration from public shopping streets to private shopping areas, where mall owners like the Mall of the Americas can shut down protest much more readily than the police could do in a truly public area. We can pass laws which force malls to be public areas. The Supreme Court decided that in Pruneyard v. Robins. But only a handful of states have done so. We can similarly pass laws which say that any content hosting site must be content neutral. Eg, if you want to use Stack Overflow to post your diatribes against whale hunting, SO cannot shut you down. That doesn't make sense. Okay, so we only require that of "powerful" sites, which you suggest. Which is defined as .... what? Who gets to decide? Who gets to challenge that? If Yahoo was once powerful but is no longer so, who gets to decide when the transition occurs? One possibility is to set up a common carrier status, where a company offers its services without discrimination to the general public. This is how the phone system works. But why would a company want to do this?
- modeless 10y ago
  His latest "novels" were made up of pictures.
- orik 10y ago
  When the redditor wrote "I'm calling it now. It was child porn." he didn't mean google account got removed for having Pedophilia in writing, but was suggesting that Google probably found actual child porn somewhere on this Google Account (Gmail, Drive, Blogger, Youtube, Whatever) and shut down the account.
  - ythl 10y ago
    > he didn't mean google account got removed for having Pedophilia in writing, but was suggesting that Google probably found actual child porn somewhere on this Google Account (Gmail, Drive, Blogger, Youtube, Whatever) and shut down the account. If that's the case, why isn't Cooper in jail?
- ivanhoe 10y ago
  Big problem here is that Google, Facebook and other US based companies are not strict just on imposing US regulations and laws, but through the censorship also very much adhere to the mainstream US cultural and moral biases. And those are not always coherent with the rest of the world, US being much more conservative about a lot of issues. And big companies being big, they can impose such rules and moral criteria to the whole planet and that way they basically colonise other cultures, forcing people to change their behaviour in order to adhere to the mainstream US moral ideas. For instance in Balkans it was very common theme for parents to take photos of their babies having a first bath and to later show those photos around to family and friends. It's a sort of ex-Yugoslavia tradition from the days of first Polaroid cameras, we all had such photos of us as kids and still keep them in photo albums. But posting your child's naked photo on Facebook will get you account banned instantly and if you are US based can get you in a lot of trouble. So people stopped doing it. And not just that, but more and more people now accepted the position that it's not morally acceptable to take such photos, thus re-aligning their sense of morality with the moral norms imposed by social networks. Such global censorship is really changing the world.
  - mtgx 10y ago
    I understand it's their "right" to censor whatever they want (well, the EU may disagree with that, though, given Google's dominant position in search, and the FTC should, too, but this is America, the land of "corporations are protected from punishment"), but it's also people's right to call them out on it. Just like it's people's right to call out Google [1], Facebook[2], and Twitter[3] for censoring links and hashtags for political reasons. [1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12146920 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12146920 [2] - http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2016/07/24/facebook-calls-wikileaks-block-accident/ http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2016/07/24/facebook-calls-wiki... [3] - http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/jul/23/twitter-users-erupt-dncleaks-disappears-from-trend/ http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/jul/23/twitter-user...
  - forgotpwtomain 10y ago
    That's a very interesting point - I'd very much like to read a well-cited article/study on this if such is available, or is it just a personal observation?
- night815 10y ago
  https://xkcd.com/1357/ https://xkcd.com/1357/
- macspoofing 10y ago
  >Pedophilia and necrophilia in writing is protected as freedom of speech. Sure, but protected speech only protects you from government censorship. For example, Reddit recently instituted a policy of disallowing anything that sexualizes children. Pedophilic writings would probably fall under that. Should they have the right to take those posts down? Or have that kind of policy? > If google is now censoring literature (as opposed to pictures/media) -- that's pretty bad.. That's par for the course. You can't sell ads if your site hosts writings on pedophilia. Most platforms and social networks would probably take down his content.
- Lawtonfogle 10y ago
  Is it? That might only apply in some jurisdictions and is likely something many will keep making laws against until one sticks. If it is protected under the first amendment is something that could easily switch, being so many loop holes have since been created for it.
the_decider 10y ago
So I'm assuming Google would also delete certain blog posts by Vladimir Nabokov
- GFK_of_xmaspast 10y ago
  Have you actually read Lolita.
  - exolymph 10y ago
    Lolita contains erotic descriptions of sexual acts involving a child — the scene where Dolly is on Humbert's lap. But yet, it's a work written from the perspective of an unreliable sociopath. Things aren't so simple.
    - the_decider 10y ago
      “I recall certain moments, let us call them icebergs in paradise, when after having had my fill of her –after fabulous, insane exertions that left me limp and azure-barred–I would gather her in my arms with, at last, a mute moan of human tenderness (her skin glistening in the neon light coming from the paved court through the slits in the blind, her soot-black lashes matted, her grave gray eyes more vacant than ever–for all the world a little patient still in the confusion of a drug after a major operation)–and the tenderness would deepen to shame and despair, and I would lull and rock my lone light Lolita in my marble arms, and moan in her warm hair, and caress her at random and mutely ask her blessing, and at the peak of this human agonized selfless tenderness (with my soul actually hanging around her naked body and ready to repent), all at once, ironically, horribly, lust would swell again–and 'oh, no,' Lolita would say with a sigh to heaven, and the next moment the tenderness and the azure–all would be shattered.”
deftnerd 10y ago
I wouldn't doubt that Google participates in the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children database of child porn hashes in order to identify and shut down accounts with illegal images in their Google Drive or Gmail. If this is the case, I wonder if this opens up an attack vector against a targeted account. If the system is set up a certain way, an email with a illegal image attachment could cause a google account to be closed and purged, with notification to law enforcement. http://www.missingkids.com/Exploitation/Industry http://www.missingkids.com/Exploitation/Industry states "Through the Hash Value Sharing Initiative, U.S. based Electronic Service Providers can partner with NCMEC to receive a list of MD5 hash values which represent the "worst of the worst" images of apparent child pornography." as well as "Major U.S. companies have implemented PhotoDNA, and the technology is helping them identify child pornography images on their servers that may have otherwise gone undetected." Interestingly enough, if a provider is using just the MD5 database and not PhotoDNA, and someone could get one of the MD5 hashes of an illegal image, a bad actor could use a hash collision attach to make an innocuous image have the same MD5 hash. Also, here is an article (from 2014 so it might be out of date) about which technologies google uses to identify child abuse images: http://www.pcworld.com/article/2461400/how-google-handles-child-pornography-in-gmail-search.html http://www.pcworld.com/article/2461400/how-google-handles-ch... From that article... "Google itself compiles a database of images of possible abuse that have been brought to the company’s attention, sources close to the company said. Those images are then reviewed by a human employee. If confirmed to show abuse, the company assigns each image a unique digital fingerprint, which is entered into its database. " That has to be the worst job ever.
- userbinator 10y ago
  You'd think they would move to a better hash function by now... MD5 has been broken for many years. There's a little program from a few years ago that let you create colliding blocks in seconds on a PC of the time.
  - nkozyra 10y ago
    MD5 is long-broken as a security mechanism, but as a broader identifier of hashes, a soft match (or matches with potential false positives) might actually be preferred. In this case it might not inherently be a bad idea to use (as opposed to for password hashing).
jamesrcole 10y ago
As I said in reply to that comment, the problem with the lack of transparency is that, how could an innocent person in Cooper's position defend themselves against accusations like that which could ruin their reputation?
- tedunangst 10y ago
  Sue the person making the accusation. Note that Google is not the one making the accusation.
kome 10y ago
It was not child porn, at all. Stop spreading lies.
pavlov 10y ago
It's pretty scary that when Google (or BigTechCompanyX) deletes your data, people will automatically assume you must be a child pornographer. Is account deletion an automatically applied child porn sentence with no assumption of innocence and no recourse to an actual judicial system? Seems that way.

forgotpwtomain 10y ago

Pedophilia and necrophilia in writing is protected as freedom of speech. If google is now censoring literature (as opposed to pictures/media) -- that's pretty bad.. I thought we'd finally (already) won this fight in the US with Howl/Naked Lunch, but maybe not?

eng_monkey 10y ago
Freedom of speech protects you from Government prosecution for expressing your opinions. Google is a private company.
- forgotpwtomain 10y ago
  Today, Google controls more public discourse than the US government, if they are censoring freedom of speech - it IS a big deal.
  - netheril96 10y ago
    I wholeheartedly agree with this. First Amendment was written at the time when government was almost the only organization powerful enough to silence dissenters. Nowadays corporations like Google, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, etc have more effective control of the venue of speech, and they should be subject to the same scrutiny then, not be given leeway as "private entities".
    - throwaway160303 10y ago
      The government still is the only entity that can silence dissenters. All the entities you listed are limited to merely kicking you off their platform. Facebook can't 404 your posts on Reddit, and none of them and none of them can stop you from standing on the sidewalk with a sandwich board. Saying that social media platforms should be subject to "scrutiny" (which is pretty vague and non-actionable), or are somehow beholden to public opinion, is nonsense. They're beholden to users, at most. And it's not like Google shut down the blog of of someone saying "GOOG's target price should be about $12". Let's see how much backlash they gets from their users over this, ha.
      - Karunamon 10y ago
        The government still is the only entity that can silence dissenters. All the entities you listed are limited to merely kicking you off their platform. From the standpoint of the one being silenced, what's the difference? The fact of the matter is, the Googles and the Facebooks and the Reddits of the world hold a tremendous and frightening amount of control over public discourse and public opinion. I feel less and less comfortable with them wielding that power unaccountably. You know how we hold companies to a higher and more stringent standard when they reach monopoly status in a market? Perhaps it's time to look into something similar for large social media sites.
        daveFNbuck 10y ago
        The difference is that he can easily get his blog running again on another platform. If the government were silencing him, he couldn't do that.
- jordanlev 10y ago
  This line is getting way over-used. Please notice the last sentence in grandparent's comment: "This is not a Google issue; this is a law enforcement issue".
  - foota 10y ago
    This comment doesn't make sense. Parent is commenting that it's _not_ a law enforcement issue since writing is generally protected speech.
    - function_seven 10y ago
      Your parent meant 'grandparent'
- hjdivad 10y ago
  The first amendment protects Americans from Government prosecution for expression their opinions. Freedom of speech is a principle that extends beyond the US Constitution.
- aaron695 10y ago
  > Freedom of speech protects you from Government prosecution for expressing your opinions. Google is a private company. This is a tired comment. Could we please stop saying it. We are aware of this. Yes your ISP has the right to cut off your internet access because you vote Democrats. They are a private company. But that doesn't make it right and doesn't mean we can't be angry about it!
  - probably_wrong 10y ago
    I don't think we are as aware of what that comment means as you'd think. Yes, we know that Google can delete whatever they want whenever they want. And yet we might get angry as hell... buy we keep hosting our content with them. You want to get angry? Sure, go for it. You want to get change, though? Then I suggest we stop giving them money to keep doing what they are doing. That, I believe, is the spirit of the parent comment .
    - joering2 10y ago
      Well why do you think DuckDuck Go continues to thrive in the first place? Even Google itself said that their "don't be evil" motto is quite stupid. I personally try to ban them from my life as much as possible. Just recently in Google Maps a window popup with history of all the places I drove to. That was a shocker but how naive was I thinking they don't keep this data. Since then I bought TomTom for cash and said goodbye to Google Maps. You should do the same!
  - knorker 10y ago
    Child porn is not protected speech though, and Google is not allowed to facilitate it. Your ISP is allowed to let Democrats use the Internet. You may be making a general point I agree with, but it doesn't apply here, assuming it indeed is child porn.
    - icebraining 10y ago
      Actual child pornography is not protected, but literary accounts (which seem to be the case here) are.
- knorker 10y ago
  A private company that is legally mandated to take certain actions in presence of child porn. Free speech does not apply. (assuming the hypothesis that this is child porn is correct)
- syshum 10y ago
  No in the US the 1st amendment protects you from Government Prosecution, codifing the Concept of Freedom of Speech into the very foundation of our Legal System Freedom of Speech however is a concept that applies to everyone, and everything including Google Companies that proclaim the desire to respect Freedom of Speech, that claim to operate platforms in the promotion of Freedom of Speech, and make a profit doing so, should be HEAVILY criticized when they violate that principle
- DavidWanjiru 10y ago
  My guess is that the reason why freedom of speech only protects you from being made to shut up by govt through prosecution, and not being made to shut up by a private company due to the space it occupies in the world's technology and information zeitgeist, is because when the freedom of speech laws were formulated, the govt threat to your speech is the only major threat that existed. A Google kind of threat to freedom of speech didn't exist. The question then becomes, is Google stifling freedom of speech? Can their impact on your freedom of speech by deleting your blog or posts be compared to the govt's impact on your freedom of speech through prosecution? I say yes. Freedom of speech and similar laws seek to give you an immunity against govt, not because govt is evil, but because govt is powerful, and you are not. Google is powerful, and they were alive to just how powerful they were going to be when they came out with that don't be evil admonition. Whereas Google took it upon themselves to not be evil, the writers of freedom of speech and similar laws tool it upon themselves to tell govt to not be evil. Should our societies protect individuals against entities who have power beyond some kind of threshhold? I'd say yes.
  - dalke 10y ago
    If you make the argument that a private company, by shutting down a user's account, is like government restriction on free speech, then how do you determine the balance between the right of free speech and the right of free association? Remember, freedom of speech is only one part of the First Amendment. Those same writers also included the freedom of association. An organization like Google, Fox News, Amazon, or the Wall Street Journal is not obligated to associate with everyone. We can change things. We can pass laws which mandate that certain things are public spaces. For example, the rise of the malls means that the migration from public shopping streets to private shopping areas, where mall owners like the Mall of the Americas can shut down protest much more readily than the police could do in a truly public area. We can pass laws which force malls to be public areas. The Supreme Court decided that in Pruneyard v. Robins. But only a handful of states have done so. We can similarly pass laws which say that any content hosting site must be content neutral. Eg, if you want to use Stack Overflow to post your diatribes against whale hunting, SO cannot shut you down. That doesn't make sense. Okay, so we only require that of "powerful" sites, which you suggest. Which is defined as .... what? Who gets to decide? Who gets to challenge that? If Yahoo was once powerful but is no longer so, who gets to decide when the transition occurs? One possibility is to set up a common carrier status, where a company offers its services without discrimination to the general public. This is how the phone system works. But why would a company want to do this?
modeless 10y ago
His latest "novels" were made up of pictures.
orik 10y ago
When the redditor wrote "I'm calling it now. It was child porn." he didn't mean google account got removed for having Pedophilia in writing, but was suggesting that Google probably found actual child porn somewhere on this Google Account (Gmail, Drive, Blogger, Youtube, Whatever) and shut down the account.
- ythl 10y ago
  > he didn't mean google account got removed for having Pedophilia in writing, but was suggesting that Google probably found actual child porn somewhere on this Google Account (Gmail, Drive, Blogger, Youtube, Whatever) and shut down the account. If that's the case, why isn't Cooper in jail?
ivanhoe 10y ago
Big problem here is that Google, Facebook and other US based companies are not strict just on imposing US regulations and laws, but through the censorship also very much adhere to the mainstream US cultural and moral biases. And those are not always coherent with the rest of the world, US being much more conservative about a lot of issues. And big companies being big, they can impose such rules and moral criteria to the whole planet and that way they basically colonise other cultures, forcing people to change their behaviour in order to adhere to the mainstream US moral ideas. For instance in Balkans it was very common theme for parents to take photos of their babies having a first bath and to later show those photos around to family and friends. It's a sort of ex-Yugoslavia tradition from the days of first Polaroid cameras, we all had such photos of us as kids and still keep them in photo albums. But posting your child's naked photo on Facebook will get you account banned instantly and if you are US based can get you in a lot of trouble. So people stopped doing it. And not just that, but more and more people now accepted the position that it's not morally acceptable to take such photos, thus re-aligning their sense of morality with the moral norms imposed by social networks. Such global censorship is really changing the world.
- mtgx 10y ago
  I understand it's their "right" to censor whatever they want (well, the EU may disagree with that, though, given Google's dominant position in search, and the FTC should, too, but this is America, the land of "corporations are protected from punishment"), but it's also people's right to call them out on it. Just like it's people's right to call out Google [1], Facebook[2], and Twitter[3] for censoring links and hashtags for political reasons. [1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12146920 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12146920 [2] - http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2016/07/24/facebook-calls-wikileaks-block-accident/ http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2016/07/24/facebook-calls-wiki... [3] - http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/jul/23/twitter-users-erupt-dncleaks-disappears-from-trend/ http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/jul/23/twitter-user...
- forgotpwtomain 10y ago
  That's a very interesting point - I'd very much like to read a well-cited article/study on this if such is available, or is it just a personal observation?
night815 10y ago
https://xkcd.com/1357/ https://xkcd.com/1357/
macspoofing 10y ago
>Pedophilia and necrophilia in writing is protected as freedom of speech. Sure, but protected speech only protects you from government censorship. For example, Reddit recently instituted a policy of disallowing anything that sexualizes children. Pedophilic writings would probably fall under that. Should they have the right to take those posts down? Or have that kind of policy? > If google is now censoring literature (as opposed to pictures/media) -- that's pretty bad.. That's par for the course. You can't sell ads if your site hosts writings on pedophilia. Most platforms and social networks would probably take down his content.
Lawtonfogle 10y ago
Is it? That might only apply in some jurisdictions and is likely something many will keep making laws against until one sticks. If it is protected under the first amendment is something that could easily switch, being so many loop holes have since been created for it.

the_decider 10y ago

So I'm assuming Google would also delete certain blog posts by Vladimir Nabokov

GFK_of_xmaspast 10y ago
Have you actually read Lolita.
- exolymph 10y ago
  Lolita contains erotic descriptions of sexual acts involving a child — the scene where Dolly is on Humbert's lap. But yet, it's a work written from the perspective of an unreliable sociopath. Things aren't so simple.
  - the_decider 10y ago
    “I recall certain moments, let us call them icebergs in paradise, when after having had my fill of her –after fabulous, insane exertions that left me limp and azure-barred–I would gather her in my arms with, at last, a mute moan of human tenderness (her skin glistening in the neon light coming from the paved court through the slits in the blind, her soot-black lashes matted, her grave gray eyes more vacant than ever–for all the world a little patient still in the confusion of a drug after a major operation)–and the tenderness would deepen to shame and despair, and I would lull and rock my lone light Lolita in my marble arms, and moan in her warm hair, and caress her at random and mutely ask her blessing, and at the peak of this human agonized selfless tenderness (with my soul actually hanging around her naked body and ready to repent), all at once, ironically, horribly, lust would swell again–and 'oh, no,' Lolita would say with a sigh to heaven, and the next moment the tenderness and the azure–all would be shattered.”

deftnerd 10y ago

I wouldn't doubt that Google participates in the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children database of child porn hashes in order to identify and shut down accounts with illegal images in their Google Drive or Gmail. If this is the case, I wonder if this opens up an attack vector against a targeted account. If the system is set up a certain way, an email with a illegal image attachment could cause a google account to be closed and purged, with notification to law enforcement. http://www.missingkids.com/Exploitation/Industry http://www.missingkids.com/Exploitation/Industry states "Through the Hash Value Sharing Initiative, U.S. based Electronic Service Providers can partner with NCMEC to receive a list of MD5 hash values which represent the "worst of the worst" images of apparent child pornography." as well as "Major U.S. companies have implemented PhotoDNA, and the technology is helping them identify child pornography images on their servers that may have otherwise gone undetected." Interestingly enough, if a provider is using just the MD5 database and not PhotoDNA, and someone could get one of the MD5 hashes of an illegal image, a bad actor could use a hash collision attach to make an innocuous image have the same MD5 hash. Also, here is an article (from 2014 so it might be out of date) about which technologies google uses to identify child abuse images: http://www.pcworld.com/article/2461400/how-google-handles-child-pornography-in-gmail-search.html http://www.pcworld.com/article/2461400/how-google-handles-ch... From that article... "Google itself compiles a database of images of possible abuse that have been brought to the company’s attention, sources close to the company said. Those images are then reviewed by a human employee. If confirmed to show abuse, the company assigns each image a unique digital fingerprint, which is entered into its database. " That has to be the worst job ever.

userbinator 10y ago
You'd think they would move to a better hash function by now... MD5 has been broken for many years. There's a little program from a few years ago that let you create colliding blocks in seconds on a PC of the time.
- nkozyra 10y ago
  MD5 is long-broken as a security mechanism, but as a broader identifier of hashes, a soft match (or matches with potential false positives) might actually be preferred. In this case it might not inherently be a bad idea to use (as opposed to for password hashing).

jamesrcole 10y ago

As I said in reply to that comment, the problem with the lack of transparency is that, how could an innocent person in Cooper's position defend themselves against accusations like that which could ruin their reputation?

tedunangst 10y ago
Sue the person making the accusation. Note that Google is not the one making the accusation.

kome 10y ago

It was not child porn, at all. Stop spreading lies.

pavlov 10y ago

It's pretty scary that when Google (or BigTechCompanyX) deletes your data, people will automatically assume you must be a child pornographer. Is account deletion an automatically applied child porn sentence with no assumption of innocence and no recourse to an actual judicial system? Seems that way.