46 ms·

So... a USB stick that can find pornographic images. On your hard drive. (On the surface level, I can appreciate the technical hurdles required to get here. I

by anulman 16y ago

So... a USB stick that can find pornographic images. On your hard drive. (On the surface level, I can appreciate the technical hurdles required to get here. I just find it hard to believe that this could flag anyone even mildly computer-savvy.)

peteforde 16y ago
The article clearly states that the device searches several media types (CDs, DVDs, USB drives, even flash cards) and looks at file signatures instead of file extensions so things can't be hidden. You didn't read the article very well.
- anulman 16y ago
  Sorry I wasn't clear enough – I was trying to imply that sites like YouPorn, with an Alexa rank of 75 (source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YouPorn http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YouPorn), eliminate the need for local storage (save the cache, thanks pipeline_tux). Further, the article never said anything about video, which I would imagine has only grown in popularity over the past decade.
kovar 16y ago
I've used all the tools mentioned in the article and they generally will find most anything present, even if the user is computer savvy. Two major reasons: a) artifacts and b) carelessness. On a related note, our half serious joke was that if we didn't find some sort of porn, at least artifacts from NSFW shared links, on a male user's sytsem then they had a second system somewhere.
pipeline_tux 16y ago
You'd be surprised at what your web browser and operating system cache... That one session where you forgot to switch to incognito mode could leave hundreds of images on the hard drive ;)
- SoftwareMaven 16y ago
  That does bring up the question: how effective is incognito mode against forensics?
  - pipeline_tux 16y ago
    Relatively... The browsers themselves won't write anything to disk but this doesn't stop things like plugins (EG: Flash, Java, media players, etc) from writing to disk, or lower level operating system functions (IE: Swap) writing to disk. How likely is it that these will write to disk? I don't know exactly, but it would vary between browser plugins and operating systems. For example: I use Linux, with no swap, and with few browser plugins and would consider myself fairly safe when in incognito mode.

by anulman 16y ago

peteforde 16y ago

The article clearly states that the device searches several media types (CDs, DVDs, USB drives, even flash cards) and looks at file signatures instead of file extensions so things can't be hidden. You didn't read the article very well.

anulman 16y ago
Sorry I wasn't clear enough – I was trying to imply that sites like YouPorn, with an Alexa rank of 75 (source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YouPorn http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YouPorn), eliminate the need for local storage (save the cache, thanks pipeline_tux). Further, the article never said anything about video, which I would imagine has only grown in popularity over the past decade.

kovar 16y ago

I've used all the tools mentioned in the article and they generally will find most anything present, even if the user is computer savvy. Two major reasons: a) artifacts and b) carelessness. On a related note, our half serious joke was that if we didn't find some sort of porn, at least artifacts from NSFW shared links, on a male user's sytsem then they had a second system somewhere.

pipeline_tux 16y ago

You'd be surprised at what your web browser and operating system cache... That one session where you forgot to switch to incognito mode could leave hundreds of images on the hard drive ;)

SoftwareMaven 16y ago
That does bring up the question: how effective is incognito mode against forensics?
- pipeline_tux 16y ago
  Relatively... The browsers themselves won't write anything to disk but this doesn't stop things like plugins (EG: Flash, Java, media players, etc) from writing to disk, or lower level operating system functions (IE: Swap) writing to disk. How likely is it that these will write to disk? I don't know exactly, but it would vary between browser plugins and operating systems. For example: I use Linux, with no swap, and with few browser plugins and would consider myself fairly safe when in incognito mode.