Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by LinuxBender 2953 days ago
This would be a useful service if their system could detect signs of skin cancer.

In terms of squelching revenge porn, I do not see how this would remove anything from non facebook servers. Is 4chan going to integrate with this? Are they really only using hashing? Simple hash checks are negated with trivial effort.

If they are just hashes, why are users uploading anything beyond a hash? Example: virustotal [0] can get the hash of a file using javascript rather than uploading the file. Is this to see that the file is really porn?

[0] - https://www.virustotal.com/
3 comments
always_good 2953 days ago
Well, imagine how much revenge porn is being shared on Facebook and their other social networks because that's where the victim is.

You don't need global buy-in for it to be useful. Raising the barrier can be useful.

The bullies have to not just find another video host, but be bothered to actually do it.

Watching my friend's little brother wonder how to do anything out of the same three Android apps he uses daily, I've become convinced that Facebook's measure will be effective enough.

link
LinuxBender 2953 days ago
I agree in principal with what you are saying. There are certainly cases inside of FB that this could help, assuming they are not just doing simple hashing.

In my opinion, I believe they should extend their service via an API or hash database that could be used by other sites to reduce some of the group raids on FB accounts and other social media sites to improve the effectiveness of this initiative. Imagine if CloudFlare were to uptake this database and show what sites were sharing a particular file, or even allow website admins to filter such images.

link
koolba 2953 days ago
It's not just hashes of the raw bytes of the photos. More likely something like PhotoDNA[1] that's already used for tracking child porn.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PhotoDNA

link
LinuxBender 2953 days ago
That would be great. Are there any links that suggest Facebook is using this?
link
syshum 2953 days ago
I doubt it is Simple file level Hashing

MS Pioneered tech for Child Porn that looks at the actual photo and hashes parts of the file, PhotoID, that makes is more robot than a simple file hash, which ML I am sure this has improved alot in the decades it was first released

However I agree that is unlikely to curb Revenge Porn...

link
blackflame7000 2953 days ago
The technique is called fuzzy hashing
link