[heads]

The officers are busy. Last year nearly 800 cyber tips filtered through the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children. Officers are carrying out search warrants on a weekly basis and some electronic files have been spread so widely that officers know their hash value by heart.

It’s difficult to say whether sexual exploitation and the spread of sex abuse materials has actually increased dramatically in recent years.

This whole article feels like a cute dog story with barely any journalism about something that is very threatening to the Internet. Was it was submitted to trigger debate about propaganda rather than on the merits of the reporting?

I imagine there is a lot of useful statistical analysis to be done on the list of filenames, their metadata, and various content hashes which could absolutely answer some questions about the patterms of CSAM over the past decade.

[janalsncm]

Network effects are definitely interesting to law enforcement. There was an interesting podcast about one of the sites that got busted which was being run out of Korea: https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/131/

[simplicio]

I mean, the dog angle is legitimately interesting. I've never heard of police dogs being used to sniff out things other then drugs or people.

[Hnrobert42]

I went to RSA in San Francisco. At the time, I was staying with friends in San Mateo, but I got a hotel for a night in SF. Rates were outrageous, and we were a small startup. The cheapest hotel I could find was $400/ night for a bedroom with a shared bath down the hall.

The next night, back at my friend’s house, I noticed the telltale 3 bite pattern on my shoulder. Breakfast lunch and dinner. It itched like CrAZy. It was bedbugs. There was no way to know if I’d only gotten bit at the hotel or if I’d brought bugs to my friend’s home with me.

I learned you can hire a sweet yellow lab like Mojo to sniff out bedbugs. The dog wandered the whole house. My heart dropped when he alerted on the sofa where I’d been remotely working.

It cost about $3500 to treat the house. They rolled in fans that heat the whole house above 105°F for an hour. Sure enough, they found some bedbug eggs. It all worked out, damn what a hassle.

Note: the dog was from a different company than the treatment folks. They do that to avoid conflict of interest.

[WirelessGigabit]

I live in Phoenix and this post just squashed my entrepreneurial desire to start a bed-bug eradication service.

How am I going to compete with 'oh just turn off your AC for a day in summer and you're good'.

[ecshafer]

You need to get 113F/45C to kill bed bugs and eggs within 90 minutes. 105F actually sounds too low. But its harder to kill eggs, which you need to get up to 118F. They are resillient and evil creatures.

[Hnrobert42]

Yeah. I was going from memory and this was about 5 years ago. Yours sounds more correct.

[BobaFloutist]

Not only that, police dogs are notoriously not great at actually sniffing out drugs instead of just alerting on meat products or on people their handler is biased against.

[chrisandchris]

In Europe, there are dogs sniffing bark beetle, which destroys forests. Much more faster than any humands checking the trees. [1]

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

[multjoy]

You would be amazed what a dog can pick up. Drugs, obviously. Cash is a big one, electronics, invasive plant species, archaeological human remains.

If it has an odour of any sort and the dog can be imprinted on it then they will find it. The skill is the training.

[Beijinger]

Dogs are used to detect:

people cadavers drugs explosives electronics cash bed bugs