[ceheaaf]

Didn't get past the paywall but, recently a friend had their primary school targeted by blackmailers who took public photos of children and made (I'm told) extremely explicit images with them, threatening to release them if not paid.

What's the defense? Intelligent screening of incoming messages so that the threat never reaches the blackmail target? I imagine they'll find an unprotected channel.

Don't post innocuous images of children ever? Seems like losing.

[eska]

Don't post innocuous images of children ever? Seems like losing.

I do have to say that I find it disturbing how liberally parents seem to post pictures of their children in public though. Respect the privacy of your children, they’re not your pets.

[ceheaaf]

I'm more thinking, the winning school sports team, a choir performing, etc. Things that would be posted in normal institutional participation and give children positive affirmation and recognition

[defrost]

Certainly in my lifetime we never posted such things publicly across the globe, neither for myself nor my peers, nor for my children and most of their peers at school.

Such things were printed and handed out and rarely made it past that years parents and students and the school archive (physical visit required).

[suddenlybananas]

Getting in the newspaper or on TV for winning an award or competition or something has been around for a long time.

[defrost]

For the very rare few, yes, a fair while.

For the Dux's and general high performers, less time than I've been alive.

For entire classrooms to be posted up via live streams, Insta, tok's, etc ... barely a decade or so.

It's not something that was always normal, and just because it's become "normalised" doesn't mean it must remain that way.

[Cthulhu_]

Some schools will (try to) do this, but under European privacy and portrait right laws, they have to get explicit permissions from parents first.

I think a school news letter / yearbook is cute, but it should be private and only for the students and parents. A physical version would be best, you can put those in the archive instead of realize 20 years later that the digital versions are gone.

[CalRobert]

It's nice to see pictures of people. I like when parents share photos of my kids at events where they're having a great time but I couldn't make it. It's nice when the local paper shows a picture of happy graduating 8th graders.

Saying "you shouldn't do this thing that was basically harmless from the birth of photography until the ~2010's" is ignoring a lot of history and context.

[627467]

Broadcasting private photos of children to strangers and corporations was common until 2010s? Were you posting them on classified section on newspapers in 1999?

[mittensc]

> What's the defense? Intelligent screening of incoming messages so that the threat never reaches the blackmail target? I imagine they'll find an unprotected channel.

Same defenses that are used against fraud and other crime.

criminal prosecution of the blackmailers AND the services used to generate the pictures.

This is effectively child porn... so penalties would be pretty harsh.

There are extradition treaties to most of the world, so unless the blackmailers are in China/Russia they will end up in jail.

That same thing played out with piracy with people extradited to the US from various countries

[graemep]

I just looked it up and according to Wikipedia distributing child porn is a crime in both, possession is a crime in China. Blackmail is a crime in both too. So even if they do not extradite the blackmailers they are likely to face jail under the their own laws.

[pjc50]

> What's the defense?

Prosecution of AI operators for making indecent images of children?

[ben_w]

Although I agree this is necessary, I don't think it is sufficient.

Hackers and blackmailers on the internet can be anywhere from trivial to impossible to identify.

Even harder to prosecute when they're in a different jurisdiction, as not everywhere has extradition treaties to everywhere else. I wouldn't be overly surprised if e.g. the North Korean government runs some schemes like this (though not necessarily actually this) to bring in money.

But yes, definitely do the easy things first, like trying to stop e.g. grok from doing it and also going after users of e.g. grok who try to get around such efforts. A lot more crime happens than can be prosecuted, so raising the minimum competence threshold to commit crimes in the first place is very necessary.

[Cthulhu_]

Sure, but the reality is that if it happens abroad there is no legal recourse. Laws are not global, but the internet is. The only real option there is to close the internet.

Or to elect me as god-emperor and unify the world under my rule.

[ben_w]

I'd already realised by about 2010 that the internet was making a mockery of national sovereignty; I absolutely expect nations to demand some way to effectively close the borders of the internet without breaking everything as it presently would.

[antran22]

That is propagation of CSAM. We already have way of dealing with people transmitting CSAM, that is to prosecute them heavily.

You won't prevent people stabbing others with knife by banning knife or asking people to wear knife-proof vest going outside. You deter them by making everybody know that the consequence of harming somebody else is going to be a very unpleasant experience.

[nkrisc]

Why a school, in this day and age, is posting pictures of children is beyond me. At my kid’s school we refused to sign the photo release clause, and any time they might be taking pictures they had to email us to ask if it was OK if our child was included. We agreed to it for the yearbook, but refused everything else.

[jvidalv]

Not caring.

[arkh]

> What's the defense?

Prosecuting every one of those blackmailers. If this kind of crime starts going into the "you're gonna get caught and jailed 100%" category, less people will try it.

[Cthulhu_]

What if the blackmailer is anonymous and abroad?

[d1sxeyes]

That's not a defence, that's a remedy.

[bandrami]

In the US possession of CSAM is a strict-liability crime. If the models contain the data to produce it, the modelmakers should be liable.

[pbhjpbhj]

Models don't have to contain imagery of a thing to produce imagery of that thing - the canonical example is the pelican riding a bicycle.

Model makers, arguably, are like pencil manufacturers but in a World of good artists.

I think you can hold people to account for what they help to create, but not what they have potential to do.

Now, if models were trained on any csam, of course, the model's owners should be held you account.

[Jordan-117]

The vast majority of these offences are from apps or sites that generate and host the images themselves, often by openly promoting their ability to "nudify" people, and payment leaves them a paper trail. That makes them complicit. I agree that local/open source models are harder to police, but most grade schoolers are not going to be able to set up and run something like that.

[bandrami]

And I think it would be an interesting question of discovery to determine if the models were or weren't trained on CSAM. (Diffusors were trained on both pelicans and bicycles, you know...)

I still think there's a lot of legal and IP landmines lying in wait from the Hoover-esque pre-training eras

[pbhjpbhj]

Well, yes, models might be trained on naked adults and clothed children, incidental to their purpose.

Agreed on your second remark. If I'm still around it will be interesting to look back on this period on twenty years and think about how things should have been handled.

[hjkl0]

> Don't post innocuous images of children ever?

Don’t raise boys who abuse girls. That’d be a big step in the right direction.

[account42]

Because girls can never be abusive?

[croon]

Yes, but statistics are very clear here [0]. Speaking as a dad of both, we have tried to raise our kids to treat everyone as a human first, but there are very obviously ways for boys to fall into different behaviors than girls, both from culture (probably mainly) but also from testosterone when older. Girls can absolutely be cruel in other ways, though, and of course incidents diverging from statistical patterns, as with most things.

[0] https://www.abs.gov.au/media-centre/media-releases/97-cent-s...

[teaearlgraycold]

Well TFA exclusively discusses instances of boys abusing girls.

[Asooka]

That is a clear-cut case of extortion. The defence is having the police do their job and apprehend the criminals in question. If you screen incoming messages and stop them from reaching their target, extortionists will switch to publicly releasing one risque image with threats of releasing more explicit ones. There is always an unprotected channel as you noted.

As an aside, please do not use the b-mail word. It is insensitive towards BIPOCs.

[account42]

> As an aside, please do not use the b-mail word. It is insensitive towards BIPOCs.

No it isn't. If anything needs to stop its the ever escalating orwellian censorship of words that you're proposing.