A novel idea for scrubbing the internet clean

[Captain.Theophilus]

Hello, friends.

It's no secret that the internet grows filthier by the day. I'm speaking specifically of pornography.

As a man who's a recovering porn addict (four years clean!) and now happily married, I'm struck more than ever with the ability of a single image to stick in my head and affect me in a way I would not prefer.

I would like to speak with a web developer, someone who knows Javascript or other web-design languages. I have a fairly novel idea for a type of internet filter that is less of a content filter and more of a tasteless image filter.

If you are an experienced web developer I would ask for just a bit of your time to explain my idea to you, so you can tell me if it seems plausible.

I ask this as a favor, I can't offer anything in return!

Thanks for your time,

-Micah

 

[awitch]

Congratulations on your sobriety.

While it's been awhile since I've done any developing, I have been an IT professional for many years and I don't think what you're looking for is the right way to go about it. I could go into the technical details if you like, but I'd rather make some suggestions that might be more helpful for anyone who might be interested. These come from working with clients who wanted to block employees from wasting time while enforcing their network usage policies.

1. Subscribe to a service such as opendns.com or K9. The computers on your network use these third party DNS servers which return a "blocked" page if they receive a request for a website that is known to contain questionable content. The filters are customizable so you can block sites based on any/all categories such as pornography, occult, drugs, social media, gambling, etc. The system keeps logs of where and when you tried to access these sites and can be set up to send an alert to someone if you do.

Contact your Internet Service Provider as well. They may offer a similar service for free.

2. Acquire a hardware firewall (everyone should have one) that has content filtering. Most of these products can block ports or individual programs like instant messaging and file sharing. They can also contain web content filters and can limit your online time and provide usage reports and tampering notifications.

3. Keep your computer in a public part of the home like the living room.

4. Windows Essentials for Windows 7 and 8 contains free web content filtering which can also block web pages and the use of certain programs. I don't like Norton/Symantec, but that's one example of professional software that can also be used.

(note the layered approach: filter at the ISP, filter at your network gateway, filter on the local computer)

5. If anyone feels they have an addiction to pornography, check out SAA (sexual addicts anonymous); they are like Alcoholics Anonymous but deal with sexual addictions. You might find a sponsor willing to receive usage and tampering reports.

6. Install adblock plus from adblockplus.org (free) in all your web browsers to block any popups and advertisements that might be a trigger.

7. Revoke your own administrator rights on your user account so you can't bypass the security settings or install programs that might be used to access such material. You probably want to make sure there is another user account that does have admin rights but you do not have the password for.

It's true that there are always ways to get around these filters for someone desperate enough and filters are only so effective (even the Google image filters are far from perfect). You can make it difficult to access such material and automatic usage disclosure to people you trust is a really good incentive to avoid risky behavior. Support groups can also be helpful.

 

[Captain.Theophilus]

Awitch thanks for your ideas.

Most internet filters are either too strong or too weak. If you want one that works it has to block out all the thousands of good things because there might be one bad thing on a site. That doesn't work for me. I'm a fan of eating and drinking with sinners, just like Jesus did, not avoiding all the websites they might frequent because I don't want to get my hands dirty.

That being said, I don't want to see any naked or half-naked women, or other sexually suggestive things while I'm doing so. For that reason, I think it's time that a realistic, yet effective internet filter be employed, specifically for the purpose of detecting and bleeping out those particular elements on the page. I have what I think is an excellent idea for doing so, but I don't want to post it publicly because when I design the program I want to provide it as a free service, and I don't want someone else to capitalize on it. I think a clean, worry-free browsing experience is something we're all entitled to, and I want to help provide that, but before I go off to do all the work myself, I'm asking a favor of a web designer if they will hear my idea in a private message to tell me if it's plausible from a design standpoint.

I want to be very clear; I'm not looking for a generic, run of the mill internet filter. I don't need a filter or accountability software. I'm trying to make my visits to yahoo.com, google search results, and whatever other websites I frequent to be pain free and worry free. Am I being clear?

With your suggestion about AdBlock -- I've gone pretty much about as far as I can with it. It blocks a lot of stuff, but some stuff can't be blocked because you just can't separate the element from other important parts of the page. YouTube thumbnails is a great example of this.

What I would be designing would be in the spirit of adblock, but with a much different central function and a far more powerful detecting force.

 

[awitch]

Most internet filters are either too strong or too weak. If you want one that works it has to block out all the thousands of good things because there might be one bad thing on a site.

Sure, there is some truth to this; filters often use various heuristics to come up with a score and based on your sensitivity settings, determine if it should be blocked or passed.

Email spam filters can check definitive characteristics of messages such as the country of origin, does the hostname of the originating mail server match it's reverse IP lookup? Are there SPF records? Is it listed on any real time block lists? Does it contain known phrases, URLs, or risky attachment file types? etc. Yet, we find some spam gets through and some legitimate messages get blocked.

What about images? One image can be resized, the file type changed, the file name changed, slightly photoshopped, etc. What are you going to test against? Given the billions of images available on the Internet, and the millions more added every day, any database you keep is going to be unfeasibly big and the time to test against such a database will take too long. That's why filtering is typically done by the website's URL; there's a finite number of registered domains, and the presence of keywords in the domain name or webpage's code can be used to determine if a block is necessary.

That being said, I don't want to see any naked or half-naked women, or other sexually suggestive things while I'm doing so.

That goes back to my comment about subjectivity. Is a picture of a woman in a bikini obscene? If it's your spouse and she's waiving to you from the other side of the pool, probably not.

I have what I think is an excellent idea for doing so, but I don't want to post it publicly because when I design the program I want to provide it as a free service, and I don't want someone else to capitalize on it.

I think you need to patent the algorithm before telling anyone.

I think a clean, worry-free browsing experience is something we're all entitled to, and I want to help provide that, but before I go off to do all the work myself, I'm asking a favor of a web designer if they will hear my idea in a private message to tell me if it's plausible from a design standpoint.

I could be wrong but I'm not sure a web designer is the right direction. WDs have to (or should) adhere to standards to get as many browsers as they can to render sites properly.

What I would be designing would be in the spirit of adblock, but with a much different central function and a far more powerful detecting force.

Adblock kind of works the same way as the methods I've discussed prior. It contains a database of sites known to host advertisements so they can be blocked when a call is made to retrieve one.

I don't see how it would be feasible, but I am curious to hear your idea, and I would honor your request to keep it confidential if you were willing to disclose it privately. Again, you may consider acquiring a patent first.

 

[Captain.Theophilus]

I have no idea what you're saying. It seems to me you're more interested in arguing and making a point than talking about this.

Most importantly, you've managed to type several paragraphs of feedback that I didn't ask for, and somehow avoided answering my only question. Don't bother responding again.

 

[Sketcher]

As a Christian who is also in IT, I'm backing awitch 100% on this. He's not picking any arguments, he's just explaining to you how things work, with their limitations and the parameters you have given him thus far. He's even offered to hear you out further privately, to get a better idea of what you want to implement.

Personally, what it sounds like you want to do is the computer image equivalent of making beef brisket using no more than a salmon and a cutting board. You would need an algorithm that can reliably predict visual stimuli in raster images, across all possibilities of size, compression, and format, and still be efficient enough to serve up a site with acceptable load times, on the hardware that is common today. If you have such an idea, I can see why you would want to keep that close to the chest. If this is the case, I would recommend that you learn how to become a good web developer yourself to fill in the knowledge that you are asking for web developers to give you, then code it yourself. Nobody would beat you to the patent that way. However, if you want this to be truly free, develop it under the GPL license. This isn't to say that someone else wouldn't look at the code and make a commercial equivalent, though. Something that powerful would be worth lots of money.

 

[pgp_protector]

Use a Text only browser.

 

[EphesiaNZ]

Use a Text only browser.

You can still look at text based erotica and download images and videos using a text based browser. However it does limit that real time interactivity. You will never stop net porn unless the masses protest about against it. Unfortunately, people are either too busy with their lives or just don't care. And Captain, there are plenty of addons to block pornography (all based on javascript IIRC) so i doubt if you will have anything new to offer but, please prove me wrong by all means.

 

[iluvatar5150]

What I would be designing would be in the spirit of adblock, but with a much different central function and a far more powerful detecting force.

If you're trying to filter out provocative images, what you want is not a web developer, but someone who specializes in automated image processing and analysis - something like facial recognition, but for boobs.

That's going to be difficult and expensive. Once you get that figured out, the web part of it will be easy.

 

[EphesiaNZ]

something like facial recognition, but for boobs.

Right, opening a Sourceforge account now