stewlewis":3w0o748k said:
Servers, computer programs etc do all the monitoring of internet traffic, audio video content, phone calls, texts.....
Not people working shifts.
And, they can do it fast, building links and 'intelligence gathering'
Mods on here ban tit pics, typing isis bomb president will cause a computer to wake up, hit record, scan this post and anything linked to it. In seconds....
Citizen Four told us.
Except it doesn't actually work. They've been trying to filter out copyrighted content from youtube for years. They managed a simple system where a database of thousands of songs was compared to every video, and if it matched, that video was muted.
Then people figured out if you slightly sped the speed up or down it'd fool the system into thinking it was something else - but a human wouldn't even notice.
Then they had to deal with films. Again, database of every popular film, compare every upload, block the matches. People started flipping the video over left to right, and the system couldn't do anything. Eventually they added a check for that - doubling the time it took - and people responded by slightly tinting the colours.
There was enough cat and mouse games like this that eventually they gave up and said "if you find your stuff pirated on here, email us and we'll take it down".
That's the sort of problem you face even when you're just telling the computer to compare two objects [songs, pictures, etc] side by side and tell you if they're identical. What exactly do you do when there is no reference object, or if you want it to pick out things that aren't identical, but sort of similar?
They've been working on getting computers to read a person's handwriting for 50 years now, and it still doesn't work all that well. We almost have driverless cars finished, but road signs all use one font, road markings are all standardized, and the other cars in traffic all share very easily recognizable traits. And still, we're told "not quite ready for release yet".
Even if you fed it a picture of a beheading, and said "computer, this is a beheading", it wouldn't recognize a photo of a different beheading, or even the same one from a different angle.
You'd have to come up with a system to recognize, well, basically anything that can show up in a picture, all those millions of things. And then you'd have to teach it about how those objects interact. And then you'd have to come up with a vigorous, air tight definition of an unacceptable level of violence. And then, finally, you have to teach it how to recognize that from the first two things.
And you want this from the same technology that gets people excited because a robot can sometimes walk up the stairs without falling over? No chance.
Even the NSA's big scary server farm is mostly useless. It's a glorified tape recorder. Having a personal copy of everything anyone has ever said ever is no use if you don't know where to look in the first place. They have crucial evidence on probably millions of crimes, but without anyone telling them there was one, they don't know to search for it. Just like how there's an office with copies of all of our birth certificates in it, but nobody working there knows who you are until you walk up and talk to them.
