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Microsoft releases tool to spot abuse images

Microsoft has released a free tool
that lets website owners spot when
images of child abuse are being
shared by users.
It said it had made the PhotoDNA tool
available to tackle the 720,000 abuse
images uploaded to the net every day.
Police forces, anti-abuse organisations
and large social networks have been using
the tool for some time to dig out the
illegal images.
Microsoft said the online tool was for
small firms that lack the resources to do
image-checking themselves.
Exploited services
Spotting abuse images among the 1.8
billion pictures uploaded to online
services every day was an almost
impossible task, said Courtney Gregoire, a
senior lawyer at Microsoft's Digital
Crimes Unit in a blogpost outlining
the initiative.
While many large social networks such as
Twitter, Facebook and Flipboard were
already using PhotoDNA, before now it
had not been available to smaller online
services, she said.
"We needed an easier, more scalable way
to identify and detect these worst-of-the-
worst images," said Ms Gregoire.
The PhotoDNA system has been used to
analyse and classify images of child sexual
abuse held by Interpol, police forces and
the US National Center of Missing and
Exploited Children.
The technology generates a signature or
hash for each image that can be compared
with any new image to see if there is a
match. It can spot images it has seen
before even if they are cropped or
otherwise manipulated to avoid detection
systems.
Many of the images shared online have
been seen before and spotting people
trading them can help police forces
unearth abusers previously unknown to
them.
The free service puts PhotoDNA in the
cloud and lets websites check images
uploaded by users.
"It's definitely going to help," said
Christian Berg of NetClean which uses the
PhotoDNA technology in the image
analysis software it makes for police
forces and large companies. "Especially
for the smaller firms that cannot afford to
do this themselves.
"Those smaller services are regularly
exploited by people that like to share
abuse images online," he said.

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