Find the porn, boy! Find it! Get the porn! Good boy!
August 26, 2015 1:02 PM   Subscribe

 
Great misleading headline there NBC news.

Detecting computer media is completely different than detecting porn
posted by vuron at 1:06 PM on August 26, 2015 [1 favorite]


Wait is there another use for thumb drives?
posted by GuyZero at 1:10 PM on August 26, 2015 [8 favorites]


And dogs can find drugs. But the police cannot lengthen your traffic stop just to call in a drug dog. At least not without reasonable suspicion.
posted by T.D. Strange at 1:10 PM on August 26, 2015 [1 favorite]


This is why I keep all my sensitive thumb drives inside a box of Snausages.
posted by Faint of Butt at 1:14 PM on August 26, 2015 [8 favorites]


The difference between regular data and porn data is in how the individual bits are arranged. The naughty bits, that is.
posted by Strange Interlude at 1:15 PM on August 26, 2015 [30 favorites]


Dogs! Is there anything they can't do?
posted by octobersurprise at 1:15 PM on August 26, 2015 [2 favorites]


Porn Sniffing Dog is the name of my punk band.
posted by JohnFromGR at 1:20 PM on August 26, 2015 [4 favorites]




Especially if the handler is into kink.
posted by Cool Papa Bell at 1:23 PM on August 26, 2015


Dog Potter Stewart: I know it when I smell it
posted by schmod at 1:24 PM on August 26, 2015 [8 favorites]


I too can find porn. Do you guys want me to prove my assertion?
posted by I-baLL at 1:25 PM on August 26, 2015 [1 favorite]


Huh....That's not how I imagined that would work. My method would actually find porn specifically, not just any data, though.
posted by If only I had a penguin... at 1:26 PM on August 26, 2015


Happy National Porn Day, everybody!
posted by tonycpsu at 1:28 PM on August 26, 2015


Okay, I'll bite. What's your method, IoIhap...?
posted by Strange Interlude at 1:29 PM on August 26, 2015


Sorry, I wasn't being coy exactly, I thought it was kind of easy to guess and was just avoiding being explicit. I assume media containing porn is more likely to have been handled with the hands of a person who has recently viewed porn. And not many people are going to sterilize their thumb drive when they're done, so I thought there might be traces of semen on porn media but less likely on other media.
posted by If only I had a penguin... at 1:31 PM on August 26, 2015 [3 favorites]


Dogs can detect:
  • PowerPoint presentations
  • GNU HURD
  • Photoshop layers for the Lay's potato chip logo
  • Any kind of spreadsheet
  • .DS_Store files
  • "Clash of the Titans" in 480p
  • A selection of screen door specifications
  • Wikipedia (compressed)
  • Tax returns, 2007-2014
  • Source code for a server log cleanup tool
  • Other dogs
  • Demo recordings in .WAV format
  • An Ubuntu installer
  • Christmas 2013
posted by swift at 1:31 PM on August 26, 2015 [47 favorites]


first you need a penguin
posted by andrewcooke at 1:31 PM on August 26, 2015 [5 favorites]


oh. well that spoilt my timing. never mind.
posted by andrewcooke at 1:32 PM on August 26, 2015 [1 favorite]


It is possible to read the Court's opinion in Roth v. United States and Alberts v. California, 354 U.S. 476, in a variety of ways. In saying this, I imply no criticism of the Court, which in those cases was faced with the task of trying to define what may be indefinable. I have reached the conclusion, which I think is confirmed at least by negative implication in the Court's decisions since Roth and Alberts, that under the First and Fourteenth Amendments criminal laws in this area are constitutionally limited to hard-core pornography. I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description; and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I smell it.

-- ChiefJustice Toby, Dog Court
posted by Naberius at 1:36 PM on August 26, 2015 [6 favorites]


May reflect the bias of the handler.

Dog found porn? Dirty, dirty cop.
posted by Kabanos at 1:48 PM on August 26, 2015 [1 favorite]


I can't wait until the next person stops me while I'm walking my puggle.

"That's a really cute dog. Is he friendly?"
"Ayup. Brazzer's a natural porn-hound if I ever seen one. Never loses the scent."

Wait should I name him Brazzer or Smutt
posted by jake at 1:49 PM on August 26, 2015 [6 favorites]


Horndog the Porndog
posted by Kabanos at 1:50 PM on August 26, 2015 [3 favorites]


Or maybe the other way around?
Discuss.
posted by Kabanos at 1:51 PM on August 26, 2015 [1 favorite]


Can a dog find my lost sense of wonder? And if he can, can he not chew the shit out of it?
posted by Halloween Jack at 2:03 PM on August 26, 2015 [5 favorites]


Reiterating larrybob's observation: They're a great fiction that juries believe, and an additional weapon, but although they're effective at creating an excuse they're not terribly scientific on the evidence procurement thing.
posted by straw at 2:10 PM on August 26, 2015 [2 favorites]


HE SNIFFS IT FOR THE ARTICLES, OKAY.
posted by Drastic at 2:17 PM on August 26, 2015 [25 favorites]




This dog made the news in Seattle the other day because he just joined the Seattle PD.

YOU CAN'T SNIFF OUT PORN IN THE CLOUD, FUZZFACE!

(My porn's not illegal, at least.)
posted by Sunburnt at 2:41 PM on August 26, 2015 [1 favorite]


In the case of flash-drive sniffing, it's a shame nobody has tried to pin down exactly what substance the dog is actually noticing. It seems unlikely it's the silicon or any of the thin-film materials. Presumably it's either a plastic or a glue used in packaging. I wonder how ubiquitous any particular material (smell-designated class of materials?) is in media manufacturing.

Also - the buried headline in the article straw linked above would seem to be that in 85% of all runs in which the handlers and observers knew no actual target substances were present, an alert was issued! With a false positive rate like that, worrying about handler influence seems like a secondary concern.

In any event, I'm glad I always hide my incriminating flash media inside the cases of older, bulkier flash media filled with public-domain videos of cats.
posted by eotvos at 3:05 PM on August 26, 2015 [2 favorites]


I store my porn on the NSA's server farm in Utah. At least, that's what I want them to think. Who else is going to archive our Petabyte of radio telescope pulsar search data?
posted by RedOrGreen at 3:06 PM on August 26, 2015 [2 favorites]


yeah yeah wake me up when a dog can do something a deep learning recursive neural network can't do
posted by danhon at 3:25 PM on August 26, 2015


Scooby Dooby Don't
posted by The Vice Admiral of the Narrow Seas at 3:27 PM on August 26, 2015


Wait should I name him

Frenulum. No wait, that's my metal band.
posted by thelonius at 4:18 PM on August 26, 2015


yeah yeah wake me up when a dog can do something a deep learning recursive neural network can't do

eat poop?
posted by ymgve at 4:22 PM on August 26, 2015 [6 favorites]


Any dog could find my porn. 'Coz I leave it staaaaanky.
posted by dgaicun at 4:28 PM on August 26, 2015 [2 favorites]




Jared has aides and they can't manage to hide his porn?
posted by bendy at 7:22 PM on August 26, 2015


Ok so maybe dogs can't sniff out porn per se, but they know it when they see it.
posted by mattholomew at 7:25 PM on August 26, 2015


Dogs! Is there anything they can't do?

Drive standard transmission
posted by Ray Walston, Luck Dragon at 7:45 PM on August 26, 2015 [3 favorites]


Fun fact: nobody can drive standard transmission.* Anyone who seems to be is simply using a car equipped with props to fake it for the prestige. It is a lost art of the elder days.

*except for three-toed sloths, and they don't feel like it, maaaaan.
posted by Halloween Jack at 8:24 PM on August 26, 2015 [1 favorite]


Jared has aides ...

This is a malicious Internet rumor. Jared is a responsible adult who always uses protection when he's with child prostitutes.
posted by dgaicun at 9:52 PM on August 26, 2015


While I have problems with dogs used to generate probable cause for more invasive searches using a dog to locate items you already have a warrant for seems reasonable. The effectiveness of those searches not withstanding.
posted by Mitheral at 9:43 AM on August 27, 2015 [1 favorite]


Sure, it can find porn, as long as it's not cowgirl or missionary…
posted by klangklangston at 2:41 PM on August 27, 2015 [1 favorite]


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