The Asian Independent 16 - 30 Nov. 2019

www.theasianindependent.co.uk
London : The UK-based Internet
Watch Foundation (IWF) has revealed
that nearly half of the child abuse content
in the social media space is being
shared openly on micro-blogging platform
Twitter.
According to a report in
The Telegraph that accessed
the IWF data, 49 per cent of
the images, videos and url
links it found on social media,
search engines and cloud services
in the last three years
were on Twitter - "making up
1,396 of the total 2,835 incidents".
This is a scary incident
as the child abuse images and
videos slipped through
Twitter's filters and were
available for anyone to see.
According to the IWF, it helps
minimise the availability of
online sexual abuse content,
specifically child sexual abuse
content hosted anywhere in the world.
The majority of its work focuses on
the removal of child sexual abuse
images and videos. "We search for
child sexual abuse images and videos
and offer a place for the public to
report them anonymously. We then
have them removed," it said on its
website. Microsoft's Bing search
engine was second in the IWF report,
NEWS
Twitter leads in child abuse
content on social media
with 604 incidents recorded between
2016 and 2018, followed by Amazon
with 375 and Google with 348.
"The IWF found 72 incidents of
abuse being openly hosted on
Facebook, 18 on its sister site
Instagram and 22 on YouTube," said
the report. A Twitter spokesperson
replied to the IWF report: "We have
serious concerns about the accuracy
of these figures and the metrics used
to produce them. We will continue to
work with the IWF to address their
concerns and improve the accuracy of
their data". Susie Hargreaves OBE,
CEO of the IWF said that "our data is
accurate and recorded fairly and consistently
regardless of where we find
child sexual abuse material".
Microsoft also questioned the IWF
data. Earlier reports claimed
that Microsoft's search
engine Bing is still serving
child porn, and certain
search terms on the platform
brought up child porn
images and related keywords.
"Microsoft's Bing search
engine reportedly still
served up child porn, nearly
a year after the tech giant
said it was addressing the
issue. "The news comes as
part of a report in The New
York Times that looks at
what the newspaper says is
a failure by tech companies
to adequately address child
pornography on their platforms,"
reports CNET. The tech giant has long
been at the forefront of combating
abuse imagery, even creating a detection
tool called "PhotoDNA" almost a
decade ago. But many criminals have
turned to its search engine Bing as a
reliable tool. "Part of the issue is privacy,
some companies say," said the
report.
New York : Using a special type
of radar, researchers have discovered
the invisible footprints hiding since
the end of the last ice age -- and what
lies beneath them. The fossilised
footprints reveal a wealth of information
about how humans and animals
moved and interacted with each other
12,000 years ago, according to the
study published in the
journal Scientific
Reports.
"We never thought to
look under footprints,
but it turns out that the
sediment itself has a
memory that records the
effects of the animal's weight and
momentum in a beautiful way," said
study lead author Thomas Urban
from Cornell University in the US. "It
gives us a way to understand the biomechanics
of extinct fauna that we
never had before," Urban said. The
researchers examined the footprints
of humans, mammoths and giant
sloths in the White Sands National
Monument in New Mexico.
Using ground-penetrating radar
(GPR), they were able to resolve 96
per cent of the human tracks in the
area under investigation, as well as all
16-11-2019 to 30-11-2019
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‘Ghost’ footprints
hiding since end of
Ice Age found
of the larger vertebrate tracks. "But
there are bigger implications than just
this case study," Urban said. "The
technique could possibly be applied to
many other fossilised footprint sites
around the world, potentially including
those of dinosaurs. We have
already successfully tested the method
more broadly at multiple locations
within White
Sands," Urban
added. "While these
'ghost' footprints
can become invisible
for a short time
after rain and when
conditions are just
right, now, using geophysics methods,
they can be recorded, traced and
investigated in 3D to reveal
Pleistocene animal and human interactions,
history and mechanics in genuinely
exciting new ways," said study
co-author Sturt Manning. GPR is a
nondestructive method that allows
researchers to access hidden information
without the need for excavation.
The sensor - a kind of antenna - is
dragged over the surface, sending a
radio wave into the ground. The signal
that bounces back gives a picture of
what's under the surface.