What colour are your bits? (2004)
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What colour are your bits? (2004)
1–10 of 25 posts
Re: What colour are your bits? (2004)
#2It's a good article (perhaps a little slow to get going), and an interesting topic.
I suppose today, with the surges of interest in ML-derived content, the concept of "color" of bits is more relevant than ever.
There's the quote "Machine learning is money laundering for bias" (consider, eg, that if you ask an image generator model to create a "woman," it will very likely be a white woman), and I suppose the same is true for copyright, and other things. Basically it adds a layer of plausible deniability, and some could argue changes the "color of the bits."
As the article discusses, the law often _does_ care about the color/provenance of bits, though CS people are more prone to take a "data is just data" approach.
Re: What colour are your bits? (2004)
#3That part about child pornography was a bit...weird. Am I misreading it or is the author suggesting children can consent?
Re: What colour are your bits? (2004)
#4That part about child pornography was a bit...weird. Am I misreading it or is the author suggesting children can consent?
I think they are distinguishing between photographs of real situations (with children) and realistic renders. The result may be essentially the same, but the "bit colour" (the source) taints the first.
The author seems to argue if there are no children involved there's no problem, but notes others argue the images are harmful to view regardless of how they are produced.
Re: What colour are your bits? (2004)
#5That part about child pornography was a bit...weird. Am I misreading it or is the author suggesting children can consent?
"But when it comes to child pornography, I think maybe Colour should make a difference - if we're going to ban it at all, it should matter where it came from. Whether any children were actually involved, who did or didn't give consent, in short: what Colour the bits are. The other side takes the opposite tack: child pornography is dangerous by its very existence, and it doesn't matter where it came from. They're claiming that whether some bits are child pornography or not, and if so, whether they're illegal or not, should be entirely determined by (strictly a function of) the bits themselves."
I see what you mean about the "who did or didn't give consent" line. I don't see how "consent" could be a mitigating factor in determining whether or not something qualifies as CSAM.
Re: What colour are your bits? (2004)
#6That part about child pornography was a bit...weird. Am I misreading it or is the author suggesting children can consent?
Consider loli — should that be illegal? No real children are involved, but nonetheless loli depicts the sexualization of children. In Canada loli is prohibited, in the US it is not (which I personally think is the right call, but the matter is very controversial).
Re: What colour are your bits? (2004)
#7That part about child pornography was a bit...weird. Am I misreading it or is the author suggesting children can consent?
I think it's fair to say that 20 years ago, discussions around CSAM were a lot less developed than they are today in a variety of ways.
There were a lot more people much more ready to publicly make (IMHO terrible) arguments about how a jpg is just a stream of bits, which is a number, and you can't just arbitrarily ban specific large integers. Or about how nobody is harmed if streams of bits get passed around, it's just data, ones and zeroes, that's not harming anyone. Or that the data is encoded, so it's meaningless without a decoder, a different decoder could decode that bitstream into literally anything else.
Fundamentally these arguments were always pretty nasty and meritless. It's images/video of kids being raped, the continued existence and trading of which can be argued to do continuing harm to the victims. The accessibility of this stuff also goes some way to normalise the behaviour and create bubbles in which there is demand for new material, so more kids get abused.
Ideas of children being unable to consent were well established in law and society though, it was only 20 years ago, so that bit about consent does stick out considerably. But again in certain corners of the internet * there were people who would argue about it, you hope theoretically.
( * and not that obscure, pretty sure you could find this sort of stuff in the comments on slashdot back in that sort of time-period)
Re: What colour are your bits? (2004)
#8That part about child pornography was a bit...weird. Am I misreading it or is the author suggesting children can consent?
It's unfortunate - I was going to send this around because it's an excellent thing to think about, but then there's that bit that comes out of nowhere and if I send that to someone they'll think certain things about me.
Re: What colour are your bits? (2004)
#9That part about child pornography was a bit...weird. Am I misreading it or is the author suggesting children can consent?
"But when it comes to child pornography, I think maybe Colour should make a difference - if we're going to ban it at all, it should matter where it came from. Whether any children were actually involved, who did or didn't give consent, in short: what Colour the bits are. The other side takes the opposite tack: child pornography is dangerous by its very existence, and it doesn't matter where it came from. They're clai…
Photographs or movies involving, for example, nude children, which do not meet the bright-line child pornography standard, are nonetheless in a legal gray area and may be considered to be exploitation of those children if the parents did not give consent. Think Thora Birch at the end of American Beauty.
Re: What colour are your bits? (2004)
#10That part about child pornography was a bit...weird. Am I misreading it or is the author suggesting children can consent?
I think it's fair to say that 20 years ago, discussions around CSAM were a lot less developed than they are today in a variety of ways. There were a lot more people much more ready to publicly make (IMHO terrible) arguments about how a jpg is just a stream of bits, which is a number, and you can't just arbitrarily ban specific large integers. Or about how nobody is harmed if streams of bits get passed around, it's ju…
The internet was just colonised by bland NPCs and everyone interesting is now on the dark web. The reason why you don't see them here today is the same reason why you didn't see them in the NYT in 2003, you can't make money off ads when you're out of the Overton window.