Question
Some mail scanning software claims to be able to identify "pornograhpic" images attached to email messages.
From a technology point of view it is very dubious that this can ever be done. The very definition of "porn" varies between different relgions, societies, states and countries. You would be challenged to find a legal definition of porn – this is usually left to the discretion of a judge…
For example, if I gave you a photograph, what would you look at:
- The amount of flesh colour? So how well will it distinguish porn of people of different races? What about sun tans? What about a car that happens to be brown?
- The people in the picture? So what happens if it is an innocent picture of a person on a (lets say) beach? Or a picture showing you a skin complaint? What about allowing people to download pictures and pictures of works by famous artists (obviously, this may include pictures of naked bodies such as Statue of David).
If you have software that "scans" pictures looking for porn, what does it do with all the false positives (i.e. legitimate pictures identified as potentially having porn)?
Answer
GMS Anti-Spam does not include any experimental technology to identify pornographic images by analysing pictures attached to email messages.
GMS Anti-Spam does provide the ability to stop messages containing picture files (e.g. JPG, GIF) as well as block other attachment types including those embeded within compressed files.
GMS Anti-Spam Update Service using Zero-hour Recurrent Pattern Detection does provide the ability to detect image based spam no matter the content of the images. This technology makes no determination as to the actual content of the image, it is purely based on whether or not the message is considered to be spam or not.
Keywords:porn JUCE scanning JPG GIF Spam checker GMS Anti-spam anti spam antispam