Government is preparing to procure a pornography detecting software at a cost of Shs2.6Billion, the Ethics and Integrity Minister, Father Simon Lokodo said.
The detector is intended to be installed on cell phones, television sets as well as computers.
“We want telecom companies to have ‘software filters’ which can track and block public access to ‘pornographic material’. In countries like China, Korea and Rwanda, this software is successful,” the Minister said
Red Pepper online has made research on the software that can be used to detect pornography on phones and here are some of the options ;
Belkasoft Evidence Center
The Forensic Studio Ultimate edition of Belkasoft Evidence Center comes with the ability to automatically detect human faces and pornographic content in still images and video files.
The ability to automatically find pornography in multimedia files such as pictures and videos is a signature feature of Forensic Studio Ultimate compared to Standard and Professional editions.
With Belkasoft Evidence Center Ultimate, forensic specialists can find pornography in pictures and video files in a fully automated way.
When scanning the disk, the tool will automatically create a list of still images and video files with pornographic content, and will turn lengthy videos into snapshot galleries of still images by extracting key frames, helping forensic specialists to speed up the investigation a great deal by quickly glancing over detected evidence instead of spending time reviewing each of the many video files.
In addition, Forensic Studio Ultimate can discover scanned or photographed documents by detecting the presence of text in the images.
Belkasoft Evidence Center employs a neural network algorithm to detect human faces and find pornographic content.
While it is not yet possible to create a 100% perfect algorithm, we come very close to detecting most pornographic images and video files captured in reasonable lighting conditions with very few false positives and extremely small change of missed evidence.
At the time of the writing, the chance of missing a file containing evidence during automatic porn detection is 4.96%, while the chance of a false positive (reporting pornographic content on a file without it) is about 16.31%.
Please note that any of the following conditions will reduce the chance of successful porn detection:
Poor lighting conditions and night vision devices
No or little skin tones appearing in the image
Heavy post-processing, special effects, monochrome or black-and-white conversion
To help forensic specialists discover more evidence, Belkasoft Evidence Center assigns a scoring factor to each image or video file. Evidence can be sorted by that score factor by clicking thePorn probability column. The most suspicious images will appear in the beginning of the list.
Note: key frame extraction must be performed first before detecting pornography in video files.
Finding images containing scanned or photographed documents is yet another ability of Belkasoft Evidence Center.
By activating image-specific analysis, investigators can automatically locate pictures, photos and images containing scanned documents and photographed text.
This feature is often used by corporate security specialists, helping to prevent or investigate information leaks and security breaches.
Snitch Plus
Snitch can detect and remove porn and other unwanted material from your computer’s hard drives using ‘smart’ drive scanning and cleaning technology.
More than 40 file properties are analysed to help find and identify adult content inside images, movies and other files.
Wide range of file types detected
Snitch uses a sophisticated package of specialized search algorithms to scan your computer for inappropriate files. These algorithms are optimized to detect the majority of files that cause concern. File types detected include images (various types), movies (various types), audio files(various types), suspicious internet activity, internet cookies, as well as renamed files, files with obscene or suspicious filenames. With User-Defined searches, Snitch can be customized to detect specific types of files as well.
Second Generation SkinScan™ Technology
Snitch can detect images containing nudity with its proprietary image processing technology, and then sort the results by ‘suspiciousness’. This allows easy location of pornography and other adult material. Recovered files can easily be deleted from the system.
Browse movie and image thumbnails
Quickly determine suitability of detected images and movies by browsing through them using pages of small images or ‘thumbnails’. Questionable images can be enlarged to full screen for further inspection.
User Interface Enhancements
The Snitch user interface has been enhanced for easier operation, with extra features including Save / Load result sets, abiltity to pause a scan to review results and then resume scanning, additional file copy / delete functions, right-click menus, etc.
Keyword Analysis
Snitch incorporates a vastly expanded database of keywords that can be used to enhance search results. Filenames can be checked for the presence of keywords, text based files and documents can be scanned for contained keywords, and the results can be used to boost the suspiciousness rating of files.
Interactive deletion of offending articles
Deletion of undesirable files and internet results could not be easier. Results can be added, within the Snitch interface, to a deletion list. At the completion of result viewing, the selected items are permanently deleted with the press of a single button.
‘Safe Files’ and ‘Safe Folders’
The user is now able to add files to a ‘safe file’ list which flags them as safe and prevents them from appearing in results in future scans. This is useful in speeding up scanning and saves the user from reviewing of files that are known to be OK. The user is also able to save time by excluding specified folders from future scans if they are known to be clean.
Simple one-button operation
Snitch is simple to operate for users who are unfamiliar with computers. With the press of a button, Snitch will automatically scan the target computer using the most common settings, and return results without user intervention.
Password Protect Snitch
The user can set Snitch to require a password before use, to prevent unauthorized access by third parties.
Paraben’s Porn Detection Stick
Paraben’s Porn Detection Stick is a thumb drive device that will search through all the images on your computer, scan them for pornographic content, and create a report of suspected pornographic images.
It even scans deleted images and Internet cache files so there’s no hiding Internet activity.
This means even if Internet Explorer cache files are deleted, many images can still be recovered and scanned for pornography.
Best of all, no software is installed on the target machine so they don’t know you’ve performed a search. You can even securely delete objectionable images. ”
Protect your computer from unwanted pornography. Someone doesn’t have to be seeking out pornographic images to contaminate your computer. In fact, many porn sites contain harmful viruses that can do more damage. The Porn Detection Stick offers you peace of mind that your system is clean of unwanted illicit or even illegal images.
Product Features:
Portable
Because the porn detection software is embedded in a USB thumb drive, you can easily take it anywhere and use it on any computer you own.
Fast
A search of a 500 GB hard drive with over 70,000 images takes only about an hour and a half. Imagine how much time it would take you to manually find and search that many images.
Accurate
The Porn Detection Stick uses advanced image analyzing algorithms that categorize images as potentially harmful by identifying facial features, flesh tone colors, image back grounds, body part shapes, and more. With less than 1% false positive indications, your search for contamination on your computer won’t waste your time.
Deleted Data & Internet Activity Scans
Looking in places you wouldn’t be able to makes the Porn Detection Stick very thorough. Even if images are deleted or Internet history is cleared, you can still recover and scan deleted images and Internet activity making your scans much more effective than manual searches for pornography.
Blue Coat K9 Web Protection
K9 Web Protection by Blue Coat is one of the most popular free software to block porn and other unwanted contents on the Internet.
It is basically a local web filter that runs on port 2572 that scans for every URL that you visit on your web browser and taking necessary actions based on the rules.
When you access a website that belongs to a blocked category, an alert page will be loaded instead with the option of allowing this site or category if you know the password.
Although K9 Web Protection installer is only 1.9MB in size, but it is packed with features such as selecting the categories to block, implementing time restrictions, always allow and block list, URL keywords and forcing safe search option in search engines.
You can also view what URLs that has been visited so you know what websites your children are visiting
Because K9 Web Protection runs as a local filter, it will work on any web browsers. It runs without any tray icon at the notification area and it is not possible to terminate the k9filter.exe using Task Manager.
Disabling or uninstalling the program will require a valid password. If you forget the password, there is an option at the uninstaller to send a temporary password to your email that is registered with your protection license.
The best part is, even if your child somehow knew the password and uninstalled the program from their computer, you will receive an email notification informing you about it.
Qustodio
Other than just filtering bad websites, Qustodio parental control software comes with an additional capability of monitoring your children’s social interactions, listing searches, apps usage and web activity.
Qustodio configuration is done on the web and the settings are automatically sync to the computer.
By logging in to the family protection portal, you get to view the activity summary and timeline, and configure the rules & settings.
You can either select block, allow or monitor on the website categories, adding custom exceptions, blocking unknown websites that cannot be categorized, and also enforcing safe search.
You can also enable scheduling to set a limit for your child to use the Internet.
It has strong protection against tampering where even advanced users won’t be able to bypass the filtering and limits.
During installation, it will ask to install a safety toolbar and changing your default search provider.
You can uncheck both of the options then click Accept and Install button because Qustodio does not need both of that to function.
Weirdly, you also have the option to hide Qustodio from computer during installation but we could not find a way to re-enable that option when the program is installed.
PicBlock
PicBlock is an innovative porn blocking tool where it uses keywords and image detection algorithm to recognize the availability of nudity on the website or even on hard drive and then blocks it.
When your child visits any website, PicBlock will first scan for any sexually explicit keywords on the URL and webpage.
The page will be blocked if there are found keywords but if none, it uses a secondary method which is scanning the images on the webpage for possible nudity and then blurring it by pixelating the photo.
PicBlock comes with self defense and invisibility feature. In at Settings, you can find the ability to password protect the program and also to run it in silent mode where only a shortcut key can launch the settings window
PicBlock clams to be able to detect pornographic images on the hard drive as well but unfortunately it doesn’t work very well in Windows 7.
The blocked images doesn’t show up as thumbnail, but can still be opened with an image viewer.
Moreover there are periodic crashes on Explorer and Task Manager.
The more tech savvy child may be able to bypass PicBlock by simply terminating the process with Task Manager or just uninstall it.