Microsoft invests significantly into fighting this filth. Don't let someone's news agenda lead you into false conclusions.
People in companies that track this stuff down get special hash lists from certain law enforcement agencies and the evidence itself is pretty much a controlled substance; so they need special authorization to safely handle and report it with a chain of custody. Two Microsoft employees got PTSD because of the large amount of data they had to check:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/01/12/two-former-micro...
I knew a lawyer who had to defend someone in this type of case. He was allowed to view the evidence (he chose not to), but only him. No paralegals, no one else in his office that wasn't directly sitting on the defense table.
If you're not granted specific authorization, even looking at this content is illegal, so Microsoft, Facebook, Apple, Google, etc have a very limited staff of people who are even authorized to handle this stuff.
It's a difficult problem.
Edit: to be completely clear, PhotoDNA isn't a cryptographic hash. It's a hash function that maximizes similarity of hashes based on inputs, and is probably closer to a bloom filter in some respects.
> If you're not granted specific authorization, even looking at this content is illegal, so Microsoft, Facebook, Apple, Google, etc have a very limited staff of people who are even authorized to handle this stuff.
With the risk of offending folks, this is such a retarded law/process. Holy fuck. This is dystopian-level letter of the law vs spirit of the law.
We don't make footage of car hackings illegal to own, why should this be any different?
At the end of the day, the harm is already done, no point causing more.
1. "Google does it better than Bing"
Google unfortunately does it better than Bing by censoring all searches. It has been impossible to turn off safesearch on Google for many years (the "filter explicit results" setting only switches between soft and hard filtering). This has a positive outcome in this situation, but also greatly degrades the quality of available results in other cases.
2. Omegle?
The article mention Omegle's role very explicitly, however it reserves all of its vitriol for Microsoft specifically. Why? Omegle and the other platforms that are actually producing, hosting and facilitating the origination of this disgusting content should be the ones that have to get their shit together, or in some cases be persecuted. But Microsoft is a "juicier" target.
3 "even people not seeking this kind of disgusting imagery could be led to it"
They turned off SafeSearch, as clearly seen in the article's illustrative screenshot. This is a sleazy statement meant to whip people into a frenzy.
4. "Microsoft must" "human moderators" "underfunding" "another example of tech companies refusing (...)"
The article explicitly orders people, over and over, to be outraged, despite Microsoft's prompt and appropriate response, and makes assumptions that are unconfirmed or untrue.
TechCrunch's conduct here was not great - it seems to me like they handled the situation in such a way that showed their only aim was to attract clicks, rather than get the problem resolved promptly. It was tabloid behavior.
It's bad not because they're ignoring it, instead it's bad because they're just not particularly competent?