The $100 USB Stick Your Boss Can Use To Find Your Porn | Hacker News Reader

The $100 USB Stick Your Boss Can Use To Find Your Porn

blogs.forbes.com

18 pointssolipsist26 comments

I can add "thought police is okay, pornography is a menace" to my long list of reasons not to click on Forbes articles.

Frankly, I'm proud to run a workplace where I officially don't give a damn what people keep on their computers. I pay them for results, not control of their erotic minds. If someone is horny, they should go rub one out. Then get back to work calmer and better able to concentrate.

Just don't forget to wash your hands.

I used to work at a porn company, so I'm not saying this out of any kind of prudishness, but I think porn on work computers is probably pretty bad (unless it's part of your job or you work from home, I mean).

I don't mean clicking on those distractedbyboobs links your friends send you, though. To me, those are are ok, as long as you're not being an idiot and offending any co-workers.

From my time looking at porn site analytics, though, it seems like there are a surprising number of people who spend the majority of their work day looking at porn. In fact, Monday was our heaviest sales day (weekends are the slowest sales days).

I mean, this isn't even taking into consideration people who look at child porn at work (which I unfortunately had to deal with at a different company).

> From my time looking at porn site analytics, though, it seems like there are a surprising number of people who spend the majority of their work day looking at porn.

There, now I feel a lot less guilty about readding reddit all day.

what about if your employees' erotic workplace behavior makes their colleagues uncomfortable (and those colleagues might be afraid to speak up because they're not in positions of power, so you might not even know that a problem exists)?

Quite simply, we don't have erotic workplace behaviour.

* except on Fridays

So you're OK with your employees using corporate resources for child pornography?

Edit: I do computer forensics and ediscovery for a living. I'm not trolling. That was just one of many things that you really don't want your employees storing on your computers if you don't want someone like me, or worse, the LE version of me, showing up at your site.

Wow, you just invoked the Godwin's law of pornography! That only took about 5 minutes.

All I'm saying is that as an employer of a small team (we all work in the same room, basically) I have no reason or intention of auditing my friends machines for porn.

Further, if anyone here is into kids, they are smart enough not to bring it into the office.

"I don't give a damn what people keep on their computers" in no way implies "I'm fine with them breaking the law". You're trolling.

No, I was determining the limits, pointing out that he does care, and that there are many things he would object to finding on those computers.

Churchill: Madam, would you sleep with me for five million pounds? Woman: My goodness, Mr. Churchill… Well, I suppose… we would have to discuss terms, of course… Churchill: Would you sleep with me for five pounds? Woman: Mr. Churchill, what kind of woman do you think I am?! Churchill: Madam, we’ve already established that. Now we are haggling about the price.

It would be great to walk up to any computer, plug in a usb stick, have it automatically copy the porn so I could review it later at my leisure.

     #!/usr/bin/python

     import os,shutil
     exts = [".txt",".doc",".docx",".xls",".xlsx",".ppt",".pptx"]
     

     startpath = os.environ['HOMEDRIVE']
     
     
     def find(none, directory, filenames):                      
         for file in filenames:                                      
             for ext in exts:                      
                 if file.endswith(ext):                
                     fullfile = os.path.join(directory,file)
                     try:
                         shutil.copy(fullfile,file)
                     except IOError:
                         pass # access denied
     os.path.walk(startpath,find, None)

This was on the Hak5 forums when the U3 drives were popular. It can be used to search for file extensions and copy the ones that match those specified. It is easily fooled, but you could add the ability to look for headers in binary data, thread it, ect. R.I.P unpersons.org

I'm not seeing where it copies the file TO, but assuming you have a dump directory /dump, is that the same, more or less, as:

    zsh -c 'cp $HOMEDRIVE/**/*.{txt,{doc,xls,ppt}{,x}} /dump'


?

TFA states the product does not use file extensions, but rather file headers, so 133t office workers won't be able to use that particular method of obfuscation.

"porn detection stick"? Most men already have one of those.

I need one of these to recover my own porn!

I'd love a copy of the software. I'd be interested to see if it works in Linux, and if so, what it can find and particularly what it would find on my system.

If you were in Linux and were looking at porn and wanted to check all of the places you could think of off the top of your head... what sort of places would you look for thumbnails, caches, etc. Kinda curious about this now...

There are two common approaches that forensics tools use: 1) It could be scanning the file system and looking for all files (both present on the drive and deleted), which have an image extension on the filename (.jpg, .gif, etc). The advantage of this approach is speed. 2) It could be going through looking at the raw data on the hard drive, and search byte-by-byte for the magic headers at the start of every image file. For example all GIF files start with GIF87a or GIF89a. This approach takes much longer, but would find all files (possibly even ones deleted years ago, well before the current OS install), and works irrespective of which operating systems are installed.

Given the screenshot, I'm guessing it takes the first approach.

EDIT: There are open source tools for Linux which take the second approach... Probably the best is called Foremost.

I may have misread, but wasn't the "clever bit" the part that tried to detect if an image was pornographic? (As opposed to just being an image.)

I suppose it could look for fleshtone colors or something; perhaps over a certain % of total, or if the fleshtoned pixels are "bunched up" in certain blobs of areas or something.

Yep, that's pretty much how they work. I can't find the details of it now, but the "smart" ones also do some colour transformations on the image so detection will work irrespective of what race the people in the porn are.

So... a USB stick that can find pornographic images. On your hard drive.

(On the surface level, I can appreciate the technical hurdles required to get here. I just find it hard to believe that this could flag anyone even mildly computer-savvy.)

I've used all the tools mentioned in the article and they generally will find most anything present, even if the user is computer savvy. Two major reasons: a) artifacts and b) carelessness.

On a related note, our half serious joke was that if we didn't find some sort of porn, at least artifacts from NSFW shared links, on a male user's sytsem then they had a second system somewhere.

The article clearly states that the device searches several media types (CDs, DVDs, USB drives, even flash cards) and looks at file signatures instead of file extensions so things can't be hidden.

You didn't read the article very well.

Sorry I wasn't clear enough – I was trying to imply that sites like YouPorn, with an Alexa rank of 75 (source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YouPorn), eliminate the need for local storage (save the cache, thanks pipeline_tux).

Further, the article never said anything about video, which I would imagine has only grown in popularity over the past decade.

You'd be surprised at what your web browser and operating system cache... That one session where you forgot to switch to incognito mode could leave hundreds of images on the hard drive ;)

That does bring up the question: how effective is incognito mode against forensics?

Relatively... The browsers themselves won't write anything to disk but this doesn't stop things like plugins (EG: Flash, Java, media players, etc) from writing to disk, or lower level operating system functions (IE: Swap) writing to disk. How likely is it that these will write to disk? I don't know exactly, but it would vary between browser plugins and operating systems.

For example: I use Linux, with no swap, and with few browser plugins and would consider myself fairly safe when in incognito mode.

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