

Federal officers use video game console to catch child pornographers - billclerico
http://www.axcessnews.com/index.php/articles/show/id/19037?31

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camccann
This part made me chuckle a bit:

 _What other systems don't have, however, is adaptability. Condon said that,
unlike its fellow next-generation gaming machines, the PS3 lets users install
Linux, a free, open-source operating system.

[...]

Unfortunately for ICE, the new slim-PS3 won't suffice.

"The newer PS3s have been restricted, locked down, so you can't put Linux on
them," Condon said._

Oh dear, the slashdot thread practically writes itself...

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mistermann
What a total nonsense article. No mention of rainbow tables which could
probably crack the passwords of 90% of the dreaded child pornographers in
seconds with any machine. Indirection if you ask me.

Remember Jaycee Lee Dugard? From
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kidnapping_of_Jaycee_Lee_Dugard...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kidnapping_of_Jaycee_Lee_Dugard#Missed_opportunities_to_rescue_Dugard)

"On April 22, 1992, less than a year after her kidnapping, a male caller
reported to the Contra Costa County Sheriff's Department that he saw a girl
who closely resembled Dugard staring intently at a missing child flyer of
herself in a gas station in Oakley, California, less than two miles from the
Garridos' home. The caller, who left no name, reported seeing her leave in a
large yellow van, which matches the description of an old yellow Dodge van
that was recovered from the Garrido property in 2009. The license plate was
not reported and the sighting was investigated only cursorily.[32]"

"In 2006 one of Garrido's neighbors called 9-1-1 to inform them there were
tents in the backyard with children living there and that Garrido was
"psychotic" with sexual addictions. A deputy sheriff spoke with Garrido at the
front of the house for about thirty minutes and left after telling him there
would be a code violation if people were living outside on the property. After
Dugard was found in August 2009 the local police issued an apology."

If the "police" __really __cared about this type of thing, they wouldn't have
the person with seniority in their division fuddling around with PS3's. This
type of story is just to make the public feel good about what is being done.
If their goal was to actually catch people, they'd approach legitimate
"hackers" and make them an offer they can't refuse, but instead, they must
give these types of jobs to people with union seniority, who are of course the
ones that know almost nothing about it.

~~~
smanek
Rainbow tables are useless against any marginally modern crypto scheme (e.g.,
any that has a salt). I imagine a child pornographer (if they were using
crypto at all) would likely use some simple off-the shelf software like
Truecrypt - which is essentially uncrackable.

And what's the point of that really long anecdote? I don't see how that
relates to this article ...

------
ryanwaggoner
I'd really like to know if they have had any success with this. The article
says they can try 4 million passwords per second, though it's not clear if
that's per machine or for all 20 machines that they currently have. They also
state that a six-digit password has 256^6 possible combinations, or 282
trillion. 282 trillion combinations at 4 million / second is still more than 2
years, but I'm guessing that they're smart about how they apply the algorithm
since most of the characters in a password probably fall within a set of 100
more common characters. Throw 20 machines at it and get smarter about your
guesses and I'm sure that gets down to maybe a few days, but what about 10 or
12 digit passwords? Just wondering if this has been at all effective.

~~~
noonespecial
My guess is that they're actually using dictionary (or pre-generated rainbow
tables with near words) attacks.

Pedophiles don't tend to be the sharpest tools in the shed so I'm guessing
dictionary words do the trick 90% of the time.

When in doubt make your password something like j3vm#sdq-oj3ew7!d. I call it
an "8 by 8" and have committed myself to memorizing a bunch of them for
everyday use.

~~~
camccann
_Pedophiles don't tend to be the sharpest tools in the shed so I'm guessing
dictionary words do the trick 90% of the time._

You know, users in _general_ don't tend to do very well at picking passwords.
The great success story of educating users on password strength is that, after
years of telling people to use both numbers and letters, the most popular
password went from being "password" to "password1".

Not to mention that it's probably unwise to assume that criminals of any sort
"don't tend to be the sharpest tools in the shed". Maybe it's true, maybe not,
but underestimating an adversary's competence is _asking_ for trouble.

------
jerf
What's the equivalent performance you could get from a modern $300 nVidia
graphics card? Serious question, as I have no way of guessing, though I have a
hard time imagining the modern nVidia won't spank the PS3 every which way. (Or
possibly two $150 cards.)

I suspecte somebody's playing up the PS3 angle for publicity, the only
question is whether it's the FBI or Sony.

~~~
mukyu
Without knowing what they consider a password, it is hard to tell.

Even though the Cell processors and GPUs are similar, they both do have
different strengths still. There exist password systems that would get
miserable performance on either or both.

------
JeffL
What's funny is that game consoles are usually subsidized by the makers,
hoping to make their profit on the games. Not positive about PS3, but that's
probably why they're getting such a cheap computer for this purpose.

------
NathanKP
I felt that this was a well-written article but the ending feels like a
pathetic stab at.... humor?

 _Despite having so many PS3s at their disposal, both Skinner and Davenport
said agents have resisted the temptation to play video games on the consoles._

