Despite Ashley Madison furore, our view of infidelity has not always been fixed

caught by Captblack76/shutterstock.com

When in 2010 I interviewed Noel Biderman, founder of infidelity website Ashley Madison, he said: “It’s easy to vilify me. But I’m not doing anything wrong. I didn’t invent infidelity.” He had a point, though at the time the moral outrage generated by the site suggested that Biderman had not only invented adultery, but all the evil in the internet too.

Five years on, and his website – and attitude – has spectacularly backfired following a hack that has outed personal details of its members and corporate emails. The outrage value of unprincipled web businesses has certainly dwindled – and within the internet’s wild west of trolling, pornography, cyberbullying, celebrity promotion, ungrammatical communication and hook-up apps, Ashley Madison seems positively tame. Who cares about some largely North American adulterers and their kinks? Arranging an affair through a dating site is pretty vanilla compared to a lot of what goes on. And mainstream dating sites like OkCupid and Match are perfectly good for cheaters too.

And yet Ashley Madison has never stopped being deeply contentious. Failed attempts to float on the New York and London stock exchanges suggested moral recoil on the part of bankers, a group hardly known for their disdain of smut. And so it fell to a group calling themselves Impact Team to reveal the site’s secrets with the moralising zeal of the righteous. Or the wronged – it’s suggested that the hackers had assistance from a disgruntled ex-Ashley Madison employee.

“Time’s up!” the hackers announced when Ashley Madison and its two sister companies remained in business after a warning. “We have explained the fraud, deceit, and stupidity of ALM and their members. Now everyone gets to see their data.” Data, the new private parts, was duly exposed, with women told: “Chances are your man signed up on the world’s biggest affair site, but never had one. He just tried to. If that distinction matters.”

Marital infidelity brings people including, apparently, hackers, to the very highest pitches of moral indignation – even today, in a world where teenage daughters and sons may well make contributions to amateur pornography websites. So outrageous is the idea of being cheated on – and so staunchly moral – that adultery would seem a universal, timeless evil. But a look at 20th-century history, at least in Britain, suggests that infidelity was not always the worst thing that could happen to a marriage.

In fact, as leading social and cultural historian Professor Claire Langhamer makes clear, perceptions of the wrongness of affairs are linked to changes in attitudes to relationships in the post-war period. The more marriage became tethered to love, with sex its crowning glory, the more fidelity mattered. At the same time, the arrival of the contraceptive pill in the 1960s and no-fault divorce led to a more sexually-oriented, exploratory approach to relationships. Yet as Langhamer argues, even as attitudes grew more permissive, with experimentation before and during marriage becoming more common, attitudes towards infidelity hardened.

So does the tsunami of personal and marital nightmares unleashed by the data from a site like Ashley Madison being made public mean that modern relationships are too close, or endowed with too much importance? Would it be better for cheaters and their spouses if relationships were more economic and pragmatic, and less territorial and sexualised? Perhaps.

It might also be better if we saw a renewal of the art of discretion – itself a kind of pragmatism in a digitised age where commercial promises of security can be so quickly overturned. Here the hackers of Ashley Madison make a good point: the site said all its user information was deleted – and it wasn’t.

Looking back to mid-20th-century Britain, a female volunteer from the sociolological Mass Observer project put the central, and perhaps distinctly British, role of keeping schtum instead of open censorship (or open admission) when she said:

I would never have foreseen … that I would be involved in a significant number of extra-marital affairs or that they would prove part of the life experience of most (not all) of my family and friends … Such relationships were still spoken about in a whisper, behind closed doors, shocking. Yet my own family was quite considerably rattled by a quasi-affair of my father’s: muttered about, hinted about, never pronounced openly.

Adultery is not likely to stop because people say it’s bad. Internet dating sites must learn to guarantee that private actions are “never pronounced openly” – in failing to do so, Ashley Madison has got its comeuppance. As for its customers’ best-laid plans, I’ll leave that to you to judge.

Windows 95 turns 20 – and new ways of interacting show up desktop's age

Windows 95 and DOS6: actual museum pieces. m01229, CC BY

The arrival of Microsoft Windows 95 on August 24 1995 brought about a desktop PC boom. With an easier and more intuitive graphical user interface than previous versions it appealed to more than just business, and Bill Gates’ stated aim of one PC per person per desk was set in motion. This was a time of 320Mb hard drives, 8Mb RAM and 15” inch CRT monitors. For most home users, the internet had only just arrived.

Windows 95 introduced the start menu, powered by a button in the bottom-left corner of the desktop. This gives a central point of entry into menus from which to choose commands and applications. The simplicity of this menu enables users to easily find commonly used documents and applications. All subsequent versions of Windows have kept this menu, with the notable exception of Windows 8, a change which prompted an enormous backlash.

We take these intuitive graphic interfaces for granted today, but earlier operating systems such as DOS and CP/M allowed the user to interact using only typed text commands. This all changed in the 1970s, with Ivan Sutherland’s work with Sketchpad and the use of lightpens to control CRT displays, Douglas Engelbart’s development of the computer mouse, and the Xerox PARC research team’s creation of the Windows Icon Menu Pointer graphical interfaces paradigm (WIMP) – the combination of mouse pointer, window and icons that remains standard to this day. By the early 1980s, Apple had developed graphical operating systems for its Lisa (released 1983) and Macintosh (1984) computers, and Microsoft had released Windows (1985).

DOS - these were not good old days. Krzysztof Burghardt

Imagining a desktop

All these interfaces rely on the central idea of the desktop, a comprehensible metaphor for a computer. We work with information in files and organise them in folders, remove unwanted information to the trash can, and note something of interest with a bookmark.

Metaphors are useful. They enable users to grasp concepts faster, but rely on the metaphor remaining comprehensible to the user and useful for the designer and programmer putting it into effect – without stretching it beyond belief. The advantage is that the pictures used to represent functions (icons) look similar to those in the workplace, and so the metaphor is readily understandable.

Breaking windows

But 20 years after Windows 95, the world has changed. We have smartphones and smart televisions, we use the internet prolifically for practically everything. Touchscreens are now almost more ubiquitous than the classic mouse-driven interface approach, and screen resolution is so high individual pixels can be difficult to see. We still have Windows, but things are changing. Indeed, they need to change.

The desktop metaphor has been the metaphor of choice for so long, and this ubiquity has helped computers find a place within households as a common, familiar tool rather than as specialist, computerised equipment. But is it still appropriate? After all, few of us sit in an office today with paper-strewn desks; books are read on a tablet or phone rather than hard-copies; printing emails is discouraged; most type their own letters and write their own emails; files are electronic not physical; we search the internet for information rather than flick through reference books; and increasingly the categorisation and organisation of data has taken second place to granular search.

Mouse-driven interfaces rely on a single point of input, but we’re increasingly seeing touch-based interfaces that accept swipes, touches and shakes in various combinations. We are moving away from the dictatorship of the mouse pointer. Dual-finger scrolling and pinch-to-zoom are new emerging metaphors – natural user interfaces (NUI) rather than graphical user interfaces.

What does the next 20 years hold?

It’s hard to tell but one thing that is certain is that interfaces will make use of more human senses to display information and to control the computer. Interfaces will become more transparent, more intuitive and less set around items such as boxes, arrows or icons. Human gestures will be more commonplace. And such interfaces will be incorporated into technology throughout the world, through virtual reality and augmented reality.

These interfaces will be appear and feel more natural. Some suitable devices already exist, such as ShiverPad, that provide shear forces on surfaces that provide a frictional feel to touch devices. Or Geomagic’s Touch X (formerly the Sensible Phantom Desktop) that delivers three-dimensional forces to make 3D objects feel solid.

Airborne haptics are another promising technology that develop tactile interfaces in mid-air. Through ultrasound, users can feel acoustic radiation fields that emanate from devices, without needing to touch any physical surface. Videogame manufacturers have led the way with these interfaces, including the Microsoft Kinect and Hololens that allow users to use body gestures to control the interface, or with their eyes through head-mounted displays.

Once interaction with a computer or device can be commanded using natural gestures, movements of the body or spoken commands, the necessity for the Windows-based metaphor of computer interaction begins to look dated – as old as it is.

Here's why the Greenwich Prime Meridian is actually in the wrong place

Out of line Sameer Walzade/flickr, CC BY-NC-ND

If you’ve ever been to the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, London, it might come as a shock to learn that the Prime Meridian line located there is in the wrong place. In fact, it’s out by about 100 metres.

Since the late 19th century, the Greenwich Meridian has been the line at which most maps mark 0° longitude, the starting point for measuring geographical coordinates in an east-west direction. But we now know that the line, a physical representation of which is visited by thousands of tourists every year, should more precisely be 0.001472° (or 102.5 m) further east.

How did the Victorian astronomers who created the Meridian get their calculations wrong? It comes down to the fact that the Earth is not a perfect sphere. In order to determine the precise angle at which to position the line as it ran through the Greenwich Observatory, its creators used early instruments that were aimed vertically at what are called “clock-stars” in the night sky. These are the brighter stars, whose positions have been observed over long periods of time and can be used as reference points in the sky.

To find the exact vertical direction (a line pointing at the precise centre of the Earth’s mass) the Observatory’s astronomers first found the exact horizontal direction (at 90° to the vertical) by looking at the surface of a pool of mercury in a basin.

Pointing at the stars Andres Rueda/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY

This method, however, assumed that the Earth’s gravitational force that created the horizontal surface on the mercury was both uniform and straight down. But because the Earth is not perfectly round and local gravitational forces vary with terrain, the surface of the mercury at Greenwich was not precisely horizontal relative to the centre of the Earth’s mass. As a result, the vertical line to the stars and therefore the meridian line on the ground were slightly skewed.

Today, we have the significant advantage of access to the satellite-based Global Positioning System (GPS), which does not rely on the Earth’s varying gravitational force and uses a more accurate method to calculate the centre of the planet’s mass. This has enabled scientists to determine the true vertical direction and in doing so produced a new meridian slightly to the east of the old one. Because the Earth isn’t a perfect sphere, it was impossible to simply move the new line over and maintain an accurate coordinate system.

Does it matter?

So what are the implications of this apparent inaccuracy, particularly given that it is the location from where every place on Earth is measured and from which all clocks are ultimately set? Fortunately, the answer is none, really.

We must remember that the position of the Prime Meridian is actually rather arbitrary and could theoretically be located anywhere. Its location through Greenwich was agreed at the International Meridian Conference of 1884 because it was the most popular candidate. Before this point, roughly ten other prime meridians were also in use, including ones through various other cities including Paris and Cadiz.

Because all important scientific measurements are today made using GPS and not the original location of the Greenwich Meridian, the impact of the error is actually minimal. Arguably, the main issues are confined to the Royal Observatory itself and how it plans to address the issue at the tourist site. There is certainly an argument for a new marker at the “true” Prime Meridian 102m to the east (although being set in one of London’s heavily regulated Royal Parks might make this somewhat problematic).

And where should we envisage the true Prime Meridian? Certainly, the new location is the more accurate line and the one that will be used in the future. But we shouldn’t forget the groundbreaking work that was conducted by scientists in centuries past with only limited tools. The fact that the two lines are just 100m apart is testament to their hard work and ingenuity and so disregarding the old line would be disrespectful. The old line will remain a historic and scientific curiosity, while the new one will allow for ever more accurate navigation within the Earth’s terrestrial, oceanic and atmospheric system.

The search for 'dark matter' and 'dark energy' just got interesting

We are a big step closer to tracking down what's hiding in galaxy clusters like Abell 2218. NASA/ESA via wikipedia

Only about 5% of the universe consists of ordinary matter such as protons and electrons, with the rest being filled with mysterious substances known as dark matter and dark energy. So far, scientists have failed to detect these elusive materials, despite spending decades searching for them. But now, two new studies may be able to turn things around as they have narrowed down the search significantly.

Shedding light on dark matter

Dark matter was first proposed more than 70 years ago to explain why the force of gravity in galaxy clusters is so much stronger than expected. If the clusters contained only the stars and gas we observe, their gravity should be much weaker, leading scientists to assume there is some sort of matter hidden there that we can’t see. Such dark matter would provide additional mass to these large structures, increasing their gravitational pull. The main contender for the substance is a type of hypothetical particle known as a “weakly interacting massive particle” (WIMP).

To probe the nature of dark matter, physicists look for evidence of its interactions beyond gravity. If the WIMP hypothesis is correct, dark matter particles could be detected through their scattering off atomic nuclei or electrons on Earth. In such “direct” detection experiments, a WIMP collision would cause these charged particles to recoil, producing light that we can observe.

One of the main direct detection experiments in operation today is XENON100, which has just reported its latest results. The detector is located deep underground to reduce interference from cosmic rays, at the Gran Sasso laboratory in Italy. It consists of a 165kg container of liquid xenon, which is highly purified to minimise contamination. The detector material is surrounded by arrays of photomultiplier tubes (PMTs) to capture the light from potential WIMP interactions.

The new XENON100 report has found no evidence of WIMPs scattering off electrons. Although this is a negative result, it rules out many so-called “leptophilic” models that predict frequent interactions between dark matter and electrons.

But the most important consequence of the XENON100 analysis is with regards to the controversial claim of dark matter detection by researchers at the DAMA/LIBRA experiment in Italy, which is in conflict with the results from many other detectors such as the Cryogenic Dark Matter Search. Leptophilic dark matter was proposed as a viable explanation for this discrepancy since exclusions from other experiments would not directly apply. However, the new results from XENON100 firmly rule out this possibility.

Chasing chameleons

Meanwhile, dark energy explains our observation that the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate. Unlike normal matter, dark energy has a negative pressure, which allows gravity to be repulsive, driving the galaxies apart. One of the most promising dark energy candidates is a so-called “chameleon field”.

In many dark energy models, we would expect to see significant effects on both laboratory and cosmological scales. However, the attractive feature of a chameleon field is that its impact depends on the environment. At small scales, such as on Earth, the density of matter is high and the field is effectively “screened out”, allowing chameleons to evade our detectors. However, in the vacuum of space, the matter density is tiny and the field can drive the cosmic acceleration.

The vacuum chamber of the atom interferometer. Holger Muller photo., CC BY

Until now, experiments have only used relatively large detectors, failing to observe chameleons as the density of matter is too high. However, it was recently proposed that an “atom interferometer”, operating on microscopic scales, could be used to search for chameleons. This consists of an ultra-high vacuum chamber containing individual atoms and simulates the low-density conditions of empty space so that screening is reduced.

In the second report, researchers implement this idea for the first time. Their experiment works by dropping caesium atoms above an aluminium sphere. Using sensitive lasers, the researchers could then measure the forces on the atoms as they were in free fall. The results were perfectly consistent with only gravity and no chameleon-induced force. This implies that if chameleons exist, they must interact more weakly than we previous thought – narrowing the search for these particles by a thousand times compared to previous studies. The team are hoping that their innovative technique will help them to hunt down chameleons or other dark energy particles in a future experiment.

Both of these studies demonstrate how laboratory experiments can answer fundamental questions about the nature of the cosmos. But most importantly, they raise hope that we will one day track down these tantalising substances that make up a whopping 95% of our universe.

Why there must be freedom to publish flaws and security vulnerabilities

It's not just the badge that gets nicked. tedits, CC BY-ND

Two academics have been given permission to publish their security research which reveals vulnerabilities in a wireless car locking system. It comes two years after Volkswagen, one of the manufacturers using it, won a court injunction banning publication.

Despite a court order in its favour, Volkswagen has now allowed the report to be republished with only minor redactions. However the case reveals the tension between security researchers and software firms, or in this case the software used by car manufacturers. While some firms such as Facebook, Google and Microsoft offer financial rewards for those finding bugs, others such as Fiat Chrysler assert that such activity is criminal or as Volkswagen did, take it to the courts – while failing to address the highlighted problems that expose their customers to risks.

The car industry may feel bullied just now, but Volkswagen’s approach of using the courts to try to keep information about a key flaw under wraps is the equivalent of sticking your fingers in your ears and hoping everything will turn out well. This is a serious issue, one that is too important for the brute force of court rulings. In any case, the internet has little respect for national boundaries or court jurisdictions, and the information was available online regardless of the court’s ruling.

Knock knock, come in

The Megamos transponder wireless key. Verdult/Ege/Garcia

The encryption used in the Swiss-made Megamos transponder is so weak that an intruder needs only listen to two messages transmitted from the fob in order to crack the key. The vulnerability relates to the poor, proprietary cryptographic methods used by the device, where the researchers found they could generate the transponder’s 96-bit secret key and start the car in less than half an hour.

This vulnerability has been well known since 2012, and code to exploit the flaw has circulated online since 2009. Yet there has been no product recall of the dozens of models from Audi, Porsche, Bentley and Lamborghini, Nissan and Volvo it affects, and no patches released to fix its problems.

Vulnerable wireless keys are a growing problem. It is reported that 42% of all car break-ins in London were related to various wireless key access systems, particularly for high-value cars from BMW and Audi.

For example, the RollJam device can be bought online for £20 and opens many well-known brands of cars – it “jams” the wireless signal twice when the user uses their key, and then is able to grab the access code for the car. It also opens most garage doors and disables some alarm systems.

A universal canopener, the RollJam device opens cars easily. RollJam

Academic freedom vs industry interests

The researchers who have now been permitted to publish, Roel Verdult and Barıs Ege of Radboud University in the Netherlands and Flavoi D Garcia of the University of Birmingham, approached the manufacturer in May 2012, explaining that they intended to present their findings at the USENIX 2013 conference, giving the manufacturer plenty of time to produce a fix for the problem. Instead Volkswagen used the courts to block publication of the paper, pitting the prevention of the potential insecurity of Volkswagen cars against the freedom of academic publishing.

The scope of the patching required to fix Megamos’ problems would be enormous, as there is no simple update to replace the weak propriety cryptography at the heart of the problem. Clearly this was an incentive for Volkswagen to seek an injunction, but doing so hasn’t made the vehicles any more secure, nor has it prevented the information circulating on the internet.

Table of models affected (bold indicates models the researchers tested). Verdult/Ege/Garcia

Other manufacturers have been stung too – Ford recalled 433,000 Focus, C-MAX and Escape vehicles due to a software bug where drivers could not switch off their engines. And recently a security researcher showed how BMW cars could be breached by sending commands that told the cars to open their doors and lower their windows, leading BMW to issue a patch for over 2m BMW, Mini and Rolls-Royce vehicles.

But this case was avoidable: the Megamos vulnerability was one of poor design and implementation – using poor-quality, home-brewed encryption instead of one of the many common standards that would have proved far more impenetrable. This should have been reviewed as part of the due diligence process in evaluating the designs. Were they published, someone in the industry could have pointed out their flaws. Yet it’s this same process of research, publication and evaluation common in academia that Volkswagen tried to prevent.

This a sorry tale of responsible disclosure by academics followed by a gagging order, and ultimately for the problem to go unfixed. Unless the car industry takes this problem seriously, designs and tests systems properly before release then they will be weighed down by the costs of recall and repair and fines from regulators.

While some hunt vulnerabilities for glory, the researchers in this case were responsible and gave the companies involved a good amount of time to deal the problem before the paper was due to be published. While many in cryptography have faced pressures not to publish, such as government efforts to suppress Ron Rivest’s work on public key encryption, academic freedom to publish and review responsibly is a key part of how mistakes are discovered and how knowledge progresses.

How did Jupiter and Saturn form? The answer may lie with the humble pebble

We know exactly what it looks like but have been unable to explain how it came into being - until now. NASA, ESA, and A. Simon (Goddard Space Flight Center), CC BY-SA

After many decades of exploring the solar system, we still have much to learn about our closest celestial neighbours. One of the biggest remaining puzzles is how the giant gas planets managed to form in the early days of the solar system, with the leading theories suggesting that they could have formed by repeated collisions between objects about ten times smaller than our own moon.

Now a new model suggests they could have developed with the help of slowly forming, relatively small pebbles – a discovery that may help us answer a number of other questions about the planets.

There is a lot we actually do know about our solar system. The sun and its planets formed out of a cloud of gas and dust about 4.5 billion years ago. We can even watch this process in motion in other places in our galaxy. We also know that, once the pieces which eventually form the planets get to a certain size, they can grow by their gravitational pull on smaller objects – trapping them in unstable orbits before they eventually crash into the surface. Violent growth, but growth nonetheless.

But there is a big gap in the understanding of this process, and it’s how a disk of rotating gas and dust can possibly lead to the number of large and small planets that we see today. This is exactly the question that the new paper is trying to answer.

The interior of the gas giants RHorning/wikimedia

Over the past decade, scientists have proposed a number of models starting with the assumption that the gas and dust disk forms a bunch of small objects very quickly. If you run a simulation of this scenario (termed the “standard model” in the new study), you find that the dust is able to roll up into clumps, and from there into denser and denser objects until you wind up with something a few centimetres to a metre across. These objects, dubbed “pebbles” (yes, that’s the technical term) can all grow quite quickly and rapidly reach the mass of the Earth.

The problem is that if you assume that this is constantly happening, you wind up with way too many of these Earth-sized proto-planets. And having too many objects would result in them scattering off each other – ending up in crazy orbits that are no longer aligned with the disk surrounding the star.

The disk, however, is the only place where there is a lot of material for these proto-planets to continue growing, which they would need to do in order to form planets that look like Jupiter and Saturn. But in this model, their crazy orbits no longer take them through that material, meaning they stop growing. In this way our model solar system stalls out with a bunch of Earth-sized objects, and no gas giants.

This is a problem for our understanding of how the gas giants formed, because if you always end up forming 100 proto-Earths and no gas giant planets, then the model is clearly incomplete.

Artist’s impression of a giant gas exoplanet near our solar system. NASA, ESA, and G. Bacon (STScI), CC BY-SA

We also know that our solar system isn’t particularly unique; especially with the treasure trove of information that the planet-hunting Kepler satellite is feeding us, there are an increasing number of solar systems which appear to have a few giant planets further out, and smaller, (potentially) rocky planets closer in, just like ours. Cracking how gas giants form is therefore increasingly relevant.

Mystery solved?

So what is the solution to these problems? The new model suggests that instead of the disk of gas and dust forming into pebbles rapidly, the proto-planets might build up more slowly. And indeed, if the pebbles form less quickly, then the objects which grow from them are both less numerous and take much longer to grow.

The authors ran another simulation, this time with a slow addition of pebbles into the mix over time. This means that instead of the disk going granular all at once, the pebbles form gradually, here and there. This change allows the largest proto-planets to grow to much larger sizes. With this new model, the smallest objects are either captured by the larger ones, or scattered far away from the disk, which – as in the standard model – stops them from growing. Meanwhile, the largest few objects are able to grow faster and faster (limited largely by how slowly the pebbles are being formed), until they reach a point where they could plausibly go on to develop into a gas giant.

The details of the simulation will be refined as time goes on and computers are able to do more intensive calculations – but it is a promising start that this work has been able to reproduce a number of the features of our solar system, while avoiding some of the problems of the previous model. If these results hold, planetary scientists will be able to push forward, answering more detailed questions about how the planets moved to their current positions, or how and when the gas giants gained all their gas.

IWF's efforts to remove child porn from the web won't tackle paedophile networks -- but it's still important

IWF moves will control only the most visible child abuse images online. Cybercrime by hamburg_berlin/shutterstock.com

In the fight against the spread of child sexual abuse images on the web, the Internet Watch Foundation has announced that it is to share its database of digital signatures of images, known as the hash list, with internet giants Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Twitter and Yahoo.

This action follows David Cameron’s announcement of tougher measures to combat online child sexual abuse material at the #WePROTECT conference in November 2014.

The big question is whether this will make any great difference and, if so, why hasn’t it happened sooner?

The IWF and its critics

The Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) is a charity founded in 1996 to receive and act upon reports of images depicting the sexual abuse of children (mislabelled as child pornography) and those images of adult content that are deemed illegal in the UK. Funded by telecoms operators, software and hardware manufacturers and other organisations, the IWF’s role is officially outlined by a Memorandum of Understanding between the Crown Prosecution Service and the Association of Chief Police Officers, which protects IWF staff from prosecution. The IWF operates a reporting hotline service and directs law enforcement to illegal images it has assessed so that take-down notices can be issued and investigators can follow-up.

Over the past 20 years the IWF has been at the forefront of policing child sexual abuse and other extreme imagery, overseeing development of content rating systems and encouraging the development of similar practices in other countries. During this time, the IWF’s workload and need for its services have increased – reports of child sexual abuse imagery have risen from 1,291 in 1996-7 to 74,199 in 2013-14.

The IWF is not without its critics, however. It has been labelled as government censorship by the back door, while others suggest the images it deals with are harmless by themselves, and that they may even have a beneficial or preventative use for those with paedophilic sexual interests. These are minority views, however, and a more widely held fear is that viewing images of child sexual abuse may precipitate thoughts to into action and lead to real harm to real children. While such an argument seems logical, there is no conclusive evidence yet that this is the case as research findings often conflict.

But, what is a fact is that the demand for these images leads to more images being created – which perpetuates the abuse of children. The law is quite clear that possession of such imagery, even images that are computer generated but depict similar scenes, are illegal.

Where should the focus be?

The main criticism of the IWF’s move to share its hash list of abusive and extreme images is that it is not tackling the real problem. While Google, Facebook and other major internet firms could, equipped with the IWF’s hash list of known images, provide automatic scanning and blocking of some kind, this wouldn’t takle the paedophile groups involved in the trade of such imagery. They do not use social media or the open web: they hide in the darker recesses of the internet where the IWF does not go. Perhaps even more disturbing is the fact that collections of imagery are used as tokens for entry to closed paedophile networks which are involved in the organisation of harmful activity towards children and underage young people, such as providing children for sex and then photographing or filming them.

But many of these more secretive networks are already the target of police operations and require a different type of policing. Significantly, this argument also detracts from the main issue being highlighted by the IWF, which is the importance of keeping these illegal images out of the public domain and preventing them from becoming normalised. It also encourages partnerships between a range of organisations and businesses that have hitherto been rather reluctant to accepting full responsibility for their role in facilitating the sharing of materials. Clearly, undesirable internet activity can only be prevented effectively by collective action.

IWF’s recent announcement sends the message that possession of child abuse imagery is wrong; it also keeps those undesirable images away from the more public side of the internet. As long as valuable police time is not tied up investigating minor infringements at the expense of actually shutting down paedophile networks, IWF’s decision is surely a good thing.