InternetWatchFoundation
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Startups seek to de-anonymize Bitcoin to fight crime
Startups in the UK and US are claiming that they're able to strip Bitcoin users of some of their anonymity to fight online crime. Reuters is reporting that London-based company Elliptic has teamed up with the Internet Watch Foundation to stop the cryptocurrency being used to buy child pornography. The IWF is supplying Elliptic with Bitcoin addresses which are believed to be involved with online child abuse. The startup, which monitors transactions at some of the US and Europe's biggest exchanges, will check future purchases against this list. If any of the suspect addresses are found to match, Elliptic will raise the alarm to partners as well as law enforcement agencies.
Many legal porn sites are fronts for child abuse
There has been a sharp increase in the number of websites hiding illegal images of child abuse behind otherwise legal-seeming adult pornography sites, the UK-based Internet Watch Foundation reported this week.
Internet giants team up to fight child porn through shared lists
The world's larger online companies have already been doing quite a lot to combat child porn on their own, but they're now teaming up to fight that sexual abuse across the internet. Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Twitter and Yahoo are partnering with the UK's Internet Watch Foundation to share hash lists (aka digital fingerprints) of blocked indecent images. In theory, the move makes sure that a photo pulled on one site doesn't simply pop up elsewhere. All of the IWF's members will eventually use the list, so you could soon see this collective blocking in use at Amazon, Apple, Dropbox and PayPal, among others.
