Yeesh, sorry.

It shouldn't come as a surprise that when I'm introduced to someone and they say they know of 4chan, my immediate response is "I'm sorry."

No problem. I'm in my 50's. I didn't see my first porno until I was 19 at a drive-in. I didn't see my first super-gore picture until I was in my 30's. It seems very weird to me that kids see all this at a very young age. Now Hentai is another weird thing to me. I do know humans are adaptable, but don't know in what way kids have adapted to it. My poor father, he heard Jimmy Fallon mention 2 girls 1 cup so he looked it up. He was visibly shaken when he told me about it. I have managed to avoid that one.

If nothing else, I suspect children of the Internet generation have learned not to blindly Google things they heard about from their friends. So perhaps a bit of wisdom is trickling down :-)

That's true. The last time I made that mistake was many years ago with goatse. I also laerned to check links that might be cleverly disguised. Would that they were all as innocent as rick rolls. If I really want to be safe, I open a link up and only look at it with my peripheral vision. It works surprisingly well to classify something as bad without actually taking it all in.

There is this pretty cool research project at Stanford (it's headed by Andrew Ng of the Coursera fame) that uses NLP and machine learning to detect content that the user might prefer not to see. It's still pretty rough around the edges but this demo is pretty cool.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ

I actually really like that song, maybe because I came of age in the 80's. The funniest thing about it is that Rick Astley seems pissed. He should lighten up because nobody remembered anything about him before rick roll and now he's a household name.

>The funniest thing about it is that Rick Astley seems pissed.

Where'd you get that impression? He's been pretty cool about the whole thing last I heard.

This was from an interview a few years back. It could have been because he wasn't making any money from it. I haven't kept up, but glad he's embraced it.

Astley participated in a rickrolling himself, at the Macy's Thanksgiving parade a few years ago. He popped out of a float in the middle of another musical performance and started singing Never Gonna Give You Up. It was a staged stunt, with a canned background track ready to go, and the TV announcers obviously feigning surprise.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wL-hNMJvcyI

I've thought about something like applying a threshold filter to thumbnails to distort them sufficiently so they're not potentially "offensive" but have it still be apparent if they might contain bad content. It's too difficult a problem for me to actually implement though, and I suspect it could be easily hacked somehow.

I don't know if there is a service to rate images. Google seems to have the best technology. It seems like it wouldn't be that hard to programmatically upload an image using an api and get a rating back. This might be a way to curtail teen sexting, which is against the law. A parent could for example, admin a setting to change nudie selfies to a Sesame Street character on their way out. Or maybe better yet, process any photographs taken with the cell phone at the time they are taken and make all nudie images turn into Sesame Street characters ;-)

Something like that (but with humans) was discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6075465

I don't know if anyone's actually doing it either. I could see Google having the power to pull it off. Though i'm not entirely sure given the current climate of paranoia I'd necessarily want Google keeping track of knowing exactly what and how much inappropriate material can be (even tangentially or erroneously) associated with me. A third party application would be nice but I think it would need to be anonymous - a concept Google seems dead set against.

That's true, then Google would have nude pictures of your teenagers.

As part of the internet generation, I believe the opposite to be true. Hence the widespread popularity of 2g1c

Have a strong suspicion that adults are more sensitive and find this stuff more disturbing than kids.