dj_sniffy

Using keywords to find and block "bad" websites is what programs like Cybersitter and Netnanny are doing. These methods are not accurate and give false positive results.

For example, http://www.veganporn.com contains the keyword of porn, so it must be porn! But when you visit the site, it's anything but.

This example illustrates the problem with keyword-based searches.


Sniffy takes a different approach by downloading all of the images, and a team of human beings view the images and assign tags to the images that describe the image. Once the image has been tagged, it goes into the database and then can be used to find matches.

if pic A from a website was determined to be "adult content", and the same image was found on other, then sniffy can automaticallly detect that the image was "adult" since it was already verified, and also, can flag which website had the same occurrence of the image.

If a sponsor were to give sniffy their banner images to sniffy, sniffy would be able to report back which websites that were using the banner.

This is especially useful to sponsors who have affiliates that sigh up to their programs, but then stick their banner and link on many different websites and pages. While this may be legitimate action, since registering each website and page is too time consuming, sponsors may not know where the traffic is coming from. More importantly, they may not know if they are directly supporting a CP website because of their banner being on the page.

Sniffy not only verifies the list of URL's that a sponsor asks sniffy to scrub, but also casts a wider net in searching all adult related websites, and helping to find the other URL's that a sponsor's banner is on, that the sponsor didn't know about.

It's a lot of work to human eye validate the images, but it's necessary to ensure 100% accuracy. This is what the sniffy project is geared up to do, to provide a service that helps detect CP violations that go in parallel with ASACP's goal of removing CP from the internet.


-dj