DarkBERT: A Language Model for the Dark Side of the Internet

by rajtilakjee • 3 years ago

142 59 3 years ago

tetris11• 3 years ago

While crawling the Dark Web, we take caution not to expose ourselves to content that should not be accessed. For example, illicit pornographic content (such as child pornography) are easily found on the Dark Web. However, our automated web crawler takes the approach of removing any non-text media and only stores raw text data.
By doing so, we do not expose ourselves to any sensitive media that is potentially illegal.

This is the part I was looking for. Although I wonder if some of the text parsed might also be questionable in terms of legality.

I also was amazed at it cleanly categorizing the data into Pornography, Violence, Gambling, Hacking, etc., since to my naive mind, some of these categories likely have huge overlaps, especially so on the Dark Web.

mtlmtlmtlmtl4• 3 years ago

You might think that naïvely, and it makes sense, but I think it's actually the opposite way; the dark web is highly compartmentalised it seems to me. Most people who use the dark web genuinely(i.e not just exploring out of curiosity) need it for one thing, and only one thing. Whether it's drugs, illicit porn of various genres, political forums, hacker forums. Illicit porn especially seems to be banned from any site not specifically set up for it(just like regular porn on the regular internet, I guess). I have no idea what the sites that do allow it looks like , but probably they're highly specialised like everything else I've seen on the dark web.

182716314• 3 years ago

No content on the Internet should be illegal to access, period.

zoklet-enjoyer3• 3 years ago

Murder and rape pictures and videos should be illegal

bandyaboot• 3 years ago

I suspect you’d change your tune pretty fast if there were some horrifying content involving a family member involved.

super2562• 3 years ago

I'm with you.

Last week, my favourite German lawyer Udo Vetter made a blog post [1] about parents reporting questionable media in group chats to the police.

He warns urgently to never do this.

If you're in a large telegram group, discord, WhatsApp or whatever, and your phone downloads the questionable media automatically, you're already doing a crime (the mere possession of such media is illegal). In Germany, the minimum punishment for the possession of child porn is one year; a monetary fine is not possible and a dismissal of the case due to insignificance isn't possible either.

According to Udo Vetter there have been cases where "concerned parents have brought printouts of the chat messages to the police so that the things are not distributed further. Criminal proceedings for possession of child pornography were the result."

Further down in the blog post how there were funny cases like the police seizing a mobile phone of a drug dealer, and then finding group chats with thousands of users where questionable images were shared. Which will then start a mass investigation on thousands of innocent people, who weren't even looking at that stuff. No one looks at group chats 24/7, especially in fast-moving chats with like 10 messages/minute.

The issue isn't even new. I remember many times when IRC networks were flooded with such media by troll collectives like myg0t, 4chan and whatnot.

[1] https://www.lawblog.de/archives/2023/05/12/lustiger-gruppenc...

alphanullmeric• 3 years ago

No virtual act in general. Force is only justified in response to force.

dontupvoteme• 3 years ago

at what point does ascii art of an illegal image become illegal?

chpatrick• 3 years ago

The torment nexus comes to mind.

cookieperson• 3 years ago

Hasn't this been posted 4x this week? Feel like I've seen this many times...

bmacho• 3 years ago

I don't think it ever reached the first 2 pages on HN? I haven't seen it at least.

JohnKemeny• 3 years ago

This is the third time. You can use the search field in the bottom of the page.

https://hn.algolia.com/?q=https%3A%2F%2Farxiv.org%2Fabs%2F23...

leobg• 3 years ago

Awww, I wish they’d called it DarkoBERT. Would’ve been fun especially for those who grew up with German Disney translations where Scrooge McDuck is called Dagobert.

bombcar• 3 years ago

Cloak and DaggerBERT would apply quite well with the darker web theme.

bee_rider• 3 years ago

On the bright side, if it turns evil we can enlist the help of LightERNIE to convince it be less of a grumpy guy.

Eisenstein• 3 years ago

Just by requiring an account to view a forum (without validating any of the information at all) this entire project would be foiled. All the 'bad guys' have to do is put up a login page with a 'create account' link and it would be ignored, according to the criteria they gave in the appendix (login pages were discarded). I can only imagine how much data was hidden in this way.

brookst• 3 years ago

While true, I'm not sure that matters. Unless your intuition is that the data behind such login pages is quantitatively different from what they crawled, the training, model, and findings should still hold, right?

civilized• 3 years ago

The paper claims there are massive differences between language used on the surface web and the dark web. That is, people talk differently when they're in a different environment that takes special effort to get into.

If we have to guess one way or the other, it seems like we should assume the same is true of the crawlable dark web versus the non-crawlable dark web.

MacsHeadroom• 3 years ago

Not my intuition, but experience. All of Dread is behind a login, for example.

vorticalbox• 3 years ago

Do they have plans to release it on huggingface?

causality0• 3 years ago

Is this truly necessary? I feel like it's not that hard to teach a regular model what jargon means.

syngrog66• 3 years ago

speaking of the "dark web" I do wonder and worry about the seemingly growing pattern of censorship and chaos-sowing, from certain segments on both the political Left and the Right.

I'm trying to extrapolate from these trends, taking them into the future, and then parody them, in a game I've been building. (see my bio if curious)

reneberlin• 3 years ago

Why? What purpose does this serve? Is this a fun project? What is funny about it? What problem does it solve? I just don't get it!

DarkBERT: A Language Model for the Dark Side of the Internet

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