What evildoers do, if the web gets censored

Lots of discussion happens in German cyberspace around the planned blocking of child porn. It is foreseen to redirect DNS queries for blacklisted domains to a "Stop" sign, which will tell the user, that the site (s)he wanted to visit is blocked. Contrary to earlier promises the IP addresses of the users will be made available to the law enforcement agencies for what they call real time surveillance.

The proponents (one of them confused "servers" and "surfers" in a parliament debate) try their best to make every opponent of this plan look like a pedophile.

I think it's the opposite: Child molesters and other evildoers will have a lot of fun once the blocking mechanism is operational.

Disclaimer
I neither plan nor endorse any of the activities listed below. I only describe theoretical possibilities to demonstrate, how easy it is to abuse such a nonsense.

Things to come

• Pedophile newbies, who search for child porn, will find a leaked block-list from another country. The secret German list will leak as well, sooner or later. It was never as easy as today.
  
• Less smart pedophiles will google for ways to circumvent the blockade. The first hit will be some commercial "surf anonymous" proxy provider. In the end, even more people will earn money with abused kids.
  
• Smarter pedophiles will google better and configure another DNS server. If using another DNS server becomes illegal, they'll find a free SSL proxy. If SSL proxies become illegal, they'll use foreign VPN provider. Connections to foreign VPN providers cannot be illegal because they are used by lots of big companies.
  
• Less smart child porn webmasters will simply use numeric IPs for linking to their sites
  
• Smarter webmasters will regularly send a DNS query for their domain to a censored DNS server. If the returned IP number becomes incorrect, it's time to shut down the site and reopen it somewhere else under a different name. Can easily be scripted into a fully automated warning system. Also works if the block-list is really secret.
  
• Never give your IP address to a bad guy. Today you can get hacked, if you have a poor firewall. Tomorrow the cops might pay you a visit. There is no firewall against cops wanting to visit you. That's because one can easily flood the DNS server of your German provider with forged requests for some blocked domain and your IP address as source. Should be no more than 50 lines in C, including comments.
  
• The ultimate end of civilization is near if the first stop-sign worm appears. Not only because it'll DDOS the stop-sign servers. Most important effect will be to flood the law enforcement agencies with IPs of innocent people. Less time to concentrate on the bad guys.
  

Those, who know the facts and still want to install DNS blockades against child porn, are either pedophiles, criminals or conspirators who'd like a censorship mechanism for all kinds of unpleasant content. The latter might be the reason why each country maintains it's own block list.

Alternatives
Everyone except the pedophiles supports a serious fight against child abuse and child porn, not only in the internet. There are lots of organizations, who are committed to this. Interestingly, some of them are against blockades. Here are 3 German ones:

Carechild
Abuse victims against internet blockades
Self-help group of abused women

Psychedelic visualization programming howto

A 3 day project was to enhance gmerlins default visualization (the one which comes with the gmerlin tarball) a bit. Here is a description, how this visual work. There are lots of other visuals out there, which are based on the same algorithm.

General alrorithm
It's actually pretty simple: Each frame is the last frame filtered a bit and with something new drawn onto it. This repeats over and over.

Drawing something
There are 2 absolutely trivial things to draw, which are directly generated by the audio signal:

• Stereo waveform: Looks pretty much like a 2 beam oscilloscope
  
• Vectorscope: One channel is the x-coordinate, the other one is the y-coordinate. The whole thing is then rotated by 45 degrees counterclockwise. It only sucks for mono signals, because it will display a pretty boring vertical line then.
  

The vectorscope is drawn as lines and as dots. This makes a total of 3 foreground patterns in 7 colors.

Filtering
There are 3 types of filters, which are always applied to the last frame: An image transformation, a colormatrix and a 3-tap blur filter. The blur filter is needed to wipe out artifacts when doing the image transform repeatedly on the same image.

The image transform uses the (usually bad) linear interpolation, which means that the recursive process also blurs the image. There are 8 transforms: Rotate left, rotate right, zoom in, zoom out, ripple, lens, sine and cosine.

Then there are 6 colormatrices. Each of these fades 1 or 2 of the RGB components to zero. Together with the foreground colors (which always have all 3 components nonzero) we get a large variation of the colors when they are recursively filtered.

Background colors
The image transformation sometimes makes areas in the current frame, which are outside of the last frame. These areas are filled with one of 6 background colors. Background colors are dark (all components < 0.5) to increase the contrast against the foreground.

Beat sensitivity
Then I wrote the most simple beat detection: For each audio frame, compute the sound energy (i.e. calculate the sum of the squared samples for each channel). If the energy is twice as large as the time averaged energy, we have a beat. The time averaged energy if calculated by doing a simple RC low-pass filtering of the energies for each frame:

avg_energy = avg_energy * 0.95 + new_energy * 0.05;

Variations
The following things can be changed on each beat (and a random decision with defined probability):

• Foreground pattern (3)
  
• Background color (5)
  
• Transform (8)
  
• Colormatrix (6)
  

This makes 5040 principal variations.

Result
I hacked a small tool (gmerlin_visualize), which takes an audio file and puts it into a video file together with the visualization. The result is here:

Simple music visualization from gmerlin on Vimeo.

As you can see, the video compression on vimeo isn't really suited for that kind of footage. But that's not vimeos fault. It's a general problem that video compression algorithms are optimized for natural images rather than computer generated images.

Possible improvements
The variety can easily be extended by adding new image transformations and new foreground patterns. Also, some contrast between foreground and background is sometimes a bit weak. A more careful selection of the colors and colormatrices would bring less variety but a nicer overall appearance.

Feel free to make a patch :)