There are two kinds of child pornography: the kind created by criminals and the kind our children create themselves. To stop the distribution of both kinds of child porn, Andrew Cuomo, the New York Attorney General, has reached an agreement with several major ISPs to purge their servers of this material and to bar users from accessing the websites and newsgroups that distribute them. And there is a new product that can help families stop their kids from creating and distributing images of themselves that might be classified as porn.
AT&T, Verizon, Sprint-Nextel, AOL, TimeWarner have signed the Cuomo's agreement and will work closely with the Attorney General to ensure children are better protected from this form of victimization. The Attorney General has created a resource website at www.nystopchildporn.com where consumers can find information on the agreement and resources to report any inappropriate imagery or sites they might discover. This landmark agreement comes after an extensive investigation by law enforcement to review millions of images found online, to catalogue these images by unique identifiers, or "hash marks", which allow other legal entities to identify images seen before, and can help lead to the capture and conviction of those who prey upon the young victims.
And for the concerned parent who suspects their child has either created sexually explicit photos of themselves or is looking at porn on the internet, there is a tool that potentially can help. There is a new product/service out that purports to help consumers determine if there is porn on their computer. SurfRecon has a little USB drive that you can purchase for $49.95. It connects to your computer, reviews all found images and compares them to a database of millions of known porn images. There is an image viewer for unrecognized images, so if your child is creating objectionable material, it will show up in the viewer, no matter what file extension they used or name they saved it under.
SurfRecon has 100 million images already in their database and adds another 4 million each week. (They don't add your images to the database, so your photos remain private.) You can learn more about their products on the company's website, www.surfrecon.com. Just having this little drive in your possession may serve its purpose if it just discourages your curious teen from exploring this kind of online material.