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All I want for Christmas is this Google feature

May 1st, 2006 by , Filed under: Commentary

Here is what I want for Christmas. Yes, it’s only May, but I figure I had better get my requests in quick ;)

I want to be able to search for binary files by checksum. Simple, right?

A few applications where I would find this useful:

1) I pay some creative genius thousands of dollars to create my company icons (or web page, or whatever). I’d like to checksum those files and google for pages which have image files which match that checksum. I’d also like to know when Google first noticed that file on website X (i.e. did I receive stolen icons or were my icons stolen?).

2) OK, I really only have one reason for requesting this new feature…however, I bet spooks worldwide could make use of this as well. Inject some kiddy pr0n onto a P2P network and then use your BigBrotherIsh passive sniffers to see who/where your pr0n ends up.

That’s it. I’d like to thank Google for considering my request ;)

!Dmitry

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  • z00le

    I love feature #1 as it will finally allow me to trace where I got my icons from :)

  • melic

    The feature 2 you name already exists and it is being used by the Spanish police, they have a database with illegal pictures that had been hashed and track them down over the P2P networks. These is freely available to anyother police force in the world but it is likely that no other country will use it as it is flawed.
    1-If you change only ONE pixel the total checksum will change
    2-Anybody can name an illegal picture “Ferrari” since other users can’t see the picures downloaded until they are in their computer, anybody searching for “Ferrari” could be falsely accussed of downloading illegal material as the software only tracks the checksums not the names of the pics.
    3-I personally have never come accross anything illegal in P2P networks besides warez I wonder how many pics are there.Is it really worth the time?Wouldnt it be better spent somewhere else?

    I imagine that if the software was that good then it could also be used to track down illegal software as they also have a checksum.The fact that no other police force wants to use it when it is freely available to them says a lot about it.

  • dmitryc

    The fact that the spanish police implemented a shoddy solution doesn’t imply the idea can’t be used in a decent manner :) I was being somewhat ‘tongue-in-cheek’ regarding bullet 2, since I already know that at least one 3-letter US agency uses something similar with an interesting ‘discovery’ mechanism :)

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