Home | Friday 4th December 2009 | Issue 702
AND FINALLY
Nottingham city council is as cash strapped as most are – and currently has a £30m hole in its finances as it struggles to maintain its failing public services. Given the current political climate, it’s perhaps beyond droll to note that the incumbent council leader is call Kay Cutts.
But this hasn’t stopped them from spunking over £80,000 on an internal smut hunt, paying outside contractors to use their ‘intelligent software’ to trawl council computers looking for ‘inappropriate’ material.
Well just porn actually, racist and other extremist material slips through the net. The software must use some complicated set of algorithms to identify things like a predominance of skin-coloured pixels within images, characteristic grunting-shaped soundwaves in videos or likely word combinations of porn-sounding file names, and determines an estimated level of obscenity. How accurate this process is unknown – presumably some perv relishes the job of testing the results.
But apparently Notts is festering in filth – 2,700 images were labelled as those “which may cause distress or psychological harm to an unexpected viewer” and only 12% of the PCs have yet been checked. Next up are individual councillors computers, who must now be cold sweating in anticipation. Whether spending up to three quarters of a million quid to check ‘em all and prove once and for all what a bunch of wankers work for council goes down well with the electorate – or merely gives them the hump, as their bin collections get cut, remains to be seen.
