A while ago, I wrote a piece called “Chester the Molester gives Photoshop two thumbs up!” In it, I described how a guy was arrested for photoshopping fake kiddie porn, splicing real kid’s faces on to other naked bodies — and the real kids’ faces were taken from photos he’d snapped while working at a summer camp.
Well, Chester has a new favorite piece of software he can play with. Somebody got the bright idea to put together a program that lets you “fake” a live webcam, and insert it into an instant-messenger program. Download.com thinks that the demo of this deserves some attention, so they featured it on their page.
Here are the manufacturer’s own words about the product:
Stream/Play videos and movies on Yahoo/MSN/AOL messengers. It stream videos and movies on your messenger just like an actual webcam. You don’t need to have a webcam for webcamming. Enjoy pretending a teenage girl or someone you want to be. Your chat mate will never figure out that it’s not a real webcam. See demo on our website.
Every day, it seems, there’s another story of a would-be pedophile getting arrested for arranging to meet an underage child for sex, only to find out they’d been chatting with a police officer. And for every one that’s caught this way, lord knows how many actually succeed in their sick plots. But apparently Web Solution Mart thinks that they need more help, so they’re selling this program that will help them pretend to be a teenager themselves.
Way to go, folks. What next — online directories of school children, along with their online IDs and photos? Hotel discount programs for pedophiles? Happy meals with condoms?
A tip of the hat to Bullwinkle, who’s even more disgusted than I am — if that’s possible.
Alternatively, think of it as an aid to law enforcement. What better way to convince Scott Ritter that he’s really inviting an underage girl to Burger King?
Then again, if CNET can get its mind out of the gutter for just one millisecond, this software might be a good tool to adapt the use of free IM networks for the distribution of legitimate video content. Although if it’s main feature is to imitate a Webcam connection, then the software is suspect at best.
Do you really think someone could fool anyone with a video pretending to be a webcam? It would take maybe 3 minutes of chat to realize that the person in the video wasn’t the one talking to you. Whenever I use webcam chat there is always a lot of video interaction, you can’t do that with prefabricated videos.
Is there a NAMBLA discount?