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Dogs Trained to Sniff Out Piracy

Posted by Zonk on Sun Mar 18, 2007 04:22 PM
from the anti-peg-leg-pooches dept.
Government The Courts Media Businesses News Politics
RockDoctor writes "Northern Ireland has for decades been using sniffer dogs to detect bombs and bomb-making materials. According to the BBC, a dog trainer in the Province has trained two dogs to sniff out some of the chemicals used in the manufacture of optical discs. While this has an obvious risk of false positives (polycarbonate plastics and their associated plasticizer additives are used in many other industries, for example), it does seem to be effective at locating discs which are not declared in customs manifests, and doing so much faster than human inspection of the cargo can do."
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[+] Anti-Piracy Dog Uncovers Huge Cache of Discs 283 comments
sgt scrub writes "I've never thought about sniffing my CDs before buying them but that is all about to change. According to this Yahoo! news article, dogs can be trained to tell the difference between a legit copy of a DVD and one from those pesky pirates. From the article, 'A DVD-sniffing anti-piracy dog named Paddy has uncovered a huge cache of 35,000 discs in Malaysian warehouses, many destined for export to Singapore, industry officials said on Wednesday. Paddy was given to Malaysia by the MPA to help close down piracy syndicates, which churn out vast quantities of illegal DVDs. The dog is specially trained to detect chemicals in the discs.'" We ran a story about anti-piracy dogs being trained in Ireland a few years ago.
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  • Fly with your external hdd to transport your piracy overseas.

    • Re:Workaround (Score:5, Funny)

      by Jozer99 (693146) on Sunday March 18 2007, @08:22PM (#18397771)
      My dog can already sniff out Body Odor, Ramen noodles and Hotpockets, the three indicators of major piracy (and WoW) and I haven't even trained her! How is this a big deal!?!

  • Dog substance addiction (Score:5, Funny)

    by flyingfsck (986395) on Sunday March 18 2007, @04:25PM (#18396513)
    Well, at least the dogs should not get addicted to plastics, like the drug sniffing dogs...

    • Re:Dog substance addiction (Score:4, Funny)

      by MillionthMonkey (240664) on Sunday March 18 2007, @05:20PM (#18396849)
      Drug sniffing dogs are addicted to plastic?

      The credit card industry is really making irresponsible loans these days. There's no way these dogs make enough money to cover all the treats they'll buy if they're given half a chance preapproved with a 0% teaser rate.

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by j-pimp (177072)

        Well, at least the dogs should not get addicted to plastics, like the drug sniffing dogs...

        I know you're joking, but this comment is also in response to the "Won't dogs get cancer sniffing chemicals?" question. The dogs take in the same amount of particles no matter what they trained to detect. Imagine them like a vacuum cleaner that picks up every scent that every bag gives off. They are trained to notice certain smells, but they inhale everything equally. Bomb sniffing dogs were inhaling drugs long before they were trained to detect them, and both drug and bomb dogs have been inhaling these chemicals since they were put in action.

        So are veterinarians on Slashdot able to answer this? In general, do airport dogs, or any other group of law enforcement trained scent finding dogs, tend to get different sicknesses than the general population of dogs of the same breed? I would think that state and municipal dogs tend to get more variety in their environment. Howerver, dogs assigned to railroad and airport security details tend to breath air from the same mostly closed system day in and day out. If they tend to get lung cancer or other di

        • Re:Dog substance addiction (Score:5, Informative)

          by rts008 (812749) <rts008@@@hotmail...com> on Sunday March 18 2007, @11:45PM (#18398645) Journal
          IANAV (I Am Not A Veterinarian), but AM a certified, licensed Veterinary Technician (think RN for critters).

          I have never seen any research or data on this question you bring up. Usually, something this far from "Mainstream Public Awareness" never gets studied unless someone with vested interest in the specific topic is interested in pursuing the subject, and has enough influence to make it happen.

          (Disclaimer: my awareness of research is NOT all encompassing!!!)

          The answers you are looking for have probably not been addressed, if they have been- not public knowledge. It may have been addressed by the Humane Society, or the SPCA, but if so, has remained fairly quiet.

          Hate to say it, but even tho' "man's best friend" is man's best friend, the dog is still considered a domesticated beast to serve us; Thus only to be considered on a "how useful to us" basis.

          My experience with K-9's (Police Dogs and US Military MP's) suggest several things:

          1. The handlers/partners usually have the dogs as family pets in addition to being their work partner. This may limit overall what the dogs get exposed to compared to all human teams doing the same job.

          2. The dogs have REALLY sensitive olofactory organs- if it's too "strong", they will keep their distance and "point" to indicate a detection or hit.

          3.Uhmm... they're not immune to "specialized training":(http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid =185460&cid=15305486)

          4. A lot of this has been covered here:(http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/05 /10/2331237&from=rss)

          5. Mostly, if it's not considered hazardous for the human handlers, then it's not considered hazardous for the "k-9"'s on the same duty.

          I doubt that the issues you are adressing have been fully thought about...I commend you, and feel slightly ashamed that I have not thought about this.

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by hazem (472289)
        The dogs take in the same amount of particles no matter what they trained to detect. Imagine them like a vacuum cleaner that picks up every scent that every bag gives off.

        That only makes sense if the atmosphere has a uniform distribution of every kind of particle. Clearly this is not true. If the distribution is uniform then the dogs would have no differential to determine direction with.

        Drug dogs are trained to seek out areas with higher concentrations of drugs. How else do you think they are able to de
  • What if the dog gets interested in the content of the disk? [animal-sex.com]

  • Slippery slope (Score:3, Funny)

    by deft (253558) on Sunday March 18 2007, @04:30PM (#18396551) Homepage
    First they do this... and then they train the dogs to sniff out the actual pirates.

    Once these dogs have the secent of basement dwelling teenager with poor hygiene... it's all over.

    RIAA is probably training them now. What exactly is the scent of p2p?
  • We're constantly learning that animals can accomplish feats we've been too arrogant to suspect them of: reasoning, memory, abstract concepts, tool use, eleven dimensional bee dances... and now, these dogs can determine, through scent alone, whether bits are pirated or legitimately owned.

    Incredible.

  • Do these dogs die of cancer?

  • Argh, ye matey, and yer poochie too! (Score:5, Funny)

    by Zarf (5735) on Sunday March 18 2007, @04:41PM (#18396623) Journal
    Arr, thar be no pirates aboard me ship. She be yar and she be true as spit shine as all me laddies. Ye nay be needin' th' poochie here cap'n. Wha? Why tha' be chemicals fer me special scurvy cream. I swar I ne'er heard o' no Day-vee-day piratein' They be like gold bar? Arr! L'emme go ye scalliwags! Ye, canna keel haul a-man fer youst ha'in chemicals fer the scurvy! I swar ser it's medicinal! Don' let 'em lock me in thar brig! I did'na heard no Day-vee-day pirates! Dis is per-poster-mos!

    Poor Long Burn Silver Disc we never saw him again.
  • So now the pirated discs will be declared as DVD-Rs or something, perhaps with a few real DVD-Rs on top to fool lazy customs inspectors.

  • Who needs dogs to sniff out pirates? (Score:3, Funny)

    by Dachannien (617929) on Sunday March 18 2007, @04:55PM (#18396715)
    The filthy beggars ne'er get a wash. A man can sniff 'em out himself at thirty fathoms!

    • The filthy beggars ne'er get a wash


      Yes, they did [wikipedia.org]. At least the sailors who were undisciplined enough to become pirates did.

  • Wouldn't it be easier ...... (Score:3, Funny)

    by edwardpickman (965122) on Sunday March 18 2007, @04:56PM (#18396717)
    to train them to sniff out films and music that smell bad? A single copy of The Wickerman remake can be smelled by a human with a head cold at a hundred yards. A good bloodhound should be able to sniff out a box of them from the next county.
  • I had no idea the Brits were having such a problem with piracy? I had no idea the pirates were resorting to putting disks on planes for the purpose of taking the planes over. I mean, it has to be actual pirates to which this refers, I would hate to believe _this_ much effort is going into simply looking for undeclared optical media, esp. when a hard drive can hold so much more.

    • Re:Who would have though? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by flyingfsck (986395) on Sunday March 18 2007, @05:16PM (#18396827)
      This is probably to catch 'round tripping' tax avoidance. This technique was accidentally discovered by Sir Richard Branson when he started Virgin Media. Basically what he did, was to export discs to France with faulty paperwork or something, have it refused entry, then he turned around and drove back to Britain. Since the stuff was officially exported, he somehow scored on the VAT when he subsequently sold them in his UK shops. Eventually he got caught though, once he got too brazen about it.

  • Priorities? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Tablizer (95088) on Sunday March 18 2007, @05:09PM (#18396803) Homepage Journal
    More money and effort is going toward finding copied disks than in finding Bin Laden? I thought sniff-dogs were in short supply after 9/11? What gives? Big corps have way too much power of late.
    • given that most of the trouble in the middle east started over corporations wanting to keep their power and control (even going as far back as post WW1 and preventing the unification of Arab nations), I'd say they've had this 'too much power' thing for quite a while.

      Hell, the East India Company wasn't named that just because it was a cool name, it was the first corporation (well, equivalent, they didn't wall it that), to actually own a country.
    • More money and effort is going toward finding copied disks than in finding Bin Laden?

      I'm pretty sure Bin Landen's not in Northern Ireland. Too much competition.

      TWW

  • I fer one welcome me new pirate-sniffing houndy overlords!
  • As in, "aside from that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you like the play?"

    When are people going to figure out that a "false positive" is not a nuisance, it's a death blow to any proposed technology--unless the risk of false positives is orders of magnitude lower than the actual frequency of the rare event being detected?

    Doesn't anyone ever read Æsop's fable about the boy who cried wolf?

    Polycarbonate plastic is just the generic name for Lexan® [geplastics.com], and if you follow that link you'll notice that GE mentions many uses besides DVD's: automotive lenses, "blow molding," eyewear, water bottles, structural foam, etc. The example they show in the picture is a cell phone. I believe the original iMacs (the CRT-based ones) had Lexan housings. The company I work for uses Lexan strips to protect a surface where thin metal plates slide over and would otherwise scrap a painted shelf. The stuff is used everywhere.

    After customs inspectors have wasted two or three days opening crates of various products with tough molded Lexan housings, they'll forget the whole silly business.
  • The **AA should get together with the trainer of these dogs and Ted Stevens. Imagine what they could do with trained dogs sniffing the tubes! Piracy would drop significantly!

  • This isn't new news (Score:3, Informative)

    by Frenchman113 (893369) on Sunday March 18 2007, @05:43PM (#18396979) Homepage
    http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/05/10/23 31237 [slashdot.org] shows that the MPAA has tried this before. Altogether, I can't say this is a very smart idea. Additionally, it would be remarkably easy to DDOS by adding fragments of DVDs to every package you ship. Lastly, how many of us have our warez shipped to us? As people wisely noticed before, this is a ridiculous invasion of privacy and all the more reason to hate the MPAA and to download movies instead of buying them.
  • For those who don't know, that'll be Taiyo Yuden disks :-)
  • Think about the volume of physically produced pirate media within a country compared to that shipped between countries, especially given technology improvements such as BitTorrent. Also, now you'll have two people and two dogs sniffing for CD/DVS's (and not even indiscriminately with respect to pressed vs. burnable), and presumably you still have to have another two people and two dogs checking for drugs, too.

    BTW, this news originally came up 9-12 months ago:
    http://www.betanews.com/article/MPAA_Employs_Pira [betanews.com]
  • I remember a year or so ago FedEx allowed the MPAA to use these dogs on some of the packages they were shipping. Ever since then I started using UPS. I don't buy or send pirated disks, but if FedEx is going to sell out to those folks I figure I'll just go brown.

  • Security Theater (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Hans Lehmann (571625) on Sunday March 18 2007, @06:12PM (#18397117)
    These trained dogs, unless deployed for a limited time in a specific area, are there for little more than show. Although they can be trained to sniff out almost anything, they aren't robots. The dogs treat it as a game, but they need frequent breaks or they'll quickly tire of it. You can't just march a dog for 8 hours around the airport and expect him to magically find any contraband that finds its way into the building. They may be the best choice in a situation such as a building collapse, where they need to find bodies in an area of a few thousand square feet, but to expect that even hundreds of these dogs will be able to sniff the millions of cargo containers that come into this country every year is laughable. Besides, since it's perfectly legal to ship blank media, anyone in the bootlegging business will just declare the cargo and it will get lost among the false positives of all the other blank DVDs that come in from overseas. But I guess that trained pooches do make for good press releases, letting everyone know that something is being done about this horrible scourge of bit copying.
  • will be the first true "packet sniffer"? Can't wait!

  • There goes our tax money (Score:3, Insightful)

    by freedom_india (780002) on Sunday March 18 2007, @08:34PM (#18397839) Homepage Journal
    ....and the Govt, keeps worrying about raising taxes to built a public transport system, etc.
    We should have a way to selectively pay taxes to support initiatives we like, and MPAA initiatives like these should come out of Warner, and not me.

    • Of course it does! (Score:4, Funny)

      by EmbeddedJanitor (597831) on Sunday March 18 2007, @04:35PM (#18396587)
      The sniffer dog is trained by a trainer who eats fast food which is served by a waitress who has a boyfriend with a computer connected to the internet.

      • Re:Obligatory post (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Artifakt (700173) on Sunday March 18 2007, @05:44PM (#18396981)
        YRO is overused as a class, but there is something to rights arguements about trained dogs, etc. that whole pesky "Unreasonable Search and Seizure" clause in the U. S. Constitution implies that some searches are more reasonable than others. Dogs provide an extension of search capabilities. So do X-Ray scans, cavity searches, DNA tests, retasking military grade spy sats to look for pot plantations, or compulsory urine testing. Dogs at customs are generally considered a reasonable search tool for the kinds of things customs has to detect.
                    BUT, customs is generally charged with detecting some very odd things, such as livestock or pets that are not normally illegal to own, but are illegal to import, and with detecting drugs. Checking for bootleg CDs has certain implications that can't be avoided in this context. First, the society is assuming that catching this particular form of copyright violation is roughly on a par with catching heroin smuggling. That's pretty damned strongly implied if we put similar amounts of money into training dogs for both (and if anything, it's cheaper to train a dog to detect several related opiates and other drugs than it is one plasticiser*). Second, discovering CDs proves nothing, unless the humans associated with the dogs can make a proper determination that the CDs aren't legal ones. That implies we (as a society) are devoting resources to training the human customs agents in telling bootleg CDs from legitimate ones, AT A TIME WHEN WE HAVE SERIOUS DOUBTS ABOUT THEIR TRAINING IN DETECTING INCOMING TERRORISTS WITH WMDS!

        * I've actually helped local law enforcement train drug and explosive sniffing dogs. It's difficult fun to try and outwit a well trained sniffer dog, and I have no doubts at all they can be trained to accurately find polycarbonate plasticizers, but I really, seriously doubt it's as easy as training them for much more aromatic explosive nitrate compounds, and that is weeks or months of work. Typical training involves taking the dogs to an unfamiliar location, which means setting aside a national guard armory, old courthouse or other state owned building, often for several days, and having about 20 people previously unknown to the dogs available to plant the 'evidence'. You can't use just one or two people over and over or the dog starts using their scent markers to shortcut training. Instead you have to have several people take turns, hand off packages to each other, and otherwise mix things up so the dog trains properly on the chemical desired. That can be 20 people on a payroll all day even if they are going to actually do only 15 minutes work each, and this is far from cheap.
        • Hmm with a later post about video games being used instead of books in schools and some research I watched once about pigs playing video games for food rewards, it's a pity we can't train drug sniffing dogs using a computer capable of producing smells and a VR helmet.

          Then again virtual reality would really confuse a dog that still doesn't quite understand it's own reflection isn't another dog in the mirror. :P

        • that whole pesky "Unreasonable Search and Seizure" clause in the U. S. Constitution implies that some searches are more reasonable than others.

          Yes, Customs needs to have reasonable suspicion to search you, but not to search your stuff.

          Customs has the right to inspect everything that comes through the borders, with limits (reasonable suspicion) only on people.

          There is no such thing as "Unreasonable Search and Seizure" when it comes to cargo, packages, mail, or 'things that are not people'.

    • Good idea, you can get lion poop (sold as Zoo Poo) at the Pretoria zoo in South Africa. It is commonly used to keep dogs out of flower beds. However, naphtalene moth balls work just as well in flower beds and may be easier to explain when found in your luggage than Zoo Poo...
    • Actually, none of those things will deter a bloodhound from separating out scents they are trained to find. [And Chemical Mace would certainly set off the airport's sniffers - resulting in searched luggage anyways.

      Coffee beans .. heh .. thats what happens to your brain when you SMOKE too much pot, coffee beans will clear lingering residue from a human's nose, barely, if your like .. smelling perfume, or candles .. because its normally of of a differnt tone of scent, not because it masks smells :P

      I can see t
    • ship burnt disks rather than making them in the destination country?
      not transfer files over the net rather than by airplane?


            Because this is a plot by Microsoft to prevent the shipment of Ubuntu discs! :)

    • I'm pretty amazed that dogs can smell these solvents in such tiny amounts
      IANASD (I am not a sniffer dog), but have you ever cracked open a stack of CDRs that didn't smell awful? There's some funky stuff in them there disks; if sniffer dogs can't smell it then the world's in some pretty big trouble.

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