The new scope of censorship – in Russia they introduce a system to control memes, cartoons and political videos.
We tell how Roskomnadzor is going to find criticism about Putin even in pictures and videos using the Oculus system. The system has already been put into operation at the beginning of 2023. We analyze in detail how it works now and what it can do.
Since the outbreak of hostilities in Ukraine, Roskomnadzor has been rapidly expanding its control over the Russian-language Internet and introducing new systems for heavy-handed censorship. So since 2023, the department has launched Oculus . Using this system, they are going to automatically analyze more than 200 thousand images per day and quickly find the so-called prohibited content in them. It includes propaganda of suicide, drugs, tobacco products.
Screenshot from the document “Functional_requirements_OCULUS_11_02_2022.docx”
However, the system is primarily developed for political purposes. It is going to be used to quickly identify calls for mass protests and insults to Vladimir Putin in images and videos.
Screenshot from the document “Presentation_on_results_of_R&D_Oculus_24_02_2022”
The Main Radio Frequency Center (GRFC) is responsible for the implementation of the project . It was his employees who found contractors to create the Oculus, and also supervise its implementation, use and subsequent improvements. Thanks to the hacking of the servers of the Main Radio Frequency Center in the fall of 2022, CyberPartisans obtained internal documents and the source code of the system. And today we will talk about how Oculus works and how its implementation will turn out for the Internet.
“Oculus” – from idea to implementation
Work on the Oculus system began on October 21, 2021 with a scientific study that was commissioned to be carried out by employees of the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology.
For 15 million Russian rubles, they were given the task of finding out in 2 months whether it is possible to find certain content in images and videos using artificial intelligence. In addition, the MIPT staff had to develop the concept of “Oculus”.
As a result of the work done, we confirmed the fundamental possibility of using artificial intelligence for such tasks. And in December 2021, a technical task appeared, according to which they began to look for contractors to develop the Oculus system.
In August 2022, this task was assigned to Excursion RDC LLC under a contract for 58 million rubles.
Screenshot from the document “Letter rescheduling stage 1.docx”
This company was founded in 2014 by two start-up businessmen Artem Ponomarev (pictured left) and Sergey Brailko (pictured right) with an authorized capital of only 10 thousand rubles.
At the beginning of 2022, it had only 29 employees. They had not previously engaged in government contracts, but they undertook to develop the Oculus from scratch before December 12, 2022, that is, in just 4 months.
Screenshot from the document “Team Oculus 250822.xlsx”
The budget and deadlines for the implementation of the project , according to experts familiar with the content of the terms of reference, are unrealistic and bewildering. However, in February 2023, Roskomnadzor announced the launch of the system.
Now let’s figure out what exactly a small company managed to implement for a modest budget and in such a limited time frame. Let’s talk more about how the Oculus works.
Sources from the USA
You can easily get acquainted with the work of Yolo-5 on the official website of the company. It is enough to upload a photo to the site, and online artificial intelligence will determine all the main objects that are depicted on it.
From the point of view of neural networks, this project was ideally suited for the implementation of the Oculus prototype. Thus, the Russian company “Extraction RDC” actually finalized a ready-made solution created in the USA for recognizing various objects in photos and videos.
How Oculus censorship works
Oculus is able to detect predefined images, such as logos, coats of arms, symbols, politicians’ faces. Below you see examples of images in which the artificial intelligence of the system was trained to identify negative information. All these files are taken from the GRCHTS servers. They train “Oculus”.
All such images are considered violations by the censors of Roskomnadzor and should be blocked so that even on the Internet people cannot share their point of view and joke about sensitive political topics.
The system itself does not search for images and videos with violations, and also does not have a user interface at all.
Oculus is integrated into a single information analysis module used by Roskomnadzor censors. Through it, images and videos are transmitted to the system from sources that are already under constant control of Roskomnadzor. For example, from the pages of famous bloggers, politicians, media personalities, online publications. And Oculus, in turn, must analyze these materials and give the result to the operator. This is how censorship works with regard to pictures and videos on the Russian-language Internet.
Words are better than deeds
Oculus checks the images. That is, the system breaks all downloaded videos into separate frames and looks for prohibited content in each. Moreover, for the task at hand, Oculus works quite slowly. If we take the speed declared by Roskomnadzor of 200 thousand images per day, it turns out about 3 seconds for processing one image. And even a relatively short video contains several thousand frames. So the system is hardly capable of processing more than a few hundred videos per day, while there are thousands of them on the Internet every day.
Oculus will help Roskomnadzor to check only a very small part of new videos from sources that are already under the control of censors.
And at the moment, the system is only looking for specific images. If a video, for example, agitates to join the Right Sector, but does not have its logo or it is drawn in a non-standard design, Oculus will not recognize the prohibited content. 😉
Thus, the system is faster than a human, but not more efficient. And despite the loud statements about the launch of Oculus in February 2023, at the moment, at the disposal of Roskomnadzor, in our opinion, there is more a prototype of the desired solution, and not a full-fledged product.
To create a software package that is able to find prohibited content in more videos, according to various estimates, from 500 million to 1.5 billion rubles are required from the internal documents of the GRFC. And at the moment it is not implemented.
Screenshot from the document “Presentation_on_results_of_R&D_Oculus_24_02_2022”
And the plans are Napoleonic ….
Plans for work on the Oculus are described in the internal documents of the GRCHTS until 2025:
- 2023 – the system is going to be “taught” to process video with a broken sequence of frames and drawings, as well as improve text recognition and expand the list of objects for search.
- 2024 – we intend to add analytics of emotions, age of faces, as well as postures of people and their actions.
- 2025 – Oculus, according to the project’s customers, should be able to distinguish fakes in images and identify people by silhouettes.
In a developed democratic state, such technologies of neural networks and artificial intelligence would be used mainly for the benefit of society. For example, to identify and block the propaganda of suicide, drugs, pedophilia. But in Russia at the moment they are trying to use them mainly for the total political control of society. And in the future, such technologies, unfortunately, can be used in Belarus.
Therefore, we ask you to distribute this material so that as many people as possible learn about the Oculus system, and we will also publish internal documents on it that we received when the networks of the Main Radio Frequency Center were hacked
13 feb 2023 09:18
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Roskomnadzor introduced a search system for prohibited pictures and videos on the Internet
Roskomnadzor has implemented an automated search system for content banned in Russia on the Internet. Prior to this, department employees viewed such photos and videos “mostly manually.”
All-seeing Oculus
Roskomnadzor launched the Oculus information system for automatically searching for prohibited content, said a representative of the Main Radio Frequency Center (FSUE GRCHTS) subordinate to Roskomnadzor , which acted as the customer for the project. According to Vedomosti , the system was tested in December 2022, and in January 2023, integration with other Roskomnadzor monitoring tools began.
The system detects violations of Russian legislation in pictures and videos. As the interlocutor of the edition specifies, the program recognizes images and symbols, illegal scenes and actions, analyzes the text in photo and video materials.
Oculus automatically detects such offenses as extremist themes, calls for mass illegal events, suicide, pro-drug content, LGBT propaganda , etc.,” he explained.
From manual labor to software
Prior to Oculus, GRFC experts analyzed content “mostly manually.” According to the representative of the body subordinated to Roskomnadzor, operators on average processed 106 images and 101 videos per day.
rkn750.jpgPhoto: © inkytape / Photogenika Photobank
Roskomnadzor introduced a content monitoring system on the Internet
The system will help automate and speed up this process and will analyze more than 200,000 images per day, “viewing” one image will take about three seconds.
At the same time, the program will be updated. Until 2025, the system will learn to recognize people’s postures and their actions, and will detect prohibited materials “in several frames on video clips, in complex handwritten texts and drawn content.” It will also be possible to add new classes and types of violations, the representative of the GRFC added.
Why is all this necessary
As explained in the SCRC, an automated solution for searching for prohibited content is necessary due to the multiply growing flow of such materials on the Internet.
Now, “unprecedented volumes of fakes are spreading on the Web, especially about SVO, which are aimed at replacing real facts with a specially constructed “reality”, ”a representative of the GRFC notes.
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In 2022, on the basis of the requirements of the Prosecutor General’s Office , more than 100,000 Internet resources were deleted or blocked, which contain false information (including about the course of a military special operation), the expert said. Back in 2021, there were about 7 thousand such materials, in 2020 – 1.5 thousand, and in 2019 – several hundred.
In addition to the array of content on the subject of SVO , the volume of materials with drug propaganda, calls for suicide, child pornography is also growing like an avalanche on the Internet , the representative of the GRFC added.
As the CEO of the Social Laboratory company Natalia Tylevich notes , Oculus does not collect data, but only classifies them according to specified requirements. The system has a predetermined set of information sources, it can analyze specific pages of websites or publics and profiles in social networks.
The risks of using Oculus are manifested only in how correctly the content is classified and how it will be further interpreted in conjunction with other components of the system and a person, the expert adds.
“The issue of interpretation and settings will determine the scope of such errors, how controversial content will be classified – whether to consider it prohibited or not. But one way or another, these will be the risks not so much of the decision itself, but the risks of further work with the data obtained as a result of its work, ”the expert concluded.
Total information
The Oculus system first became known in the middle of 2021. Then the GRFC published a procurement for the development of terms of reference for the program. The price of the contract amounted to 15 million rubles. Then there was a purchase for the development itself – already for 57.7 million rubles.
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The IT company Execution RDC is working on Oculus.
According to one of the developers of IT solutions , the total cost of the monitoring project is estimated at 1.5 billion rubles. This suggests that, notes the interlocutor of Vedomosti, that the development of the GRFC and the involved companies on this toolkit will continue