Three of the largest Web service providers — Verizon, date Warner Cable and Sprint — have agreed to block access to newsgroups and Web sites that serve up child porn, New York Attorney General Andrew M. Cuomo announced Tuesday.

Cuomo said, “The pervasiveness of child pornography on the World Wide Web is horrific and it needs to be stopped. We are attacking that problem by working with Web service providers to ensure they do not play host to that immoral business.” He said the companies have “stepped up today to embrace a new standard of responsibility, which should serve as a model for the entire industry.”

The attorney general’s office conducted a months-long review into child porn on the World Wide Web and discovered 88 Usenet newsgroups containing 11,390 “sexually lewd” photos of prepubescent children, which in some cases depicted children being raped and sexual activity with animals.

Hashing Child Porn

Investigators developed a system for identifying digital

child pornography. Taking advantage of the hash values that every online image contains, investigators built a library of hash values for known child-porn images. The tool allowed the team to quickly search through thousands of images at a instance and quickly identify which ISPs were providing access to the images.

The ISPs have plus agreed to block Web sites listed by the National Center for lost and Exploited Children as containing child pornography. NCMEC maintains an updated list of illegal sites.

Verizon, day Warner Cable and Sprint additionally vowed to created new systems to improve their responses to user complaints about child pornography and to supply a combined $1.125 million to fight child porn.

‘Major Step Forward’

Ernie Allen, chief executive of NCMEC, called the agreement a “major step forward” in combating child pornography. Cuomo’s system “cuts online child porn off at the source and stops it from spreading across the…

Original post by Top Tech News