9 ms·

Thanks to facial recognition, a third person is arrested following a pop concert

65 points by erwan 8y ago

josefresco 8y ago
Masks and temporary/permanent face altering techniques will explode as this technology takes hold. I think about it like ad-blocking, something that may work itself into the mainstream despite it's questionable ethics.
- MarkMMullin 8y ago
  If the technology just stayed at facial recognition, maybe - I work on stereoscopic vision, so you'd have to change your head geometry too for my cameras if you're in parallax range..... and we're getting to the point of being able to do realtime skeletal pose analysis -- https://storage.googleapis.com/tfjs-models/demos/posenet/camera.html https://storage.googleapis.com/tfjs-models/demos/posenet/cam... So, it's an arms race :-/
  - josefresco 8y ago
    Egad Batman! Thanks for the background - how would one change their head geometry? Would a prosthetic nose, or subdermal implants serve this purpose?
    - saiya-jin 8y ago
      a hat and beard will probably be enough for next 20 years, after that we will probably have to resort to more advanced techniques like wigs
    - MarkMMullin 8y ago
      Probably - its an arms race after all - at this time for the stupider systems the following steps can confuse them 1 - use makeup techniques to make the nose fade into the face and don't let it get a profile view - noses are very important - a prosthetic nose probably won't help tho, cause the nose is an orientation characteristic more than an identification one 2 - eyes and the facial geometry around them are secondary, so no nose and giant movie star sunglasses adds to the machines confusion 3 - collar worn sparkle lighting directed upwards is baffling to machine - silly things keep picking up the light sparkles on the face as feature points (heh) 4 - makeup patterns based on the WW2 ship camouflage mess up geometry detection Now, all of that will defeat a simple recognizer but if the developers had a lick of sense, the system will still pop it out as anomalous. Mission impossible facial masks could certainly help, but pretty much everyone is removing the IR filters at this point and the facial thermography would be all messed up Then there's all the work going on in recognizing more than just a face - I've seen some stuff on incorporating more of the body into the recognition pattern (I've always wanted to watch one of those systems misrecognize Mitch McConnell as a turtle :-) As the available horsepower continues to expand, more of the totality of the individual can be recognized (my own accidental contribution to this is that cheap stereoscopic vision makes it a lot easier/more accurater to pick out foreground from background) At the end of the day, I think Scott McNeally had it right in the '90s - "You have no privacy. Get over it" I am of mixed minds about this stuff in public spaces, the good and bad examples are evenly distributed
    - dghughes 8y ago
      Or maybe infrared reflecting material similar to sun block. The local cancer society came to my workplace to promote skin health and one of the items was a small camera system. You put sun block on one part of your face, stuck your head in a box and a camera and screen showed the sunblock as black paint. If an IR type of material could be made you could paint geometric dazzle type paint on your face to obscure its geometry.
      - MarkMMullin 8y ago
        Slick idea - I'd be concerned tho that, given the semi normal rough distribution of heat on the face (there's a reason head wounds bleed so much) that this attempt to game the system would be easily detected as gaming the system. The good news is any idiots building a product by bolting together parts from OpenCV that they barely understand would probably fall for it. Me, I'd be embarrassed if I didn't tag you as anomalous. HOWEVER - if you were really really good and accurate with the application of the blocker (cause if its zinc oxide it does work in both directions) and you backed it up with makeup for the visible light side of the house, you probably could fool most by establishing a completely different facial geometry. Anyway, certainly a concept worth ruminating on. :-) I think it would beat me at my imaginary best if done well. Have to find a counter, I guess.. Like gait :-)
        toofy 8y ago
        > Me, I'd be embarrassed if I didn't tag you as anomalous So it sounds like these types of strategies need to be turned into fashion trends in order to make the anomalies not so anomalous?
  - 8_hours_ago 8y ago
    > skeletal pose analysis ... it's an arms race I see what you did there :)
    - MarkMMullin 8y ago
      Nice catch - I was completely oblivious to it till you pointed it out, and it was an accident, I swear! Lazarus Long says punsters and practical jokers get keelhauled or staked out on anthills :-( That's no fun
- gldalmaso 8y ago
  The sci-fi cyberpunk genre might have accidentally/accurately predicted this trend. The artwork makes heavy use of face/head mods and accessories.
  - josefresco 8y ago
    I'm glad you commented. My original commented mentioned how I thought the fashion industry might take this on. Both as a way to generate new revenue, but also a way to stay "cutting edge" aka trendy. It's one thing to wear a "face mod" because you're paranoid - it's quite another to wear one because your favorite celebrity does.
  - superhuzza 8y ago
    Definitely not accidental, I seem to remember at least one of William Gibson's books mention people avoiding face recognition with masks.
- monocasa 8y ago
  Yep. And it's super cyberpunk. https://cvdazzle.com/ https://cvdazzle.com/
  - dpflan 8y ago
    Thanks for sharing. This is excellent!
- J-dawg 8y ago
  > Masks and temporary/permanent face altering techniques will explode as this technology takes hold Along with a corresponding explosion in legislation to prevent you from covering your face in public. It already exists in France (popularly known as the 'Burqa Ban', but I think it covers other face coverings). I'm especially curious to see how this will go down in the UK, which is increasingly authoritarian while often painfully politically correct. An ill-thought-out and ambiguous piece of law will be rushed through Parliament, with various exemptions for religious groups. The far right will become outraged about these exemptions, and stage protests. The "nothing to hide, nothing to fear" brigade will be out in force. The government will make vague statements about protecting us from terrorists. Paedophiles will definitely be mentioned at some point. Eventually there'll be farcical prosecutions of people who were just cycling to work with a pollution mask, or going to a fancy-dress party. And the police will continue to claim they're under-funded, while somehow finding the resources to pursue bullshit like this.
  - wilsonnb 8y ago
    It's already illegal in many states in the US. Possibly at the local level as well. Here's the relevant law for Virginia. https://law.lis.virginia.gov/vacode/title18.2/chapter9/section18.2-422/ https://law.lis.virginia.gov/vacode/title18.2/chapter9/secti... It's a class 6 felony, which in VA means you'll be looking at "a term of imprisonment of not less than one year nor more than five years, or in the discretion of the jury or the court trying the case without a jury, confinement in jail for not more than 12 months and a fine of not more than $2,500, either or both".
    - coolspot 8y ago
      > However, the provisions of this section shall not apply to persons (i) wearing traditional holiday costumes; It doesn't say I can't wear traditional holiday costume outside of holiday, so it should be okay to wear Halloween scary costume all year long.
      - JTbane 8y ago
        >However, the provisions of this section shall not apply to persons (i) wearing traditional holiday costumes; Perhaps you ought to dress up as Santa Claus when you want to rob a bank, then
- 0xdeadbeefbabe 8y ago
  IR leds in a hat
- dpflan 8y ago
  Masks, face altering, stickers, etc. I like this research about "Adversarial Patches" - stickers that confuse image recognition systems. I imagine one may wear a display with ever changing images that are salient and confuse such systems. > Research Article: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1712.09665.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1712.09665.pdf > Video for patches: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i1sp4X57TL4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i1sp4X57TL4
  - beenBoutIT 8y ago
    Ambitious widespread adoption of brand new badly flawed technology. China's plan with tech is looking more and more like the Great Leap Forward 2.0.
- beagle3 8y ago
  There is nothing ethically questionable about ad blocking. Advertisers would like you to believe that there is, and perhaps at some point in the past it arguably was. However, today [not] using an ad-blocker is as ethically questionable as having [un]protected sex with a stranger. There isn't a single ad network that does not, every now and then, dish out drive by malware.
- IshKebab 8y ago
  Yeah only among weirdos.
- jstarfish 8y ago
  I'd like to think so, but my bank already prohibits wearing sunglasses or hats indoors. They have a guard that will turn you away and everything. In the future, simply entering a store with CCTV is an opt-in for FR analytics and all that entails.
drdebug 8y ago
npr.org gave me a choice between agreeing with all the cookie sharing stuff, or decline and get a text-only version, I love the choice !
- 0x006A 8y ago
  sadly the text only version links to the home page not the article, which is odd since one can guess the url from the link -> https://text.npr.org/s.php?sId=613692526 https://text.npr.org/s.php?sId=613692526
petermcneeley 8y ago
Many forms of privacy will disappear but these are all modern creations anyway. Think of how a small tribe use to behave. Was there anything that was private in a small community? Would a criminal also too be instantly spotted in the local lodge as the bard plays his tunes?
- scottlocklin 8y ago
  The global village has already brought back the ancient tradition of witch hunts; looking forward to the blessings which will come along with being spied on by powerful panopticons instead of village gossips!
- maxxxxx 8y ago
  I don't think you can compare small tribes watching each other with the current situation where someone with access to surveillance systems can record all movements in a whole country and get them analyzed automatically. Surveillance used to be expensive and cost a lot of effort but increasingly it can be done more complete and cheaper. The world may look differently if previous dictators had had the surveillance systems of today or the near future in their hands.
  - petermcneeley 8y ago
    Yes but this is just a further expression of our unaddressed ever-increasing social inequities. Even among the basic primates there is a great variety present in their visible social hierarchies. The shape that our reconstituted tribes take is for us now to choose.
- gaius 8y ago
  Think of how a small tribe use to behave. Was there anything that was private in a small community But you could walk over the hill to the next village and start again.
  - perl4ever 8y ago
    I rather think that when it was the norm for most humans to never go outside their small community, you couldn't, practically speaking, walk over to the next village and start again. They would probably eat you or something. At least, if it was easy to travel and integrate with others, it would be by definition a larger scale society. Edit: however, I just thought of the story of Cain in the Bible, so that stands as presumably a pretty ancient archetype.
Abrecht 8y ago
> "Cameras are set in China at 2.8 meters above the ground. That means they won't be able to capture human faces. That's a rule. I'm confused.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- parliament32 8y ago
  I think they mean surveillance cameras run at an angle that makes automated facial recognition impossible.
  - trevyn 8y ago
    Today’s state of the art facial recogition systems work with close to +/- 90 degrees of head pan and tilt. It’s really quite impressive.
  - gnode 8y ago
    Yes, but this is in an article about people being captured by facial recognition surveillance. It appears to contradict itself. Maybe it's a typo?
  - mtgx 8y ago
    That seems unlikely.
- lordnacho 8y ago
  Must be a translation/proof-reading error. A camera 1m above people's heads would be perfect for capturing faces.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- manicdee 8y ago
  Catch faces? Hit heads perhaps? As in, “Ouch! I caught that camera with my face.”
forgot-my-pw 8y ago
> The man, who authorities identified only by his surname, Yu, is accused of having stolen around $17,000 worth of potatoes in 2015. That's a lot of potatoes to move!
- mkoryak 8y ago
  maybe a dozen of really expensive potatoes?
  - carterehsmith 8y ago
    Well, that made me search for "most expensive potatoes" and sure enough, some exotic potatoes go for $300/pound. til. http://www.luxuo.com/lifestyle/gastronomy/potato-la-bonnotte.html http://www.luxuo.com/lifestyle/gastronomy/potato-la-bonnotte...
  - dTal 8y ago
    Or a single Faberge potato... (edit: Holy shit, that exists...)
    - griffoa 8y ago
      Yeah, I hear those potatoes are the shit over in Palo Alto along with pink BMW's for 16th birthdays.
- habeebtc 8y ago
  I thought the same thing and did some searching. Based on the street price of potatoes in China, it's in the neighborhood of 30k pounds. More if that number is wholesale value. The other thing we can surmise which is strange about the crime: He had to have stolen a truck worth of potatoes. So he either used his own truck, or he stole a truck and then gave it back after having fenced the potatoes.
  - magduf 8y ago
    >So he either used his own truck, or he stole a truck and then gave it back after having fenced the potatoes. I wonder if it's possible that he ditched the truck afterwards, it was recovered unharmed, so they didn't bother charging him with that, or the article just didn't bother listing the additional charge of truck theft since the potato theft was far worse financially.
joering2 8y ago
10 years from now frontpage HN: "Thanks to cameras placed in every room of every Chinese house, 10,000 people have been saved from otherwise being abused, kidnapped, raped or trafficked this month alone!" Yay!
- wedn3sday 8y ago
  If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear!
  - nnq 8y ago
    If you have nothing to hide, you are literally worthless! (In a financial sense, not saying this as an offense.) People should get it that in a full fledged information economy the only thing that will have value will be information that they only they have. So encrypt, don't share, obsfucate, and when applicable use legal protection like patents for anything you can... Never know what might be of value. One of the few good ideas I've hear in the crypto space is owning and encripting your personal data so that only you can sell it to advertisers. Sounds retarded, but as more and more things will become worthless there might be some prophecy of a future to come...
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
m_t 8y ago
Direct access to the text only version: https://text.npr.org/s.php?sId=613692526 https://text.npr.org/s.php?sId=613692526 Thanks to GDPR, I can now acess a page with what I want to read way faster than before!
- gnode 8y ago
  While I appreciate them being the first site I've seen that's actually trying to be GDPR compliant (not just giving me a "yes I accept tracking" and "no I don't want to see the content" choice), it's a bit annoying that their "decline and visit plain text site" link goes to the homepage, rather than the article.
  - iovrthoughtthis 8y ago
    This is an obvious "force people to join by providing a shit service" ploy. Articles done event have properly tagged titles.
- 2bitencryption 8y ago
  I'm still a bit ignorant on all things GDPR, which part of it says they must provide a plaintext site? I'm wondering if I will start seeing more of these in the future.
  - fapjacks 8y ago
    I'm just guessing, but GDPR does require that if a person says "no" to tracking (or rather, if they do not explicitly opt-in), that the service cannot be degraded. So I'm wondering if NPR is just serving completely script-less, ad-less text to provide the same thing to this audience?
    - gnode 8y ago
      I wonder how regulators would look at this practise. It would depend on whether taking away formatting and any image / video content counts as degrading. For some people this is desirable, but for others it may not be. My interpretation is that they would be free to give the text-only version to EU residents unilaterally, but not to make formatting tied to tracking consent, as tracking is not functionally necessary for formatting. As an extreme example, I don't think Youtube could have "yes, track me and let me watch the video" and "no, read text transcript of video" as options and claim equivalency.
heyyyouu 8y ago
And yet: http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-44089161 http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-44089161 -- did they maybe get lucky? I tend to believe there's still issues with the technology and/or data in/data out issues (unless, for example, the Chinese have REALLY good photos of people to start with -- that's the excuse the British police gave in the above story for the 91 percent false positive rate).
beenBoutIT 8y ago
$17k potato heist. AI-Powered Facial Recognition. The "Michael Jackson" of China. I can't help but think of how cool it would be if Michael Mann put together an updated Chinese remake of "HEAT".
nikkwong 8y ago
Anyone have thoughts on how the public will feel about this kind of tech being applied to the streets of the U.S.? We seem to be so libertarian, yet it seems like other countries (and even law enforcement currently in the US) have been implementing it with little concern of public opinion and/or public outcry.

65 points by erwan 8y ago

Masks and temporary/permanent face altering techniques will explode as this technology takes hold. I think about it like ad-blocking, something that may work itself into the mainstream despite it's questionable ethics.

MarkMMullin 8y ago
If the technology just stayed at facial recognition, maybe - I work on stereoscopic vision, so you'd have to change your head geometry too for my cameras if you're in parallax range..... and we're getting to the point of being able to do realtime skeletal pose analysis -- https://storage.googleapis.com/tfjs-models/demos/posenet/camera.html https://storage.googleapis.com/tfjs-models/demos/posenet/cam... So, it's an arms race :-/
- josefresco 8y ago
  Egad Batman! Thanks for the background - how would one change their head geometry? Would a prosthetic nose, or subdermal implants serve this purpose?
  - saiya-jin 8y ago
    a hat and beard will probably be enough for next 20 years, after that we will probably have to resort to more advanced techniques like wigs
  - MarkMMullin 8y ago
    Probably - its an arms race after all - at this time for the stupider systems the following steps can confuse them 1 - use makeup techniques to make the nose fade into the face and don't let it get a profile view - noses are very important - a prosthetic nose probably won't help tho, cause the nose is an orientation characteristic more than an identification one 2 - eyes and the facial geometry around them are secondary, so no nose and giant movie star sunglasses adds to the machines confusion 3 - collar worn sparkle lighting directed upwards is baffling to machine - silly things keep picking up the light sparkles on the face as feature points (heh) 4 - makeup patterns based on the WW2 ship camouflage mess up geometry detection Now, all of that will defeat a simple recognizer but if the developers had a lick of sense, the system will still pop it out as anomalous. Mission impossible facial masks could certainly help, but pretty much everyone is removing the IR filters at this point and the facial thermography would be all messed up Then there's all the work going on in recognizing more than just a face - I've seen some stuff on incorporating more of the body into the recognition pattern (I've always wanted to watch one of those systems misrecognize Mitch McConnell as a turtle :-) As the available horsepower continues to expand, more of the totality of the individual can be recognized (my own accidental contribution to this is that cheap stereoscopic vision makes it a lot easier/more accurater to pick out foreground from background) At the end of the day, I think Scott McNeally had it right in the '90s - "You have no privacy. Get over it" I am of mixed minds about this stuff in public spaces, the good and bad examples are evenly distributed
  - dghughes 8y ago
    Or maybe infrared reflecting material similar to sun block. The local cancer society came to my workplace to promote skin health and one of the items was a small camera system. You put sun block on one part of your face, stuck your head in a box and a camera and screen showed the sunblock as black paint. If an IR type of material could be made you could paint geometric dazzle type paint on your face to obscure its geometry.
    - MarkMMullin 8y ago
      Slick idea - I'd be concerned tho that, given the semi normal rough distribution of heat on the face (there's a reason head wounds bleed so much) that this attempt to game the system would be easily detected as gaming the system. The good news is any idiots building a product by bolting together parts from OpenCV that they barely understand would probably fall for it. Me, I'd be embarrassed if I didn't tag you as anomalous. HOWEVER - if you were really really good and accurate with the application of the blocker (cause if its zinc oxide it does work in both directions) and you backed it up with makeup for the visible light side of the house, you probably could fool most by establishing a completely different facial geometry. Anyway, certainly a concept worth ruminating on. :-) I think it would beat me at my imaginary best if done well. Have to find a counter, I guess.. Like gait :-)
      - toofy 8y ago
        > Me, I'd be embarrassed if I didn't tag you as anomalous So it sounds like these types of strategies need to be turned into fashion trends in order to make the anomalies not so anomalous?
- 8_hours_ago 8y ago
  > skeletal pose analysis ... it's an arms race I see what you did there :)
  - MarkMMullin 8y ago
    Nice catch - I was completely oblivious to it till you pointed it out, and it was an accident, I swear! Lazarus Long says punsters and practical jokers get keelhauled or staked out on anthills :-( That's no fun
gldalmaso 8y ago
The sci-fi cyberpunk genre might have accidentally/accurately predicted this trend. The artwork makes heavy use of face/head mods and accessories.
- josefresco 8y ago
  I'm glad you commented. My original commented mentioned how I thought the fashion industry might take this on. Both as a way to generate new revenue, but also a way to stay "cutting edge" aka trendy. It's one thing to wear a "face mod" because you're paranoid - it's quite another to wear one because your favorite celebrity does.
- superhuzza 8y ago
  Definitely not accidental, I seem to remember at least one of William Gibson's books mention people avoiding face recognition with masks.
monocasa 8y ago
Yep. And it's super cyberpunk. https://cvdazzle.com/ https://cvdazzle.com/
- dpflan 8y ago
  Thanks for sharing. This is excellent!
J-dawg 8y ago
> Masks and temporary/permanent face altering techniques will explode as this technology takes hold Along with a corresponding explosion in legislation to prevent you from covering your face in public. It already exists in France (popularly known as the 'Burqa Ban', but I think it covers other face coverings). I'm especially curious to see how this will go down in the UK, which is increasingly authoritarian while often painfully politically correct. An ill-thought-out and ambiguous piece of law will be rushed through Parliament, with various exemptions for religious groups. The far right will become outraged about these exemptions, and stage protests. The "nothing to hide, nothing to fear" brigade will be out in force. The government will make vague statements about protecting us from terrorists. Paedophiles will definitely be mentioned at some point. Eventually there'll be farcical prosecutions of people who were just cycling to work with a pollution mask, or going to a fancy-dress party. And the police will continue to claim they're under-funded, while somehow finding the resources to pursue bullshit like this.
- wilsonnb 8y ago
  It's already illegal in many states in the US. Possibly at the local level as well. Here's the relevant law for Virginia. https://law.lis.virginia.gov/vacode/title18.2/chapter9/section18.2-422/ https://law.lis.virginia.gov/vacode/title18.2/chapter9/secti... It's a class 6 felony, which in VA means you'll be looking at "a term of imprisonment of not less than one year nor more than five years, or in the discretion of the jury or the court trying the case without a jury, confinement in jail for not more than 12 months and a fine of not more than $2,500, either or both".
  - coolspot 8y ago
    > However, the provisions of this section shall not apply to persons (i) wearing traditional holiday costumes; It doesn't say I can't wear traditional holiday costume outside of holiday, so it should be okay to wear Halloween scary costume all year long.
    - JTbane 8y ago
      >However, the provisions of this section shall not apply to persons (i) wearing traditional holiday costumes; Perhaps you ought to dress up as Santa Claus when you want to rob a bank, then
0xdeadbeefbabe 8y ago
IR leds in a hat
dpflan 8y ago
Masks, face altering, stickers, etc. I like this research about "Adversarial Patches" - stickers that confuse image recognition systems. I imagine one may wear a display with ever changing images that are salient and confuse such systems. > Research Article: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1712.09665.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1712.09665.pdf > Video for patches: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i1sp4X57TL4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i1sp4X57TL4
- beenBoutIT 8y ago
  Ambitious widespread adoption of brand new badly flawed technology. China's plan with tech is looking more and more like the Great Leap Forward 2.0.
beagle3 8y ago
There is nothing ethically questionable about ad blocking. Advertisers would like you to believe that there is, and perhaps at some point in the past it arguably was. However, today [not] using an ad-blocker is as ethically questionable as having [un]protected sex with a stranger. There isn't a single ad network that does not, every now and then, dish out drive by malware.
IshKebab 8y ago
Yeah only among weirdos.
jstarfish 8y ago
I'd like to think so, but my bank already prohibits wearing sunglasses or hats indoors. They have a guard that will turn you away and everything. In the future, simply entering a store with CCTV is an opt-in for FR analytics and all that entails.

drdebug 8y ago

npr.org gave me a choice between agreeing with all the cookie sharing stuff, or decline and get a text-only version, I love the choice !

0x006A 8y ago
sadly the text only version links to the home page not the article, which is odd since one can guess the url from the link -> https://text.npr.org/s.php?sId=613692526 https://text.npr.org/s.php?sId=613692526

petermcneeley 8y ago

Many forms of privacy will disappear but these are all modern creations anyway. Think of how a small tribe use to behave. Was there anything that was private in a small community? Would a criminal also too be instantly spotted in the local lodge as the bard plays his tunes?

scottlocklin 8y ago
The global village has already brought back the ancient tradition of witch hunts; looking forward to the blessings which will come along with being spied on by powerful panopticons instead of village gossips!
maxxxxx 8y ago
I don't think you can compare small tribes watching each other with the current situation where someone with access to surveillance systems can record all movements in a whole country and get them analyzed automatically. Surveillance used to be expensive and cost a lot of effort but increasingly it can be done more complete and cheaper. The world may look differently if previous dictators had had the surveillance systems of today or the near future in their hands.
- petermcneeley 8y ago
  Yes but this is just a further expression of our unaddressed ever-increasing social inequities. Even among the basic primates there is a great variety present in their visible social hierarchies. The shape that our reconstituted tribes take is for us now to choose.
gaius 8y ago
Think of how a small tribe use to behave. Was there anything that was private in a small community But you could walk over the hill to the next village and start again.
- perl4ever 8y ago
  I rather think that when it was the norm for most humans to never go outside their small community, you couldn't, practically speaking, walk over to the next village and start again. They would probably eat you or something. At least, if it was easy to travel and integrate with others, it would be by definition a larger scale society. Edit: however, I just thought of the story of Cain in the Bible, so that stands as presumably a pretty ancient archetype.

Abrecht 8y ago

> "Cameras are set in China at 2.8 meters above the ground. That means they won't be able to capture human faces. That's a rule. I'm confused.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
parliament32 8y ago
I think they mean surveillance cameras run at an angle that makes automated facial recognition impossible.
- trevyn 8y ago
  Today’s state of the art facial recogition systems work with close to +/- 90 degrees of head pan and tilt. It’s really quite impressive.
- gnode 8y ago
  Yes, but this is in an article about people being captured by facial recognition surveillance. It appears to contradict itself. Maybe it's a typo?
- mtgx 8y ago
  That seems unlikely.
lordnacho 8y ago
Must be a translation/proof-reading error. A camera 1m above people's heads would be perfect for capturing faces.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
manicdee 8y ago
Catch faces? Hit heads perhaps? As in, “Ouch! I caught that camera with my face.”

forgot-my-pw 8y ago

> The man, who authorities identified only by his surname, Yu, is accused of having stolen around $17,000 worth of potatoes in 2015. That's a lot of potatoes to move!

mkoryak 8y ago
maybe a dozen of really expensive potatoes?
- carterehsmith 8y ago
  Well, that made me search for "most expensive potatoes" and sure enough, some exotic potatoes go for $300/pound. til. http://www.luxuo.com/lifestyle/gastronomy/potato-la-bonnotte.html http://www.luxuo.com/lifestyle/gastronomy/potato-la-bonnotte...
- dTal 8y ago
  Or a single Faberge potato... (edit: Holy shit, that exists...)
  - griffoa 8y ago
    Yeah, I hear those potatoes are the shit over in Palo Alto along with pink BMW's for 16th birthdays.
habeebtc 8y ago
I thought the same thing and did some searching. Based on the street price of potatoes in China, it's in the neighborhood of 30k pounds. More if that number is wholesale value. The other thing we can surmise which is strange about the crime: He had to have stolen a truck worth of potatoes. So he either used his own truck, or he stole a truck and then gave it back after having fenced the potatoes.
- magduf 8y ago
  >So he either used his own truck, or he stole a truck and then gave it back after having fenced the potatoes. I wonder if it's possible that he ditched the truck afterwards, it was recovered unharmed, so they didn't bother charging him with that, or the article just didn't bother listing the additional charge of truck theft since the potato theft was far worse financially.

joering2 8y ago

10 years from now frontpage HN: "Thanks to cameras placed in every room of every Chinese house, 10,000 people have been saved from otherwise being abused, kidnapped, raped or trafficked this month alone!" Yay!

wedn3sday 8y ago
If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear!
- nnq 8y ago
  If you have nothing to hide, you are literally worthless! (In a financial sense, not saying this as an offense.) People should get it that in a full fledged information economy the only thing that will have value will be information that they only they have. So encrypt, don't share, obsfucate, and when applicable use legal protection like patents for anything you can... Never know what might be of value. One of the few good ideas I've hear in the crypto space is owning and encripting your personal data so that only you can sell it to advertisers. Sounds retarded, but as more and more things will become worthless there might be some prophecy of a future to come...

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

m_t 8y ago

Direct access to the text only version: https://text.npr.org/s.php?sId=613692526 https://text.npr.org/s.php?sId=613692526 Thanks to GDPR, I can now acess a page with what I want to read way faster than before!

gnode 8y ago
While I appreciate them being the first site I've seen that's actually trying to be GDPR compliant (not just giving me a "yes I accept tracking" and "no I don't want to see the content" choice), it's a bit annoying that their "decline and visit plain text site" link goes to the homepage, rather than the article.
- iovrthoughtthis 8y ago
  This is an obvious "force people to join by providing a shit service" ploy. Articles done event have properly tagged titles.
2bitencryption 8y ago
I'm still a bit ignorant on all things GDPR, which part of it says they must provide a plaintext site? I'm wondering if I will start seeing more of these in the future.
- fapjacks 8y ago
  I'm just guessing, but GDPR does require that if a person says "no" to tracking (or rather, if they do not explicitly opt-in), that the service cannot be degraded. So I'm wondering if NPR is just serving completely script-less, ad-less text to provide the same thing to this audience?
  - gnode 8y ago
    I wonder how regulators would look at this practise. It would depend on whether taking away formatting and any image / video content counts as degrading. For some people this is desirable, but for others it may not be. My interpretation is that they would be free to give the text-only version to EU residents unilaterally, but not to make formatting tied to tracking consent, as tracking is not functionally necessary for formatting. As an extreme example, I don't think Youtube could have "yes, track me and let me watch the video" and "no, read text transcript of video" as options and claim equivalency.

heyyyouu 8y ago

And yet: http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-44089161 http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-44089161 -- did they maybe get lucky? I tend to believe there's still issues with the technology and/or data in/data out issues (unless, for example, the Chinese have REALLY good photos of people to start with -- that's the excuse the British police gave in the above story for the 91 percent false positive rate).

beenBoutIT 8y ago

$17k potato heist. AI-Powered Facial Recognition. The "Michael Jackson" of China. I can't help but think of how cool it would be if Michael Mann put together an updated Chinese remake of "HEAT".

nikkwong 8y ago

Anyone have thoughts on how the public will feel about this kind of tech being applied to the streets of the U.S.? We seem to be so libertarian, yet it seems like other countries (and even law enforcement currently in the US) have been implementing it with little concern of public opinion and/or public outcry.