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Juggalos figured out how to beat facial recognition
- Torgo 8y agoHowever the surveillance state still has: gait-recognition, shoe-recognition, and clothing-recognition.
- Legion 8y agoMore like "stumbled into" than "figured out".
- electricslpnsld 8y ago"Stumbled into" is the discovery mode for many major scientific breakthroughs.
- kbenson 8y agoIt's actually a little amazing how many people are stumbling over themselves to point out how one possible interpretation of the title that implies some credit is due to this group that people have a generally poor opinion of couldn't possibly actually have done anything useful. This, people, is exactly what prejudice is.
- Legion 8y agoOR, as was my point, the title as written suggests they were actively engaged in efforts to evade facial recognition, which is a completely different story. > This, people, is exactly what prejudice is. You're reaching.
- kbenson 8y ago> the title as written suggests That is one interpretation (as I covered elsewhere in these comments, "figured out" is used often in to describe discoveries that were accidental in nature. Interestingly, rarely to people complain about the wording when it's a white guy from 50 years ago), and I the fact that people are both jumping to that conclusion here, are unwilling to consider their interpretation might be biased, and feel the need to comment on this when it's already been noted and in numbers that I think are substantially higher than would be seen if the group in question did not have the same reputation, speaks volumes. Is it actually so implausible that one of more people that consider themselves Juggalos (or associate with the group) notices they weren't being tagged quite the same way when in makeup, and investigated? If it's not so implausible, why is everyone rushing to point out it's probably not what happened, and if it is implausible, why do you think that? I don't know whether the discoverer is a Juggalo. I suspect he's not, from his Twitter feed, but I can't be sure. I've had plenty of friends into similar tech scenes and also into some weird shit (and I've been to a Defcon in the early 2000's, which is all the extra evidence I need). The fact that so many people seem willing to assume he's not and present that as fact (how many people clicked through to the twitter feed it to see if the person was associated with Juggalos?) in a refutation of the title (which only makes sense with that assumption), suggests something to me.
- Legion 8y agoSure, but this isn't a story of people who were making a concerted effort to avoid facial recognition, which the title's wording implies for a little bit of sensationalism.
- toofy 8y ago> ... we’re making a concerted effort. It’s interesting — knowing that so many major discoveries through all of history were completely accidental I didn’t read it this way at all. I actually interpreted it to mean they “stumbled upon” a way to defeat facial recognition. It never ceases to amaze me how we can all read and infer such different meanings from text.
- cornholio 8y agoFace recognition is a great example of a privacy-toxic technology thwarted by something like GDPR. As soon as you cross the line from mass recording of anonymous images to recognizing individuals, even in a public space, you require consent. The only problem is that the main users of face recognition, security agencies and government are not subject to GDPR - that needs to be restricted in a future version because today it wouldn't have been politically feasible.
- lucb1e 8y agoThis website isn't even GDPR compliant and it's trying. Imagine the footage being recorded of us all silently, without cookie banner...
- kodablah 8y ago> Face recognition is a great example of a privacy-toxic technology thwarted by something like GDPR [...] security agencies and government are not subject to GDPR. Sounds to me like it is the opposite and implicitly condones its use by excluding those organizations. The larger the law-built divide between government rights and non-government rights becomes, the less likely any of us entrepreneurs will be able to counteract it. Next, people will be cheering a law that prevents people from developing facial recognition technology.
- cornholio 8y agoNot sure I understand your logic. We moved from a free for all to a significantly restricted regime for personal data. There is, for the first time, a continent-wide recognition of the social value of privacy. This was achieved despite gargantuan efforts to quench it by the affected interests. And this is a bad result because it doesn't go to the politically impossible extreme? It's a foot in the door, we have a fighting chance for an universal right to privacy. That's the only way to restrict governments and the only way to get that is to convince the general public that it'a a right worth fighting for. The GDPR is a massive step in that direction.
- kodablah 8y ago
- yathern 8y agoThe title of this article seems to imply that face painting was intentionally used among Juggalos to deter computerized facial recognition - of course we know that's not the case. Though to be fair, somewhere in the history of the practice, it may be argued that it was to throw off human face-recognition. This reminds me of a sort of creative look into futuristic fashion I saw a bit ago: https://cvdazzle.com https://cvdazzle.com Where the fashion of the future is made to be expressive while preventing mass surveillance.
- tzahola 8y agoChecked the cvdazzle site. Why do these models - and models on "high fashion" photos in general - look always like they feel deep contempt towards the viewer? Where did this trope come from? What are they trying to suggest? I don't get it.
- cardiffspaceman 8y ago> What are they trying to suggest? That smiling pleasantly is hard
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- yellowapple 8y agoIf I had to pose for a camera while wearing ridiculous-looking clothes and/or makeup, I'd have some pretty deep contempt for everyone involved (including the viewer) as well.
- the-pigeon 8y agoIf you are a model then you choose the wrong career path...
- scotu 8y agonot everybody has the luxury of doing what they like in life...
- docker_up 8y agoOnce this technique becomes more widespread, get ready for laws that make it illegal to fool facial recognition, similar to wearing masks, etc.
- jeffreyrogers 8y agoI would imagine there is a pretty strong first amendment case against such laws in the United States. Mask laws have been successfully challenged on those grounds (though sometimes the challenges have been unsuccessful).
- jstarfish 8y agoYour bank will likely not let you in if you're wearing a hat or sunglasses. "No shoes, no shirt, no service" has also been a thing for as long as convenience stores have been around. Not that far of a stretch to think this will ultimately extend to face paint. If you want true anonymity, just wear a motorcyle helmet everywhere. We still don't know who The Stig is.
- jeffreyrogers 8y agoSure, but your bank is a private institution, not the government.
- 8note 8y agois there really a big difference? the government has a right to any data the bank collects about you
- ryanmonroe 8y ago> the government has a right to any data the bank collects about you This is not true in the US. Banks certainly have a right to give any information you've given them to the government though.
- 8y ago
- qop 8y agoUhhhh, juggalos paint their face and it JUST SO HAPPENS that it beats face recognition sometimes. I assure you there was little to no intellectual effort on their part towards that end. Fucking magic. All in the motherfucking air.
- moate 8y agoSo you're saying the band that produced the lyric "Fucking Magnets, how do they work?" might not have been pointedly trying to solve the problem of privacy in an evolving digital society?
- sctb 8y agoWould you please stop posting like this and start following the guidelines? https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- qop 8y agoI've never broken a guideline here.
- saudioger 8y agoIt happens to trick current facial recognition systems looking for typical faces... but I imagine it would be well within the possibility to create a "juggalo" filter that simply adjusts the levels until the impact of the makeup is reduced enough to grab a face out of?
- lostcolony 8y agoPer the article, if you instead rely on a depth map, makeup doesn't work. But it does prevent basic image recognition.
- saudioger 8y agoRight, depth mapping doesn't care about face paint... but I'm saying that even with basic image recognition you can probably correct for it.
- biggestlou 8y agoWHOOP WHOOP
- matte_black 8y agoFacial recognition is only “beaten” when a person’s normal face can go undetected without looking like a fucking juggalo.
- mieseratte 8y ago> Facial recognition is only “beaten” when a person’s normal face can go undetected without looking like a fucking juggalo. I know this is crudely put and thus being downvoted, but there is a kernel of truth to it similar to the XKCD encyption / wrench[0] comic. Sure, you might've beat facial recognition in the lab, but in a real world scenario you're walking around in ridiculous looking clown face paint so you're going to come under immediate scrutiny regardless. [0] - https://xkcd.com/538/ https://xkcd.com/538/
- mirimir 8y agoMaybe you can have advance air support. A drone with an IR laser targeted by a lens detector. But you'd need to avoid targeting people wearing glasses. But no, that's silly. Really, you just need to give up on the idea of being anonymous in public. Because that was never something that you could count on.
- matte_black 8y agoIf only there were some sort of light we could shine to wash out a person’s face with, but have it only be visible to cameras and invisible to humans.
- mirimir 8y agoThat would likely just flag you as someone trying to obfuscate facial recognition. Making you quite unique, no? I have noticed that it's very hard to recognize faces of people with very black skin, under low-light conditions. So I can imagine black makeup that's 100% non-reflective across a wide range of wavelengths. But then there's millimeter-wave radar. How would one block reflection of mmW radar?
- pssflops 8y agoAre they still considered a gang via FBI's classification? Might be more a criminal act to be a Juggalo than to circumvent facial recognition.
- esaym 8y ago"juggalo" man its been awhile since I've heard that word....a long while.
- Confiks 8y agoMore specifically: Juggalos figured out how to beat facial recognition tech trained on normal faces and trying to recognize normal faces. While the black and white paint does seem to negate a lot of natural contrast human faces have – and on which the recognition of faces is currently based – there seems a lot of information left to recognize specific faces, especially when considering stereovision or even possible pulsed laser reflection / LIDAR based solutions (think long-range iPhone X sensor). Even if the recognition of an individual within a database of millions yields too many false positives, the set can be further refined by considering other subject metadata, say geolocation or social connections. While considering this, it's still important to not succumb to privacy nihilism. Not everything is lost, but it's hard to practice that when 'beating' facial recognition tech means "looking like a fucking juggalo" [1]. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17452411 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17452411
- crankylinuxuser 8y agoSpeaking of that, I already fed in data from a kinect of the infrared region of interest from a LBP cascade. It works to identify the perceptual hash of the depth and contour of the face. It beats all makeup, completely.
- piyh 8y agoI'll need some makeup artists from Star Trek TNG to help me get ready in the mornings.
- crankylinuxuser 8y agoQa'pla
- guelo 8y agoThat wouldn't work against the traditional anti-face detection technology: bandanas.
- tzakrajs 8y agoFursuit?
- digikata 8y agoSo it might thwart some newer learning algos, but I wonder how it would do against the more classical heuristically guided techniques that tend to look at more invariant characteristics like facial feature spacing and ratios.
- Apocryphon 8y agoSo this explains why there's face-painted neo-barbarian tribal subcultures in cyberpunk settings.
- theoh 8y agoReminded me of this, by JP Lewis in 2001 Lifting Detail from Darkness http://www.scribblethink.org/Work/Talks/dalmatian.pdf http://www.scribblethink.org/Work/Talks/dalmatian.pdf This application sketch describes a high quality method for separating detail from overall image region intensity. This intensity-detail decomposition can be used to automate some specialized image alteration tasks. Our work was motivated by the movie 102 Dalmatians, which featured a dalmatian puppy without spots. Animal handlers determined that the obvious idea of applying makeup to the dog was not possible – evidently there was no suitable makeup that was both safe to the dogs and that would stay in place during normal dog activity (including licking). This left Disney TSL with the task of painting out all the spots on the dog every few frames (the paintings were carried for a few frames with a simple scheme). The spot removal task was larger than anyone guessed, and ultimately required a large number of artists (up to 40) working for eight months. The problem also proved to be more difficult than expected from an algorithmic point of view. As the spots often had visible fur texture, initially it was believed that there must be some simple compositing technique that could lighten these spots.
- indoorfish 8y agoWhen did avoiding mass government surveillance become such a tame conversation topic?
- heyyyouu 8y agoFace recognition technology is proving to be fairly (if not wildly) inaccurate when in the field: https://pureai.com/articles/2018/05/15/facial-recognition-struggles-false-positives.aspx https://pureai.com/articles/2018/05/15/facial-recognition-st... It looks like the base photos are big issue, but of course there are other factors.
- tsumnia 8y agoThis is why a lot of research focuses on the Faces in the Wild dataset [1] [1] http://vis-www.cs.umass.edu/lfw/ http://vis-www.cs.umass.edu/lfw/
- jdietrich 8y ago"Accurate" isn't a terribly meaningful description. We really need to talk about sensitivity and specificity. If you're looking for a very low-probability event (a terror suspect in a random crowd) then your facial recognition algorithm needs to have phenomenally high specificity to be useful, otherwise you'll be glutted with false positives. This isn't a problem isolated to facial recognition - many cancer screening tests are worse than useless, because the harm of unnecessary treatment due to false positives outweighs the benefits of early detection. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_rate_fallacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_rate_fallacy
- halbritt 8y agoWOOP WOOP
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- emodendroket 8y agoSeems like you could just wear a mask or a balaclava.
- tmaly 8y agoreminds me of the book scanner darkly by Philip K. Dick. The people had these suits to mask their face
- newswriter99 8y agoNo they didn't. "Juggalo face makeup is better at throwing off facial recognition software than intentional methods." There's your headline. God I'm so tired of intentionally-misleading headlines. Clickbait nonsense.
- codetrotter 8y agoI agree with you. The Juggalos painted their faces but someone else discovered its effectiveness in fighting facial recognition. FTA: > According to Twitter user @tahkion, a computer science blogger for WonderHowTo, Juggalo makeup outmatches the machine learning algorithms that govern facial recognition technology.
- kbenson 8y agoWhile I think it's impossible to do with this crowd, because we've already been biased by this conversation, it would be interesting to run the phrases "Juggalos figured out how to beat facial recognition" and "Native Americans figured out the secret to a healthy lifestyle" (or some other positive association from a positively associated group) randomly across focus groups. I suspect people will come out with more problems accepting "figured out" for a negatively associated group than a positively associated one, even through I think the meaning of that wording is identical in both phrases.
- woolvalley 8y agoIf you have to wear that much makeup, might as well wear a mask.
- kolpa 8y agoMasks obscure vision and proprioception.
- brettgo1 8y agoFacial recognition, how does it work?
- mirimir 8y ago> People are constantly trying to come up with ways to work around facial recognition technology using everything from rigged hats (if you’re out in public) to heavy pixelation (if you’re online). Why does "online" necessarily involve facial images? I've used this image[0] for several years. I did use a cropped and fuzzed version of this[1], for a while. And other images, for other personas. 0) https://s3.amazonaws.com/keybase_processed_uploads/7c420e0c6aaec5a59dbb540a2fe30805_360_360.jpeg https://s3.amazonaws.com/keybase_processed_uploads/7c420e0c6... 1) https://russia.wcs.org/Portals/32/images/News/Vladimir%20Arsenyev%20foto.jpg?ver=2016-09-28-032154-880 https://russia.wcs.org/Portals/32/images/News/Vladimir%20Ars...
- gexla 8y agoIn case anyone is wondering "What is a Juggalo?" https://genius.com/Insane-clown-posse-what-is-a-juggalo-lyrics https://genius.com/Insane-clown-posse-what-is-a-juggalo-lyri... Among other things, a Juggalo... > He's a graduate He graduated from...well At least, he got a job He's not a dumb putz He works for himself scratching his nuts Given this, nothing would surprise me about any headlines referring to Juggalos.
- crwalker 8y agoI hope there is a better solution than returning to the bauta. Venice faced a related challenge (in a small city any passerby has a good chance of facial recognition) and it seems that their masks were sometimes used around the year for anonymity. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnival_of_Venice#Carnival_masks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnival_of_Venice#Carnival_ma...
- lapinot 8y agoI'm surprised no one mentioned that you can actually achieve somewhat the same thing and still be mostly unnoticed for human eyes by attaching some infrared LEDs on a scarf, cap or goggles.
- justboxing 8y agoNone of these 'hacks' work because almost all involve putting something on your face or your head. I think the holy grail would be if someone comes up with a tiny device that you can wear on your ear, or around your neck, that emits something invisible and that which only obscures cameras. That way, the humans interacting with other humans in public are not looking like clowns in makeup and having normal interactions, while obscuring and befuddling the big-brother cameras. I tried to research this in 2015 and was told about infra-red ray emitters. Not sure if there's any truth to it, or if it's even possible. If any of you have made any progress on this and would like to collaborate, please contact me. Email in bio.