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What I find the most interesting about this article is that someone was able to be identified using a picture of their fingerprints. Thus, any photos posted on
by jasoneckert 6y ago
What I find the most interesting about this article is that someone was able to be identified using a picture of their fingerprints.
Thus, any photos posted online could be scoured for identification information. And with computer vision technologies becoming more mature, it means that regular video footage of people could identify them the same way in seconds or less using a wide variety of different visual traits.
The implications of this on individual privacy are immense.
- hunter2_ 6y agoI wouldn't be surprised if writing style could also be used. I tend to use certain constructions and vocabulary across many of my comments. Some are under a handle with little or no link to my real identity, and some are quite the opposite. I expect someone could deanonymize the former based on correlation of writing style with the latter.
- 3131s 6y agoThat's called stylometry and it can be surprisingly accurate under the right conditions.
- gruez 6y agoWhat’s the actual scientific evidence backing this? I’m asking because various forensic techniques that were previously perceived to be reliable (fingerprints, handwriting analysis, bite marks) turned out to be total bunk.
- SpelingBeeChamp 6y agoEvidence that fingerprint analysis is "total bunk?" That one is news to me.
- mattmanser 6y agoWell, not total bunk, but less reliable than generally believed: https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21228442-600-miscarriage-of-justice-points-to-fingerprint-flaws/ https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21228442-600-miscarri... Then again a lot of forensic techniques seem to fall into the same category: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20150512-can-we-trust-forensic-science https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20150512-can-we-trust-for... A lot of the problems come from human bias and over-stating the accuracy of tests at trial.
- wincy 6y agoWell I’m fairly certain this is how they figured out who the Unabomber was. His brother recognized his style of writing and called the feds.
- thatcat 6y agoIt's statistical analysis of word frequency, distribution, phrasing, and other features to create a fingerprint of someones writing style. I'm not sure what you mean by evidence, it's used to narrow a set of possibilities of authorship like a search filter.
- refurb 6y agoThat's in the indictment too. He misspelled "quality" across several different posts. Alone it's not conclusive, but it's one more piece of evidence linking all of the activity together.
- hunter2_ 6y agoYes, though I was thinking more about entirely correct writing. Patterns among hay in a haystack, as opposed to a needle.
- justinclift 6y agoPeople have been warning this is likely possible, for years.
- achairapart 6y agoFacial recognition would be much easier then looking for fingerprints. Given all the social media apps steadily growing their datasets, won't be long before a leaked dump of a greater part of the whole world population data will be available to anyone. Maybe facial surgery will be a major thing in the future. Or we will all wear masks anytime, beside viruses. I know, that's not a bright vision of the future. I wonder where is the line where technology will switch from useful to socially dangerous and how far we are from it. To tell the truth, it already kind of switched from useful to a useless waste of time in many cases. Or the day when FAANG & other big tech will get bored with selling those stupid ads and move on to more powerful and scary things.
- slim 6y agothis is not news. in 2008 CCC published finger prints of Angela Merkel https://www.wired.com/2008/03/hackers-publish/ https://www.wired.com/2008/03/hackers-publish/
- detaro 6y ago> in 2008 CCC published finger prints of Angela Merkel The article you link neither talks about a fingerprint of Angela Merkel nor about a fingerprint recovered from a photograph. (But a CCC group did indeed years later show a politicians fingerprint recovered from a photo, but again not Merkels)
- slim 6y agosorry
- sslalready 6y agoI’ve reflected on the fact that some makers on YouTube wear gloves and wondered if this is for privacy reasons. I see globes being worn even when they’re not obviously doing anything that risk getting their fingers dirty.
- sebastialonso 6y agoWhich is hilarious if you're monetising their videos.
- flatiron 6y agoYouTube obviously knows who they are. I think they would want to prevent 4chan from doxing them.
- epakai 6y agoPossibly to hide damaged cuticles, dirty fingernails, or something else unsightly. Comments will harp on just about any flaw. Ben Heck addressed comments about his fingers' condition, but he just offers some sarcasm about them instead of hiding it. Some might resort to gloves.
- michaelt 6y agoThat could just be for continuity - so if they shoot the video out of order, you don't get the gloves appearing and disappearing and reappearing between scenes.
- genewitch 6y agoThere was some pytorch software called "enhance", i.e. ./enhance <image> [options] and you could take an image that someone took of their unpowered tv across the room and pull out a high resolution image of their face from the reflection in the matte-ish surface. I used it on reddit to convince people it was unsafe to post any images of that sort. It seemed to work for about 6 months. There's magic in image enhancement, but I don't know that ridges and valleys of a fingerprint are there, yet. I don't even know that "this specific person is scared that they leaked their face in a way that is recognizable to them" even scales to "never upload anything" - it could be this sort of news is programming the population that computers can tease out identities with any and all leaked information, pictures, audio, etc. Heck, a decade and a half ago there were claims that governments could narrow a search for an audio file upload based on the deviation from 60hz on the power line noise - in an audio recording. So who knows?
- absorber 6y ago> Heck, a decade and a half ago there were claims that governments could narrow a search for an audio file upload based on the deviation from 60hz on the power line noise - in an audio recording. Wow. Any source for this?
- RisingFusion 6y agoI think it was referring to Electrical network frequency analysis, which is to find the time that the recording was made. It compares small changes in mains hum frequency to historic records of the changes. I am not sure how it is in the US, but the UK grid has a single frequency over the network so it wouldn't work for finding the location.
- teruakohatu 6y agoThe propagation of waves is very fast, but wouldn't distance from multiple large sources or sinks fluctuate the frequency just slightly based on distance?
- 6y ago
- soulofmischief 6y agoAnyone engaging in legally questionable activity who didn't already consider this attack vector and take it seriously simply haven't been paying attention and have bad OPSEC. The possibility of this kind of attack has always been mathematically possible and it doesn't take machine learning or computer vision to do it. It boils down to basic linear transformation. There's a long history of attempts to identify persons by photos of fingerprints for evidence, there's just a level of uncertainty involved which make it more suited for gathering intelligence than court-submitted evidence.
- microtherion 6y ago> identified using a picture of their fingerprints It's not clear to me that they identified him that way. It might be that they arrested him due to other evidence, compared the fingerprints afterward, and told him that they could prove the fingerprints matched, whereupon he pled guilty. It's no unheard of to elicit guilty pleas using less than scientifically robust forensic methods.
- refurb 6y agoIndeed. I got the impression this was one of many pieces of evidence used to put the case together. The biggest one was the money laundering. Porras had used a money laundering service controlled by Homeland Security Investigations. Vendors sent the money launderer a certain amount of Bitcoin and the money launderer mailed cash back to the vendor. At some point in the money launderer’s career, federal agents quietly took control of the money laundering operation and used the position to identify dozens of darkweb vendors.
- jcrawfordor 6y agoWhen I wrote my thesis on Bitcoin money laundering I could not locate any hard evidence that law enforcement had operated a honeypot laundering service, other than it being an extremely obvious thing to do. That was a bit ago, but I wonder whether or not this is the first instance of an agency disclosing they had done so.
- redisman 6y agoWhat I find incredibly disturbing is that these resources and expertise are being spent on drugs rather than child abuse materials etc.
- oh_sigh 6y agoIt isn't either/or. There are teams devoted to hunting child abusers and teams devoted to hunting large scale drug dealers.
- rv-de 6y agoHow is that surprising? Isn't it absolutely obvious and technically trivial? They'll manipulate it into something monochrome with sufficient contrast and feed it into their database - done. Having said that it could just as obviously be a deceit to distract from an informant or other sources of information.
- junon 6y agoI pulled in the image from the article and tried it myself. A few minutes of fiddling around with the various filters, I got this result: https://imgur.com/82yHUoM https://imgur.com/82yHUoM I reckon that'd be enough to run through a database.