10 ms·

Xiaomi Camera censoring German postal voting documents

165 points by aysfrm11 5y ago

aysfrm11 5y ago
Does anyone know what is going on here? Is Xiaomi stock camera known for censoring certain documents?
- input_sh 5y ago
  I'd say something like this is more likely: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EURion_constellation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EURion_constellation
perihelions 5y ago
Is there perhaps an invisible anti-counterfeiting constellation [0] on the ballot? Have digital cameras started enforcing that type of optical DRM? It's true the envelope's closed, but part of the ballot paper is visible through the transparent window. Should the poster be worried about their smartphone reporting them to law enforcement? [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EURion_constellation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EURion_constellation
- randomhodler84 5y ago
  Now that Apple has changed the rules, everyone should be under their impression that their phone is a cop and will snitch them out to the re-education board for punishment. This is reality.
  - jodrellblank 5y ago
    > "This is reality." No, it isn't. Go learn about the system they built instead of posting fearmongering lies about it.
    - marcinzm 5y ago
      What they built is a way of scanning things on your phone and reporting that to Apple. The chance of multiple governments not passing laws eventually to force this into scanning for whatever they wish is low. Previously to this Apple could have fought back on privacy terms but now its argument will be much weaker. edit: It's also a model based scanner so they scan for types of things and similar things instead of explicit copies of things. Which makes it an even more powerful tool for governments than a simple direct scanner.
      - Retric 5y ago
        All of which has been common for a long time. You where already sending your unencrypted phots to Apple, that’s the point when you should be concerned. Apple and all other service providers are required by US and most other countries laws to do searches on their servers. The only difference is Apple is upfront about what their doing on iCloud where most backup providers are keeping silent. Edit: iCloud data is specifically called out as available here: https://www.apple.com/legal/privacy/law-enforcement-guidelines-us.pdf https://www.apple.com/legal/privacy/law-enforcement-guidelin...
        xoa 5y ago
        >All of which has been common for a long time No, this has never been done before. >You where already sending your unencrypted phots to Apple No, I wasn't. The whole point here is that Apple is not scanning server side, they've built the functionality to scan device side. You need never use iCloud in any way whatsoever in order for Apple's new scanning tech to be used against you. That is a major difference. >Apple and all other service providers are required by US and most other countries laws to do searches on their servers. No, they are not, even if that was the new thing Apple is doing which it isn't. If a company builds server-side scanning, then they may be required to fulfill certain requirements. But companies are not required to actually do that in the first place even if many choose to do so. Apple already did scan uploaded photos and voluntarily chose not to have E2EE for iCloud data in order to please law enforcement agencies, but that's a voluntary choice by Apple. This new client side scanning is a different beast. Please try to gain even the slightest fucking clue what you are talking about before spouting off on something so important. Edit: to add for those interested in more details on the law, the federal reporting requirements are under 18 U.S. Code § 2258A [0]. What you'll see there is a "Duty To Report", and the reason for that is to evade Constitutional protections. If the government compelled companies to scan, as well as any legal challenges (by very well funded actors) and public blow back, as a practical matter those companies would become State Actors for the purposes of 4th Amendment evaluation. However, even if it's heavily incentivized so long as it's "voluntary" courts have repeated ruled that 3rd parties can do searches that would be illegal for the government, turn discovered evidence over to the government who in turn may then use it freely. Walter v. United States (1980, [1]) is a good example, covering the [righteous and just prosecution] of someone transporting "films depicting homosexual activities" after it was mailed to the wrong address and turned over to the FBI which I'm sure everyone here on HN would applaud and definitely is what they have in mind when they think of client side scanning in the US. Tim Cook is carrying on that tradition with Pride no doubt. ---- 0: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2258A https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2258A 1: https://www.oyez.org/cases/1979/79-67 https://www.oyez.org/cases/1979/79-67
  - sneak 5y ago
    Color printers already do this, embedding the device serial into microdot patterns on print-outs. Scanner firmware won't scan currency, even if doing so is legal.
    - causi 5y ago
      I've never had an issue scanning currency. Some machines won't photocopy it.
  - hkt 5y ago
    It isn't reality. But if it was, I would suggest using a different phone. Maybe a fairphone running /e/ - that's my setup, with almost exclusively open source software. I can recommend it.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- myself248 5y ago
  Looking at OP's photos, I can't discern any such markings.
  - detritus 5y ago
    I think you'd be surprised at how light and subtle these things can be. I remember seeing some on something printed back in early 2000s and they were yellow dots barely registerable under a magnifying loupe, never mind by eye up close. Which, if the same sort of case here, makes the CCD(s) on the phone here particularly impressive.
- captainmuon 5y ago
  Oh god, I am waiting for law enforcement to print this on their uniforms so they can't be photographed.
  - perihelions 5y ago
    Richard Stallman coined the term "treacherous computing" to describe things like this. Pity it hasn't caught on -- I think it should! https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/can-you-trust.en.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/can-you-trust.en.html [2002]
    - petepete 5y ago
      He's always right in the long run.
  - soco 5y ago
    If it was so efficient people marching at rallies would have used it already (on themselves I mean).
  - monkeybutton 5y ago
    Should pair well with playing copyrighted audio.
- schroeding 5y ago
  I just took a picture of every Euro banknote (which of course have EURion on them) in my wallet with my Poco Phone (which has the same MIUI version / camera app) and all photos are perfectly normal But could of course be a special change in this Xiaomi model :-) The german postal voting documents do, with 99,9% certainty, not include any EURion constellations (---and they have no window, the return address is printed directly on the envelope--- EDIT: they do in cologne! See [1], last image, sorry for the misinformation). Wouldn't make much sense, as the envelope is thrown away immediately and the inner letter (which is not the ballot) contains a unique number per postally voting citizen that's not trivialy guessable. They are however made from non-bleached (only coloured) recycling paper, so maybe the camera is picking up some artifacts from the different visible paper fibers? [1] https://imgur.com/a/SCHGo4N https://imgur.com/a/SCHGo4N
- monopoledance 5y ago
  There is something really scary about this being all secret functionality. How do I know my scanner/printer/camera/... isn't snitching on me when connected to the internet? Also can I put those dots in any picture/document to mess with cameras/editing software? Or is there more than those few dots to it? Would be kinda useful for public images, to at least annoy some stalkers, impersonators and other creeps. Doing this all over the place could also really support open source projects like GIMP!
bellyfullofbac 5y ago
The title assumes, with "censoring". A more appropriate title would be "Strange quirk when photographing German postal voting documents with the Xiaomi Camera". But what a quirk, a real life object causing issues in software.
- q-rews 5y ago
  This is not a quirk. It may be targeting the wrong document, but it’s a feature. Somebody spent time on making this behavior happen.
  - bellyfullofbac 5y ago
    People and their conspiracy theories... Cell phone cameras do a lot of post-processing, like skin smoothing, color enhancing and edge sharpening. Before jumping to this censorship conspiracy without evidence, I would investigate if one of those algorithms are buggy, and somewhere on the photo there is a combination of pixels that trigger the bug. Or sure, I'd investigate if there's censorship code, but I'm not going to assume there's some evil stuff going on before I see the code. Maybe it's as simple as flash memory corruption on the guy's phone, the photo of mostly table and just the edge of the envelope is "simpler" (lots of the table which is just white), so maybe it takes less space. The more complicated photo would take more storage space, what if it's hitting a bad block or a period of bad blocks because of the physical memory layout (e.g. a sequence of bytes every 4MB is bad).
    - solarkraft 5y ago
      It’s probably unintended, but intentional censoring methods exist, as documented elsewhere in this thread. The most likely explanation seems to be this being a side-effect of those. Your explanations appear less likely, as I’d expect those types of bugs to show differently.
      - bellyfullofbac 5y ago
        You believe what you want man, I personally don't buy it yet, and I'm not going to waste my brain power trying to convince people who are already convinced "It's the man! It must be the evil man!" and see any thing as proof of their evilness. "Most likely".. we live in different realities.
ipsum2 5y ago
I doubt this is a censorship, or a anti-counterfitting feature. It's most likely something wrong with the codec used to display images, possibly 10-bit heif photos are being interpreted as 8-bit jpegs. See other people getting the exact same shade of green in random photos: https://forums.androidcentral.com/ask-question/912123-photos-taken-today-all-show-solid-green-154kb.html https://forums.androidcentral.com/ask-question/912123-photos... https://www.reddit.com/r/oneplus/comments/4p2ief/pictures_on_op3_saving_as_solid_green/ https://www.reddit.com/r/oneplus/comments/4p2ief/pictures_on... https://forums.oneplus.com/threads/solid-green-photos.453215/ https://forums.oneplus.com/threads/solid-green-photos.453215...
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- minxomat 5y ago
  Yes indeed. This was a really common bug on iOS 13 beta, too.
- ipsum2 5y ago
  @dang or other mods, can you change the title to be a little less inflammatory?
- trompetenaccoun 5y ago
  When you click OPs link you get to the reddit thread where as an explanation they cite your very comment here on HN. And we've come full circle.
- nix0n 5y ago
  I don't think that's right. Why would a codec problem, repeatably, affect images of a particular document, but not other images?
  - ipsum2 5y ago
    Note that in the OPs photo (https://imgur.com/a/SCHGo4N https://imgur.com/a/SCHGo4N) it happens to every other image consistently. If you were shooting raw (with Pixel, not familiar with Xiaomi camera), it would save the raw and jpeg together. The gallery not being able to display the raw image results in the green image would be consistent with whats being shown.
woliveirajr 5y ago
The user says that with ProShot it worked, it would be nice if those photos were provided so that we could look for differences.
- Spare_account 5y ago
  The user supplied a link with a number of sample images, including the photo taken with ProShot at the bottom. https://imgur.com/a/SCHGo4N https://imgur.com/a/SCHGo4N
  - gpas 5y ago
    Doesn't imgur compress/resize and convert the images after importing?
malf 5y ago
I’ll bet someone slapped a common QR code library in there that also matches other barcode types, made a few modifications and didn’t test the unusual types.
- schroeding 5y ago
  The envelope contains no barcode :-) They have: - The strings "Entgeltfrei im Bereich der Deutschen Post" (free shipment in Germany), "Wahlbrief" (postal voting document), "An <address of your local election office>" - The name of the manufacturer and an order number for the envelope (which is identical on all envelopes), "Fachverlag Jüngling-gbb, Bestell-Nr 109 024 9319 099" - Two fields that are filled out by hand (with a pen) by the election office before sending them to the citizen, "Wahlscheinnummer" (serial number) and "Stimmbezirk" (polling station) They have not changed in the last... 30 years? :-) I don't think any of that could trigger a barcode library :-D EDIT: This is not true for all postal voting documents in all German municipalities, every municipality can order their own postal documents from several sources (or even print their own), but the specific envelope with the "green image problem" still does not contain a barcode, as seen in the last image the user posted: https://imgur.com/a/SCHGo4N https://imgur.com/a/SCHGo4N
mintplant 5y ago
The unofficial Google Camera port I've been using silently discards photos containing the sun's reflection in water. Rather than assuming Google is intentionally concealing the appearance of a celestial body, I've chalked this up to a bug in post-processing code that only kicks in when a specific image recognition pattern matches. Modern ML-driven camera systems make for some fun "500 mile email" [0] esque failure modes. [0] https://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail.html https://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail.html
gpas 5y ago
Other green picture bug threads from Xiaomi.. https://xiaomi.eu/community/threads/sensor-problem-and-green-screen-problem-in-camera-for-mi-8se.53485/ https://xiaomi.eu/community/threads/sensor-problem-and-green... https://xiaomi.eu/community/threads/mi-10-ultra-camera-issues.57715/ https://xiaomi.eu/community/threads/mi-10-ultra-camera-issue...
bitL 5y ago
A question - does Photoshop/AfterEffects/Premiere automatically embed a similar sort of a "watermark" to e.g. make tracking back meme authors possible? How about cameras?
maxmunzel 5y ago
In some countries it is allowed to vote, but your employer or landlord may request you to prove to you that you voted for the „right“ guy by sending them a picture of your filled out ballot. A feature like this (properly implemented) could actually be great for those countries. The slippery slope argument still applies of course.
threshold 5y ago
Let’s have fun with this. Get a copy of the barcode or trigger and we can print it on a cheap line of clothing. Tshirts hats whatever
sally1620 5y ago
Modern camera stacks use a lot of machine learning to figure out what kind of scene is being captured; primarily to apply specific tuning for that scene. For example, certain settings are applied for night time, portrait, landscape, beach, etc. Xiaomi might be using an ML detector to figure out it is looking at something that resembles an official document, and refusing to take a picture of it.

165 points by aysfrm11 5y ago

aysfrm11 5y ago

Does anyone know what is going on here? Is Xiaomi stock camera known for censoring certain documents?

input_sh 5y ago
I'd say something like this is more likely: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EURion_constellation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EURion_constellation

perihelions 5y ago

Is there perhaps an invisible anti-counterfeiting constellation [0] on the ballot? Have digital cameras started enforcing that type of optical DRM? It's true the envelope's closed, but part of the ballot paper is visible through the transparent window. Should the poster be worried about their smartphone reporting them to law enforcement? [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EURion_constellation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EURion_constellation

randomhodler84 5y ago
Now that Apple has changed the rules, everyone should be under their impression that their phone is a cop and will snitch them out to the re-education board for punishment. This is reality.
- jodrellblank 5y ago
  > "This is reality." No, it isn't. Go learn about the system they built instead of posting fearmongering lies about it.
  - marcinzm 5y ago
    What they built is a way of scanning things on your phone and reporting that to Apple. The chance of multiple governments not passing laws eventually to force this into scanning for whatever they wish is low. Previously to this Apple could have fought back on privacy terms but now its argument will be much weaker. edit: It's also a model based scanner so they scan for types of things and similar things instead of explicit copies of things. Which makes it an even more powerful tool for governments than a simple direct scanner.
    - Retric 5y ago
      All of which has been common for a long time. You where already sending your unencrypted phots to Apple, that’s the point when you should be concerned. Apple and all other service providers are required by US and most other countries laws to do searches on their servers. The only difference is Apple is upfront about what their doing on iCloud where most backup providers are keeping silent. Edit: iCloud data is specifically called out as available here: https://www.apple.com/legal/privacy/law-enforcement-guidelines-us.pdf https://www.apple.com/legal/privacy/law-enforcement-guidelin...
      - xoa 5y ago
        >All of which has been common for a long time No, this has never been done before. >You where already sending your unencrypted phots to Apple No, I wasn't. The whole point here is that Apple is not scanning server side, they've built the functionality to scan device side. You need never use iCloud in any way whatsoever in order for Apple's new scanning tech to be used against you. That is a major difference. >Apple and all other service providers are required by US and most other countries laws to do searches on their servers. No, they are not, even if that was the new thing Apple is doing which it isn't. If a company builds server-side scanning, then they may be required to fulfill certain requirements. But companies are not required to actually do that in the first place even if many choose to do so. Apple already did scan uploaded photos and voluntarily chose not to have E2EE for iCloud data in order to please law enforcement agencies, but that's a voluntary choice by Apple. This new client side scanning is a different beast. Please try to gain even the slightest fucking clue what you are talking about before spouting off on something so important. Edit: to add for those interested in more details on the law, the federal reporting requirements are under 18 U.S. Code § 2258A [0]. What you'll see there is a "Duty To Report", and the reason for that is to evade Constitutional protections. If the government compelled companies to scan, as well as any legal challenges (by very well funded actors) and public blow back, as a practical matter those companies would become State Actors for the purposes of 4th Amendment evaluation. However, even if it's heavily incentivized so long as it's "voluntary" courts have repeated ruled that 3rd parties can do searches that would be illegal for the government, turn discovered evidence over to the government who in turn may then use it freely. Walter v. United States (1980, [1]) is a good example, covering the [righteous and just prosecution] of someone transporting "films depicting homosexual activities" after it was mailed to the wrong address and turned over to the FBI which I'm sure everyone here on HN would applaud and definitely is what they have in mind when they think of client side scanning in the US. Tim Cook is carrying on that tradition with Pride no doubt. ---- 0: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2258A https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2258A 1: https://www.oyez.org/cases/1979/79-67 https://www.oyez.org/cases/1979/79-67
- sneak 5y ago
  Color printers already do this, embedding the device serial into microdot patterns on print-outs. Scanner firmware won't scan currency, even if doing so is legal.
  - causi 5y ago
    I've never had an issue scanning currency. Some machines won't photocopy it.
- hkt 5y ago
  It isn't reality. But if it was, I would suggest using a different phone. Maybe a fairphone running /e/ - that's my setup, with almost exclusively open source software. I can recommend it.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
myself248 5y ago
Looking at OP's photos, I can't discern any such markings.
- detritus 5y ago
  I think you'd be surprised at how light and subtle these things can be. I remember seeing some on something printed back in early 2000s and they were yellow dots barely registerable under a magnifying loupe, never mind by eye up close. Which, if the same sort of case here, makes the CCD(s) on the phone here particularly impressive.
captainmuon 5y ago
Oh god, I am waiting for law enforcement to print this on their uniforms so they can't be photographed.
- perihelions 5y ago
  Richard Stallman coined the term "treacherous computing" to describe things like this. Pity it hasn't caught on -- I think it should! https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/can-you-trust.en.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/can-you-trust.en.html [2002]
  - petepete 5y ago
    He's always right in the long run.
- soco 5y ago
  If it was so efficient people marching at rallies would have used it already (on themselves I mean).
- monkeybutton 5y ago
  Should pair well with playing copyrighted audio.
schroeding 5y ago
I just took a picture of every Euro banknote (which of course have EURion on them) in my wallet with my Poco Phone (which has the same MIUI version / camera app) and all photos are perfectly normal But could of course be a special change in this Xiaomi model :-) The german postal voting documents do, with 99,9% certainty, not include any EURion constellations (---and they have no window, the return address is printed directly on the envelope--- EDIT: they do in cologne! See [1], last image, sorry for the misinformation). Wouldn't make much sense, as the envelope is thrown away immediately and the inner letter (which is not the ballot) contains a unique number per postally voting citizen that's not trivialy guessable. They are however made from non-bleached (only coloured) recycling paper, so maybe the camera is picking up some artifacts from the different visible paper fibers? [1] https://imgur.com/a/SCHGo4N https://imgur.com/a/SCHGo4N
monopoledance 5y ago
There is something really scary about this being all secret functionality. How do I know my scanner/printer/camera/... isn't snitching on me when connected to the internet? Also can I put those dots in any picture/document to mess with cameras/editing software? Or is there more than those few dots to it? Would be kinda useful for public images, to at least annoy some stalkers, impersonators and other creeps. Doing this all over the place could also really support open source projects like GIMP!

bellyfullofbac 5y ago

The title assumes, with "censoring". A more appropriate title would be "Strange quirk when photographing German postal voting documents with the Xiaomi Camera". But what a quirk, a real life object causing issues in software.

q-rews 5y ago
This is not a quirk. It may be targeting the wrong document, but it’s a feature. Somebody spent time on making this behavior happen.
- bellyfullofbac 5y ago
  People and their conspiracy theories... Cell phone cameras do a lot of post-processing, like skin smoothing, color enhancing and edge sharpening. Before jumping to this censorship conspiracy without evidence, I would investigate if one of those algorithms are buggy, and somewhere on the photo there is a combination of pixels that trigger the bug. Or sure, I'd investigate if there's censorship code, but I'm not going to assume there's some evil stuff going on before I see the code. Maybe it's as simple as flash memory corruption on the guy's phone, the photo of mostly table and just the edge of the envelope is "simpler" (lots of the table which is just white), so maybe it takes less space. The more complicated photo would take more storage space, what if it's hitting a bad block or a period of bad blocks because of the physical memory layout (e.g. a sequence of bytes every 4MB is bad).
  - solarkraft 5y ago
    It’s probably unintended, but intentional censoring methods exist, as documented elsewhere in this thread. The most likely explanation seems to be this being a side-effect of those. Your explanations appear less likely, as I’d expect those types of bugs to show differently.
    - bellyfullofbac 5y ago
      You believe what you want man, I personally don't buy it yet, and I'm not going to waste my brain power trying to convince people who are already convinced "It's the man! It must be the evil man!" and see any thing as proof of their evilness. "Most likely".. we live in different realities.

ipsum2 5y ago

I doubt this is a censorship, or a anti-counterfitting feature. It's most likely something wrong with the codec used to display images, possibly 10-bit heif photos are being interpreted as 8-bit jpegs. See other people getting the exact same shade of green in random photos: https://forums.androidcentral.com/ask-question/912123-photos-taken-today-all-show-solid-green-154kb.html https://forums.androidcentral.com/ask-question/912123-photos... https://www.reddit.com/r/oneplus/comments/4p2ief/pictures_on_op3_saving_as_solid_green/ https://www.reddit.com/r/oneplus/comments/4p2ief/pictures_on... https://forums.oneplus.com/threads/solid-green-photos.453215/ https://forums.oneplus.com/threads/solid-green-photos.453215...

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
minxomat 5y ago
Yes indeed. This was a really common bug on iOS 13 beta, too.
ipsum2 5y ago
@dang or other mods, can you change the title to be a little less inflammatory?
trompetenaccoun 5y ago
When you click OPs link you get to the reddit thread where as an explanation they cite your very comment here on HN. And we've come full circle.
nix0n 5y ago
I don't think that's right. Why would a codec problem, repeatably, affect images of a particular document, but not other images?
- ipsum2 5y ago
  Note that in the OPs photo (https://imgur.com/a/SCHGo4N https://imgur.com/a/SCHGo4N) it happens to every other image consistently. If you were shooting raw (with Pixel, not familiar with Xiaomi camera), it would save the raw and jpeg together. The gallery not being able to display the raw image results in the green image would be consistent with whats being shown.

woliveirajr 5y ago

The user says that with ProShot it worked, it would be nice if those photos were provided so that we could look for differences.

Spare_account 5y ago
The user supplied a link with a number of sample images, including the photo taken with ProShot at the bottom. https://imgur.com/a/SCHGo4N https://imgur.com/a/SCHGo4N
- gpas 5y ago
  Doesn't imgur compress/resize and convert the images after importing?

malf 5y ago

I’ll bet someone slapped a common QR code library in there that also matches other barcode types, made a few modifications and didn’t test the unusual types.

schroeding 5y ago
The envelope contains no barcode :-) They have: - The strings "Entgeltfrei im Bereich der Deutschen Post" (free shipment in Germany), "Wahlbrief" (postal voting document), "An <address of your local election office>" - The name of the manufacturer and an order number for the envelope (which is identical on all envelopes), "Fachverlag Jüngling-gbb, Bestell-Nr 109 024 9319 099" - Two fields that are filled out by hand (with a pen) by the election office before sending them to the citizen, "Wahlscheinnummer" (serial number) and "Stimmbezirk" (polling station) They have not changed in the last... 30 years? :-) I don't think any of that could trigger a barcode library :-D EDIT: This is not true for all postal voting documents in all German municipalities, every municipality can order their own postal documents from several sources (or even print their own), but the specific envelope with the "green image problem" still does not contain a barcode, as seen in the last image the user posted: https://imgur.com/a/SCHGo4N https://imgur.com/a/SCHGo4N

mintplant 5y ago

The unofficial Google Camera port I've been using silently discards photos containing the sun's reflection in water. Rather than assuming Google is intentionally concealing the appearance of a celestial body, I've chalked this up to a bug in post-processing code that only kicks in when a specific image recognition pattern matches. Modern ML-driven camera systems make for some fun "500 mile email" [0] esque failure modes. [0] https://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail.html https://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail.html

gpas 5y ago

Other green picture bug threads from Xiaomi.. https://xiaomi.eu/community/threads/sensor-problem-and-green-screen-problem-in-camera-for-mi-8se.53485/ https://xiaomi.eu/community/threads/sensor-problem-and-green... https://xiaomi.eu/community/threads/mi-10-ultra-camera-issues.57715/ https://xiaomi.eu/community/threads/mi-10-ultra-camera-issue...

bitL 5y ago

A question - does Photoshop/AfterEffects/Premiere automatically embed a similar sort of a "watermark" to e.g. make tracking back meme authors possible? How about cameras?

maxmunzel 5y ago

In some countries it is allowed to vote, but your employer or landlord may request you to prove to you that you voted for the „right“ guy by sending them a picture of your filled out ballot. A feature like this (properly implemented) could actually be great for those countries. The slippery slope argument still applies of course.

threshold 5y ago

Let’s have fun with this. Get a copy of the barcode or trigger and we can print it on a cheap line of clothing. Tshirts hats whatever

sally1620 5y ago

Modern camera stacks use a lot of machine learning to figure out what kind of scene is being captured; primarily to apply specific tuning for that scene. For example, certain settings are applied for night time, portrait, landscape, beach, etc. Xiaomi might be using an ML detector to figure out it is looking at something that resembles an official document, and refusing to take a picture of it.