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AI cameras took over one small American town, now they’re everywhere
- tmikaeld 3y agoHm, isn't it possible to wear clothing that AI can't see?
- gumballindie 3y agoSo called ai is likely opencv and a model slapped on top. So to determine what it can and cant see you can play a bit with opencv to see how feature detection and extraction works.
- DoingIsLearning 3y agoTalking about feature extraction reminded me of these military exercises where they fooled a DARPA robot that was meant to be doing surveillance. The military reached their target by moving inside a giant cardbox! Snake style!
- dbish 3y agoIt’s very model and hardware dependent
- hackideiomat 3y agoThere's active infrared clothing which can partially protect you from cameras in general. E.g., a cap with 10 LEDs or so will probably hide your face most of the times.
- squarefoot 3y agoThat would probably overload the sensor so that your face would be less identifiable, but you would become instantly "that guy with the glowing face" which would make you much easier to track. Unless of course everyone starts using them, but that's another story.
- azalemeth 3y agoI've wondered about doing this, just to make the point obvious that I don't like being face-tracked everywhere.
- 01100011 3y agoIf I cared, I'd probably wear a couple near-infrared leds and blink them in a random timing pattern and combinations of lights so that cameras which pick up a little NIR would effectively be blinded.
- comboy 3y agoaka the most easily trackable person
- danielbln 3y agoHow to turn yourself into a beacon in 1 simple step.
- Terr_ 3y agoObligatory: https://xkcd.com/1105/ https://xkcd.com/1105/
- TeMPOraL 3y agoAnd if more than one person tries this, then: > random timing pattern and combinations of lights is an FFT away from being a unique tracking ID for that person! :).
- kolinko 3y agoThere is no such thing. There were a few articles in press about such clothing, but it doesn't work. If a human can see you, an AI can just as well - with modern tech. The only success was with highly controlled environments, and specific models - but these are extremely unlikely to scale to proper models.
- ben_w 3y agoI wouldn't expect most companies to use "proper" models at this point; some will, but for most (especially when used for mass-surveillance) I'd expect low computational cost models. This will change over time, but just for the moment we do have an AI bubble exceeding the supply of people who can make good AI.
- gruez 3y agoEven then such attacks only work under very controlled conditions and do not generalize across models. You might be able to fool one vendor/generation, but not all the others.
- firtoz 3y agoUnpopular opinion: Some time ago I decided to assume that everything I do outside of my house, and some of what I do inside of my house, is public knowledge which can be retrieved reasonably quickly. And if I'm to be targeted directly or indirectly (from appearance, faith, race, or some kind of behaviour or anything else) then I can defend against that. I mean, to prevent or punish when an authority decides to abuse their power of observation (e.g. a stalker decides to follow someone via webcams and harass them), or to try our best to prevent or avoid the conditions that lead a nation state etc to target some groups (or individuals). Also, if some authority decides to [do harmful thing] all people of x religion, it doesn't matter that much if they do it by AI webcams or "report your neighbour to the police" word of mouth.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- Sakos 3y agoBased on the experiences I've heard and read about, you're clearly trivializing the "defend myself" part and don't understand how problematic this is for the people actually affected by the discrimination or targeting you're talking about. It's not as easy as "oh, this is racism, you're in the wrong". These are institutions with comparatively unlimited resources with an interest in defending their behavior and how they treat the people they target. Lives are destroyed over this kind of thing.
- firtoz 3y agoSo we should try to fix that, for us and everyone else. I know it's hard, but some things are hard. Preventing cameras etc is harder I think, because they can use "think of the children", except maybe in some parts of Europe it seems.
- xyzzy123 3y agoI think you have the right idea but both things can be right. I think it's possible to simultaneously vote against "your worst enemies getting control of the state" and to agitate against the kind of widespread surveillance you wouldn't want your worst enemies to be in control of. I do hear (what I think is) your argument that legislating against ubiquitous surveillance is counter to the inevitable tide of cameras and AI getting crazy cheap, a future where everything is a sensor and processing costs drop to zero. But I think (maybe naively) it's possible we can also have social norms and boundaries around how these things get used.
- city41 3y ago> In part that outreach is because Fusus and its customers need town residents and businesses to hand over access to their camera feeds. I wish there was more details on this. Did they create some kind of hardware that intercepts any camera at a low level, or does there need to be one device for nest cameras, another one for wyze, etc. The article seems to imply it is hardware and not just software, but it's pretty vague.
- Sakos 3y agoThe way I understand it is they provide hardware that lets them access local network-connected cameras (once given the necessary credentials), which is then passed on to the Fusus network by the hardware. Which is why they promise it works with every dumb camera.
- hackideiomat 3y agoSo I shall give them access to my network? Not only my cameras but also my home network...
- altacc 3y agoFrom the article it seems that residents & businesses need to buy hardware from Fusus: "I acknowledge that in order to participate in this program I will have to purchase equipment from FUSUS and pay any associated costs to access the technology required to transmit data." So Fusus get paid twice: by people buying the cameras and by the police/authorities using the feeds from those cameras. There's good money to be made living in a paranoid surveillance society!
- kolinko 3y agoInteresting to see how different countries approach this. In Europe, the AI act is that it explicitly bans systems like these. Two societies - one embraces such monitoring, another bans it. We'll have a nice experiment going on in the upcoming years :)
- spandextwins 3y ago[flagged]
- nightfly 3y agoIt's impossible to tell if you are making this statement seriously or sarcastically.
- hackideiomat 3y agoI hope this is a joke. It must me.
- jers 3y agoIt might be a reference to the book little brother.
- rokkitmensch 3y agoMost of the problem children in Portland are well known to LEOs and their private-army counterparts. There's simply no point in taking a methhead to court for either breaking into your car or stealing it. I understand the joke, but to pedantically respond for everyone's education, the issue (at least in Portland, the hometown I emigrated from), is nothing but political will to effect change (humorously, given the local attachment to the Obama-era H&C paradigm). I've said for years and will continue to reiterate, that things will have to get much worse over there before anything gets any better.
- eesmith 3y ago“If we have a guy that walks into a crowd with a gun and we pick him up on camera, our officers are on top of him in a matter of a minute, seconds, really,“ Why? It is not illegal to walk into a crowed with a gun in Mississippi. https://gunlawsuits.org/gun-laws/mississippi/open-carry/ https://gunlawsuits.org/gun-laws/mississippi/open-carry/ says "Mississippi is a permissive open carry state, and you do not need a permit to open carry within its territory." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_laws_in_Mississippi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_laws_in_Mississippi says nothing about prohibitions related to crowds.
- hackideiomat 3y agoAnd even if it was illegal. At that point, the gun already shot people if it was there to be used. Cameras do not prevent crimes. Arguably, it should be very illegal to carry a gun (in a crowd) tho :D
- curt15 3y agoChina is far "ahead" of any US city in this regard.
- johnp314 3y agoWith more and more cameras everywhere we are coming to the end of the "who done it" investigative novels and movies and TV shows - at least those set in current times. Who needs a Sherlock with amazing logic and investigative skills when all the police and investigators need do is get recorded camera data. Police shows are becoming boring as they simply go from one camera to the next to discover the perp. Yes, we have increased safety, and those intending to do us harm have less assurance of getting away with it, but something is lost (I'm not sure what it is exactly) in the knowledge that as we go about our lives we are being continually watched and there is less and less potential mystery and uncertainty in what's taking place around us and/or by us.
- okasaki 3y agoIt would be more accurate to say that we're being recorded, and the recording is then viewed when something notable happens. Nobody is really watching you go about your business.
- g-b-r 3y agoAlmost everywhere where there are surveillance cameras there's someone who watches at least some of the feeds at a time for at least most of the day
- soco 3y agoThe novels and shows will simply move the focus to the "who edited its footage" (okay already doing it - watch the Devs series)