Finally a solution for my prosopagnosia!
Harvard duo hacks Meta Ray-Bans to dox strangers on sight in seconds
A pair of inventive Harvard undergraduates have created what they believe could be one of the most intrusive devices ever built – a wake-up call, they tell The Register, for the world to take privacy seriously in the AI era. AnhPhu Nguyen and Caine Ardayfio, who've collaborated previously on some positively explosive projects …
COMMENTS
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Friday 4th October 2024 07:21 GMT chuckufarley
As a good American...
...Wait, that doesn't make any sense. Look at what these two idiot have created because they want to "help us." Shame on them for seeking glory early and not completing the scientific process in order to find a way to stop it from working. If only Lou Reed were still with us to write a rock anti-anthem that would put them in their place.
Also: Thumbs Down to you too! Just because you can never means you should.
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Friday 4th October 2024 07:43 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: As a good American...
I see the angle you're going for but come on use a bit of logic.
This type of thing talked about in the article has been envisioned in films for decades like Robocop or Terminator and one of my favourite ahead of it's time (or was it) films enemy of the state. Therefore with the idea out there it would only be a matter of time before someone did what these two did. In fact it wouldn't be of any surprise to me if it's not already being done especially in the realms of law enforcement and three letter agencies. I can also guarantee without any doubt that someone somewhere is in the process of adapting this for supermarkets to combat theft if they already haven't.
It's not a case of "Just because you can never means you should" it's "Just because you can means you should let people know". Think of it as a vulnerability. Now we know about it we can take steps to mitigate it. Personally my online presence is available but my photograph is extremely rare (maybe 1 or 2 obscure pictures from over a decade ago) and I intend to keep it that way.
They have done some good work here and it should be acknowledged.
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Friday 4th October 2024 16:55 GMT Eclectic Man
Re: As a good American...
One of my previous employers had a photographer do a portrait of me, which was then published in 'The Times' (yes, that one), without my knowledge. I have changed a bit since then, but it was a bit of a shock, and so my visage is in 'the pin;lic domain'. Not much I can do about that.
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Sunday 6th October 2024 13:53 GMT Eclectic Man
Re: As a good American...
Ahem, indeed:
https://www.historic-newspapers.co.uk/original-newspapers/?cvg_source=google&cvg_adid=599949758560&cvg_cid=57526659&gad_source=1&gbraid=0AAAAADx3983RA6cmMbv6oCo00gzoHiTcx&gclid=EAIaIQobChMIga6ZrPP5iAMVJZdQBh0suwdkEAAYASAAEgK1UvD_BwE
"With over 3 million titles available, spanning from the early 1900’s right up to yesterday, we’re confident that you’ll be able to find an original newspaper from a date of your choice with ease. You can then add one of our special presentation options to ensure you have the perfect original newspapers for birthdays, anniversaries or any other milestone commemorative occasion."
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Friday 18th October 2024 15:57 GMT The Travelling Dangleberries
Re: As a good American...
It occurred to me a couple of years ago that it was probably possible to track people with no social media presence using facial/gait recognition simply by looking at other people's pictures and videos say posted when on holiday.
Those people in the background when you take a cute picture of your 4 year old, face smeared in blue ice cream. Or you appearing in their pictures of "Ye Olde Ice Cream Shoppe" complete with your child, face smeared in blue ice cream.
I have a maxim in life that l use often - "If I have just come up with such an idea then someone else will have already produced a prototype or working system".
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Friday 4th October 2024 11:59 GMT BOFH in Training
Re: As a good American...
I recall reading something years ago about Palantir doing something like that - thru a mobile app.
Someone demo'ed something where they take a pic of a random person and got all sort of details within seconds.
At least that was what I recall reading. If they could do it years ago, as a company, it will not take much for a couple of people to do something similar - with all the other services you can use to connect everything together.
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Saturday 5th October 2024 17:54 GMT MachDiamond
Re: As a good American...
"At least that was what I recall reading. If they could do it years ago, as a company, it will not take much for a couple of people to do something similar"
The idea here is to do it in close to real time and present the data to the user via some sort of heads-up display. I would expect that something like this would excite law enforcement since officers are usually equipped with cameras. Instead of just recording when they are switched on, they'd constantly be identifying people and logging the date/time/location. If somebody has been naughty and is wanted, perhaps the system will beep and give the officer a data display with the current pic, a mugshot and summary data. Commercially, stores could implement it to spot people that have been trespassed or identified as shop lifters so the next time they come in, they'll be asked to leave. A box of "Get Stuffed" bars are real money these days.
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Monday 7th October 2024 08:34 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: As a good American...
Wouldn't surprise me if this already exists to a certain degree. Cops have been testing facial recognition for a long time with limited success...iirc various methods were shit canned because the false positive rate was too high...it also wouldn't surprise me if these lads with their specs had the same issue but for the videos they posted online they cherry picked the juicy examples and excluded the duds.
I'd be curious to know how well their demo works in a room full of black people, because historically facial recognition has always been terrible at recognising darker faces...if the tech they have works better than any previous attempts at the same thing, then we have cause for concern...but if not, then the risk of false positives is sufficiently high that in quite a few conversations triggered by this tech you're going to be walking up to a stranger to strike up a conversation using information that doesn't pertain to them.
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Friday 4th October 2024 17:03 GMT Bitsminer
Re: As a good American...
One vote for mentioning Enemy of the State (1998, dir Tony Scott, with Will Smith, Gene Hackman).
Think about it: it was done in 1998!
The writers had some very good advice on the tech of the day; the kicker for me was the scene where the NSA hacker played by Jack Black finds the ex-girlfriend of Will Smith's character with a phone number that yields her complete financial, educational and employment and telephone history in about half a second.
With today's AI-based tech it's about 60 seconds slower, but still.
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Saturday 5th October 2024 02:31 GMT Herby
Re: As a good American...
In the movie (Enemy of the State), all of the technology used as about 10 years old, according to the producers and those that they contacted. So, that was about 1990 technology. I think things that can be done (by 3 letter agencies), are a little more developed by now.
(not that I would know :-)).
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Friday 4th October 2024 17:14 GMT FIA
Re: As a good American...
I can also guarantee without any doubt that someone somewhere is in the process of adapting this for supermarkets to combat theft if they already haven't.
I worked in retail about 7 years ago, and back then one of the larger supermarkets was trialling facial recognition in one of their stores. The idea was they tied it to your loyalty card and used it to identify when you looked at something, but didn't buy it, so they could then incentivise you with vouchers.
I dunno if it ever went into general use, but that was many years ago and technology in this area has only improved.
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Friday 4th October 2024 23:18 GMT John Brown (no body)
Re: As a good American...
"I can also guarantee without any doubt that someone somewhere is in the process of adapting this for supermarkets to combat theft if they already haven't."
They sorta have already. Facial recognition is (or at least has been) used with images of know shoplifters. There was at least one case of an an innocent false positive person being refused entry and complaining loudly in the media about it.
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Friday 4th October 2024 08:15 GMT Jonathon Green
Re: As a good American...
Some people won’t believe a thing can be done unless they see it happening, and, in the case of this sort of thing if it can be done somebody hidden away in a dark corner is already quietly doing it (and probably not for your benefit).
So yeah, if you can you absolutely should because it’s the only reliable way of getting enough people to care about this sort of thing…
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Friday 4th October 2024 08:22 GMT AbominableCodeman
Re: As a good American...
'stop it from working' an interesting proposal, which would probably involve nuking linkedin/facebook/ecquifax/transunion and any number of huge data harvesters from orbit, i suspect this would meet quite some resistance.
Maybe the problem lies not with the AFR, but with the unconstrained data harvesting and people throwing thier PII up on the internet without consideration, that preceeded it?
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Friday 4th October 2024 08:32 GMT KittenHuffer
Re: As a good American...
"'stop it from working' an interesting proposal, which would probably involve nuking linkedin/facebook/ecquifax/transunion and any number of huge data harvesters from orbit, i suspect this would meet quite some resistance."
I don't know ..... that sounds like a damn good idea to me!
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Saturday 5th October 2024 18:00 GMT MachDiamond
Re: As a good American...
"Add in multiple unique faces per name/address/DOB etc, then you would really be building an effective confusion matrix."
Some years ago there was an article about a face generator that was excellent at creating people that don't exist. My thought was to see if it would be possible to create a face based on your own that would look like you to a human but not to a facial recognition program. The photo that winds up on our driving license is often a poor likeness of us (DMV is really good at getting the worst photo) but as long as it's reasonably close, anybody looking at it will disregard discrepancies. If I take a photo of myself and lower my ears a couple of mm, would it still look like me? Would a recognition program think so?
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Saturday 5th October 2024 10:55 GMT ITMA
Re: As a good American...
How are they "idiots"?
What they have done is simply show what is already possible using what already exists without needing huge (or expensive) resources to do it.
You see it as "seeking glory". Others, including me, may see them as showing us the danger of A.I.
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Friday 4th October 2024 07:50 GMT simonlb
Black Mirror
This reminds me of the Black Mirror episode where everyone has implants in their eyes which flash up information in a constant feed and if you decide to block someone they are shown as a grey blob in your vision and they cannot communicate with you. Sounds perfect for door-to-door salesmen.
But seriously, this is complete privacy nightmare although probably old-hat for one of the five-eyes organisations.
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Friday 4th October 2024 08:48 GMT Andy The Hat
Re: Black Mirror
If what these researchers have done doesn't wake people up and reflect on the tip of the iceberg of what both Big Brother/organised criminals can actually do now, I don't know what does ...
There has been a major backlash in the UK against routine police surveillance of political marches, strikes and that sort of thing. Up until a few years ago this would result in a dataset of thousands of pictures of law-abiding people on marches or protests which would/should only be of relevance if those faces could be matched to datasets of other illegal activity. There has been a lot of screaming about removal of those pictures as they are of law abiding citizens engaging in lawful activities.
Now it seems, not only can those datasets be collected (it even appears that the current Government are condoning and even encouraging their use) but probably pumped through facial recognition systems in almost real time to be identified. At this point "we have deleted the images of law abiding citizens" would be a valid statement to privacy campaigners but a more accurate completion would be " and no longer require the images as we have identified the individuals, have a full personal, financial and social profiles, who they talk to and where they were last summer."
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Friday 4th October 2024 08:39 GMT Pascal Monett
"so that people can take their own privacy and data into their hands"
I'm sorry, but I strongly feel that the days where we could take care of our own privacy are long gone.
Ever since Google, our privacy has been in the hands of strangers in suits sitting in plush, expensive rooms who only think of how they can monetize our private lives.
And Eric Schmidt is the asshole who started it. Damn him. (but, if not him, there would have been another)
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Friday 4th October 2024 12:10 GMT Captain Hogwash
Re: "so that people can take their own privacy and data into their hands"
Au contraire, Blackadder. Add not using social media, replacing whatever smartphone with AOSP, replacing whatever desktop OS with Linux and then the ball is beginning to roll. Plenty more could be done beyond that but these are just the basics.
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Friday 4th October 2024 13:52 GMT Tom 38
Re: "so that people can take their own privacy and data into their hands"
Add not using social media, replacing whatever smartphone with AOSP, replacing whatever desktop OS with Linux and then the ball is beginning to roll. Plenty more could be done beyond that but these are just the basics.
But that's like building a car with amazing safety features that stop it crashing in to other cars; great, you're no longer crashing, but what about every other car on the road?
You could do _all_ the things you're suggesting, but if your partner/friend/relative keeps posting and tagging you publicly, its not going to make any difference.
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Friday 4th October 2024 20:22 GMT Aleph0
Re: "so that people can take their own privacy and data into their hands"
"I am prepared to lose any partner/friend/relative who does that"
Perhaps a naive question, but if they don't tell me and I don't use socials myself how would I even discover I've been tagged?
I mean, without compromising my privacy myself by giving away my PII or photos to dubious "people search" sites in order to ascertain whether that info appears anywhere on the Internet...
Icon: I'm sorry officer, I promise the only reason I'm wearing this mask in public is to protect my privacy ;)
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Sunday 6th October 2024 20:06 GMT MachDiamond
Re: "so that people can take their own privacy and data into their hands"
"You could do _all_ the things you're suggesting, but if your partner/friend/relative keeps posting and tagging you publicly, its not going to make any difference."
I don't allow any person I know with an InstaPintaXittFace account to take a photo of me and let them know that they shouldn't. If they do, they're out.
If you are so defeatist, just give up now so there's more oxygen and clean water for the rest of us.
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Sunday 6th October 2024 20:03 GMT MachDiamond
Re: "so that people can take their own privacy and data into their hands"
"Add not using social media, replacing whatever smartphone with AOSP,"
Rewards cards and signing up for anything and everything are a big problem. Scrupulously filling out every form you are handed without considering whether the entity really needs every bit of information they are asking for, etc.
Long ago when I was doing a lot of photojournalism, I got a PO box since I could be called out at the last minute. The post office will also accept packages from any shipping company on my behalf so I had nothing come to the house. UPS, FedEx, DHL and their brethren sell lists. I've kept up having all of my mail and packages to to a PO box and for years, nothing with my name on it has come to the house. That has broken the chain on a lot of things with the benefit of my "home address" resolving to the post office in town. I have to disclose my physical address to the government and not doing so could involve some stiff penalties, so I do that and it worries me. My driving license does show my PO box and that's allowed since it's been in place for many years as Vips/celebs demanded it. They'd otherwise use their attorney's office if they couldn't.
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Friday 4th October 2024 08:49 GMT elsergiovolador
Facebook
The glasses don't necessarily need to look up people. They should just create book of faces and tell you if you have seen someone already. You could create your own "dossier" for each face.
This way you can learn if someone is following or observing you or figure out if you are surrounded by random NPCs.
For instance if each day you see very much only new faces, then it means you may be in the lower version of simulation.
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Friday 4th October 2024 13:43 GMT tyrfing
Unless they have Facebook branding or something they won't be identifiable as such.
Even if these guys make them as branded (it sounds like they won't, since they did it as a proof of concept), it's possible now.
Cue knockoffs from other people fairly quickly.
It does depend on whether wearing glasses in general will be fashionable. It might be, but we might have a Red Guard movement.
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Friday 4th October 2024 11:00 GMT Brewster's Angle Grinder
We'll all look like sirens...
There have been articles on El Reg, in the past, about striking visual makeup - not unlike camouflage patterns - that can confuse conventional facial recognition algorithms. I seem to recall T-shirts with dozens of faces on them, as well as less obvious designs, also confusing software.
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Friday 4th October 2024 12:07 GMT Blazde
Re: We'll all look like sirens...
The t-shirts won't help at all with a tiny bit of human input to direct any confused facial recog toward your actual face. I doubt any value make-up has is robust. The sweet spot for the algorithms is to build a 3D map of your face, so if you're one of the many poor souls who've already uploaded entire minutes of video to TikTok or Instagram Reels or whatever then you're screwed. If you only have a couple of grainy stills out there, then with a hoody or facial hair change to blur your outline (or maybe the Katie Price/MJ approach), your real identify might only appear in say the top 0.01% of matches worldwide. In which case they'll need an additional piece of information like the town you live in, or your first name. Comforting.
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Friday 4th October 2024 14:56 GMT Elongated Muskrat
Re: We'll all look like sirens...
I think a lot of the "facial recognition" actually works by determining the proportions between facial features (e.g. nose length, gap between nose and mouth, chin length, eye separation, etc. etc.). There might be a certain amount of 3D wireframing to this, because people's faces are not flat, but the cameras involved are fairly unlikely to be stereo ones (although that's a possibility), or have the sort of fine detail depth-perception to tell the difference between shadows and makeup on a moving image of a face. They still have to determine the overall shape of a human, i.e. determine what is a face, because it's on the front of a head, on top of a body, and "camouflage" that blurs or confuses boundaries as determined by computer image recognition software is definitely one approach to foiling this. T-Shirts with overlapping partial faces on them probably is reasonably accurate in reducing the confidence in these algorithmic matches, so that it doesn't always determine which part of the body is the face accurately. Masks, reflective visors, and makeup all interfere with the image recognition algorithms in different ways, and combinations of these things probably proves quite effective.
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Saturday 5th October 2024 08:22 GMT Blazde
Re: We'll all look like sirens...
the cameras involved are fairly unlikely to be stereo ones (although that's a possibility)
The police facial recognition cameras here in the UK certainly all look stereo and some of them even have 3 pods (2 cameras and a near-infrared source?). Maybe you can distract the algorithm for brief moments but you're not going to hide your facial geometry while walking past them with any essentially 2D foil like a t-shirt or make-up.
When it comes to source footage, presumably police mugshots in the future (or already now) will take depth measurements in a much more controlled setting. But that's not necessary. With a little bit of source video, especially well-lit head-on 'selfie'/Zoom footage, you can reconstruct the depth.
I think the 'party tricks' that fooled older 2D systems will very soon be minor historic footnotes.
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Friday 4th October 2024 21:05 GMT Yet Another Anonymous coward
Re: We'll all look like sirens...
>The t-shirts won't help at all with a tiny bit of human input to direct any confused facial recog toward your actual face.
Depends on the contents of the T-shirt !
Although programmers would only be able to identify other people from images of their shoes
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Saturday 5th October 2024 18:06 GMT MachDiamond
Re: We'll all look like sirens...
"I doubt any value make-up has is robust. "
There was a make up artist that did herself up to look like a bunch of different people to use in her portfolio. It was pretty amazing what she could do. If that skill could be put into a "Chanel make-up box" like the one in The Fifth Element, people could change their outward appearance quickly and easily.
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Monday 7th October 2024 10:42 GMT DoctorPaul
Re: We'll all look like sirens...
I recall an episode of QI where Stephen Fry showed a pair of glasses with multicoloured frames which it was claimed would make facial recognition systems identify the wearer as a particular female action movie star. Patterns in the frames exactly matched that face at a tiny scale and as soon as the system went "ping, that's a match" it moved on to other faces in the field of view. Anyone know if that still works?
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Sunday 6th October 2024 13:05 GMT TheMaskedMan
Re: Bally up
"Balaclavas will be the norm before long."
And will be illegal shortly thereafter.
I'm not at all surprised about this - I assumed the Three Letter hereberts would already be doing something of the sort. It won't act as a wake-up call though. Very few people in the real world will get to hear about it, and very few of them will care.
This being the case, I'm disappointed they're not releasing the source. I'd love to see how it works, and maybe we could use it on all those people who want to use it on us. How many politicians would be happy knowing that we can see their background?
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Friday 4th October 2024 12:20 GMT Elongated Muskrat
Just wait...
...until these people discover Google Lens.
This seems like a flashy but largely content-free piece of research that amounts to "we automated a google image search with an expensive wearable camera".
The only thing to really take away from this is that the data about people is freely available on the internet, and we should be more aware of the privacy implications of giving away our personal data to corporations.
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Saturday 5th October 2024 18:20 GMT MachDiamond
Re: Just wait...
"The only thing to really take away from this is that the data about people is freely available on the internet, and we should be more aware of the privacy implications of giving away our personal data to corporations."
There's a book I bought titled "How to be Invisible" that's mostly pre-social media, but it does have very good tips.
The big problem is people aren't taught the difference between secrecy and privacy. While they may not have anything egregious to hide, they should know that they still have things that should be kept private and how they might be giving that information away. Just because there's regulations that prevent the medical industry selling PII, that doesn't mean it's never going to get hacked, sold/published and incorporated into a database. With that in mind, you should be questioning whether your doctor/dentist/optometrist needs all of the information they are asking for. I'll leave stuff out and if told they must have it, I'll make something up. For that, I have several sets of false information I'll use so I can remember my lies.
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Sunday 6th October 2024 13:14 GMT Doctor Syntax
Re: Just wait...
"you should be questioning whether your doctor/dentist/optometrist needs all of the information they are asking for"
They may well have good reason. For instance for medical reasons SWMO has regular eye checks. For other medical reasons she has to have an antibiotic dose prior to dental treatment, a situation where knowledge of presence or absence of allergies is significant. Personally dental treatment a few weeks back seems to have cleared up what appeared to have been a long-standing medical condition. Also it's well established that dentists are quite likely to be the first to discover an oral cancer in a patient and opticians have also been able to discover various medical problems.
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Sunday 6th October 2024 20:14 GMT MachDiamond
Re: Just wait...
"They may well have good reason. "
DOB, SSN, Mother's maiden name, last home address before present address, employer, name of previous employer......
What you presented is likely information that IS needed. That said, I'd not want my dentist broadcasting that I have indications of oral cancer to the world. That information should be given to me so I can seek appropriate services. BTW, an "optician" is the one that makes your glasses, not the one that does your eye exam, optometrist, or a medical doctor that specializes in eyes, ophthalmologist.
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Sunday 6th October 2024 23:29 GMT Doctor Syntax
Re: Just wait...
I take it you're in the US so they'll want to perform credit checks.
That's not all needed in the UK but they would have NHS and/or NI number which lets them know what my entitlement to treatment is - no need for credit checks. They do seem to use DoB in the NHS as a check that they've got the right John Smith, e.g. doctor's check in includes month of birth.
You are correct about optometrist but traditional usage is optician, especially as it's the same practice, at least in my case. And in the event of a patient presenting with a detached retina the optometrist will refer then direct to the hospital for emergency treatment.
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Wednesday 9th October 2024 20:40 GMT MachDiamond
Re: Just wait...
"I take it you're in the US so they'll want to perform credit checks."
Yeessss, but. If I have insurance or will be paying at the time of service, they don't need to do a credit check. This is why I say to have a think about if the information being requested is appropriate. If I'm asking the dentist to extend credit, that information I listed above is not appropriate.
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Friday 4th October 2024 12:40 GMT heyrick
Brilliant!
I want this. No longer do I need to squirm and cringe in the morning when saying hello to my cow-orkers using a generic greeting because their name is...um...er... Emily? Anna? Something with a vowel in it?
Apparently it is quite common for people with dyscalculia to have trouble with people's names. I wonder what the connection is between numbers and names? Hmm, sometimes I feel like my brain is an undocumented instruction; it does something but not quite right.
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Friday 4th October 2024 13:49 GMT Bebu
Re: Brilliant!
I want this. No longer do I need to squirm and cringe in the morning when saying hello to my cow-orkers using a generic greeting because their name is...um...er... Emily? Anna? Something with a vowel in it?
You could probably get away with a static gallery of images with names projected inside your glasses. Or convince the office to put a staff photo board on the wall opposite where you normally encounter these 'orkers. I too cannot put names to faces but garments to names works fine although the individuals involved have less personality than their attire. Workday wardrobes don't normally sport the variety of recreational or party wear so works reasonably well over a week or two.
The Philosophy Department at the University of Woolloomooloo* uniquely solved this problem.
Apparently it is quite common for people with dyscalculia to have trouble with people's names. I wonder what the connection is between numbers and names? Hmm, sometimes I feel like my brain is an undocumented instruction; it does something but not quite right.
Seemingly not vice versa - a well known science broadcaster in Australia has trouble recognising faces but with a higher degree in the physical sciences presumably doesn't suffer from discalculia.
* warning: even for the Pythons this is very politically incorrect by today's standards.
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Friday 4th October 2024 15:00 GMT Elongated Muskrat
Re: Brilliant!
I don't think the philosopher's song is that non-PC, unless you find the epithet "drunken fart" offensive.
(I didn't watch the whole clip with sound on, because I'm currently "at work", but I can't recall that skit being much more than a joke about everyone in Aus being called Bruce and a song about drinking)
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Sunday 6th October 2024 20:17 GMT MachDiamond
Re: Brilliant!
"* warning: even for the Pythons this is very politically incorrect by today's standards."
It's still epic!
Their material is going to live on for hundreds of years. Just recently somebody made a Python reference that floored me due to the person and situation. Now I can't remember the details other than that.
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Friday 4th October 2024 13:09 GMT Børge Nøst
Hollywood needs to come up with something fresh now
This has been bleeding obvious to me for some time and I have just been waiting for it to happen. Perhaps now people will be more careful about what they make publicly available about themselves; the Nazis used yellow armbands to tag people, but this has the potential to show not only religion but so much more that you tag _yourself_ with.
I get this feeling of Neo walking in the matrix where the woman in red is, except you see info-tags being overlaid to pop up above all the people around you.
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Friday 4th October 2024 17:06 GMT Eclectic Man
Creepy
I mean, this is sooo creepy. Yes it is a 'warning' but I had thought the 'action man' hero films where the 'hero' photographs someone and then finds out all about them was Sci Fi, not reality.
I guess the 'powers that be' reckon that 'you have nothing to fear if you have nothing to hide'. (Except, of course, mistakes, unaccountable people being corrupt*, incorrect data in databases or looking uncannily like a 'person of interest', or just a police officer being so pissed off that he shoots you** or are just plain racist***.)
*When Sir Robert Mark took a high level position in the London Metropolitan Police he described the plainclothes division as "the most corrupt organisation in London".
**https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2024/oct/02/chris-kaba-shooting-trial-met-police-martyn-blake-streatham-london
*** https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-67148208. (OK I don't know the police were racist, but what do you think?)
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Friday 4th October 2024 19:03 GMT DS999
Bet it is wrong at least half the time
Facial matching is very good against one, like how your phone matches your face to unlock. Against a restricted set, like if you had given it photos of your friends, it could do pretty well. But it is terrible at matching against an unknown and unbounded set, and the larger the unbounded set the worse it does.
So I'm not really worried about this, they'd never know if the information they get about the person is about that actual person or just someone who looks similar. Or someone who looks nothing like him (maybe not even the same race/sex) but because of the way some internet page google (or whatever service they use) scraped from, a person who looks like the target was included on a page that was also linked to someone else (like maybe showed up as a connection in their linkedin profile page)
The largest set to match against being used in practice I'm aware of is the NFL's facial matching. But that's still pretty limited - a few tens of thousands of people, and from what I hear it isn't necessarily a smooth process i.e. a friend who has done it had to remove his sunglasses and still took a couple tries to match him. Maybe it gets better after you've matched a few times, but that's the thing - to work really well you need not only a restricted/bounded set but training on the actual person. Also the NFL has as close to an unlimited budget as you're going to see.
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Friday 4th October 2024 20:54 GMT doublelayer
Re: Bet it is wrong at least half the time
It depends who is using it and to what purpose. In many of the cases where I've seen the technology used or calls to do so, I am not reassured by it being wrong. Law enforcement use is probably the most obvious example, where being falsely identified as a suspect can still be a rather bad event for you. In fact, in that case, accurate recognition would seem marginally less dangerous, though in reality it's just dangerous in a different way.
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Saturday 5th October 2024 04:49 GMT DS999
Re: Bet it is wrong at least half the time
Yes the consequences of being falsely identified can be really bad if its the cops.
But we're talking about some yahoo walking down the street supposedly being able to figure out who they are looking at and getting info including their SSN within a minute. I call bullshit. There's no way it would be reliable or trustable, and just isn't something anyone should be worried about. I wouldn't hide my face if I saw this guy, I'd point and laugh and call him a fool and bet him $100 he can't tell me my name.
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Saturday 5th October 2024 07:50 GMT harrys
privacy ..... pay for it !!!!
Looking around....
pay about 30 quid a month to some company to upload your photo and do the regular scanning and take down requests on ur behalf
analogous to......
the mafia goon popping round saying "be a shame if u didnt have any security round here"
oh well, if reporting the goon to the police makes no diff (aka whatever local data protection scheme)......
just grin and bear it and pay the "insurance"
chrony capitalism at its best :)
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Saturday 5th October 2024 18:41 GMT MachDiamond
"The USA really should replace Social Security numbers for something else. Or at least legally require other forms of ID to be used besides that."
My Social Security card has a notice on it "Not to be used for identification", IIRC. There wasn't the initial security done when SSN's were first issued and now that it IS used for ID (the number, not the card), it's been replaced with a person's telephone number. There's no problem asking for a phone number and since they can be transferred, people keep them nearly forever if they don't move country. What the big data folk want is a number that stays with somebody hopefully for life or at least a really long time that isn't seen as a massive breach if it gets published. Always question whether you need to hand your phone number out when signing up for something. Places that require them are places I don't do business with if I can help it. If they want to send me a text and won't send an email to verify something, they can go........
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Sunday 6th October 2024 20:21 GMT MachDiamond
Re: Harvard duo hacks Meta Ray-Bans...
"setup by a Harvard dropout"
There are a few university dropouts that have done exceptionally well and may not have if they stayed on to get their degree. One can always go back to finish up a degree, but a good business idea/product is going to have a limited shelf life.
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Monday 7th October 2024 11:39 GMT Clarecats
Supermarket cameras
Several years ago I saw an item about shoplifting from an American store. The thieves knew how to hide their faces from cameras just by looking down or away from the cameras they could see. Typically they would do this in an off-licence. So the store installed a tiny twitter noise which they said subconsciously made the thief look that direction and get recorded. They tried it on a professional shoplifting demonstrator and got his face on the camera. No facial recognition was involved, they just wanted proof to ban or prosecute the thieves.
A week or two ago I was passing the off-licence part of a supermarket and I heard the twitter. I hung around and listened, and it was every twenty seconds or so from a particular corner. Naturally, I didn't look at it. First time I've heard it. I thought it was quite loud, but maybe thieves are wearing earbuds.
I don't think spirits thieves read The Reg so I don't mind posting about the method, it could be used to gain images of people who don't want to be photographed on public streets, for facial recognition purposes.
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Wednesday 9th October 2024 20:50 GMT MachDiamond
Nefarious applications
A recent story about a sports figure that got his watched removed at a crowded event got me thinking. If I could walk down the street with an "app" running on my glasses that pointed out people it recognized as having a worth/income over a certain amount, that could make target selection easier. That guy sitting outside of the cafe having coffee has a watch that looks very nice, oh, he's Mr so-and-so and worth millions, I expect that watch is worth real money. I think I'll take it from him. The lady that just was just in the bank is somebody with high worth, where does she live? It would be tough to get information from a license plate number, but if you know who the person is, chances are better than they can be found online. Get her phone number and ring her up saying you are from the bank and she needs to come back for some reason when she's someplace good for your needs. When she stops to get turned around, you do your deed.
I'm going to have to start writing these down in a notebook and create some scenarios I can sell to authors. The trick is protecting them. Ideas don't qualify for Copyright.