The thing is? Ignoring the apparent void that black skin creates on all cameras (oy), it doesn’t take much time. It takes computing power.

As poops and giggles a few friends and I took the public (rumble…) traffic camera feeds that a nearby county has online. Set up a simple python script to scrape those and then configured an off the shelf tool to track a buddy’s general car (green hatchback) and told him to just drive around for an hour.

We were able to map his route with about 70% accuracy with about two hours of scripting and reading documentation. And there are companies that provide MUCH better products for the people who have access to the direct feeds and all the cameras we don’t have access to.

I mean, you definitely want to wear a mask and some goggles at a protest. If only for the purpose of pepper spray. I totally don’t have a thin gaiter, goggles ,and a beanie and have definitely not heard great things about mountain biking helmets (the ones with faceguards) and totally am not considering grabbing one next time I do an REI run.

But also be aware that, with protests, you are almost always up against the groups who have access to all those “traffic” cameras and the like. And computer vision makes it fairly trivial to identify when a bunch of unmasked people walked into a dark alley and came out with their faces fully covered by tracking them back from the 4th street protest. It isn’t Enemy Of The State levels of asking Baby Busey and Jamie Kennedy to generate a 3d model from a single shot of Big Willy Style ogling some ta-tas, but most of the ways surveillance is used during that sequence are shockingly realistic and feasible.

Rhetorical question (because we clearly can infer the answer) but… have you ever seen a black person?

A bit of melanin does not make you into some giant void that breaks all cameras. Black folk aren’t doing long exposure shots for selfies or group photos. Believe it or not but RDCWorld doesn’t need to use nightvision cameras to film a skit.

Yeah but this is (basically) reddit and clearly it isn’t racism and is just a problem of multi megapixel cameras not being sufficient to properly handle the needs of phrenology.

There is definitely some truth to needing to tweak how feature points (?) are computed and the like. But yeah, training data goes a long way and this is why there was a really big push to get better training data sets out there… until we all realized those would predominantly be used by corporations and that people don’t really want to be the next Lenna because they let some kid take a picture of them for extra credit during an undergrad course.

No. I have worked with phone camera sensors quite a bit (see above regarding evaluating facial recognition software…).

Yes, the computation is a Thing. A bigger Thing is just accessing the databases to match the faces. That is why this gets offloaded to a server farm somewhere.

But the actual computer vision and source image? You can get more than enough contours and features from dark skin no matter how much you desperately try to talk about how “difficult” black skin is without dropping an n-word. You just have to put a bit of effort in to actually check for those rather than do what a bunch of white grad students did twenty years ago (or just do what a bunch of multicultural grad students did five or six years ago but…).

For low contrast greyscale sequrity cameras? Sure.

For any modern even SD color camera in a decently lit scenario? Bullshit. It is just that most of this tech is usually trained/debugged on the developers and their friends and families and… yeah.

I always love to tell the story of, maybe a decade and a half ago, evaluating various facial recognition software. White people never had any problems. Even the various AAPI folk in the group would be hit or miss (except for one project out of Taiwan that was ridiculously accurate). And we weren’t able to find a single package that consistently identified even the same black person.

And even professional shills like MKBHD will talk around this problem during his review ads (the apple vision video being particularly funny).

Apple already demonstrated that you can still get pretty darn close from eyes and hair. Combine that with a bit of logic (There is a 40% chance this is Sally Smith but she also lives three streets over and works on that street) and you still have very good odds.

Well… unless you are black, brown, or asian. Since the facial recognition tech is heavily geared toward white people because tech bros.

And they change nothing? It still boils down to human beings being liable.

Hosting costs money. Theoretically (some) cryptocurrency can obfuscate that but… there is a reason graph problems got really popular again for a little bit.

But domain names also cost money. They also need to be registered to a person/company.

That is why a lot of torrent sites end up getting their domain stolen.

Also, all of this ignores the actual developers. But that is par for the course when it comes to discussing liability with open source projects.

Yeah. It is why I really like that Proton basically say "We will turn on you in an instant if we get a legal order. But here is what we’ll actually turn over and here is how you can minimize your vulnerability to that.

C&Ds and legal threats still go to a person who isn’t going to go to jail or have their wages garnished by Mario until the end of their days.

At best you have a single gitlab instance running in a country that is known to not cooperate with those kinds of demands. But… just ask the various torrent sites how well that works after actively pissing off an army of lawyers who don’t mind slipping a hosting company a couple hundred bucks to get the identity and address of the person paying for that.

Plenty of hosts and providers over the years have claimed to be super privacy oriented and blah blah blah. Once they get a legal request, they roll over. Because they aren’t going to prison for the customer anymore than they are going to prison for you.

Nope.

C&Ds and legal threats still go to a person who isn’t going to go to jail or have their wages garnished by Mario until the end of their days.

At best you have a single gitlab instance running in a country that is known to not cooperate with those kinds of demands. But… just ask the various torrent sites how well that works after actively pissing off an army of lawyers who don’t mind slipping a hosting company a couple hundred bucks to get the identity and address of the person paying for that.

What is the alternative?

Closed source “I swear this executable that will let you play all the games you want is legit” hosted on sourceforge or random websites that get hugged to death every day that ends in a y?

Also: it isn’t like that would stop this kind of legal action. MS/Github are barely a factor. It is the devs themselves getting the “hey, stop it or we’ll turn you into indentured servants” letters.

I mean… everyone contributing all those super useful posts that everyone thinks are the only authoritative sources of information on the internet are doing exactly that.

Every time you provide some tech support or a bit of advice? You are providing reddit shareholders’ money.

People tried that.

reddit corporate will remove those mods and ask which other mods want to be super duper awesome and be able to say they moderate another N thousand users per day for zero pay. And people leap at that.

Until the users leave, nothing will happen. In a fucked way, reddit corporate are doing everyone a favor by removing the spineless “We are going to go silent for 24 hours with no real demands or bargaining power” idiocy.

We live in a world where everything you do or say on the internet is potentially part of someone else’s training data. Lemmy is already a shitshow for that but you can bet that “ooh, piracy board” is fair game for everyone because nobody would be dumb enough to sue about that.

If someone wants to delete a comment for ANY reason, they are more than welcome to.

If y9ou are close enough to a system of importance that you can spray it, you are close enough to compromise it in countless other ways.

This is just one of many physical access attacks. Just like “you could take a hammer to it”

Like, I know people want to think this is some Ocean’s Eleven heist waiting to happen. It isn’t. This is only viable if you can drench an area with helium (which means you can already gas everyone you care about) or you have such close physical access that there are so many other things you could do. At best it is an episode of Burn Notice where Michael has to rapidly improvise an escape where his CIA handler of the week already refused to give him something much more useful.

If you are close enough to spray a device you are close enough to just steal it. Or spray the owner.

If you are in a position where you can dump random gases into the air supply to the degree it impacts these devices then they are likely compromised in other ways as well.

Depending on what that couch has been through, it might be about marking/refreshing territory.

But also understand that there are different kinds of scratching materials and structure. My cat only likes the cardboard kind in a small A3-ish box and that is more because she likes to move it around. For actual scratching she very much prefers the ropier material in something sturdy at a 90 or 45 degree angle that she can really push against without it moving.

And I’ve NEVER seen a cat actually like one of those free standing scratching posts after the first time they push it over during a more energetic session.