Live data from Hacker News

Chinese police don high-tech glasses to nab suspects

hongkongfp.com

71–80 of 154 posts

Re: Chinese police don high-tech glasses to nab suspects

#71
post #3

I get why human rights orgs would want to speak against this technology, from a Western philosophy and law perspective. China does not have the same philosophical or legal lineage. They will have to find out on their own whether the cons outweigh the pros. Theoretically, if the system is not corrupted by misinformation (false or incomplete information), it has the potential to keep the streets free of wanted criminal…

This kind of tech has already come to Western ports of entry. Why else would Snap, Inc. have millions of dollars worth of contracts with Customs and Border Protection (alongside dozens of other contracts with DHS, DoD, etc).

https://www.fpds.gov/ezsearch/fpdsportal?indexName=awardfull...

Re: Chinese police don high-tech glasses to nab suspects

#72

All these reports have the feelings of small rumblings or rumors of purges and famines that leaked out of the Soviet Union in the 30’s. The dismissal of all of them due to China’s size and growth really strengthens the analogy too. Privacy is important because basically we all are, at least once a day, committing some kind of crime. I mean the definition for loitering is so broad that alone gets most people. The ad-t…

You yourself are admitting that terrible evil can be done by governments without any of the advanced technology that some fret over. It's not about the technology. It's about the will of the government. Think about all the horrendous evils rendered upon the citizenry of early nations and empires in the distant past. No advanced technology there. Just a twisted view of right and wrong. What this tells us is that regar…

Sure it’s about the will of the gorvening body. Then you’ll have to agree a good bunch of current western societies have governments willing to do evil or let evil be done for a reason or another.

Nothing is black and white, but the current trends about how people are equaly treated and human life is valued is still in the darker greys in my opinion.

Re: Chinese police don high-tech glasses to nab suspects

#74

All these reports have the feelings of small rumblings or rumors of purges and famines that leaked out of the Soviet Union in the 30’s. The dismissal of all of them due to China’s size and growth really strengthens the analogy too. Privacy is important because basically we all are, at least once a day, committing some kind of crime. I mean the definition for loitering is so broad that alone gets most people. The ad-t…

You yourself are admitting that terrible evil can be done by governments without any of the advanced technology that some fret over. It's not about the technology. It's about the will of the government. Think about all the horrendous evils rendered upon the citizenry of early nations and empires in the distant past. No advanced technology there. Just a twisted view of right and wrong. What this tells us is that regar…

Ok you’re definitely right with the technology thing not being an issue to “govs killing lots of people”.

Let me say that currently, because the technologies are new, not well understood, and not regulated by any kind of international treaty or norms (even national regulations sometimes) they can and will be abused in ways that are hard for other countries to protest against in a credible manner.

In China during The Great Famine under Mao, 50 million people died. I know numbers and history can seem so distant, but that’s more than the number of people who died in WWI and near the low end of estimates for WWII (especially the early estimates).

It was insanity on a level no society has ever perpetuated. A good example of this was that 40% of all structures were torn down during this period. Incredible. It’s all probably worse than we know too due to a lack of records and archives that individuals have access too.

The National Book Award winner this year was about Russian totalitarianism called “The Future is History”. If this is true, the future is a much worse place for the Chinese people.

Re: Chinese police don high-tech glasses to nab suspects

#75
post #73

Has anyone played with Baidou`s Face Ai Products , I cant read Mandrin and The site is impossible to navigate with google transelate.@ http://ai.baidu.com/tech/face Would really appreciate a pointer to a independent performance eval of the same .

[deleted]

[deleted]

Re: Chinese police don high-tech glasses to nab suspects

#76

Has anyone played with Baidou`s Face Ai Products , I cant read Mandrin and The site is impossible to navigate with google transelate.@ http://ai.baidu.com/tech/face Would really appreciate a pointer to a independent performance eval of the same .

OK. Did you find these SDK?

http://ai.baidu.com/sdk#bfr

from there you will need to still sign-up via their free tier via dreaded portal for API key:

https://console.bce.baidu.com/ai/?fromai=1#/ai/face/overview...

Apparently "立即注册" means "Sign up now"! So you will have to go through that and lovingly translate each field. If you right-click in Chrome and click Inspect on a textbox you will see they have English names for their control namess (like name="userName") ... lol.

Re: Chinese police don high-tech glasses to nab suspects

#78
post #3

I get why human rights orgs would want to speak against this technology, from a Western philosophy and law perspective. China does not have the same philosophical or legal lineage. They will have to find out on their own whether the cons outweigh the pros. Theoretically, if the system is not corrupted by misinformation (false or incomplete information), it has the potential to keep the streets free of wanted criminal…

"Wanted criminals" in China's case might be someone who posted criticism of ruling party, mentioned Tiananmen Square protests, support Tibet independence, belongs to certain religious group etc. Of course, western countries are not much better, but it just highlights the fact that we, as society, should fight mass-surveillance as it will be used for thought control. The power is simply too great and alluring to be trusted to any entity.

Re: Chinese police don high-tech glasses to nab suspects

#79

Good, technology like this is good. Worrying about potential misuse of this technology is misplaced worry. Our concern is better placed on forming governments that will use this technology for the common good (whatever that is determined to be) than on the availability of the technology itself. It's not about the technology. It's about the will of the government. Think about all the horrendous evils rendered upon the…

Government is never good or bad. If government has a will, it can only be to preserve itself. That is why it is so important to hold it accountable, to align its objective with the will of the society. Weirdly, Chinese government is driven by the fear that it can be overthrown if the economy stops growing, thus it delegates so much focus to economic investment. With technology like this, they might, in one day, think they are no longer have such concern anymore.

Re: Chinese police don high-tech glasses to nab suspects

#80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t disagree that doing image classification at scale with the parameters you’re describing is non-trivial. But I was attempting to rebut GP’s point that a small camera is incapable of performing facial recognition. That’s plain incorrect. Speed/scale are orthogonal issues.

First, faceid is a depth camera not a photo camera. It’s also quite high resolution. Second of course you CAN do recognition on something that’s low resolution. But if the question is how many labels can you correctly identify with high precision and recall... well... that’s a harder problem.

I don’t think a totalitarian regime is too concerned about false positives... nobody would ever refuse a short stay at the local police station
Post reply on HN