Image Scrubber: tool for anonymizing photographs taken at protests • Hacker News Board

Re: Image Scrubber: tool for anonymizing photographs taken at protests

#271

Post by drewmol » Sun, May 31, 2020, 11:52 PM UTC

blotter_paper wrote: post #51

jsaxton86 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, and I'd go a step further and say that if you destroy evidence of someone burning my city down or looting, you're an accomplice to that crime.

What if you stop an EMT from checking the pulse of somebody who your co-worker has been choking to death for minutes? Does that make you an accomplice, too? If your city charged these cops justly then nobody would be burning it down; cure your disease and the symptoms will go away.

>Does that make you an accomplice, too?

Yes, deliberately preventing anyone from providing care or defense for a person who's being murdered makes you an accomplice to the murder.

>If your city charged these cops justly then nobody would be burning it down

Doubtful. Here's a video of East 4th street in downtown Cleveland being destroyed by pillagers last night: https://www.news5cleveland.com/news/local-news/cleveland-met...

There's over a thousand service industry workers who've already been out of work for months due to the pandemic that the businesses on this street support. Many of them have struggled to get enough financing to even reopen, some have had to permanently close. Many (possibly most) of these businesses are destroyed and can not afford to rebuild. Who should the city of Cleveland have charged justly to prevent this? How many more innocent and unrelated people's livelihoods need to be burned down and how many more times (this has happened before, more than once)? There seem to be a lot of accomplices in the video.

Re: Image Scrubber: tool for anonymizing photographs taken at protests

#272

Post by dmart » Sun, May 31, 2020, 11:52 PM UTC

comboy wrote: post #239

Really weird that nobody in the thread is pointing out that this is basically a website that says "give me your photos, specifically from protests, which have details that you want to keep private". It doesn't matter that it theoretically all happen in the browser. You can serve different versions to different IPs etc. Every heuristic in me would be screaming don't use that if I would have a need for such tool.

It's a static site running on GitHub pages, over HTTPS, directly out of a linked repo so you can examine the source code. I literally could not imagine a more transparent way to serve this application.

The only way an attack vector is possible here is if you think GitHub themselves would maliciously inject an altered version of the code in the repo, and even then you'd be able to see the code and network requests in your developer tools.

Re: Image Scrubber: tool for anonymizing photographs taken at protests

#273

Post by thephyber » Sun, May 31, 2020, 11:54 PM UTC

ssalazar wrote: post #226

thephyber wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm pro-protest and pro-police-accountability-reforms, but some of your logic fails. > Besides, these businesses are all insured Some of them are. But having to claim on insurance is an expensive proposition that eats into profit margins (which is extra difficult in the middle of a worldwide depression). > Im certain that Apple and Luxottica, some of the richest companies in the world, can write off the loss. Most co…

I appreciate the counterargument. I would never advocate looting, especially of small/family businesses. The part of Los Angeles where I live has been hit hard by looting this weekend, including many small businesses, and its painful to see. I would highly prefer peaceful protesting and peaceful policing. But there is really no comparison of a line item on a multibillion dollar balance sheet--the linked video is all…

> The response of "what about the looters?" is a distraction from exactly that.

Yup.

And I personally think that a lot of the violence isn't the average protesters who care about police accountability, but people who are just using protests as an excuse to wreak havoc with less chance of being singled out for arrest.

Re: Image Scrubber: tool for anonymizing photographs taken at protests

#274

Post by yters » Sun, May 31, 2020, 11:54 PM UTC

throwanem wrote: post #257

yters wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This article from USA Today in 2018 implies the effect has been indefinite. Interesting graph, too, that shows the drop in police actively stopping petty crime correlates with a growth in homicides. I heard a Baltimore radio show in 2019 that said pretty much the same thing, highlighted by the police commissioner getting mugged in broad daylight as he was walking down the street with his wife. https://www.usatoday.co…

How does a reduction in police-initiated enforcement actions square with a rise in homicides? Homicide is, pretty much by definition, not a petty crime. Or is this that hoary old "broken windows" theory of policing that's taken such a well-deserved beating over the last couple of decades? The article also, despite a clear editorial slant, can't quite avoid hinting at the kind of solution that actually does need to ha…

The point is clear the police withdrawing has not improved things. The solution clearly lies elsewhere. And the 2015 riots did not make anything better.

Re: Image Scrubber: tool for anonymizing photographs taken at protests

#275

Post by throwanem » Sun, May 31, 2020, 11:59 PM UTC

yters wrote: post #274

throwanem wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does a reduction in police-initiated enforcement actions square with a rise in homicides? Homicide is, pretty much by definition, not a petty crime. Or is this that hoary old "broken windows" theory of policing that's taken such a well-deserved beating over the last couple of decades? The article also, despite a clear editorial slant, can't quite avoid hinting at the kind of solution that actually does need to ha…

The point is clear the police withdrawing has not improved things. The solution clearly lies elsewhere. And the 2015 riots did not make anything better.

Well, now you're just reiterating things you've already said and failed to support the first time. I guess that means we're done here.

Re: Image Scrubber: tool for anonymizing photographs taken at protests

#276

Post by rkagerer » Mon, Jun 01, 2020, 12:00 AM UTC

KingMachiavelli wrote: post #269

aith wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a simple static site with no server involved. Everything happens client side. You could turn off your internet while you're using it if you wanted to make sure no data is exposed.

True, but it's only safe if you do that. You have to either inspect the code every time you use the site or run it locally. Until subresource integrity [1] becomes widely used & the capability to 'pin' a given script to a specific version, web applications can not be used without at least trusting the owner of the domain. A better example is Protonmail, a secure email service. It has a nice web client and there is an…

Write a little piece of open-source client software to take a hash of the source code. Check the hash every time you use it. Spread the tool around to a community of people who review every time the hash changes and publish (separately) a history of attested hashes.

Re: Image Scrubber: tool for anonymizing photographs taken at protests

#277

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Jun 01, 2020, 12:08 AM UTC

sfj wrote: post #258

pera wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The more they expect to be held accountable, the more likely they will refrain from violence. The thing is people are already being held accountable for their skin tone, and the likelihood of changing your behavior when you have lived your entire life in an environment of constant oppression for fear of being identified in a protest is marginal, specially during catharsis, otherwise you wouldn't see for instance pe…

> The thing is people are already being held accountable for their skin tone, and the likelihood of changing your behavior when you have lived your entire life in an environment of constant oppression Actually, a lot more whites are killed by cops than blacks. And before you say that's because there are more white people than black people, blacks represent only 13% of the population but commit 52% of the crime. So, y…

[deleted]

Re: Image Scrubber: tool for anonymizing photographs taken at protests

#278

Post by sfj » Mon, Jun 01, 2020, 12:09 AM UTC

fwip wrote: post #266

sfj wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The thing is people are already being held accountable for their skin tone, and the likelihood of changing your behavior when you have lived your entire life in an environment of constant oppression Actually, a lot more whites are killed by cops than blacks. And before you say that's because there are more white people than black people, blacks represent only 13% of the population but commit 52% of the crime. So, y…

Your first link shows: more black people are killed per-capita by cops than white people. Y Your second link shows: Black people are more likely to be convicted of homicide than white people. You've made a number of unfounded leaps on top of that: That "Black people commit 52% of crime." This is wrong in several ways. You're assuming that conviction rates accurately represent rates of crimes, and also that "all crime…

> Your first link shows: more black people are killed per-capita by cops than white people. Y Your second link shows: Black people are more likely to be convicted of homicide than white people.

Yes, that's right. See the connection between crime and cops killing civilians?

> But instead, we see that black people are convicted of only 27% of overall crime.

Where do you see this? I can't find this anywhere.

> That's including the fact that certain categories are known to be racially disparate in conviction and sentencing - e.g. white & black people use marijuana at approximately equal rates, yet black people are nearly 4 times as likely to be arrested for it.

That by itself doesn't show anything. It depends on how and where marijuana was used. Smoking a blunt and driving around the neighborhood with the top down is going to picked up a lot more than someone sitting in their home smoking. You need to show situations that are the same which have more blacks being arrested than whites.

> That the people killed by cops were all committing a crime at the time. I don't have statistics on hand for this, but a well-known counterexample is Tamir Rice.

Yea, I'm sure you don't... that subset has to be so minor it has to be insignificant. Oh, an anecdotal incident where a 12 year old boy carried a replica of a pistol and aimed it at an cop, who didn't know it wasn't real. I don't see how your example justifies this as a big problem.

Re: Image Scrubber: tool for anonymizing photographs taken at protests

#279

Post by vagab0nd » Mon, Jun 01, 2020, 12:09 AM UTC

comboy wrote: post #239

Really weird that nobody in the thread is pointing out that this is basically a website that says "give me your photos, specifically from protests, which have details that you want to keep private". It doesn't matter that it theoretically all happen in the browser. You can serve different versions to different IPs etc. Every heuristic in me would be screaming don't use that if I would have a need for such tool.

Can you imagine yourself being convinced somehow that this is safe to use? I've had similar ideas before that I ended up not pursuing precisely because I knew I couldn't find a way to convince people like you.

Re: Image Scrubber: tool for anonymizing photographs taken at protests

#280

Post by t-writescode » Mon, Jun 01, 2020, 12:12 AM UTC

KingMachiavelli wrote: post #269

aith wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a simple static site with no server involved. Everything happens client side. You could turn off your internet while you're using it if you wanted to make sure no data is exposed.

True, but it's only safe if you do that. You have to either inspect the code every time you use the site or run it locally. Until subresource integrity [1] becomes widely used & the capability to 'pin' a given script to a specific version, web applications can not be used without at least trusting the owner of the domain. A better example is Protonmail, a secure email service. It has a nice web client and there is an…

Or, you could download the repository, validate it once for yourself and then use it repeatedly. It is open source, after all.