291–300 of 343 posts
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That's called stylometry and it can be surprisingly accurate under the right conditions.
What’s the actual scientific evidence backing this? I’m asking because various forensic techniques that were previously perceived to be reliable (fingerprints, handwriting analysis, bite marks) turned out to be total bunk.
Things I learned: Use the spell checker. Randomly misspell different words.
https://github.com/psal/anonymouth
(How do you hyperlink text here?)
I wish more resources were spent on law enforcement at the local level, fighting real crime. They could have more police patrolling the streets and subways, deterring assaults[0] and daylight shootings[1]. Does anyone really care that this drug dealer is locked up? Is anyone safer now? Do I have to worry any less about getting mugged on the subway at night? Of course people are calling to defund the police, and if th…
What I find the most interesting about this article is that someone was able to be identified using a picture of their fingerprints. Thus, any photos posted online could be scoured for identification information. And with computer vision technologies becoming more mature, it means that regular video footage of people could identify them the same way in seconds or less using a wide variety of different visual traits.…
I’ve reflected on the fact that some makers on YouTube wear gloves and wondered if this is for privacy reasons. I see globes being worn even when they’re not obviously doing anything that risk getting their fingers dirty.
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> (though I think it’s important for a functional society to obey laws, and get them changed if they aren’t working instead of just breaking them based on personal preference) This is an unbelievably privileged position to take. Are you not aware that the country itself was established in the finest tradition of civil disobedience? The declaration of independence was an act of civil disobedience. The end of colonial…
You always hear calls for "civil disobedience" or "non-violence" when it concerns systems that the speaker may not want outright support, but is highly sympathetic to. You never hear anyone say that US should have pursued a path of non-violence during the Cold War, after the attack on Pearl Harbor, or during the War On Terror. In those instances, violence is assuredly the order of the day. But when the villain is the…
I find it incredibly doubtful that I would elect to place myself in harms way to further any of the campaigns you've listed. I do not believe it is my place to judge others for doing so, however.
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> identified using a picture of their fingerprints It's not clear to me that they identified him that way. It might be that they arrested him due to other evidence, compared the fingerprints afterward, and told him that they could prove the fingerprints matched, whereupon he pled guilty. It's no unheard of to elicit guilty pleas using less than scientifically robust forensic methods.
Indeed. I got the impression this was one of many pieces of evidence used to put the case together. The biggest one was the money laundering. Porras had used a money laundering service controlled by Homeland Security Investigations. Vendors sent the money launderer a certain amount of Bitcoin and the money launderer mailed cash back to the vendor. At some point in the money launderer’s career, federal agents quietly…
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There was some pytorch software called "enhance", i.e. ./enhance [options] and you could take an image that someone took of their unpowered tv across the room and pull out a high resolution image of their face from the reflection in the matte-ish surface. I used it on reddit to convince people it was unsafe to post any images of that sort. It seemed to work for about 6 months. There's magic in image enhancement, but…
> Heck, a decade and a half ago there were claims that governments could narrow a search for an audio file upload based on the deviation from 60hz on the power line noise - in an audio recording. Wow. Any source for this?
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I strongly suspected that is what they did too. Got to wonder if they used the EXIF data to find him - linking photos of the pot and other social media/etc public shots, then used the fingerprints as parallel construction.
Imgur strips exif by default. I agree it sounds like parallel construction. The article mentions they compared his finger prints to those from the picture. How did they know to check against his prints? Sounds like they already knew who it was, by means that aren't admissible as evidence.
So really, nothing about this is suspicious at all, it's completely standard law enforcement practice to obtain fingerprints in any way possible and submit them to the FBI for matching, and then run down any possible matches. Your local police department does this for car breakins if they can spare the resources (not too unusual to get good latent prints off the windows, but it is unusual for police department to spend the time/money). The only odd thing here is LE's fortune, and the accused's misfortune, of images having been uploaded with such clear capture of the fingerprints.
I wish more resources were spent on law enforcement at the local level, fighting real crime. They could have more police patrolling the streets and subways, deterring assaults[0] and daylight shootings[1]. Does anyone really care that this drug dealer is locked up? Is anyone safer now? Do I have to worry any less about getting mugged on the subway at night? Of course people are calling to defund the police, and if th…
Since it's become clear that the NYPD is intentionally[0] not doing its job in "protest" over perfectly reasonable state[1] and local[2] oversight of their activities, we need to ensure that they actually do their jobs rather than create a more dangerous place by not doing so. And this deeply troubling activity may actually get the city to soften[5] these important reforms.
>Of course people are calling to defund the police, and if that happens I’ll have to be more worried.
Given that crime is at its lowest point in NYC in over 50 years (and that includes the recent uptick in shootings[3]), it seems to me that your concerns are misplaced, especially since the reduction in funding --much less than the widely quoted $1 billion -- for the NYPD has yet to take effect.[4]
[0] https://theweek.com/articles/938068/police-protection-racket
[1] https://abc7ny.com/police-reform-nyc-bills-nypd/6238620/
[2] https://council.nyc.gov/press/2020/06/18/1990/
[3] https://www.newsweek.com/new-york-crime-rise-shootings-15249...
[4] https://cbcny.org/research/was-nypd-budget-cut-1-billion
[5] https://www.ny1.com/nyc/all-boroughs/news/2020/08/26/city-co...