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How police found Twitter user accused of sending seizure-triggering GIF

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Re: How police found Twitter user accused of sending seizure-triggering GIF

#111

Post by [deleted] »

i336_ wrote: post #105
tunocina wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It won't blink as fast when played in the Twitter website or app. Twitter automatically converts it to a video when you post it, and there's a bit of a delay between every loop when you loop a video, as compared to a GIF.

Ah, right, good point. (It's mildly amusing that the affidavit went to such lengths to describe GIFs, when nowadays it's really a webm or mp4.) It seems that either twitter has vacuumed up any copies of the gif from their website, or google reverse image search has removed all/has no indexed copies of it on site:twitter.com. (I don't exactly want to upload the gif to twitter to test it...)

[deleted]

Re: How police found Twitter user accused of sending seizure-triggering GIF

#112

Post by pbhjpbhj »

amingilani wrote: post #108

If you're curious about the actual gif, I found it here[1]. Funny how something this simple can be so harmful. WARNING, THIS IS THE ACTUAL GIF AND INDUCED A SEIZURE IN ATLEAST ONE INSTANCE THAT WE KNOW OF. DON'T OPEN IF YOU'RE EPILEPTIC! [1]: https://giphy.com/gifs/acid-SDdgL8VFPq4ec

Some people find much later in life they are epileptic. Not sure if that's true of photo-induced epilepsy too? Perhaps sit down first before viewing?

Re: How police found Twitter user accused of sending seizure-triggering GIF

#113

Post by wolfgke »

Latty wrote: post #104
rtpg wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It feels like people still minimize pretty awful actions when they happen over the internet. Imagine someone running up to someone with epilepsy in public and showing them strobes? What sort of deranged person does that? Imagine someone sending death threats through snail mail over and over. Of course that's horrific! But brigaders doing it through twitter is kinda fine because "hey, you're on twitter, stupid stuff h…

Yeah, I found that I was doing this myself. I think it's because I was always posing myself the what-ifs of "well, you could just be accidentally sending something that would trigger it...", but the law can deal with intent where most software and programing problems simply can't. Where it is clear the intent was to cause harm, we should absolutely treat these things with as much seriousness as any other attempt to h…

> but the law can deal with intent

How do you come to this conclusion?

Re: How police found Twitter user accused of sending seizure-triggering GIF

#114

Post by throwanem »

wapz wrote: post #82
jacquesm wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you want to be anonymous on the internet and you are doing this for immediate and spontaneous reasons my advice to you would be to forget about whatever you were planning, likely you will not manage to maintain your anonymity. If you have a lot of knowledge in this field and a fair amount of time to prepare you may be able to pull it off but chances are you will still get a detail wrong somewhere and find yourself…

I always figured if you had to do something illegal go to a public library you've never been to before and only use a computer once and never use it again. Also disguise yourself when you go. That being said you wouldn't be able to login to anything like twitter and you can't continue your actions very easily.

You need a library card to use those machines, and though it's been a while, I recall having had to show ID last time I got one of those.

Re: How police found Twitter user accused of sending seizure-triggering GIF

#115

Post by koverstreet »

wolfgke wrote: post #113
Latty wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I found that I was doing this myself. I think it's because I was always posing myself the what-ifs of "well, you could just be accidentally sending something that would trigger it...", but the law can deal with intent where most software and programing problems simply can't. Where it is clear the intent was to cause harm, we should absolutely treat these things with as much seriousness as any other attempt to h…

> but the law can deal with intent How do you come to this conclusion?

Come on, don't be dragging the discussion down like this.

If you've got something to say about mens rea, then say it.

Re: How police found Twitter user accused of sending seizure-triggering GIF

#116

Post by throwanem »

hatsunearu wrote: post #29

Page 11-12, Weird how he takes screenshots of random shit like his research on how to trigger epilepsy. Who researches shit and takes screenshots?

I do! It's the easiest way to make a durable copy. True, it's not indexable, but that can be sufficiently overcome by manually categorizing screenshots once they're made, and they don't depend on the source remaining available, or having cellular data available when I need to refer to them, or whatever. As long as my phone is charged, they're usable.

(It looks like iOS 10, to which I've just updated, supports print to PDF in the same style as OS X. So maybe I'll be leaning less heavily on the screengrab method in future.)

Re: How police found Twitter user accused of sending seizure-triggering GIF

#117

Post by throwaway7767 »

rtpg wrote: post #77
partiallypro wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that it's easy to say someone gave you a seizure, since -most- are not fatal, even if they didn't have a seizure. There's not much evidence against or supporting that you had a seizure from a gif. This really opens the door for abuse on both ends. So, I am skeptical of "throw the book at them" as a solution, because it would be so easy to fake and ruin someone. The solution should be with browser maker…

So I'm not responsible for throwing a rock at your car because the windshield stopped it and didn't crack? There's documented evidence of intent here. The guy was trying to give their victim a seizure. There's nothing accidental here. Of course if someone accidentally gave someone else a seizure, there should be different standards applied. Of course! Also, yes, we need to make sure photosensitive people can browse m…

> Also, yes, we need to make sure photosensitive people can browse more safely (for the same reason we put airbags in cars).

I'm kind of surprised that we don't have "epilepsy mode" in a browser somewhere. Just limit the redraw speed. It'd mess with the browsing experience but much less than a seizure.

Same for TVs, for an epileptic user it's much better for a highly dynamic scene to look washed out or just blur to a whitish color than to show it accurately and potentially cause a seizure.

Re: How police found Twitter user accused of sending seizure-triggering GIF

#118

Post by i336_ »

tunocina wrote: post #102
i336_ wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

YIKES, that's using like the minimum frame delay! [Unsafe] Here's a mirror in case it goes down: http://i.imgur.com/Qi6tSit.gif [Safe] And here are the two frames extracted to two separate images. Anyone with epilepsy should be able to view this without issues. http://imgur.com/a/kQTQc

It won't blink as fast when played in the Twitter website or app. Twitter automatically converts it to a video when you post it, and there's a bit of a delay between every loop when you loop a video, as compared to a GIF.

After I received some assistance with testing (someone created a new account to test with, but then the account mysteriously disappeared - not sure what happened), I can definitely agree that videos (webms/mp4s) have a notable limp: https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B0l5ewAKDn5aNV9OS0x6QWw4VD... (this was the easiest way to share it)

I tried recording the GIF but that was too much for the GPU in my ThinkPad :P suffice to say that it's about ten times faster (and that playing the GIF in `animate' is even faster than that)

Re: How police found Twitter user accused of sending seizure-triggering GIF

#119

Post by wolfgke »

koverstreet wrote: post #115
wolfgke wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but the law can deal with intent How do you come to this conclusion?

Come on, don't be dragging the discussion down like this. If you've got something to say about mens rea, then say it.

The law can deal with "what some judge/jury conjectures that the intent might be", but it cannot deal with intent. But this weaker statement sounds like it might be implemented in software, too.
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