Interesting how a guy whose entire administration is being investigated and indicted by the FBI ran almost entirely on a ‘law and order’ platform, with this pilot being one of the staples.
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FTC orders 'gun detection' tech maker Evolv to stop overstating effectiveness
121–130 of 143 posts
Re: FTC orders 'gun detection' tech maker Evolv to stop overstating effectiveness
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Security checkpoints are the primary point of delay for getting into venues, and places that have rolled these out process people through about 95% faster. It's a huge difference. I assume expediting peak crowd throughput at low labor cost is the primary, if not entire, value of the device. I hate that it's being marketed dishonestly but I also assume most concert venue buyers know (or suspect) it probably doesn't…
I don't know anything about the devices that are being sold, but it doesn't seem impossible to me that with better signal processing from a metal detector, you could reduce false positives a bit while maintaining or slightly improving the false negative rate.
Very likely, but who's going to pay for the engineering efforts? If the customer doesn't care about having a better device, or a better device would actually make their job harder, then it's wasted effort on the part of the manufacturer.
Engineering exists to solve a problem. It's entirely likely that your definition of the "problem" differs from that of the paying customer.
Re: FTC orders 'gun detection' tech maker Evolv to stop overstating effectiveness
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
> That's a school shooting. Ah. I now understand why school shooting numbers that people are quoting are so very high as of late. Shit like Columbine is a school shooting. Shit like that is a shooting that happened to happen at school. If the assailant had used a knife, would you be calling it a "school stabbing"? If you would, then I disagree with that characterization, too. For lots of folks, the term "school shoot…
Not every school shooting is a mass shooting, no.
Based on this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42552320> many things classified as "school shooting" are not what any reasonable person would think of when they hear the term.
A kid shooting HIMSELF in the leg? Yes, it meets an extremely literal definition, but it would be incredibly stupid to -say- lock down a campus because of that.
Re: FTC orders 'gun detection' tech maker Evolv to stop overstating effectiveness
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
So what? It's not like common law has less effect. "Body of law" is understood by lawyers to include both common and statutory law.
The point is that it can easily be overridden with statute "business owners meeting definition X are only liable in conditions Y"
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Re: FTC orders 'gun detection' tech maker Evolv to stop overstating effectiveness
#125Earlier quoted context omitted.
So what? It's not like common law has less effect. "Body of law" is understood by lawyers to include both common and statutory law.
The point is that it can easily be overridden with statute "business owners meeting definition X are only liable in conditions Y"
This is a stupid point. “The current law can easily be overridden by passing a new law.”
No shit.
Re: FTC orders 'gun detection' tech maker Evolv to stop overstating effectiveness
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't know anything about the devices that are being sold, but it doesn't seem impossible to me that with better signal processing from a metal detector, you could reduce false positives a bit while maintaining or slightly improving the false negative rate.
Sure, I agree that's an interesting and likely solvable technical problem. However, the vast majority of the addressable market in today's over-secured society don't really need improved detection. Concert venues, sports arenas and similar customers buy massive volume and they are much more concerned with faster throughput enabled by shorter cycle time and minimal false positives. Of course the head of security at Ma…
Note that I said lower false positives and equal or slightly better false negatives, which aligns with what you say customers want.
Of course I suspect venues really don't care about false negative rates much at all, so there's a big temptation for everyone to just turn sensitivity down.
Re: FTC orders 'gun detection' tech maker Evolv to stop overstating effectiveness
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
There’s definitely some form of filtering you can apply to metal detector results to make a relatively good guess on whether it’s a false positive or not. Just need to train it with a variety of hidden and unhidden items. I kinda like the idea of a team of test people hiding their weapons everywhere and then taking multiple trips through the thing just to teach it.
It’s not a metal detector it’s optical. What does a person with a pistol strapped to their inner thigh walk like? Or a knife? There is no possible way to detect that visually.
> There is no possible way to detect that visually.
Well, let's not go that far. Security personnel definitely detect people carrying weapons by gait and the way their clothing hangs. Certainly computers could help do the same.
Can it ever be reliable enough? Ehh, I doubt it.
Re: FTC orders 'gun detection' tech maker Evolv to stop overstating effectiveness
#128Multiple concert venues in my city use these, so I interact with them all the time. They have replaced standard metal detectors, bag searches, and manual patdowns w/ hands and/or metal-detecting wands. Security checkpoints are the primary point of delay for getting into venues, and places that have rolled these out process people through about 95% faster. It's a huge difference. If it does trigger, you just get the m…
I guess on a more general level, I'm confused why a metal detector with bit some machine learning on top wouldn't make a better widget? You'd think that different shape metal object produce different magnetic flux, and there's probably more dimensions to that than just size?
Re: FTC orders 'gun detection' tech maker Evolv to stop overstating effectiveness
#129Interesting how a guy whose entire administration is being investigated and indicted by the FBI ran almost entirely on a ‘law and order’ platform, with this pilot being one of the staples.
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Re: FTC orders 'gun detection' tech maker Evolv to stop overstating effectiveness
#130"Hear me out, we run the same playbook, but this time with AI"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ADE_651
>The ADE 651 is a fraudulent bomb detector[1] produced by the British company Advanced Tactical Security & Communications Ltd (ATSC). It was claimed to detect many substances, such as drugs or explosives, from long distances. The device was sold to various countries, particularly in Iraq where the government was claimed to have spent £52 million for security operations.
>The device features a swiveling antenna attached to a plastic grip and requires charging by a user's static electricity. Users would insert "programmed substance detection cards" to supposedly detect specific substances, which were claimed to absorb the vapors of those substances. However, investigations revealed that the product was incapable of detecting anything, essentially being a dowsing rod. The ADE 651 was used primarily by Iraqi security forces for security checkpoints. Due to the false sense of security, many critics pointed to numerous incidents where bombings occurred despite the presence of the ADE 651 at security checkpoints, underscoring its ineffectiveness.