311–320 of 354 posts
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That reminds me of this legendary comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224
Ha, I knew what that comment was before I clicked. (“Is it that rsync/ftp comment? Yup.”) ((EDIT: but it was curlftpfs, not rsync))
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Incidentally, you just wrote a pretty good argument for (political) voting on paper instead of via machines.
I think the correct solution is a machine that prints out both a human- and machine-readable representation of the vote. The voter can confirm that the human-readable representation is correct, and you can randomly hand-count a few boxes of ballots to check that the hand-count matches the machine-count. An election doesn't need to be tamper- proof we just need to be able to detect tampering well enough to make tamper…
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I laughed out loud multiple times reading this and sent it to some friends whose senses of humor I respect and the consensus is this is funny.
I shared this with some of my friends, and we all agreed it was obnoxious. So, where do we go from here?
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I think the correct solution is a machine that prints out both a human- and machine-readable representation of the vote. The voter can confirm that the human-readable representation is correct, and you can randomly hand-count a few boxes of ballots to check that the hand-count matches the machine-count. An election doesn't need to be tamper- proof we just need to be able to detect tampering well enough to make tamper…
It's not just tampering one needs to worry about with elections. There's also secrecy (to prevent voter coercion).
I feel like this buries the lede massively: Qantas' system was run by Amadeus, who also run the booking system for some 200 other airlines [0]. If you could do this with Qantas and get all those notes, you could probably do it to any other airline and get them too. That would be bad enough, but it also appears that this issue (or one very much like it) has been reported widely at least back in early 2019. So, either…
The underlying issues have been known for quite a while. There was a fantastic talk in CCC at 2016 about the airline booking systems and the various bits of information you can glean from them.[0] 0: https://media.ccc.de/v/33c3-7964-where_in_the_world_is_carme...
It would be great if anyone can find it, I am certain I got it from HN.
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That reminds me of this legendary comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224
Ha, I knew what that comment was before I clicked. (“Is it that rsync/ftp comment? Yup.”) ((EDIT: but it was curlftpfs, not rsync))
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's lossy, but not destructive, and a 'sharpen' operation is technically the same as blur but in reverse. So you won't end up pixel-perfect after doing an 'unblur' but you will be able to make out more than you could before.
If you know anything about the probability distribution of likely inputs, it's even easier to reverse with minimal loss. Eg knowing that the input was black text on white background or a natural image (instead of eg white noise) helps a lot.
Machine learning can also do a surprising good job of it, especially if you know what the target is (e.g. a face) https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2019/9/4/20848008/ai-mach...
Sample code: https://gist.github.com/JonathanFly/80b669a72bf624d17b56a1cf...
Nice. Here's a similar personal story with a PSA that sometimes blurring is NOT sufficient. A friend of mine posted on Instagram a picture of a U.S. visa (or something similar; it was probably five years ago) to announce her trip to the U.S., and she took care to blur out sensitive information such as her passport number. But a Gaussian blur is easy to reverse and I successfully unblurred it and told her my discovery…
Your advice is good, and I agree that you didn't use specialized software to reverse the blur, but this > I didn't use any specialized software; it was just Mathematica with its built-in ImageDeconvolve function with guessed parameters for the Gaussian kernel. is one of the most HN comments I've come across recently :)
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I wonder if you could use adaptive optimal kernels, AOK[0]? I had used this for work on multiphase flow recognition from an electrical capacitance tomography, ECT, as a proxy for void fraction. We wanted to tinker with time-frequency representations. [0]: https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/20c2/b82eef0809df80a402f125...
> electrical capacitance tomography Mind blown. Wow, that is very impressive.
Nice. Here's a similar personal story with a PSA that sometimes blurring is NOT sufficient. A friend of mine posted on Instagram a picture of a U.S. visa (or something similar; it was probably five years ago) to announce her trip to the U.S., and she took care to blur out sensitive information such as her passport number. But a Gaussian blur is easy to reverse and I successfully unblurred it and told her my discovery…
> I personally recommend blacking out (add a black rectangle) instead of blurring I've seen people use image editors on mobile and they'll "scribble" out sensitive information, but one of the problems is that if you pick the wrong pen it'll blend your strokes so it's not 100% opacity (but on a casual glance it's close enough). You can zoom in and change the contrast of a photo that has been redacted this way and reco…