Live data from Hacker News

Juggalos figured out how to beat facial recognition

theoutline.com

91–100 of 137 posts

Re: Juggalos figured out how to beat facial recognition

#91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I strongly support anti-mask laws... especially in situations when you have two political opponents coming up to one another in the streets. Masks make it way too easy for some kind of provocateur to instigate fights or start a stampede. And this may be egged on my professional dark PR/intelligence people to make one side or another look good/bad.

It's a tough thing to defend on legal grounds because you have to explain how mask laws don't violate the first amendment. There could be some justification that would hold up, but as far as I know the issue hasn't gone before the Supreme Court.

You'd have to explain how they do. It's not prima facie(ha!) obvious that a face mask is "speech"

Re: Juggalos figured out how to beat facial recognition

#92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I had a chocolate bar melt in my front pocket, I would have assumed it was my body heat.

(I can't find the reference right now, but apparently the chocolate bar story is a myth.)

RF heating was understood well before the development of the cavity magnetron; Westinghouse demonstrated RF cooking at the 1933 World's Fair using a standard shortwave transmitter.

The chocolate bar story is attributed to Percy Spencer in 1945 and is probably somewhat fanciful - anyone working around high-power radar equipment would necessarily be aware of RF heating, because it presents a significant safety hazard. Spencer can legitimately claim to be the inventor of the microwave oven and is named on Raytheon's patent.

https://patents.google.com/patent/US2495429A/

Re: Juggalos figured out how to beat facial recognition

#93
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're trying to have a neutral face so it doesn't distract from what they're modelling.

But it's not a neutral face. It's a face of disdain and contempt. This is a neutral face: https://cdn.psychologytoday.com/sites/default/files/styles/a... And this is the face of disdain I'm talking about: https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcSGkhmT...

Sometimes it's for a better picture (looking up from under lowered eyebrows, for instance), and sometimes it's just how their faces look - consider the phenomenon of "resting b*&^! face".

Many people do consider a neutral face to be aggressive or unpleasant, studies show, regardless of the intent of the person with the face.

Re: Juggalos figured out how to beat facial recognition

#94
post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your bank will likely not let you in if you're wearing a hat or sunglasses. "No shoes, no shirt, no service" has also been a thing for as long as convenience stores have been around. Not that far of a stretch to think this will ultimately extend to face paint. If you want true anonymity, just wear a motorcyle helmet everywhere. We still don't know who The Stig is.

> Your bank will likely not let you in if you're wearing a hat I've never heard of this. > "No shoes, no shirt" That's health code, not appearance.

Banks frequently have signs saying you can't wear a hat, sunglasses, or masks, for what I think should be obvious reasons

Re: Juggalos figured out how to beat facial recognition

#95
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're trying to have a neutral face so it doesn't distract from what they're modelling.

But it's not a neutral face. It's a face of disdain and contempt. This is a neutral face: https://cdn.psychologytoday.com/sites/default/files/styles/a... And this is the face of disdain I'm talking about: https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcSGkhmT...

Especially to Western eyes, resting faces--some in particular--can often be interpreted that way because we're so used to forced smiles. This is particularly true for strangers because we don't have the experience to read their individual emotional expressions.

> So Jason Rogers and Abbe Macbeth, behavioral researchers with international research and innovation firm Noldus Information Technology, decided to investigate: Why are some faces seen as truly expressionless, but others are inexplicably off-putting?

> ...

> The researchers enlisted Noldus’s FaceReader.... The software...analyzes the image and assigns an expression based on eight basic human emotions: happiness, sadness, anger, fear, surprise, disgust, contempt, and “neutral.”

> To establish a baseline, Rogers and Macbeth first had FaceReader assess a series of genuinely expressionless faces. Those expressions registered about 97 percent neutrality, Macbeth said...

> Then they plugged in photos of RBF all-stars Kanye West, Kristen Stewart and Queen Elizabeth. Suddenly, the level of emotion detected by the software doubled to six percent.

> One particular emotion was responsible for the jump: “The big change in percentage came from ‘contempt,’” Macbeth said.

Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/arts-and-entertainment/w...

Re: Juggalos figured out how to beat facial recognition

#96
post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a tough thing to defend on legal grounds because you have to explain how mask laws don't violate the first amendment. There could be some justification that would hold up, but as far as I know the issue hasn't gone before the Supreme Court.

You'd have to explain how they do . It's not prima facie(ha!) obvious that a face mask is "speech"

Realistically, I think your right to free expression is threatened by the way you can be targeted for harassment or fired if you exercise it, and the mask is one simple remedy. Basically it makes sense for the same reason the anonymous ballot does. No less plausible than the idea that your freedom of speech is abridged if you can't donate millions of dollars to a political campaign.

Re: Juggalos figured out how to beat facial recognition

#97

No they didn't. "Juggalo face makeup is better at throwing off facial recognition software than intentional methods." There's your headline. God I'm so tired of intentionally-misleading headlines. Clickbait nonsense.

I agree with you. The Juggalos painted their faces but someone else discovered its effectiveness in fighting facial recognition.

FTA:

> According to Twitter user @tahkion, a computer science blogger for WonderHowTo, Juggalo makeup outmatches the machine learning algorithms that govern facial recognition technology.

Re: Juggalos figured out how to beat facial recognition

#98

Face recognition technology is proving to be fairly (if not wildly) inaccurate when in the field: https://pureai.com/articles/2018/05/15/facial-recognition-st... It looks like the base photos are big issue, but of course there are other factors.

"Accurate" isn't a terribly meaningful description. We really need to talk about sensitivity and specificity. If you're looking for a very low-probability event (a terror suspect in a random crowd) then your facial recognition algorithm needs to have phenomenally high specificity to be useful, otherwise you'll be glutted with false positives.

This isn't a problem isolated to facial recognition - many cancer screening tests are worse than useless, because the harm of unnecessary treatment due to false positives outweighs the benefits of early detection.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_rate_fallacy

Re: Juggalos figured out how to beat facial recognition

#99
post #44
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's actually a little amazing how many people are stumbling over themselves to point out how one possible interpretation of the title that implies some credit is due to this group that people have a generally poor opinion of couldn't possibly actually have done anything useful. This, people, is exactly what prejudice is.

OR, as was my point, the title as written suggests they were actively engaged in efforts to evade facial recognition, which is a completely different story. > This, people, is exactly what prejudice is. You're reaching.

> the title as written suggests

That is one interpretation (as I covered elsewhere in these comments, "figured out" is used often in to describe discoveries that were accidental in nature. Interestingly, rarely to people complain about the wording when it's a white guy from 50 years ago), and I the fact that people are both jumping to that conclusion here, are unwilling to consider their interpretation might be biased, and feel the need to comment on this when it's already been noted and in numbers that I think are substantially higher than would be seen if the group in question did not have the same reputation, speaks volumes.

Is it actually so implausible that one of more people that consider themselves Juggalos (or associate with the group) notices they weren't being tagged quite the same way when in makeup, and investigated? If it's not so implausible, why is everyone rushing to point out it's probably not what happened, and if it is implausible, why do you think that? I don't know whether the discoverer is a Juggalo. I suspect he's not, from his Twitter feed, but I can't be sure. I've had plenty of friends into similar tech scenes and also into some weird shit (and I've been to a Defcon in the early 2000's, which is all the extra evidence I need). The fact that so many people seem willing to assume he's not and present that as fact (how many people clicked through to the twitter feed it to see if the person was associated with Juggalos?) in a refutation of the title (which only makes sense with that assumption), suggests something to me.

Re: Juggalos figured out how to beat facial recognition

#100
post #19
post #5

The title of this article seems to imply that face painting was intentionally used among Juggalos to deter computerized facial recognition - of course we know that's not the case. Though to be fair, somewhere in the history of the practice, it may be argued that it was to throw off human face-recognition. This reminds me of a sort of creative look into futuristic fashion I saw a bit ago: https://cvdazzle.com Where th…

The world is filled with people that figured out things accidentally because they were doing something else. For example, the person who figured out how to heat food with microwaves (and created the first microwave) didn't set out to do so, he discovered that the chocolate bar in his front pocket melted while working on magnetrons. "Figuring something out" doesn't imply concerted research towards that goal, accidenta…

> For example, the person who figured out how to heat food with microwaves (and created the first microwave) didn't set out to do so, he discovered that the chocolate bar in his front pocket melted while working on magnetrons.

Willis Carrier was hired to build a machine to prevent the humidity in a room from making inks bleed at a magazine. He built the machine, which pulled moisture from the air by pulling them onto cooled coils, only to discover that the room dropped significantly in temperature.

He ran with it, and eventually founded the Carrier air conditioning company.

Post reply on HN