Re: Ridge Wants Fingerprints in Passports
On 2005-01-13T17:46:39-0800, Bill Stewart wrote: He's smearing his sticky fingerprints all over everything else, and now he wants them in our passports? Oughtta learn to keep his hands to himself. Fine with me if the first person to get a new biometric passport gets Ridge's fingers as part of the deal -- to verify for the world that the prints are valid. -- War is the father and king of all, and some he shows as gods, others as men; some he makes slaves, others free. -Heraclitus 53
Re: Searching with Images instead of Words
hi, They had been researching on this line in Indian Institue of Science, Bangalore. I think image searching has fundamental limits. For successfully matching two images, there should be a subset of information in both that totally match or match with a high probability. Expecting a front view of an image to match with a side view of the same image is impossible. They are both disjoint sets of information. If all the images are frontal images, we can match them with a hight probability, otherwise I doubt this technology has a future. Sarad. --- Eugen Leitl [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Link: http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/01/13/184226 Posted by: CmdrTaco, on 2005-01-13 20:29:00 from the blessing-for-those-who-can't-spell dept. [1]johnsee writes A computer vision researcher by the name of Hartmut Neven is [2]developing ingenious new technology that allows the searching of a database by submitting an image, for example, off a mobile phone camera. Imagine taking a photo of a street corner to find out where you are, or the photo of a city building to see its history IFRAME: [3]pos6 References 1. http://www.sandstorming.com/ 2. http://www.thefeature.com/article?articleid=101341ref=5147543 3. http://ads.osdn.com/?ad_id=2936alloc_id=13732site_id=1request_id=9329739 - End forwarded message - -- Eugen* Leitl a href=http://leitl.org;leitl/a __ ICBM: 48.07078, 11.61144 http://www.leitl.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE http://moleculardevices.org http://nanomachines.net ATTACHMENT part 2 application/pgp-signature __ Do you Yahoo!? The all-new My Yahoo! - Get yours free! http://my.yahoo.com
Re: [IP] No expectation of privacy in public? In a pig's eye! (fwd from dave@farber.net)
At 12:30 PM 1/12/2005, Roy M. Silvernail wrote: Just out of curiosity, if the man doesn't need a warrent to place a surveilance device, shouldn't it be within your rights to tamper with, disable or remove such a device if you discover one? Do you mean that if you discover an unsolicited gift of consumer electronics attached to your car, do you have the right to play with it just as you would if it came in the mail? I would certainly expect so... On the other hand, if it appears to be a lost item, you could be a good public citizen and take it to the police to see if anybody claims it... GPS tracker is an ambiguous description, though. GPS devices detect where they are, but what next? A device could record where it was, for later collection, or it could transmit its position to a listener. Tampering with existing recordings might have legal implications, but putting a transmitter-based system in your nearest garbage can or accidentally leaving it in a taxi or mailing it to Medellin all seem like reasonable activities. Bill Stewart [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Brin needs killing, XIIV
At 10:05 AM +0100 1/14/05, Eugen Leitl wrote: Brin needs killing, XIIV er, Eleventy Four? Fifteen the hard way? ;-) Cheers, RAH Who was backhanded once for calling Brin a statist in public... -- - R. A. Hettinga mailto: [EMAIL PROTECTED] The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation http://www.ibuc.com/ 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA ... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience. -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'
RE: [IP] No expectation of privacy in public? In a pig's eye! (fwd from dave@farber.net)
Bill Stewart wrote: At 12:30 PM 1/12/2005, Roy M. Silvernail wrote: Just out of curiosity, if the man doesn't need a warrent to place a surveilance device, shouldn't it be within your rights to tamper with, disable or remove such a device if you discover one? Do you mean that if you discover an unsolicited gift of consumer electronics attached to your car, do you have the right to play with it just as you would if it came in the mail? I would certainly expect so... Attaching it to another car would seem a suitable prank - someone who travels a lot, on an irregular path - a pizza delivery guy, or a real estate agent. Or perhaps a long distance truck. It would take some chutzpa, but tacking onto a cops car would send a message Peter Trei
Re: Florida man faces bioweapon charge
On 2005-01-13T17:48:13-0800, Eric Cordian wrote: RAH pastes: She said that on at least one occasion he showed her something he had purchased via the Internet and expressed concern that if their cat inadvertently ate enough of it, the cat would die, according to the affidavit. Obviously this news story is the grand prize winner in an innuendo contest. The article also neglects to mention FEDERAL AGENCIES' pet KILL ratio. I'm not sure about cats specifically, but dog killing is quite popular. The FBI is still investigating who sent two letters that contained ricin in 2003 through the U.S. postal system. Those letters contained threats and complaints about labor regulations in the trucking industry. Evidently the kid was in possession of Envelopes of Mass Destruction as well as castor beans, guns, and books. Envelopes! Everyone knows that civilized people communicate via instant/text message or email (insofar as they are distinct). We have no need for these ENVELOPES, which as well as being used to send toxins to KILL LAW-ABIDING TAXPAYERS also cause untold annual economic damage from paper-cut-caused hospital visits. In 1978, Georgi Markov, a Bulgarian writer and journalist in London, died after a man attacked him with an umbrella that had been rigged to inject a ricin pellet under his skin. And WTF does this have to do with the guy with the castor beans? I spot the beginnings of yet another war. Please excuse me while I go bury my umbrellas. PATRIOTS use hooded raincoats. We have no NEED for barbaric and dangerous implements like UMBRELLAS. Looks like Ricin Theatre has joined Anthrax Theatre in the armory of Weapons of Mass Deception. You forgot the guns! The GUNS! Those terrible and bloody implements of death ARE totally unnecessary! Never mind that they're PERFECTLY LEGAL and they don't make ricin (excuse me, castor beans) any more deadly. He still had guns! -- War is the father and king of all, and some he shows as gods, others as men; some he makes slaves, others free. -Heraclitus 53
Re: Brin needs killing, XIIV
To leave the attributions and headers, or not? --- Eugen Leitl [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: - Forwarded message from David Farber [EMAIL PROTECTED] - From: David Farber [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: Fri, 14 Jan 2005 04:02:03 -0500 To: Ip ip@v2.listbox.com Subject: [IP] more on No expectation of privacy in public? In a pig's eye! Thank you and best wishes - Josh Josh, thanks for sharing these remarks about privacy. Alas, these folks are falling for the usual trap that has snared so many well-meaning people for the last decade. They are right to worry about creeping Big Brotherism... and vigorously defending the wrong stretch of wall. I was naive once too. What weird reflex is it, that makes bright people fall for the trap of seeing SECRECY as a friend of freedom? As we all know, 'freedom' is a value-neutral term when used on it's own, without a suitable modifier, as in the above. (Oh, when it's YOUR secrecy you call it privacy.) To I imagine that most people, in the fuzzy space of colloquial conceptions, associate 'privacy' with the information security of their own lives, and associate `secrecy' with the concealment of corporate or government information, processes, and assets. But we may use the terms interchangeably if it makes you happy. To wit: I have secrets which I would like to keep from malicious criminals and other government workers. rail against others seeing, without suggesting any conceivable way that (1) the technologies could be stopped or (2) how it would help matters to stop govt surveillance even if we could. As I've emphasized in The Transparent Society, the thing that has kept us free and safe has been to emphasize MORE information flows. To ENHANCE how much average people know. Ok, that is a nice idea but... http://www.futurist.com/portal/future_trends/david_brin_empowerment.htm [skimmed] Given the information-centric disparity that already exists between individuals of varying allegiance or association, how is it possible to assure that most everyone is brought up to speed on the current state- of-the-art in the numerous fields of study and technology that relate to intelligence and counter- intelligence in such a way as to make the playing field level for all? As it stands, with the mutability inherent in the acquisition and interpretation of signals and surveillance data, it is too easy for large masses of people to acquire widespread mis- conceptions about the veracity of the information at their disposal. Put another way: hypothetical well-organised dis-information sophisticates could in theory arrange to give the masses a false sense of security and inclusiveness within a subtly fraudulent framework of public-mediated surveillance and information sharing. Perhaps this could be arranged by building backdoors and covert access points in the public surveillance network which would allow the 'cabal' to diguise their activities while also permitting them to arbitrarily muck about with the publically availble data, subject only to constraints imposed by the actual state-of-the-art -- enhanced on a practical level by virtue of limiting in some ways the technology available to the masses. If that makes sense to you, then it should become obvious that certifying the `public surveillance network' free compromise by privilaged elites of any kind becomes a very difficult task. And as we all know, groups like the NSA and their foreign counterparts already enjoy an indeterminate lead on the public in areas of interest and relation to information technology and surveillance. So, how do we as average citizens mitigate the threat of being lulled into a false sense of security by the flashy newness of some kind of hypothetical BrinWorld public surveillance and sharing network? Clearly this is a large problem, and I certainly don't have the answer. But, I think the idea of BrinWorld is the correct approach, and obviously some very intelligent people think so too. I would refer to the paper entitiled The Weapon of Openness, by Arthur Kantrowitz, which approaches this issue from a more general perspective. Most likely, there is a solution that we all can live with. Avoiding the risks will, however, be rather difficult. Personally, I wouldn't mind too much living in a total surveillance world if I were assured that everyone else was subject to the same level of scrutiny. This is primarily because I don't engage in activities which are particularly shameful or which are dependent upon the immoral or wanton explotation and subversion of another person's right to pursue interests that do not harm others. I am fully aware that a great many people do engage in such activities, some of which are cultural rites or religious rituals that are validated by the tacit legitimacy given to them by a tyrranical majority. And then there are people who live off the avails of crime because they find that
Re: Searching with Images instead of Words
Expecting a front view of an image to match with a side view of the same image is impossible. They are both disjoint sets of information. If all the images are frontal images, we can match them with a hight probability, otherwise I doubt this technology has a future. You are applying pure logic to a very complex subject. I'd bet this is already routinely done by TLAs and whatnot, at least as a pre-screen before human photograph inspectors. The most obvious hole in your statement is with respect to 2D Spatial FFTs of the image...you can probably greatly increase your match probability via certain masking criteria applied to the 2D FFT. And from there there's lots of stuff that can be done with colors and other indirect stuff such as (perhaps) camera signatures in the photo (eg, If there's text that says Hamamatsu Synchroscan Streak Camera then don't bother doing the FFT--it ain't a picture of your dog). Look...a human being can recognize the side image of a person a lot of the time. There should be no reason this intelligence can't be encoded somehow. -TD
Police Worried About New Vest-Penetrating Gun
http://www.wnbc.com/print/4075959/detail.html wnbc.com Police Worried About New Vest-Penetrating Gun NEW YORK -- There is a nationwide alert to members of law enforcement regarding a new kind of handgun which can render a bulletproof vest useless, as first reported by NewsChannel 4's Scott Weinberger. New Gun Frightens Police Scott Weinberger The most shocking fact may be that the gun -- known as the five-seven -- is being marketed to the public, and it's completely legal It was a very difficult decision for members of law enforcement to go public about the new weapon, but officers fear that once word of the weapon begins to circulate in the wrong circles, they will be in great danger. They agreed to speak to NewsChannel 4, hoping the public will understand what they call the most devastating weapon they face. The weapon is light, easily concealable and can fire 20 rounds in seconds without reloading. This would be devastating, said Chief Robert Troy, of the Jersey City Police Department. Troy said he learned about the high-powered pistol from a bulletin issued by Florida Department of Law Enforcement to all of its agents. Troy believes faced with this new weapon, his officers would be at a total disadvantage. Dealing with a gun like this -- it's a whole new ballgame, Troy said. Troy is not the only member of law enforcement to voice concern. As NewsChannel 4 began to contact several more departments in the Tri-State Area, it turned out that officers in Trumball, Conn., had seized one of these handguns during a recent arrest. Certainly, handguns are a danger to any police officer on any day, but one that specifically advertised by the company to be capable of defeating a ballistic vest is certainly the utmost concern to us, said Glenn Byrnes, of the Trumball Police Department. However, the company said that bullet is not sold to the public. Instead, gun buyers can purchase what the company calls a training or civilian bullet -- the type loaded into the gun confiscated by Trumball police. At a distance of 21 feet, Trumball police Sgt. Lenny Scinto fired the five-seven with the ammo sold legally to the public into a standard police vest. All three penetrated the vest. The bullets even went through the back panel of the vest, penetrating both layers. In a similar test, an officer fired a .45-caliber round into the same vest. While the shot clearly knocked it down, it didn't penetrate the vest, and an officer would likely have survived the assault. The velocity of this round makes it a more penetrating round -- that's what had me concerned, Scinto said. FN Herstal told NewsChannel 4 that they dispute the test, stating, Most law enforcement agencies don't have the ability to properly test a ballistic vest. When NewsChannel 4 asked how this could have happened, the spokesperson said: We [the company] are not experts in ballistic armor. Back in Trumball, Scinto said his officers would have to rethink how to protect the public and protect themselves. This is going to add a whole new dimension to training and tactics. With the penetration of these rounds, you're going to have to find something considerably heavier than we normally use for cover and concealment to stop this round, Scinto said. In Jersey City, Troy said he will appeal to lawmakers, hoping they will step in before any of his officers are confronted with the five-seven. This does not belong in the civilian population. The only thing that comes out of this is profits for the company and dead police officers, Troy said. I would like the federal government to ban these rounds to the civilian public. -- - R. A. Hettinga mailto: [EMAIL PROTECTED] The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation http://www.ibuc.com/ 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA ... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience. -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'
Re: Police Worried About New Vest-Penetrating Gun
At 01:54 PM 1/14/2005, R.A. Hettinga wrote: http://www.wnbc.com/print/4075959/detail.html NEW YORK -- There is a nationwide alert to members of law enforcement regarding a new kind of handgun which can render a bulletproof vest useless, as first reported by NewsChannel 4's Scott Weinberger. ... The weapon is light, easily concealable and can fire 20 rounds in seconds without reloading. A couple of questions to the gunpunks out there... I've heard that rifles easily penetrate bullet-proof vests, and that vests are really only useful against average-to-small handguns and against shotguns. Is this accurate? Any idea how much you can saw off a rifle and still have it penetrate typical cop vests? (And I assume the 20 rounds in seconds is just a scary way to say it has a big magazine and you have to pull the trigger 20 times.) Also, the police expressed worry that criminals might hear about these guns and then the cops would be in big trouble. Sounds silly to me - while some criminals might buy a cop-killer handgun for bragging rights, random criminals presumably only buy weapons useful for the scenarios they imagine being in, which is Saturday Night Specials for most applications, or whatever currently fashionable Mac10/Uzi/etc. for druglord armies that expect to be shooting at each other, or rifles for distance work and dual-use pickup-truck decoration. Do many criminals expect to initiate shootouts with vest-wearing cops in scenarios where a rifle isn't practical? Do most cops wear bullet-proof vests regularly other than in holdup/hostage SWAT situations, where the criminal might have rifles anyway, and where a regular pistol is just fine for shooting hostages? Or is this mainly a problem for the cases when cops want to stage military-style pre-dawn assaults on people's houses, where they expect that the targets usually only have pistols handy near the bed and don't have time for rifles? Seems like scare-mongering to me, not a practical concern. Bill Stewart [EMAIL PROTECTED]
