Friday, October 21, 2016

Speaking of the Surveillance Society


Anyone remember Gigapixel, the Vancouver company that developed the 4-billion pixel photograph that could capture an entire crowd with resolution suitable for face recognition software?

Look at the picture below, a Gigapixel rendering of a 420 pot protest on Vancouver's waterfront. Go to their web site and call it up. Use your mouse pointer, click and scroll in. See every face in the crowd up close and personal. This is our world today.



7 comments:

  1. Off topic but I thught you'd be interested in this.

    http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2016/10/graydon-carter-on-donald-trump

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  2. This is our world today because the notion of privacy has been usurped by private firms and big brother.

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  3. So incredible, and yet seemingly worthless.

    What's the stat? 95% of crimes are committed by people the victim knows? The other 5% are crimes of opportunity?

    It should be important to work on the techniques and technology needed to solve those rare 5% cases, but this direction seems directionless. "We're looking for a single needle in a haystack, so we need to increase the size of the haystack to find it?" I don't know about that. Just seems crazy.

    What is with this thinking, anyway? It's not thinking at all. It's just worthless in the end.

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  4. Oooops
    "See every face in the crowd "
    busted ;-)

    I read that the USA has facial recognition records for 117M people!!

    We all need to buy and wear Guy Fawkes masks, eh?

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  5. With advances in camera technology and computer processing the cops and others believe it will become possible to take one of these mega-images, such as the Vancouver Stanley Cup riot photo, and run it through facial recognition photos to see if they can identify suspects or other "persons of interest" in the crowd.

    The American report mentioned by NPoV is troubling. 117M Americans now have a facial recognition profile. That means the profile with a name attached. It's not a huge leap before that can be expanded into a system for tracking individuals that someone in the halls of power wants to keep an eye on whether that be some criminal or a political opponent.

    As for those Guy Fawkes masks remember that Harper made it a criminal offence with a 10-year maximum penalty to wear a mask at an "unlawful assembly" after the G20-protests that the cops turned into the G-20 riot.

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  6. It's pretty easy to track individuals right now. Most people voluntarily carry their personal tracking device in their pocket or purse and never think of it as a GPS tracking device.

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