A Wanted Man in China Has Been Caught Because of Facial Recognition Software (fastcompany.com) 146
An anonymous reader writes: The man was reportedly caught after facial recognition software running on cameras at a concert identified him, reports AbacusNews. That's despite there being over 50,000 people attending the concert, which took place in Nanchang, China. Law enforcement in the country has increasingly been turning to facial recognition software to surveil the public for persons of interest.
Are they sure that it's him? (Score:4, Funny)
I thought all Asians looked alike
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Re:Are they sure that it's him? (Score:4, Interesting)
I thought all Asians looked alike
Asians think caucasians all look alike. Your brain adjusts to the variation in the types of faces you see on a daily basis. If all your family, friends, co-workers, and acquaintances are white, you will have difficulty discriminating between Asian faces. And vice versa.
I live in San Jose, California, which is about 35% Asian, so when I go to Asia I have no problem recognizing individual faces.
Re: Are they sure that it's him? (Score:2)
Asians think caucasians all look alike. Your brain adjusts to the variation in the types of faces you see on a daily basis.
There is far less genetic variation among East Asians than there is among Caucasians.
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There is far less genetic variation among East Asians than there is among Caucasians.
And how exactly do you come to that absurd idea?
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There is far less genetic variation among East Asians than there is among Caucasians.
And how exactly do you come to that absurd idea?
I can't find a clear citation that East Asians have less diversity than Caucasians, but they certainly have less diversity than Africans.
Humanity's origin appears to be in the Rift Valley region of East Africa. There have been many migrations out of that region, each going through a genetic chokepoint that reduced diversity. The branches, from most genetic divergence from the core region (presumably because of an earlier departure) to the least:
1. San people of the Kalahari.
2. Pygmies of the Congo rainf
Re: Are they sure that it's him? (Score:3)
Re: Are they sure that it's him? (Score:2)
Re: Are they sure that it's him? (Score:2)
Re: Are they sure that it's him? (Score:2)
And if you'd done any reading on the subject, you'd know that those with the least genetic variation of all are the Japanese, due to having little contact with the outside world for thousands of years.
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Well,
the ideas who moved from where to where and what was settled when change every few years.
E.g. that japan is to isolated can not really be hold up. They traveled to China and Korea since millennia.
And they have a strong intermixing with the settler waves or invaders that reached them.
That is probably true for every area of the world.
Really isolated would probably be people like the Inuit, some in the high regions of the Himalaya or Aleuts etc.
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It's well known that Europeans have less genetic variation than Africans, possibly due to a population bottleneck during the ice age, so I don't see why the suggestion is absurd.
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It is actually not well known.
And on the first glance, I have no idea on what base that would be possible. How would you even measure it?
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Asians think caucasians all look alike.
Quite some years ago, I saw Chinese-American actress Rosalind Chao on The Tonight Show. She shared an anecdote about a family reunion she attended back in China. She said she kept getting introduced to relatives she couldn't tell apart - she thought everyone there looked alike!
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Reality is 'they all look alike', is inherently racist and prejudiced, full stop. They all look alike because you pay less attention to their appearance, they are not individuals, they are one of them, the them bit is what ever can be used to make them stand out to isolate them, to give you a competitive advantage over all of them. Guilt also plays a part, you no longer recognising them as individuals, just a lesser group, you don't want to recognise them individually and associate your poor behaviour with
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Reality is 'they all look alike', is inherently racist and prejudiced, full stop.
Bullcrap. Reality is that people have a hard time discriminating between faces when none of them are similar to what they are used to. That isn't "prejudice", it is just a fact.
I grew up in Tennessee, and first went to Asia as an 18 year old Marine. I had met very few Asians while growing up, and I had difficulty telling them apart despite trying hard to do so. When I left a year later, I could recognize Asian individuals easily, and I was on a first name basis with several dozen locals (in Henoko, Okin
Re:In soviet Russia (Score:5, Insightful)
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Indeed. Amazon's "Rekognition" is a much-hyped service on AWS, which one would presume is the basis of the people recognition in their Amazon Prime Photos app. It's so bad that it thinks almost any random black woman is my wife, while at times misidentifying photos that actually are her. For some unfathomable reason, the app does not let the user correct any misidentifications.
Perhaps the Chinese government does the same. If the system says you're the wanted person, you are.
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"I do wonder how many false alerts they got along the way."
False alerts? Everybody the machine recognizes goes to prison.
There _are_ no false alerts.
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Oh, that's not true of all Americans; we have the same intelligence distribution as anyone else. Stupidity is an emergent behavior.
Impossiblu! (Score:3)
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They told us time and again that the cameras they put everywhere were too high up to be used for facial recognition.
The Chinese government told you that?
Did they send you a certified letter, or just drop by your house to announce it over tea?
Since when did the Chinese government care about your privacy concerns, one way or the other, even enough to lie about their intentions?
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I thought the Chinese's explicitly said they were using face tracking on a massive scale. Perhaps you are thinking about other countries that lie about what they do with surveillance cameras.
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They told us time and again that the cameras they put everywhere were too high up to be used for facial recognition.
Who said that and when? They just had a show on one of the magazine shows on TV about the latest gen cameras installed at our city football stadium. They are mounted on the flood-light poles and have enough resolution to do facial recognition of every person on the opposite grandstand (ie 20000+ people). They showed the demo on TV and said they're already using it to remove known hooligans who already have bans from previous offences. The surveillance state is already here.
And? (Score:4, Funny)
Are things so bad that 'works as advertised' is worthy of a news story?
If only those 50,000 people attending the concert would have to go through some kind of a gate system by which they would trickle through making it easy to identify then a handful at a time. I'm sure someone much smarter than me will figure out such a system, they might even realize they could use it to see if people should be allowed in at the same time. Maybe give out tokens or tickets or something. Or go all web 2.0 and use one of them new-fangled "app" things.
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Big numbers of people in a database was never a problem for facial recognition.
Searching a big database for a few sets of numbers is something computer designers got good at over time.
The only thing that held facial recognition back for a while was camera quality and images from the side of a face, looking up and down.
Once a nation invests in a good network camera system it can track all faces. The US uses such networks to look at all dri
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It's worthy of a news story because the environment that this facial recognition did its job in and "worked as advertised" is a massively challenging problem for this type of system. It's also worthy of a news story because it is a harbinger of more to come like this, and not just in China. As this tech gets better, agencies will be able to track everyone's movements in public 24/7 and store all of it for unknown purposes. Today it's criminals, tomorrow it's people on no fly lists (rightly or wrongly) ge
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Difficult problem (Score:2)
Because faces do not contain serial numbers. Instead, many different features that change subtly over time, and look different from different angles and lighting. Matching all those fuzzy stats to a large database is not at all trivial. For every face there will be thousands that look almost identical in a database containing millions.
And I suspect not really possible. I suspect that they used other things like cell phones to reduce the set of possibilities, and then use the facial recognition as the
decent riot control too (Score:3)
riots are in part encouraged by the perceived lack of consequences to any individual in the riot due to there being too many people.
camera shutter clicks...
Face Rec scrubs image after image... wide angel shots...
police marquee select clouds of names for people standing in the "wrong" area... names get court summons sent to their registered addresses.
To this people say "masks"... sure masks... I'm sure the police have no solution for that idea.
Given that the bike lock guy was found, I'd take that very lightly.
We need more peaceful protests... sit ins... something you really can't get in trouble for... the violent aggressive stuff is toxic. And in the end, society at large won't be on your side when the hammer comes down.
Re:decent riot control too (Score:5, Informative)
why did I reference sit ins if I am ignoring agent provocateurs?
You do realize the entire point of a sit in is to prevent that sort of thing?
If everyone is sitting down, how do you "agent provocateur"?
Just schedule a protest, have everyone show up with water and food for themselves. And then sit down. Everyone sits down.
The cops will generally leave you alone because you pose no particular threat and the optics of a police officer messing with peaceful people sitting down is terrible.
Disruptors can't blend into the crowd or do violent stuff and then run away because the actual protestors are all sitting down. There is no crowd to blend into.
This is not hard. But lets not pretend that these protests are only turning violent by accident. People are showing up to them with weapons, body armor, etc. They want a fight.
Organize and then sit down. You'll have no trouble. Its really really easy. And the groups that don't do that and have problems are either too stupid to do something so easy or lying about wanting no violence. Because its that easy. Sit down.
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One, "crowd" doesn't imply standing up. Two, what's to stop cops or their lackeys posing as protesters and start doing shit?
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So in your scenario, the majority of real protesters are sitting down in a peaceful group...
And then police disguised as protestors stand up and start attacking people or throwing bricks... whilst again the majority are sitting down not doing anything?
Exactly how does that work out against the protesters?
You can't attack the people sitting down because the ACTOR is running around doing whatever.
You can ask them to leave or disperse... which you should do when instructed most of the time unless you have a pe
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I saw it in wallstreet... which was where it was... everywhere else was a metoo movement.
and in any case, what was your end game? What would have accomplishing something have meant?
Define your objective. Because what I saw at occupy was a bunch of confused people all asking for either contradictory or impossible things.
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implying I'm a Russian pawn or something.
Consider the irony of your statement.
You're accusing another citizen of your very same republic of being an agent of a repressive power as an ad hominem method of silencing your percieved opposition.
Such respect for free speech.
Such regard for the free market place of ideas.
Why don't you follow that up with a straw man or something equally retarded.
We're all members of the same big ass country, bub. You can't have big without having diverse. You like diversity don't
Re:decent riot control too (Score:5, Interesting)
Sure... Burn it down.
Anarchy is self defeating.
Anarchy leads to tyranny because in the anarchy you create an opportunity for an absolute ruler. We can see this pretty much any time anarchy has been tried. It leads almost immediately to a tyrant. It doesn't matter which ideology you follow... communist fascist whatever... you create anarchy and you're going to get a tyrant.
If you want a tyrant, create anarchy.
Once you understand that it isn't as easy as saying "its just the system, man"... you understand that the path to liberty requires maintaining these institutions and guarding them from corruption.
Absent the institutions we have tyranny.
Absent moderation of the institutions we have tyranny.
You have to moderate them. Its not easy. Its really hard. And while you are doing it many players will whisper in your ear to pervert them to service one end or another. But those roads all lead to tyranny.
I am increasingly of the opinion that there are a lot of people that deserve to live in oppression and possibly starve enough to eat their own cats.
Why? Because there isn't enough respect for the consequences of fucking up the system.
People want things for free. People want to eat the golden goose. People want the rules to only apply when they apply to someone else. People want democracy that only does what their dear leader says.
These contradictions are death. Literal... death. And I'm tired of arguing with people about it. I think they should get the fruits of their ambitions. A whole lot of people should just be allowed to kill themselves with their own bad ideas.
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Sure and so does anarchy.
What we know is that some systems of government do not have tyranny.
That is the only condition without tyranny.
Anarchy creates chaos which creates a tyrant.
A sloppily run institution leads to corrupt individuals having absolute power which is tyranny.
So... the only way out is not to run your institutions sloppily.
Are things inclined to be fucked up on occasion and thus lead to negative consequences? Sure.
All machines break eventually. But that doesn't mean there was never a reason t
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In this case it does, captain autismo.
Shall we go through examples? Nazi Germany, Facist Spain.. a fucking million examples in South America. Mao's China... Chavez's Venezuela has finally arrived at the prophesied end game.
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When has it not lead to tyranny?
As to republics being forged in anarchy, give an example.
I think I can clear up the misunderstanding if we go through the history of this shit show.
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US revolution naturally doesn't count because it was never anarchy.
There were colonial governments which were never deposed, rather their association with the crown of England was cut. What is more, they immediately associated the given colonial governments with each other... the nature of which was formalized with the drafting of the US Constitution.
What you see there is not anarchy but rather the exact opposite.
Re: decent riot control too (Score:2)
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If it correlates every time then in practice there's no difference. this is not to concede causation. Merely to point out that it doesn't matter if it is caused or correlated with if the correlation is 1:1.
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Sure, Martin Luther King's peaceful sitins were of no value. It was just the violence. /s
The ends are the means, brah. If your means are violence then your ends will be violence. You can see the scars left on communities by people that didn't care what the consequences would be for those families and businesses.
Your solution is "hellfire"... the fire that burns and leaves nothing but ash. You'll build nothing with that. You'll leave nothing but ruin in your wake which those that live in the ashes will have
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occupy was asking for what?
What would have been a win condition for occupy?
What is more, the peacefulness of occupy is questionable.
First they were camping there and making a mess. You don't need to do that. MLK Jr didn't do that. They had peaceful orderly civilized clean sit ins and then went home every day to their homes.
Second, there was quite a lot of harassment in those camps and near them.
Third, they attracted a lot of gross hippies that caused crime to jump up in the area. Drugs, prostitution, rape,
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So... strawmen? I didn't say be apolitical.
If you're going to be degenerate then the discussion is over.
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That's already done pretty much everywhere in civilized world with reasonable amount of wealth. It's called "smartphones".
Wanted for what? (Score:2)
Wanted for murder or a parking ticket?
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Yes.
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For that, you not only have to RTFA, but then click on the links in TFA to where they get their info from to finally get an answer:
He had been on a police watchlist for “economic crimes” -- a broad term that can include anything from tax evasion to the theft of public property.
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+1
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It doesn't matter. As a law abiding citizen if I break any laws it's by accident. If I knew with a 100% certainty that I'd get a speeding ticket if I exceeded the speed limit then I'd aim to go 10 under the speed limit instead of 10 over.
I know it sounds draconian but right now there's a gamble with all crimes; there's a chance you'll get away with it. The chance of getting away with speeding is much higher then that of robbing a bank or murder. If facial recognition makes it much harder to get away with an
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Plus it's not uncommon for two people to look alike
No problem!
Just arrest and torture both of them. Just to be safe.
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Impressive (Score:1)
Very impressive that the software is able to distinguish one Chinese person from another. This ability has eluded humans for eons.
World first for mass surveilance? (Score:3)
Setting aside the facial recognition component of the story, is the the first time mass surveillance has actually resulted in the apprehension of a fugitive? England is covered with cameras but you never hear stories about them doing any good.
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England is covered with cameras but you never hear stories about them doing any good.
Are you sure? Even for those terrorists planting bombs?
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England is covered with cameras but you never hear stories about them doing any good.
That's what you call observer bias. There are plenty of stories of them doing good. Hell nearly 10 years ago they were arresting and charging upwards of 2000 people a year based on CCTV footage alone.
Now whether you believe the stories or not is a different question. And that may be called conspiracy theories.
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Setting aside the facial recognition component of the story, is the the first time mass surveillance has actually resulted in the apprehension of a fugitive? England is covered with cameras but you never hear stories about them doing any good.
"Surveillance" catches criminals all the time. However a lot of surveillance is from private cameras, I.E. the murder of Jill Meagher in Australia was caught due to a CCTV camera pointing our of a shop window. The item of note here is the use of face recognition software.
The end of petty crime (Score:2)
What's funny is that even as crime rates plummet the "Tough on Crime" politics don't go away. Not sure about China, but a recent poll showed Crime was the #2 concern for Americans, only topped by health care.
Re: The end of petty crime (Score:2)
petty crime is more or less going to become impossible
And... I predict the opposite effect.
How about the Unwanted? (Score:2)
I'm more concerned when unwanted men get caught.
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That's okay. We can change their names to those of the accused, and presto!
Do we know it was really facial recognition? (Score:1)
Nice. (Score:2)
Joseph Goebbels is dancing in his grave. But who am I to complain. After all, just like everyone else I'm carrying a Televisor around with me. The upgraded version.
how many? (Score:2)
propoganda (Score:2)
we'll be hearing a lot of 'good' news from these facial recognition camera's in china in the next few months.
just to prove how good they are making the world a safer, nicer place to live in.
don't expect them to tell you what other privacy invading things they are doing with it.
Expected this claim even if untrue ... (Score:2)
Let's say the system didn't work ie. doesn't recognize faces in _real_ time.
Would they admit that?
Nope. Fake it with an actor. Put the fear of god (or cameras) in to people.
And in future when someone gets caught, comb the video records for pictures of the person and claim they were caught _because_ of the video.
Ultimately the system might be useful for retroactive evidence just as those systems are now but instilling a belief that they are 'real time' is a good way to prevent crime in the first place.