Security lapse exposed a Chinese smart city surveillance system | Hacker News Reader

Security lapse exposed a Chinese smart city surveillance system

techcrunch.com

212 pointsgulbrandr31 comments

Recently China captured a fugitive when he was sending friends to board a plane, 4 images with 98% similarity captured by the airport's cameras.

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/3007827/chin...

Curious that they have a column "attractive" in the person's features which seems to correlate with age ...

Curious about the other variables affecting it. Perhaps facial feature ratios compared to some gold standard?

Could well be a simple symmetry measure.

It is probably just trained on labeled data.

The in... in me: good jaw not weak chin, great forehead size, eyecolor with eyebrows, and overall Cha... Good face structure with low body fat 12%-13%

They're likely using a commercial facial recognition system which includes that feature for demos at trade shows. People love getting external validation, which also explains why the scores are all greater than 70.

Edit: E.g. this article mentions a system being demoed with that feature: https://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2018/04/03/598012923/...

Numbers don’t really say much unless you pin them to what they’re measuring: they might not be calibrated against a percentile. For example, on a linear scale with 0 being “horrendous” and 100 being “insanely attractive”, I’d rate most of the people I know much closer to 70 than a 50: the average person could stand to look a lot worse.

>Numbers don’t really say much unless you pin them to what they’re measuring

That's why it has the label "attractive"

Sigh, there's always one. The point is that's not a sufficiently clear definition of what's being measured. Someone I find attractive you might find unattractive, because it's a subjective attribute, so 'attractiveness' isn't an unambiguous description of what the algorithm is actually measuring.

If it’s a feature for making people who try your system at a trade show feel good about themselves as they said, it works best if it’s not measuring anything at all.

have you read the thread you're participating in?

I digress, surely naming is really hard. there's a sweet spot to hit short and sufficiently explanative. Perhaps this didn't hit it for you, but it probably did for the target audience, and if it didn't, they could call support for the product they paid for.

> Elasticsearch database

Considering that ES db aren't secured by default, it's not surprising that someone downloaded the data

Surely this is one of those technological advances where on reviewing the 'should we' it becomes clear the negatives far outweigh the positives and it is stopped... Surely.

Reminds me of a radio interview I heard this morning from a mining CEO awaiting environmental sign-off for a new mine: equipment and resources ready to get going with a couple of days notice. Not even a matter of if, but when.

from the article: “The security researcher passed details of the database to TechCrunch in an effort to get the data secured”

How is the data more secured by sending it to a news agency? Can someone explain? IMHO it’s the exact opposite, data is getting more eyeballs now, right?

Schneier is of the opinion that the threat of full disclosure is what makes 'responsible' disclosure work, if i recall correctly

https://www.schneier.com/essays/archives/2007/01/schneier_fu...

Now, obviously, this cycle hasn't been gone through in the PRC

Secure(d) has two meanings, in this case it has the meaning "obtained".

See #10 at https://www.dictionary.com/browse/secure.

> The system also uses its facial recognition systems to detect ethnicities and labels them — such as “汉族” for Han Chinese, the main ethnic group of China — and also “维族” — or Uyghur Muslims, an ethnic minority under persecution by Beijing.

I'm getting some strong ww2 death camp vibes from this...

On the bright side, at least they make sure their technology works for minorities as well. Perhaps the egalitarian ideas of the West are finally starting to take hold there.

This is just so sad. 1984 is not supposed to be a manual.

China has a very different view of personal liberty.

I read an interview with a former KGB officer who said that, while the book was formally banned in the soviet union, it was circulated among national security types as a useful fund of ideas.

Do you have a link for the interview?

This was maybe a decade or so after the fall of the USSR, in one of those old fashioned paper magazine things.

Neither the Snowden leaks. In many countries, the became the blueprint for new security laws …

Seeing the phrase "smart city" was the trigger for me, the stink of Newspeak and Doublethink is unmistakable. Shame on Eurasia, I mean, Eastasia..

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