Obsessed fan finds Japanese idol's home by zooming in on her eyes | Hacker News Reader

Obsessed fan finds Japanese idol's home by zooming in on her eyes

asiaone.com

211 pointssohkamyung161 comments

https://www3.nhk.or.jp/shutoken-news/20191008/1000037432.htm... appears to be the original source

including a much better quote about the tech relevance:

"Because the performance of smartphone cameras has improved and the image quality has become very fine, privacy information has leaked out in a completely unexpected manner. ... "Users need to be well aware that there is always a risk of privacy leaks, and new measures are required on the software side, such as the option of degrading image quality."

Friendly tip if you are uploading any photo made by you to some untrusted site (works on linux and macos):

      exiftool -all="" filename.jpg

Because oftentimes you don't need to look at the picture to figure out the location.

exiftool tool also has a GUI for Windows, It's not pretty to look at but works great

On windows you can go into the properties window, and there's an option to clear the metadata of the image.

You can also additionally configure your phone not to tag the geolocation on your photos.

Faking the geolocation might be more fun and frustrate any attacker :)

Why don't browsers do this? Firefox should implement this (warn about geolocation and suggest either remove it or fake it).

A browser extension could do this. (Maybe one already does?)

I'm guessing most of these sorts of photos are posted directly from a smartphone, though, these days. So fancy unix commands or browser extensions would help protect statistically zero people.

Apple, though, with privacy ostensibly being their thing, would be pretty on-brand to set up an iOS capability for getting to see the original image files, with all apps you don't explicitly authorize instead getting to see degraded-resolution images with the exif data scrubbed.

Android could do it, too, but it seems less likely to happen since all that extra information is valuable marketing and tracking signal.

Surely this should be a camera feature or image editing plugin (which Android already supports today).

The swipe against Android is absurd, since Google could easily slurp that information before letting you edit it (as the do with your browsing activity) to prevent others from accessing that information, if they wanted to (which they don't).

I don’t want that feature in my camera since the geo data is phenomenal for organizing and search. I want the metadata in my copy just not in the copy I upload.

I think it would be great if iOS stripped this out when you shared an image.

Edit: I had a vague memory of this being in iOS 13, so I looked for it and there’s an option to strip location data when you share an image now.

Where is that in settings?

It's not in settings, it's an option that appears when you try to share an image.

If I were to use a website and a browser were to manipulate the data without this being clearly announced, I'd be pissed beyond belief.

Besides, this also introduces a security vulnerability - image metadata parsers are complex and there are regularly bugs found in them.

That argument could be used to prove that Firefox should have no features, and it's rebutting something not stated in the parent comment.

There isn't a clear "right" answer to what metadata should be stored and displayed. And, increasingly, metadata doesn't even need to be explicit, e.g. with facial recognition.

So, generally, having software make decisions on its own about how to handle some aspect of metadata seems like a poor choice.

It's on the publishing side, so it seems like photo apps (Google Photos, Apple Photos) and publishing apps (WordPress) would be a better place to manage this?

I think he means warning users that a picture contains this information before uploading it somewhere.

Beware that this can strip colour profile information and lead to incorrect rendering of your image.

I'm not quite sure how to address that properly.

It should be possible to use exiftool to write any color profile tags you want to keep to a separate file, strip all metadata from the image, and then copy the color profile metadata you saved out earlier back to the image.

Dumb question: do Twitter, Facebook and Instagram remove location exif data?

They do, but that's not to say that they don't store the exif data for themselves.

They do, but you don't know at which stage and whether or not raw copies are kept. Most platforms will at least filter the egress.

Another English article that's a little better:

* https://www.tokyoreporter.com/crime/saitama-man-used-eye-ref...

Woah, first Japanese site I've seen that doesn't look like a casino. To be frank, I don't visit many Japanese sites, I thought all looked the same.

The article is pretty clean but the main page is probably a little closer to what you're expecting. Japanese sites do tend to have a certain sort of "busy"/boxy look to them.

Yeah. It's pretty easy for dedicated people to do. I recently watched a bunch of people track down that was spamming a board's home address from a picture of their hand that showed a small patch of front yard in less than a half hour. This was with no exif info. You should always be careful where you post pictures to and what's visible in them.

> Sato admitted to the attack after he was arrested on Sept 17 and revealed that he was a huge fan of Matsuoka.

I always find it weird when self-proclaimed "fans" harm the people they are supposedly fans of.

I imagine there's an element of solipsism to these sorts of situations. Perhaps you can only get so obsessed before the object of your obsession starts to become literally an object to you.

Marshall McLuhan remarked that photography turned the entire world into a brothel:

* http://www.sfu.ca/media-lab/426/readings/thephoto.htm

Also:

> The camera tends to turn people into things, and the photograph extends and multiplies the human image to the proportions of mass-produced merchandise. The movie stars and matinee idols are put into the public domain by photography. They become dreams that money can buy. They can be bought and thumbed more easily than public prostitutes.

Thanks for the link. Surprisingly readable even for a neophyte like me.

McLuhan's books were (AFAICT) written for the general public, and were not academic works. Worth at least see if your local library has:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Understanding_Media

The other side of this coin is that celebrity culture tends to literally be the selling of a person as an object.

The number of people who are incapable of understanding that the image portrayed of celebrities in the media is literally them selling you a manufactured image, and nothing to do with an actual human being, lifestyle, or genuinely held belief or personality I imagine must be staggeringly high.

Fan is an abbreviation for fanatic which is a much more appropriate label for this sort of behaviour. Having said that, I’d like to step back for a moment and look at our broader culture.

Few people talk about it but it’s actually extremely weird to have celebrities at all. It’s a cultural and economic phenomenon that works to hijack our tendency to form relationships and identify with people we find attractive. It takes a mechanism that’s supposed to help us bond with our family members and leverages it for profit. The fact that some people can’t handle this gets overlooked. All blame is placed on the individual, allowing the rest of us to absolve ourselves of guilt and responsibility.

The flaw is in the individual. The environment is exploitative, but wantonly acting to harm another person is an individual decision. The only defense could be medical.

Our civilization has evolved much faster than our minds and bodies, but the choice to harm others is still ours.

Let's not go into black and white thinking. Saying the onus is societal/cultural or the onus lies only on the individual are both wrong. Environmental/cultural factors will play on individual decision making - this doesn't absolve the individual but it also doesn't absolve any related societal/cultural forces at play.

Both angles can and should be explored when examining cases where individuals act out in harmful fashions.

And applying the same mentality to drugs results in the American approach of treating drug use as a moral failing instead of drug addiction as a health issue.

Also, let's not fully blame the addictive drugs because people seek them for recreation. Addiction is not instantaneous.

I support your point, drug addiction as a health issue, but the addicts, while deserving the help, are not all victims of the system.

eh, I used to think this too, but time spent studying anarchism (hey, its intellectually interesting) has left me with the conclusion that its a natural human tendency in any social system. Simply put: no matter the idea or society involved (even if the idea is anti-hierarchy, anti-status like anarchism), it is easier to remember the idea if there is a face you can put to the name. Put into practice, that means that most cultural, ideological, social or matters of importance will end up having at least one person associated with them. Those people, in turn, then become celebrities by virtue of the fact that lost of people then associate the idea or phenomenon with the person. Advertising and propaganda then catapult that into the phenomenon we have today of celebrities, but that's ultimately just making 100x more potent what would otherwise be an unavoidable (and I saw unavoidable because even anarchist communities can't get away from it) aspect of how humans interpret and remember things about the world.

Put another way, I think this is a similar side of the coin to the fact that most people tend to (consciously or not) put together lists of: "X knows about this better than me, and I trust X, and don't have time to devote to learning about this topic, therefore if I ever need to know more about this topic I can call X" for almost every aspect of our lives.

Note: I have no source here, this is just personally derived observation. A real study on this would be quite interesting. Though I'm sure when we discussed its results, we would do so by discussing the scientist's name and reputation.

Isn't it natural to ask for who is going to do whatever you just proposed be done?

"X knows about this better than me, and I trust X, and don't have time to devote to learning about this topic, therefore if I ever need to know more about this topic I can call X"

"We've got Ja Rule on the phone, let's see what Ja's thoughts are on this tragedy."

It's also a natural tendency to eat calorie dense, sugary foods. That doesn't make morbid obesity any less of a pathological and unnatural culural phenomeon.

and fanatic is akin to or directly derived from Latin, from fanum "temple", and may mean all kinds of things. Celebrated celebrity seems to mean something quite similar doesn't it?

Your criticism is meaningless, too. There are many attacks on family members.

I think you're on the right track but I'm betting it's not our symmetrical relationships with peers that are being hijacked, but rather our penchant for asymmetrical relationships with our superiors in a hierarchy. We and the chimps presumably both inherited this from our hypothetical common ancestor.

I'm going to talk about a study right now, but I can't even find it, so I have absolutely no rigor or data about this and it needs many grains of salt. Just pretend I'm holding a drink and talking to you at a party right now. "There was a study" where [species of monkey or ape] were basically encouraged to use money, i.e. they were trained to see a certain token as valuable. From this they began to trade it for food, and then for sex, and weirdly at some point, for the chance to gaze at photos of the alpha of the group. So they essentially ended up inventing trade, prostitution, and celebrity worship from first principles.

Remember when we laught at this when it was on CSI? Enhance!

Except it doesn't need to be "enhanved"; it's all already there xD

(But yes, I thought the same thing when I read the headline)

https://www.enhance.computer/ is a browser game where you get to live out your CSI dreams

Slightly related, but I once ran an imageboard for friends and set up a hook to output the EXIF geolocation of uploaded photos to a private IRC channel.

It was surprising to see how often something would show up! Even when uploading photos straight from a phone through the browser.

There's a lot of things that strip the info now before it goes to server. Photo apps themselves, image boards etc.

Far bigger leaker is MS Office or pdf metadata. Heck, they even catches that famous serial killer who took creepy pictures of himself in women underwear because eventually he started sending files, not regular letters, to police taunting them.

Edit: BTK was this sick man's nickname. Busted by having his church's computer metadata in files to police https://www.bizarrepedia.com/btk/

WARNING about the crime scene photos of the serial killers murders in that link. Would have preferred to have not seen them right before bed.

This just shows how poorly software that captures the images and adds geolocation without user knowing is made.

That's odd. When you scroll past the article the URL is rewritten to just https://www.asiaone.com. I wonder what would be the benefit of that.

Lower bounce rate? +1 pageview?

Because then you aren't on the article anymore.

It’s an annoying trend, I have also noticed it on other sites. You finish the article or viewing the image or whatever, scroll a bit past the end or flick to the bottom to check you aren’t missing anything, and then try to copy the URL and get some other page you never visited.

I tried to find info on this behavior with no luck- does it have a name?

I find this whole idol culture extremely odd.

Interestingly enough it seems like a lot of people never actually have sex (granted the following article is about japan, but they're not that different). So it almost seems like these extreme stalkers wouldn't actually become physically active, although that doesn't really make it any better.

https://www.cnn.com/2019/10/08/asia/japan-fertility-intl-hnk...

The idol culture is extremely unhealthy. This is objectification turned to 11. They get a pass in the US because it seems so distant and Japan is "odd and cool" but it is actually really creepy.

At what point does one differentiate between obsession with idols and obsession with pop stars in other countries? In my experience, J-idols appear to put a lot of work into their personalities as part of the group and their "talent" which goes beyond the fetishization of beauty we usually associate with objectification. In other words, do we know that Japanese fans view idols as people tending to objects?

How is it different from Katy Perry or Taylor Swift?

President Reagan was shot by a lunatic obsessed with actress Jodie Foster.

Sometimes I think the Japanese are attracted to the idea of their exceptionalism.

> How is it different from Katy Perry or Taylor Swift?

For many teen musicians and actresses, they are generally marketed towards fellow teens. The fact that adults focus on them is incidental (IMHO).

That is not necessarily the same with certain Japanese niches:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Junior_idol

I don't even think that's the issue. I saw a documentary on Japan and they visited one of these idol "talent agencies". It's an incredibly creepy structure that's just not comparable to anything we have in the West.

We have Harvey Weinstein and rh Disney industrial conplex, our own take on it.

> It's an incredibly creepy structure that's just not comparable to anything we have in the West.

Especially when you add the world of "junior idols":

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Junior_idol

Child beauty pageants?

That's not too far off. But instead of having overly controlling parents the idols have overly controlling corporations running their lives and 24/7 scrutiny from an extremely fickle and difficult to please fanbase.

>This is objectification turned to 11.

Fans like those stars for their whole package (myth, personality, songs, artistic expression, style, etc) not e.g. just for their body (which is usually implied by objectification).

It's also not much different than our pop idols, especially of yore (up until the 00s or so, before several other occupations, such as games, social media, web surfing, selfies, and tons of higher quality TV and movies) basically replaced pop music as the major obsession of western kids.

There have been idols attacked (and even murdered) plenty of times in good ole US.

Further reading seems to show they are different from pop idols of the west, both in fan culture[0] and how much control a talent agency has over the idols' personal life, including forcing idols to remain single so as to seem attainable by their fan base, which "may cause fans to be unable to distinguish between fantasy and real-life" [1].

0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_idol#Fan_culture 1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_idol#Criticism

yeah, my main issue with it is it seems really exploitative. Get a bunch of kids and control every aspect of their lives in exchange for fame, subjecting them to all kinds of pressures and limiting their experiences...

That was commonplace in the west for musicians and actors with a mass young fan base -- they often were forced by management to be single, or appear single, hide their relationships etc, not to disappoint the fans of the opposite sex. And of course actors/singers/etc who were gay/lesbian/bi/etc were forced to hide it for marketing reasons.

And we grew out of it. Japan did not. I wish we stopped giving Japan a pass for the things it does wrong. In terms of gender equality, minorities inclusiveness, gay rights, it lags far behind.

>I wish we stopped giving Japan a pass for the things it does wrong.

I also wish people stop considering their country's morals and current fashions as the yardstick to measure the whole world...

(Especially if they don't have such a great, past or present, track record even by their own standards, to begin with).

Who are you to give or give not Japan "a free pass"? Who said Japan needs a pass from outsiders?

To quote Feyman:

"The next morning the young woman taking care of our room fixes the bath, which was right in our room. Sometime later she returns with a tray to deliver breakfast. I'm partly dressed. She turns to me and says, politely, "Ohayo, gozai masu," which means, "Good morning."

Pais is just coming out of the bath, sopping wet and completely nude. She turns to him and with equal composure says, "Ohayo, gozai masu ," and puts the tray down for us.

Pais looks at me and says, "God, are we uncivilized!"

We realized that in America if the maid was delivering breakfast and the guy's standing there, stark naked, there would be little screams and a big fuss. But in Japan they were completely used to it, and we felt that they were much more advanced and civilized about those things than we were."

Almost 100% of an Idol's life is manufactured by the studios. What is presented to the public is barely even a person, more of a product hyper-tailored for a specific audience.

It's all of the downsides of a celebrity multiplied by 10 and no to much of the upside. The company controls how they look, what they say, who they associated with, their entire creative output, everything. They get treated more like breakfast cereal mascots than actual living human beings.

>It's all of the downsides of a celebrity multiplied by 10 and no to much of the upside

Except lots of money and fame and a fun job...

My understanding is that the pay sucks because the company takes almost all of the income. On the other hand your expenses are also very low because the company provides everything. Housing, food, clothes, etc... Many of which are sponsored so forget about making your own choice.

The fame and fun factor are certainly a big reason why people willingly do it, but that's about it for compensation.

"Objectification" can be used for any kind of dehumanization, and not only the sexual kind

If you disregard immigrants from Africa, the Middle-East and Asia, most European countries have birth rates at the same level or lower than Japan.

I think that with the current access to birth control and abortion, you can't exactly extrapolate sexual activity from birth rates in Western Europe.

When I hear fertility crisis I always wonder how it is possible to differentiate between people having children later in their lives and people not having children in the first place. As long as the age of child rearing is rising fertility will appear to go down until it spikes up one day.

Outside of a 30 year window female fertility drops to essentially zero. aka you can be reasonably sure looking a few million 55 year old woman that they are not going to have significant numbers of kids.

As the drop below replacement rate started in the 60’s it’s easy to verify the trend is real.

Given that female humans are the only female mammals with this egg limitation I bet we can crack this with stem cells too

In the mean time freezing is subject only to cultural stigma, effort and cost. Should just offer to freeze some every 20 year old’s eggs just like tetanus shots are offered to children. Younger eggs being more viable than a young 30-somethings trump card. Then people don’t have to make a conscious decision to do it and boom replacement age increases by two whole decades if we feel like it

If this became common, I would be worried for the future of humans.

Both sperm and eggs are produced in quantities millions of times higher than apparently necessary. Nature doesn't waste resources without good reason. There's a very good chance the large number of inactive sperm and eggs are part of an as-yet unidentified selection/evolution mechanism.

Freezing eggs might break that mechanism, and we probably wouldn't see the problem for many generations until human evolution suffers...

I mean you could argue that about actually curing cancer and extending our average longevity, maybe there is some additional cellular state we aren’t aware of that is being selected out

So that’s not a good enough reason for me to say “lets not pursue these obvious ideas we already have the technology for”

Is this actually only a thing inherent to humans, or is it just that we live long enough for it to be a problem?

good questions. someone else pointed out that its not only inherent to human primates, but that it does lack research

>Given that female humans are the only female mammals with this egg limitation I bet we can crack this with stem cells too

We can, eventually, I'm sure. Biology is just a mechanism, and with enough work and knowledge, we can figure it out.

However, would it make much difference? I'm thinking most women don't have children because they don't want them (or any more of them), not because they've become infertile due to age. In fact, most mothers seem to lost all interest in having more kids after having 1 or maybe 2: going through the experience shows them the grim reality of child-rearing, so once they've "done their part" with 1 or 2 kids, they've had enough.

Perhaps, if we achieve biological immortality, along with eliminating age-related infertility, people will have more kids, because they could afford to wait a long time between them. They could have the first one at 30-50, after they've gotten themselves financially situated, then they could take a break for a few decades, then have another one, then take another break, etc. Maybe after 2-3 decades, they'll have forgotten what a pain in the ass the previous one was.

Both of your paragraphs are based on a flawed assumption of not wanting any kids or any more kids. As opposed to wanting kids but not wanting to make a choice before a certain age. Some people dont want any or any more and we aren’t referring to them.

I would say the population that would like the possibility of children at a later age is big enough to make a difference.

> Given that female humans are the only female mammals with this egg limitation

But they aren't...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Menopause#Other_animals

thanks, insightful, looks like lots of more research is necessary as they aren't even sure it only applies to captive non-human primates or not.

I bet we can crack the code anyway.

I don't think this is true about 30 year window, more like 40: https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/de4j0n/ocd...

I think it was about 30 year span. Like from 15 to 45.

Odd that the youngest bracket (14–19) is bounded with a minimum age of 14. There have been a handful of births from younger mothers in the past 30 years (a 10 year old girl in 2006 in the US). Insignificant in the total graph, but weird to exclude given that the oldest bracket is open-ended (>50). Just renaming the bracket to ≤19 would suffice.

The youngest documented mother ever was 5 years and 7 months (Peru, 1939).

I am talking about the peak range so 15 + 30 = 45. A 30-34 year old woman is 500x more likely to give birth than a 10-14 year old, and over 100x more vs a 45-55 year old woman. https://www.childtrends.org/indicators/fertility-and-birth-r... (scroll down). You do see even younger and older births, but at even lower rates.

So yes these births do add up, but are effectively ignorable when analyzing trends.

> . A 30-34 year old woman is 500x more likely to give birth than a 10-14 year old

that's heavily skewed by the fact that far more 30-34 year olds are trying to have kids while most 10-14 year olds are either not having sex or actively trying to avoid pregnancy.

citation?

I'm sure you're joking, but if there is a massive body of research on 10 year olds having sex I'm not going to go googling for it at work, but I think it's safe to say that more women in their 30s are trying for babies than 10 year olds.

It’s not an either or situation.

The stats are more clear on 45 year old women having ~1/3 the odds of becoming pregnant and after that over 90% of any pregnancies spontaneously aborting. It’s only after that that the odds are further lowered from ~3% to below 1% because they also have less unprotected sex. Still, based on relative odd it seems that biology is playing a significantly larger role than culture.

Over 90% of Japanese pr0n is about sexually assaulting someone, might have something to do with this.

Not even remotely true.

Why does everyone feel entitled to give their opinion on Asian idol culture when they clearly have the barest of exposure, usually consisting of watching a documentary or reading a CNN article...

Really irritating stuff

The Netflix anime Kakegurui describes a lot about idol culture in Japan through one of its characters. It doesn't try to justify or judge the practice but it presents it thoroughly.

It's apparently possible[0] to retrieve fingerprints from a mobile phone photo of someone's hand, which might wind up being a problem for Asians making the ubiquitous peace-sign[1]. I guess they could always just turn it around, though ;)

And of course copying keys from cellphone photos is old hat to the point that it's actually an app, and people have been getting doxxed through the EXIF data on images they upload for years.

[0]https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2018/04/lifting_a_fin...

[1]https://www.asiaone.com/digital/chinas-peace-sign-selfie-tak...

Someone should build a phone app that removes eyeball reflections and exif data.

I have a feeling that, when people take selfies, they are using other apps and not their camera app itself.

in terms of exif data I'd agree, but I don't think most people have to worry about someone figuring out where they are from eyeball reflections. This guy was lucky enough to get a clear reflection, but luckier still that what was captured was meaningful enough to give him a specific location.

"Enhance."

Now, how long before this* isn't a parody anymore?

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xbCWYm7B_B4 (Enhance, Enhance, Enhance | NTSF:SD:SUV | Adult Swim)

Someone actually built the "Enhance" process used by TV police forensics?

Suddenly, all those odd-looking 'cartoony face' apps begin to make sense..

[edit] This might sound like a glib response (thanks down-voter). But I'm serious.

Apps could easily be created to thwart this.

Looks like a hog to me ... [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twin_Peaks

Camera apps should offer a feature to erase reflections somehow, without making eyes blurry.

Or just make picture low res when you share them widely on certain networks.

It would save so much wasted bandwidth if smartphones actually guided users through a workflow of resizing and compressing photos before they leave the phone or hell even when first saving them locally.

Instead everyone's sending many-megabyte barely-compressed highres JPEGs I presume since cameras have always defaulted to saving the highest quality images with the expectation that you'd post process them before distributing. That and I imagine it's desirable to not have to burn battery power on compressing photos, and maybe at&t and friends kickback some $$ to make the default flow burn more bandwidth. Many people pay for metered data and receive giant photos from friends w/unlimited bandwidth and zero fucks given.

WhatsApp and Facebook messenger resize to ~1Megapixel any image sent.

Instagram definitely compresses images too

If Google can remove fences from pictures of your child playing baseball, surely they could perform this adjacent ability as well.

Did I see a future detective ?

Enhance 224176

Enhance, Stop

Move in, Stop

Pull out, Track right, Stop

Center in, Pull back, Stop

Track 45 right, Stop

Center and Stop

Enhance 34 to 36

Pan right and pull back, Stop

Enhance 34 to 46

Pull back, Wait a minute, Go right, Stop

Enhance 5719

Track 45 left, Stop

Enhance 15 to 23

Give me a hard copy right there.

This story doesn't hold a candle to the movie, though... where do I sign for the cyberprivacy arms race?

Not sure why this isn’t the top comment.

Because it doesn't contribute to the conversation?

Because jokes shouldn't be top comments. They can lighten a thread, but they shouldn't be the tread itself.

Because social quoting is just an ego trip.

Off-topic but related: "Blade Runner" takes place in Los Angeles in "November, 2019". :-)

It's the "uncrop" feature I'm really waiting for :-)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2aINa6tg3fo

"Something weird and crazy happened in this country of 125 million people"

This is "Florida Man" type clickbait and doesn't belong on Hacker News in my opinion.

I thought it was HN-worthy because of the privacy implications.

Actually, that's fair and makes complete sense. My bad. It's just sad to see it devolve into yet another "Japan is crazy" party :(

The privacy implications are, I agree, interesting...

No worries, there are other submissions on HN where it is the exact opposite: "Japan is the best!".

Any thoughts on how he did it? Was it one photo that gave it all away, or did it take information from multiple photos being pieced together?

How did he go from having a picture to knowing the location? Guess & test?

"Saitama Man", not "Florida Man".

https://www.tokyoreporter.com/crime/saitama-man-used-eye-ref...

Does this level of resolution make undetectable deep fakes less likely?

Another case of stan...why are these people so fanatic about someone?

Only on HN does an article about a woman being attacked and sexually assaulted devolve into conversation about technical minutia.

Isn't that the point of HN? Everyone agrees that it was terrible that it happened, so repeating it isn't very productive or interesting

Yes, just like how all the articles about China currently plastering the homepage aren't devolving into outrage laden diatribes. Same goes for articles about global warming, Facebook and RMS. HN is above politics and even emotion itself!... unless it involves subjects that upset the ingroup.

Well, on most other news sites it would devolve in a conversation on Trump / Brexit / Trudeau... at least on the technical minutiae we can talk about things we know something about.

What would you prefer the conversation involve? People get assaulted all the time, the main reason this story is interesting is the technical element. It has really interesting privacy implications and is inherently technical

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