Some shirts hide you from cameras, but will anyone wear them?
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
https://www.rageon.com/products/ensemble-7
And Adversarial Fashion's anti-ALPR backpacks are cool looking as well.
https://adversarialfashion.com/collections/bags/products/sta...
Sadly, it's definitely much easier to push out a software update than it is to replace your clothing. But that game of cat and mouse won't start until the clothing becomes more commonplace, which is very doubtful.
Specifically, it shows a pair of leggings on a woman designed to look like a naked man titled "David's Marble Legs":
https://www.rageon.com/products/davids-marble-legs?refSrc=43...
> Specifically, it shows a pair of leggings on a woman designed to look like a naked man titled "David's Marble Legs":
But how is that NSFW? This is one of the most famous sculptures in western art. Everybody has seen it. I had a photo of the David sculpture in the cover of a history book when I was 11, given by our school. I find it very disturbing, even creepy, that somebody may honestly think that this image is NSFW.
some people just don't want to open a picture of a penis at work (or be surprised by one at home), no matter how artistic. I don't find this disturbing.
Is anyone actually at work anymore?
Clubbing? Throw on a long coat to cover it until you get to the club, then wander around making provocative ironic social commentary without saying a word.
That's all that comes to mind (and isn't an option currently, due to the pandemic).
Depends on the release process.
There are AI systems out there that can identify you by gait. Possibly already in your phone, ostensibly to help detect if the phone is carried by someone else. Straightforward to connect to the 24/7 video surveillance network that is built all around us: ring, self-driving cars/drones that double as corporate spies, video checkout, etc.
Furthermore, radars are coming to your phone in the near future: https://atap.google.com/soli. There is no way to hide from such radars picking up everything that moves: your gait, your breath, your heartbeat. Oh, and the gait, breath and heartbeat of anyone near you, whether they agreed to the 500 pages EULA surrendering their privacy or not.
I can’t disagree with anything in your post, but I would add that there always opportunities to be a pain in the ass.
Maybe not all systems can be toppled, but most can certainly be hacked, abused, slowed down, obscured, damaged, re-purposed, stolen, rebooted, copied, exposed, hidden, rendered obsolete, improved, deleted, etc.
I see your defeatism and raise you a giant middle finger!
Trouble is, if these get widespread enough - they won't look out of place but the moment they become widespread is the moment updates get pushed to make them obsolete. It's an unescapable situation.
Did you just say recurring revenue (for the clothing makers)?
If you haven’t read the book (written over a decade ago), a major plot point revolves around a T-shirt that renders the wearer invisible to CCTV cameras.
Most western nations are now, temporarily, accepting face coverings as daily attire in the age of COVID-19. Plenty of asian and muslim nations did previously, for cultural and health reasons.
Culturally acceptable anonymity, courtesy of the pandemic. Maybe this isn't temporary if the fear of future viral spreads takes root in culture.
[1] https://thenextweb.com/neural/2020/03/10/masks-wont-make-you...
there are techniques that can prevent this, but you pay a real price in overall performance, which may or may not be worth it.
of course it's harder to make physical objects work, but if somebody did manage to make a method for physical adversarial attacks that worked reliably, I would guess you'd run into the same problems. it's not at all clear that the endgame is that we can easily stop these attacks.
Clothes change much slower than software updates, and defending against a few adversarial examples is relatively easy, so this shouldn't be a problem.
I change my clothes at least once a day and add to my wardrobe on a ~weekly to ~monthly basis. Having been party to large system upgrades at even a reasonably competent company, I'd be shocked to find out that any surveillance system anywhere is matching that velocity.
So who says it has to be a few specific images? They could auto-generate a different selection to choose from for each purchaser and then print to order. Every individual article of clothing could be unique.
Some of these approaches are 7+ years old and still work.
As soon as they update the software, they run it over the stored video and investigate the differences. When they identify particular evasion techniques, they can flag up all instances and see what was done under their cover.
This is why I'm focusing my efforts on political solutions to protect our privacy, rather than technical solutions. That's not to say I don't think technical solutions are important, because they absolutely are, but even things like encryption could be made illegal politically if they want to. Thus politics is the most important arena for privacy advocates IMHO.
But it feels like it has gone the other way now, to the point that people dismiss potentially helpful technical solutions because "what really matters is politics" even though in reality you need both.
If the government bans privacy technologies then it's hard to use them, but if nobody develops or uses them to begin with then you don't have them either.
And for some people the government in question isn't ours, it's a foreign authoritarian government where "policy solutions" are just not going to happen and the only option available is technology. It's a lot easier to develop that technology in less authoritarian countries, which means we have a responsibility to do it, because if they have to do it the cost of a mistake is a lot higher.
So I really should re-phrase my position to clarify that I meant in the United States, but also even in the US I do think the technological solutions are important and should be developed. The important point I want to stress is that I don't think we should ever disregard the political war because of technological confidence in our ability to thwart the authoritarians. Both politics and technology are both critical pieces. If we lose on either front, we lose.
Like this: https://xkcd.com/1105/
There's also the non-technical approaches, like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-mask_law.
William Gibson, Zero History (2010)
The boy discovers it, weans himself off the drug, and then eats mostly from the health food store to avoid it. But the government uses that store to round up anyone who discovers the truth, because it's a sign plain as day you have.
Stuff like this makes me think of that story. If anything, a motivated government could just train policeman on what patterns or clothing break camera recognition and stop people based on it. Or if you have an obscured plate, they don't need the camera if it's the law not to have it.
This really only works if we have pervasive but more or less harmless surveillance by benign or robotic actors. But this is kind of like that health food store in that all the technical solutions in the world can't stop a motivated agent. You have to eat somewhere, and you have to exist in more than just image recognition databases.
Privacy online is all that remains. In meatspace, I strive only to be unremarkable. In my case, just a tired old man. Nothing to see here.
My cover story, I suppose, is using a VPN service to hide my porn addiction.
Edit: I recommend Vinge's True Names.
Of course, if the camera still captures a perfect image, that image or video is always around to be processed at a later date.
Are masks of the type worn to protect against covid-19 effective against being identified on camera? Because this seems like an amazing excuse (in terms of a silver lining on a very dark cloud) for facemasks as 'anonymity wear' to become mainstream.
Humans will forget about you, data recorded about you will be stored an reused and abused for who knows how long.
Another way of thinking about it, if I’m the only person in my community wearing these weird patterns, aren’t I even more identifiable than I would be otherwise?
I imagine for those people the ability to move around undetected would be very much worth the garish pattern.
I also question just whether the average policeman would be able to tell whether clothing was designed to be untrackable
Not to mention the safety risks of strapping IR LEDs that are that bright at other people's eye level.
Either way, blinding the camera with lights that are invisible to other people unlike these outfits would be much more effective. You can still be subversive without advertising it to anyone. If you're recruiting, then sure, where these outfits. If you actually want to not be seen by the cameras, make the cameras unable to see.
if you read the article you'd see that they only work sometimes though.
Kramer buys one - or sells them? Things go sideways.
The claim Hanwang's software works is dubious at best. And they also admit with sunglasses it totally fails.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-facial...
https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/fyrqi2/til_that...