Comment by Natsu | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Natsu | Hacker News Reader

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> 20 minutes to find an expert?

They'd had an expert in previously who came back and contradicted the prosecution's statement that enlarging won't add "pickles" (quickly corrected to pixels) to the image. The judge allowed the evidence after the prosecution followed the proper procedure.

> But I've never heard that iPad pinch-and-zoom does this. It would be surprising if it's more than plain old interpolation.

There are various methods that can be used, any of which can add new pixels and or colors, the prosecution expert didn't actually know the details. When you have a couple of pixels that's claimed to be a gun, it really matters whether it's an image artifact or not. Also, the alleged gun is somehow in Kyle's left hand (he's right handed) and does show up as the same temperature as his body on the infrared image of the same scene.

> Not to mention the defense lawyer clearly doesn't understand what the hell he's talking about

Nobody there knew what they were talking about, which is why they got experts to testify. The prosecution hasn't been following court procedure and has gotten chewed out for it repeatedly because they're trying to pull illegal tricks and are getting called on it.

The correct way to frame this conundrum is that what you see on an iPad in Photos by default[0] is not the original version the jury should be considering, either. What you get is typically a zoomed-out version, which mangles the image by selectively omitting “pickles”, or an already zoomed-in version (even without any pinching) if the image is smaller than the screen. The “true original” cannot be viewed using Photos absent third-party tooling.

[0] Excluding rare events where source image’s dimensions in pixels exactly corresponds to those of the screen on that particular iPad model.

I strongly agree with this comment. But this is why digital media is so dangerous - because few people understand the “logorithms” used to light the pixels on the screen

In court, you can't just offer evidence on its own, you need to offer a witness who can attest to the evidence's reliability, who may the be cross-examined. Doing otherwise violates one's right to confront their accusers. Binger, the prosecutor, did not want to do that. This is basic law--something he has repeatedly been admonished in court for ignoring.

Also, you're actually contradicting what the prosecution's own expert witness said in court. He said, yes, it would add pixels and he didn't know what kind or color. And for all that, the jury was allowed to see the images.

This trial has been wild. Grosskreutz went on ABC the other day to recant his sworn testimony just prior. On ABC, he said he didn't point the gun first, but even Snopes has said that yes, he did admit to that in court.[1] There is a photo of him with his gun pointed at Kyle's head as his bicep is being vaporized. It was when confronted with this that he admitted it originally in court.

Grosskreutz also claimed that Kyle re-racked his gun and this meant that Kyle wanted to kill someone, yet no unspent ammo from Kyle's gun was ever recovered, nor can any re-racking motion be seen on video. Instead, an unspent round from Grosskreutz' Glock was recovered, implying that Grosskreutz had re-racked his gun. Given the mechanics of that, it had to have been when he still had two working arms. Knowing that Grosskreutz' roommate wrote on social media that Grosskreutz wished he'd killed Kyle (something the roommate denied on the stand, saying he'd made it up), then if we use Grosskreutz' own line of reasoning, Grosskreutz had both threatened and intended to kill Kyle prior to being shot.

[1] https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/kyle-rittenhouse-gaige-gro...

Of course zooming in "adds" pixels.

And if we were to follow that pedantic logic, we should consider removing pixels from the original image (zooming out) equivalently problematic. But, apparently, no one cared that software presented a version with "subtracted" pixels in the first place, and only cared about pixels added by zooming in (which could have technically been "de-zooming-out", up to a point).

Generally, fitting a raster image with dimensions AxB into a viewport of dimensions NxM inevitably involves what effectively is adding and/or removing pixels to/from the original image. That can be done in various ways (which is why we have different resizing algorithms).

And when the prosecution is trying to infer from a single pixel what the defendant was doing, algorithms and artifacts matter.

Just watch the trial.

Yeah, nobody else was trying to say that some pixels in a greatly enlarged image meant anything until now. And no witnesses are there to testify to this gun being raised--small wonder, given that Zimminski is the one who fired the first shot, yet he wasn't even brought to court.

They could have brought him in to testify, but didn't. This is the same trick they pulled with Grosskreutz, where the DA ordered them not to search his phone (despite them already having a signed search warrant for it) and they did not interview his, and only his, interview with the police.

They also testified that they had never once done this before.

I encourage more people to watch the actual trial. Some news outlets, particularly CNN, have engaged in highly selective reporting that's getting called out by all the people actually watching the trial. The ABC coverage where they put on Grosskreutz, and let him contradict his sworn testimony in court, despite there being photographic proof that he lied, not to mention physical evidence that he (and not Kyle) re-racked his gun, was especially crazy.

I won't be surprised if this turns into a bunch of defamation suits in the future.

> But, apparently, no one cared that software presented a version with "subtracted" pixels in the first place, and only cared about pixels added by zooming in (which could have technically been "de-zooming-out", up to a point).

Courts only rule on stuff like that if there's an objection to it. If you don't object, you can't come back later and complain about it, you have to object at the time. So all of Binger's pickle objections were legally irrelevant. He knows this and is playing to the cameras, that's why he's getting yelled at by the judge, because none of what he said mattered legally. He was also pretty clearly angling for a mistrial after his earlier screw-ups, like managing to obtain information harmful to his case from his own prosecution witness on direct. This is a screwup of epic proportions.

In this case, there was doubt about the nature of a handful of pixels in an enlarged image and whether or not this depicted a gun. It's hardly "pedantic" to want to get experts to talk about the reliability of the image, rather than lawyers (none of whom knew anything), when the prosecution's entire theory at this point hinges on a legal standard of "provocation with intent" where one cannot regain innocence by fleeing or communication.

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