Slashdot Mirror
Slashback: Counterstrike, Identification, Patenxtortion
False negatives, false positives, anda false sense of assurance. coryboehne writes: "TechNews has a report on the face recognition system installed at the Palm Beach Internation Airport early results of face-recognition surveillance suggest the technology is proving once again to be unreliable.
The ACLU said the first four weeks of testing at the Palm Beach airport showed the technology was "less accurate than a coin toss." The system matched the faces of the volunteers just 455 out of 958 times, or about 47 percent of the time.
Seems to me that this is a controlled environment for the most part, and still they have problems this big? I wonder if this technology will ever be accurate enough to work properly. I suppose the biggest problem is the size of the database that would be necessary to hold the high quality pictures necessary for accurate identification.
However I must admit that I am rather glad that this is'nt working yet as I'm not too sure I even like the idea of being able to digitally locate and track anyone within range of a camera."
This is what's meant by "repeat offender." Audent writes: "Following on from this story on Slashdot about PanIP's nasty habits, InfoWorld is running a story about it all.
To quote from the story about PanIP's boss:
'These lawsuits aren't the first time that PanIP principal Lawrence Lockwood has initiated legal proceedings against companies he felt were infringing his patents. Lockwood filed a lawsuit against American Airlines in 1994, claiming that American's SABREvision airline reservation system infringed on other patents he holds. Lockwood lost the suit in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of California and then lost again on appeal in 1997.'He's since had a bunch of patents disallowed. He's obviously learned from his earlier 'mistake' and is only going for the smaller companies.
Kick his ass I say. Disclaimer: I work for IDG Comms in New Zealand)."
Temporary sanity. CyberQ writes: "Some news from Germany on the censorship front: Despite demands from prominent politicians the responsible Federal Authority decided today not to ban the sale of Counterstrike to minors [Link in German, use the fish]. This came after weeks of public discussion following a school shooting by a student who apparently trained by playing CS."
While I don't want to say that headline is false, I will say that any editor worth his salt would reject that headline - it's just too contentious an issue, and a dangerous generalization.
Of course it was the game!!
The fact that he somehow got a gun, got it into a supposedly secure area and shot people without his parents knowing he was disturbed is irrelevent as always.
Bah!!
I suppose we are lucky he wasn't using OGC 8.2..
Was he bunny hopping??:)
" The best Bucket is a SCREAMING one "
This is something I came up with a while back. If you're going to ban the sale of violent video games to minors, why not ban violent books to minors?
Books are full of violence ranging from rape, murder, war, you name it, books are just as bad as television and video games alike. If you're going to ban the same of such games as Unreal Tournament, Counter-Strike, or Quake III Arena, then you might as-well ban books involving material I just mentioned.
1) The Germans were both Nazis and murderers during WWII
Its exactly people like who who continue and propogate this hatred - the same hatred that killed six million Jews. All Nazis (originally) were Germans. Some Germans were Nazis. Your reasoning states that all Germans were Nazis... False! That's *exactly* like saying: All Democrats are American. Some Americans are Democrats. Therefore, all Americans are democrats.
Get your head out of your ass. The average German farm worker was not a Nazi - he was just a regular person caught up in an extremist government.
Not all Nazis were German. Some with Czech, French, Lithuanian, Latvian, Estonion, Croatian, Ukranian, Hungarian and especially Austrian - including the main one. There were plenty of collaborators and party members from outside of Germany.
That's quite a feat. When that hits 95%, and it's pattern matching Osama Bin Laden, what do you think airport security would do if there's a match?
The problem isn't so much that it only matches successfully 47% of the time, it's that the 47% doesn't appear to be random--the article makes it seem you can make it very likely that you will consistently be missed by the system just by wearing glasses and not looking straight at the camera. Once it's well-understood how to avoid being caught by the system, it's worse than nothing (false sense of security) even if it correctly identifies 95% of people not taking countermeasures.
Not that Osama bin Laden would be on a flight in florida anyway, and remember that identification would not have helped prevent the events of September 11, since we knew who the hijackers were when they walked on the plane, we just didn't know what they had planned.
--
Benjamin Coates
Why does the German government seem to be so inconsistent with censoring/banning games?
Germany has this problem with violence, similar to the US trying to censor "indecent material". You can say "fuck" on German TV without problems.
My guess is that this dates back to WW2; Germans now have this built-in problem with anything related to violence and discrimination.
Quite a while back when the game Carmageddon came out I remember I read in the news that the German version had zombies to replace the people that you could run over in the original.
Actually, the zombies were in the UK version (who do have this violence problem too). In the German version, you had to run over traffic cones. Yes. Traffic cones. No joke.
How is Counterstrike different?
Well, the rationale as far as I understand it is this:
In Carmageddon, the purpose is to mindlessly kill people and get rewarded for it. While Counter-Strike lets you kill people, the focus of the game is on "strategical thinking and communicating in the team". Hey, don't flame me, that's the BPjS' explanation.
ext they'll be saying that people who play flight simulator a lot are more likely to be good at flying real planes...! Where's the logic in that??
I would say that depends on the flight simulator.
Most flight studends FIRST are forced to learn the basics with a flight simulator before they are allowed to make a real flight.
Its saver and saves costs.
If a flight simulator is realistic the minimum thing you learn in it is the "check list" of procedures you have to perform to start the machine up or to start the landing phase.
Plenty of people forget to to eject the wheels while landing.
Pleanty of people try the same while to fast.
angel'o'sphere
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
... except pro-Nazi things, apparently... and that's the irony, and that's the problem: a faux respect for democratic opinion, unless it is the "wrong" one. I'm not German, and I cannot really prescribe to Germans how to handle this tension in democracy. But I am an American, and without being too jingoistic, I think we get this one right: Allow a free market of ideas. Don't allow the government, or the moral minority, or "the People" to legislate that some ideas are "wrong". Let them all fight it out. Because I believe in democracy and in the basic dignity of humankind (both possibly ludicrous beliefs, but hey...), I also believe that the right and the true will triumph.
This isn't mealy-mouthed bleeding-heart East Coast liberalism. It's a hard-eyed view drawn from the history of a free people: The only cure for darkness is light -- it's never more darkness.
If a people is presented with the neo-Nazi thugs and the radical idiocies, and given the chance to honestly evaluate them, and still fall for them... well, there is no power in Heaven or on Earth that keep such a people free. If they cannot be trusted to see through this propaganda, then they cannot possibly be protected from it. And no well-intentioned political elite is ever going to safeguard them from their own democratic process.
People are free, or they are not. They are not made free by the actions of someone else; they are free by the strength of their commitment to freedom. Let the idiots, the racists, the radicals bray and howl. I know that a free and educated people will rise above that, will see them for the sham they are, will cast them back into the darkness and ooze from which they crawled.
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
That's true, except for one thing: If, in between each of the trials in which the dropped rock fell there were 1,000,000 trials in which it did not fall, then any rational scientist would not call the rock falling a "safe bet".
How many children play video games? How many murder their classmates?
Sorry, but I do not use this logic every day, because that is not logic at all.
The enemies of Democracy are
Who REALLY gives a shit?
I love the "those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it" line.....
Guess what? At some point in our future we WILL repeat it regardless of if
we remember. Life is messy, no matter what you think, we are animals with a
VERY thin veneer of civilization applied.
Was it horrible? Yes. Was it worse than other
wars, killing, pillaging, salting the earth
episodes we have had? On a numbers scale
I believe Stalin killed more.
The people who did it are dead. It is time to get
over it.......
What you are saying is that the way to prevent the subversion of freedom and democracy is to subvert freedom and democracy? The nazis came to power because Germany was in terrible shape after World War I. They were impoverished and they were looking for any solution. They wanted somebody to blame, a new direction to go. It has little to do with the specific message of nazism, it has far more to do with the state of the society they lived in.
This scene has played out in history time and time again. Desperate people do stupid things, and they will back insane radicals because they've got little to lose. Do you really think that if nazism was allowed to show it's head in public they would actually gain significant power? My supicion is that if it came out into the open, the nazism would face a backlash from people who now don't worry about it because it's all underground.
Granted, I don't live in Germany. Perhaps I'm seriously underestimating the tendancies of the german citizenry. My sense is that without some reason to drive them to the false promises of nazism, they'll just push nazism to the margins where it belongs.
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
"Normally I'm not a fighting type of guy," he said, but the broadness of PanIP's claims and the $30,000 they want in licensing fees led him to decide "we're going to rumble, we're going to fight this thing," he said.
...
I can't help thinking that the slashdot thread on this situation may have influenced Allan Dickson's thinking on this matter.
However
without people who have the backbone to fight back, we are at the mercy of those who would claim unlimited IP rights.
Innovation belongs to those who created it. I support IP rights, but those who come along later and file "business method" patents claiming that they created something that was already being done is NOT "innovation."
utter rubbish
I've read Mein Kampf. I went to a prestigious private university in the US where this was required reading in our Western Civilizations course. (In the US, all the top universities force all their students to go through certain "core" classes, which means that engineers have to take humanities courses and poets have to take calculus.) While your culture may remember why Mein Kampf is banned in Germany, ours doesn't. I didn't understand hatred until I read Hitler; I didn't understand racial superiority until I read Nietzsche. To be honest, I still don't quite understand it, but I can now recognize how it starts.
When unemployed programmers post to slashdot to complain about how all the jobs are being taken by Indians with H-1B visas, I recognize the danger. Although I'm extremely pissed at the job market right now, I know I have to control these feelings, which are absolutely no different from those of the French who voted for Le Pen, hoping to ameliorate the "immigration situation."
We are all taught tolerance, but in some cases, intolerance is more moral. Without the free dilution of ideas, how am I supposed to know what to tolerate and what not to tolerate? I may have joined in with those slashdotters complaining about "Indians taking our jobs" had I not read Le Pen recently - remember, I was already pissed. I was, however, able to see how they were putting forth the exact same arguments as Le Pen, and I realized the direction in which they were headed.
You've pointed out that Germans are less likely to stand up for unimpeded speech out of idealism, but rather deal with the issue out of sheer pragmatism. How does one learn hatred? I say it can only come about after immense propaganda and repetition. You do not suddenly go from toleration to hatred by listening to one speech or reading one book; it takes years of "brainwashing," for lack of a better term. When an open-minded people learn to recognize hidden hatred agendas and the same fascist arguments, rather than continue listening, they turn their heads in disgust.
The fascists always use the same arguments and the same methods: they won't tell you about their agenda of hatred outright, at least not right away. First, they instill outrage. They'll start off by demonstrating the "collapse" of a nation, economically and morally. They'll appeal to unemployed and the under-employed. The second step is an appeal to history: they'll explain how great the nation was in the past, and how it's now falling apart. The third and final step is to lay the blame on a minority.
Some examples of these methods: the American white supremacists begin with an anti-affirmitive action agenda. They attempt to show how the qualified are losing jobs to the less-qualified simply out of race. The second step of the American white supremacist is to identify himself with American history: here, you'll find lots of flag-waving. A few years ago, I encountered an advertisement for a KKK rally. What I found particularly of note was that they stated only certain flags would be allowed at the rally, including the flag of the Vatican (Holy See) and the American flag. Their third step involves crime statistics about inner-city black youth. By this point, the agenda is clear.
When slashdot ran that story about the H-1B visas a week ago, I recognized step one. One person in particular was already at step three. I saw the progression and I closed my browser.
Now, from where did I recognize this progression? Did I originally see this in American white supremacist propaganda? Did I see this in Le Pen's anti-immigration ideas?
I originally saw this in Mein Kampf, in the part where Hitler explains his blue-collar days in Vienna. Did the anti-Indian slashdotters read Mein Kampf? I'm willing to wager that they didn't. It didn't take openly fascist literature to plant the start of hatred, but it did take fascist literature for me to recognize it. Read these posts carefully, and then read about Hitler's description of his working days in Vienna, and tell me what you find. It's quite disturbing.
You linked to some of your previous posts which make some interesting points. I'll reciprocrate: this regarding freedom of speech and this regarding the limits of democracy. You'll note from the context that not only are certain people willing to forcefully silence extremists, but they are also willing to forcefully silence those who would disagree with the extremists and yet stand up for the extremists' right/privilege to speak.
WRONG STATISTICAL ANALOGY
If you have a choice between two objects, and the correct one is chosen 50% or so of the time, then you have a random system, and it is roughly equivalent to a coin. If you have a choice of three (one is correct, two are incorrect), and the wrong one is chosen 33.3% of the time, you have a random system. (D6/2 for AD&Ders out there.)
ERGO, the probability to chose one correct item randomly from a field of n items is 1/n. Face recognition is one in a practical infinity. A success rate of 1% is therefore a stupendous technical achievement. A success rate of 47% is a marvel of design.
Of course, if it is to be used in any real-world application, then a success rate of 99.9% would be a Good Thing, with an independantly thinking human being to check for false positives or negatives. Maybe the software could show a phot of who it thinks the person is for a human to quickly verify.
If this is used for biometrics in private or secure building access, then it is showing strong possibilities. If it is being used to scan for wanted criminals (putting aside concerns about civil liberties and privacy in public places (if there is any such thing)), then a tightly controlled system of checks is required. A flag to say 'Hey, I think I just saw Osama bin Laden, you might want to check', rather than automatically setting off all the alarms and releasing the hounds.
Also, they say they are testing it at an airport? Doesn't sound like a controlled lab to me! Unless you have a limited set of faces, in a controlled studio environment, you are in an uncontrolled environment. Of course some environments are more controlled than others, but an airport?
Just because the possible (allright, probable) misuses of a technology are disturbing does not diminish the technical achievement of making that technology work. Remember that this tech is also necessary for AI vision systems, etc. (You could say that when this system becomes as good as a human you have effectively built an AI anyway).
"This is a Hollywood movie: when it comes to the Laws of Physics, they're lucky if they get Gravity!" --- my wife
When the last LAN party has been closed,
when Counterstrike is banned,
when the Internet is censored,
only then will parents discover that they still have to educate their children...
Two Worlds - One Sun [Spirit]
Leaving the simple fact aside that a certain few aspects of weapon combat/massacres ARE simulated/trained by playing Egoshooters - the largest portion of skill Robert Steinhauser used in the Effurt massacre he trained in action shooting training Sessions in the local "Schuetzenverein" (the tradtional german musketeers clubs). The only place in germany where civilians can optain the right to legaly own and handle such heavy weapons as a pumpgun.
Conservative german politicians in the now-all-present pre-election phase like to leave this little detail aside nowadays whilst demanding prohibition of "Killergames". For the simple reason that a large portion of conservative voters actually come from these "traditionalists" parts.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
After catching up on my casual history reading lately, and learning quite a bit about the socialist and democratic struggles of the 19th century, I now know that this is a fairly common attitude historically. I was also appalled to learn how uncivilized and backward Europe was compared to America during the 19th century, which is very ironic considering the classic European snobbishness toward Americans...
Historical note that applies later on: we (America) did not have a socialist revolution or the serious threat of one because our government was not in the business of squashing every lower-class worker who wanted better working conditions, or even--God forbid!--the vote. At the time, our government was in the business of handing out 40 acres to anyone who wanted to leave the Eastern factories and settle out west. And all those poor workers in America already had the vote. (Thank Ben Franklin for that. If Alexander Hamilton had gotten his way, the U.S. would have devolved into an oligarchy of rich landholders). Wonder why we had so much immigration from Europe during that period?
That's why radical groups are banned. That's why they have to operate underground. That's why Germany is quite keen to ban 'ideas' (I can hear the flames already) and things that are 'dangerous'.
The monarchs of Europe were also quite keen to ban dangerous ideas like "democracy", "freedom of the press", and "labor unions", too. Those ideas were dangerous--to dictators and absolutist monarchies. Again, this is history speaking.
Because people in general are easily seduced by things that make them feel good about themselves. Hitler told Germans that they were special and superior.
That is the classic excuse used by monarchs and oligarchs for not allowing democracy: the people will let themselves be seduced by bad ideas that might lead to chaos and violence. Of course, the real fear was that these ideas might lead to things like the rulers losing priviledges and power--which is, of course, Bad for Society. From their point of view.
Which is to say, it is always the excuse of the elite: we know better than you, you are as children who are easily swayed by the candy in the store window and don't know what's best for you. Frankly, history has shown that so-called elites don't know what's best for anyone, either, and are just concerned with maintaining their own selfish privileges, and that the average adult is quite capable of minding his own affairs if he hasn't been deliberately made incapable of handling them by lack of education and forced dependence. (Which, BTW, is why Jefferson, et al, insisted that an educated citizenry was necessary for democracy to work).
Now, I've never heard that Germans were uneducated, so what are you afraid that your neighbors might want or do, if they were allowed to hear about Nazis, or see a swastika?
Thus, you want to make sure that radical groups that want to dismantle democracy are not allowed a popular mandate. You do not want to legitimize them by allowing them to exist in the public sphere. You do not want to allow them to become coalition partners, to enter local governments, and to slowly subvert and destroy freedom, tolerance, and democracy.
Because that's what they want.
What they want and what they get are two different things. I see a problem with the European approach: who decides which groups are "dangerous radicals"? The government? In that case, anyone who threatens the political class' privileges, perks, and position will be deemed a "radical", count on it. Popular opinion? Well, if so-called "radicals" are unpopular, they aren't much of a threat in a democracy, are they? OTOH, allowing the majority to decide who should be suppressed introduces you to the tyranny of the majority, aka mob rule.
And they're not going to get it. We've been here, we're not going back. We like democracy, we like freedom, we like being able to say whatever we want without being locked up, we don't want to be herded into camps because of our racial distinctions or religious beliefs, and we sure as fuck don't want to let radicals who want to destroy all of that back into the limelight.
But you will, if you keep going as you are. They won't call themselves Nazis, and they won't use swastikas, but they will re-appear, and they will be the guys telling you who are the "dangerous radicals" that need to be suppressed, which speech and ideas are too dangerous to be published, and so on. They will tell the people what they want to hear, and they will be "democratically" chosen, because they will have suppressed all those other, "dangerous" voices. And you will have helped them.
So go on all you want about 'bans are bad!' and 'information wants to be free!'. Naivety will only get you so far, and jackbooted thugs will exploit all of it quite happily while you sit there letting them take away everything you hold dear.
Let me tell you something: we have Nazis and Aryan supremacist radicals in America, too. In Germany, you ban them and try to suppress them, and they have become a significant underground movement in some circles, with a lot of people being sympathetic to their views. In America, they are perfectly free to publicize themselves, preach their views and run for public office, as long as they don't break any of the laws that apply to ALL citizens (murder, theft, fraud, assault, etc.). In America, we laugh at them and consider them a bunch of jerks, and they are nothing more than a fringe movement--and they certainly don't have the passive support of the police when they commit violence (as I have heard has happened with some cases of anti-immigrant attacks in East Germany). If they do something violent, we arrest their asses and thrown them in jail like any other criminal.
Which method of dealing with radicals is working better?
---dragoness