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."
leads to violent children is bogus.
It's logic like this (from my discreet math days)...
1)Penguins are black and white
2)Old TV shows are black and white
3)Therefore some penguins are old TV shows.
Fly Fish? Participate in our forum
Counter-Strike is horrible training. Imagine the inefficiency in a real-life situation stemming from wall-hack paranoia.
you would think by now germany would know better..
..
Bans don't work in the long run
Fro example the ban on nazism in Germany forced everything underground in which the German police have to expend more hours than otherwise to keep track and monitor theri actions..if they weren't banned everyone woudl know what they are doing due to the fact that they woudl be out in the open in public view..
Don't Tread on OpenSource
From the poster: 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.
A similar story on Wired indicates higher match rates (90%) at airports in Dallas Boston. The maker of the recognition system speculates that lighting was a factor in the Palm Beach for the low match rate. 90% still a bad rate (better than 99.9% or something like that would be ideal), but it shows how differences of environment can affect these things.
The One Rule Of Chess You'll Ever Need: Don't play someone who carries a kit in their bookbag.
IANAL: this means I cannot think totally illogically.
1) In exchange for patent rights, the company must make public the details of the design it wants to patent.
1.1) In a software patent case, this may consist of example code.
2) It is legal for any person to obtain the patent application for a succesful patent.
2.1) In a software patent case, this means you may posess the example code.
3) It is illegal to implement the patent without the patentholder's express consent.
3.1) This means it is illegal to compile and execute the example code.
So now: suppose someone takes the patent application form and translates it into a different language. That definately has to be legal.
Since code is speech, this may be a computer language.
Add a bit of embellishments and you have a full-fledged application that incorporates the patent. Still legal to posess, but illegal to compile or run.
Assume it's legal to publish this (free speech and all that), and furthermore assume that US citizens may download it.
I would assume some form of system needs to be in place that prevents US citizens from compiling and executing the code, otherwise it violates the patent.
Therefore, code anything you want, make one deliberate error, publish the code and allow downloads. Citizens of a country that's stupid enough to allow patents on software must therefore be stupid enough not to be able to compile and execute broken code! (No flames please, my <sarcastic> tags don't work!)
Please, shoot holes in my argument! Where'm I going wrong? It can't be this simple!
I'm surprised that German gamers didn't demand a patch for Return to Castle Wolfenstein turning the Nazis into the French.
--Metrollica
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.
There is a law which bans the glorification of Nazi's. At least, I think. Also, in German culture, they're pretty much scared to mention anything regarding the Nazi past... It's still a touchy subject for Germany, and their answer is to not deal with it directly.
So, what we should do is keep our eyes out for companies that are violating his "patents" (e.g., get a phone book) and start notifying them that they appear to be in violation. Copy PanIP on the notice, and see what happens. If enough people (hundreds? thousands?) do this to enough companies, it should surely stir up some dust.
Foe good measure, 1) pick companies that look big enough to fight him (or obvious sympathy cases), 2) also copy the patent office on the message, and 3) send a copy to the journalists who have covered the story.
Smirk. One good way to kill things that live under rocks is to expose them to daylight.
-- MarkusQ
The ACLU has a good point, but their coin flip analogy is a little misleading. If they were really using a coin flip to 'guess' who each person was (i.e., guessing randomly), accuracy would have been much lower, with expected normalized discriminibility score (d') of 0. For example, their target set was of 250 people. So, a dumb guessing system would have less than a .4% hit rate: compared to that, 50% is pretty good. Furthermore, this wasn't a simple categorization task: there were 5000 passengers a day that were tested. Over 4 weeks there were around 1000 false alarms, which is a false alarm rate of .007 (and a d' of 2.5). Note that they could have increased the hit rate to above 50% if they wanted to allow for more false alarms, but they tuned the algorithms to err on the side of letting people through if there was any question. To me, this sounds like something the ACLU should be happy about, and they should perhaps recognize the difficulty of setting these thresholds and attempt to provide guidelines about how to do it and what to do after you register a hit. Face it, automated detection devices are going to exist, and they won't be perfect. But, in order to optimize the detection criteria, costs must be assigned to false alarms relative to misses. This is something that we shouldn't let the engineers and businessmen and law enforcement do alone--it is something that the humanists and the civil libertarians and the policy-makers and you and I need a voice in too.
he was also a member of the local gun club. I'm sure that gave him far more training than playing CS did.
Photos.
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.
Proof:
- Alexander the Great was a great general.
- Great generals are forewarned.
- To be forewarned is to be fore-armed
- Four is an odd number of arms for a person to have
- Four is an even number
- The only number that can be both even and odd is infinity
Conclusion: Therefore, Alexander the Great had an infinite number of arms."The dead do not shoo-bop-aloo-bah." -- Kai, 'Lexx'
you should read the CNN article linked in the original post:
And you should not believe what CNN is writing.
After all CNN is an american news station, the incident happend in germany.
1. He was using guns that he LEGALLY owned. I infer then, that they were HIS guns... so there was no "somehow he got a gun."
He did not LEGALY own the guns. Both guns he had where illegal. He had a pump gun, which can not be legaly owned at all in germany. And he had a pistol. His license however was for a very smal calibre sports gun. The weapon seller did not check the license correctly and he did not report the the sale of the guns to the authorities.
2. His parents were separated, and the article is quoted as saying he had bad relations with both. So there is no "without his parents knowing."
He was kicked from school. Aparently his parents did not know that. BTW: that guy was over 18, legaly adult.(IIRC) So his parents did not get a letter from school that he was kicked.
3. The article also says that he "was a gun club marksman who used his training to shoot many of his 16 victims -- 13 teachers, two pupils and a police officer..." so this isn't just some random steal your grandfather's shotgun and go on a shooting spree.
Thats right, it was a planned massacre. He anounced it even a day ago but the people thought he was joking.
Well, there are studies if violent videos or violent video games have an influence on peoples behaviour. Aparently they have.
But it needs more than that to run mad and amok.
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
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
Suppose 1 out of 10000 people in the US are terrorists. This strikes me as an absurdly high ratio, but let's assume for the sake of argument that it is this high. This system claims to scan 10000 faces in one day. At that rate, it will catch one airport terrorist and nine innocent people per day.
See something wrong here? I do.
If we assume a more realistic ratio of 1 terrorist per 100000 people, then you end up catching 99 innocent people and 1 terrorist every 10 days. At this point the utility of the system looks very questionable indeed. And this is without even considering the ease of importing new terrorists that aren't in the system yet.
I'm not that big a fan of face recognition technology in general, but airport terrorism is just about one of the absolute poorest possible applications of the idea.
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
Damn right! I've played video games since I could reach the coin-slot on a Pacman machine.
Nahhh... if Pacman had affected us as kids, we'd all be running around in dark rooms munching pills and listening to electronic music. Oh wait...
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