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Interpol Unscrambles Doctored Photo In Manhunt
jackpot777 writes in with an AP story out of Paris reporting that Interpol has distributed photos of a man suspected of sexually exploiting children. The images were recovered from pictures taken off the Internet in which the man's face had been blurred using something like Photoshop's Filter > Distort > Twirl tool. German police were able to recover recognizable images of the man, whose identity and nationality are not known. Interpol would not discuss the techniques used to recover the images. jackpot777 writes: "It does show one interesting facet of internet privacy that has also been noted with topics ranging from reading blurred check numbers in images to Google's plan to blur out license plate and face data for Street View. And that is: blurring is not the same as completely obscuring. As computers become more adept at extrapolating data of different types, your identity isn't safe unless you completely cover all those identifying features."
The pictures can be seen on Interpol's site.
Follow your Euro bills at EBT
Amazing, indeed
My 0.02 cents
Let's get this guy behind bars by the end of the week. Photo 1, Photo 2, and Photo 3. Photo 4, Photo 5, Photo 6, Photo 7, Photo 8
From the interpol web page it says:
These pictures have been produced by specialists from Germany's federal police force, the Bundeskriminalamt, working from originals found on the Internet, which had been digitally altered to disguise the man's face.
unzip; strip; touch; finger; mount; fsck; more; yes; unmount; sleep
.. can be read here.
Follow your Euro bills at EBT
Surely Interpol's top-secret image-unblurring technology is just a matter of applying the Twirl effect in the opposite direction at the same location, and perhaps applying some image-enhancement plug-ins to the resulting area? I doubt it's anything one couldn't do with off-the-shelf software.
A twirl is essentially shifting pixels around an image, and is designed to keep as much information as possible.
A blur on the other hand, especially a gaussian blur, will mix pixels together in such a way that any recovered image will be one of many possible outcomes.
Then again, removing information, by pixellating for example, would be best.
.: Max Romantschuk
>Interpol would not discuss the techniques
I showed this to my PS using friend and he shurgged, said 'Just do a radial blur in the opposite direction' and 30 seconds later had a picture about 80-90% as good as the one they're waving about as being the result of some super secret methodology.
It does strike me as a bit stupid explaining it all - now crims will just use better techniques for blurring themselves out. The media, law enforcement agencies are doing this more and more and it's insane - "we just had an idea for a terrorist attack that might happen and here it is in full", "This is foresnic evidence that allowed us to catch the crim" and so on.
I want a list of atrocities done in your name - Recoil
As computers become more adept at extrapolating data of different types, your identity isn't safe unless you completely cover all those identifying features.
Yes, or you could just stop molesting children and photographing it.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
true, blurring isn't the same as obscuring. That said, a twirl/swirl filter isn't a blur filter either. A twirl/swirl filter relocates pixels from position A to position B. The original pixels are still largely there, you just have to move them back from B to A. That's what Interpol did here - kudos to them for figuring that out. But a blur filter doesn't just relocate pixels - it blends a bunch together. Now don't get me wrong - there's certainly deconvolution methods to reduce blur - especially motion blur - ( one example software: http://www.focusmagic.com/ ) but you're not going to be able to just take any heavily non-motion blurred image and get a supersharp result back. Other techniques, such as pixelization, are even worse to restore - you may as well not try.
-That- having been said.. yes, obscuring does tend to be better.. as long as it's a proper obscuring and not some half-hearted attempt by a news station where an interviewer / whatever has said to want to be inrecognizable, and then you just get a dark silhouette of the person where you can 1. still make out the silhouette, 2. their voice goes unaltered, 3. bump up the brightness enough and you can even make out a face or, in the case of yea olde license plate, a black bar that is supposed to 'track' the license plate properly, but the person applying the bar is a lazy-ass tracker and it 'swims' over the plate, revealing tiny bits of the bottom/top on certain frames - not too much guesswork involved to figure out the proper license plate, as even with multiple possibilities, only one is likely to match the type/color of the car when looked up on the interwebs.
Now then... Let the "what if somebody photoshopped somebody else's head on there first, then applied the filter, now some poor innocent sap is framed!" replies begin.
Just cut that part out of the image, and use some algorithm to fill in the blank space without depending on the original data in that area. Hey, if you are blocking out a license plate in that way, the algorithm could even fill in something that looks like a license plate but with some random characters instead of the original ones. It doesn't matter what the algorithm does, since the information you wanted to hide was completely removed before using that algorithm.
Do you care about the security of your wireless mouse?
This guy could've just scribbled over his face with the paintbrush in MS Paint.
see the pics linked by this /. reply http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=321921&threshold=1&commentsort=0&mode=thread&cid=20908823
Very well could be made up. Look at how police are compensated. They get rewarded for closing cases. The focus is on arresting a suspect and getting a conviction. Whether or not it's the right person is not part of their pay package.
Khao Yai Land
How do they know it's the guy and not some random someone-else?
You'd have to be pretty dumb to use your own picture...oh wait, he's an idiot anyway.
As computers become more adept at extrapolating data of different types, your identity isn't safe unless you completely cover all those identifying features.
Uhm, no. As other posters have pointed out, all they did was reverse the distortion applied to the image - which in this case didn't really lose much information, just nudge it about. If you blur out someone's face, the detail can never be recovered. No, not even by the NSA. The information is lost. You *can* sharpen up edges and improve contrast, but if the information just plain isn't there any more there's not a lot you can do.
Think about it this way. A digital image is just a string of numbers. If I take a string of numbers and apply a "filter" to it then I get (0.4, 3.0, 6.2, 3.4, 5.4, 5.8, 2.6). From that, can you work out what the original values were? Possibly, because my filter is very simple. However, you don't know how much precision has been lost, or what the initial values were, so it would be nigh-on impossible to work out the original values.
Incidentally if anyone does work out the original sequence, I'd love to hear about it.
"As computers become more adept at extrapolating data of different types, your identity isn't safe unless you completely cover all those identifying features.""
New laws were passed today, making it a felony to obscure, obfuscate, scramble, cover or otherwise purposely mask your identity by modifying a digital image for the purpose of avoiding identification by law enforcement agencies.
Of course with PDF even if it appears to be completely blacked out, it might be still readable by copying and pasting the text.
How soon before someone Photoshops in the face of someone they don't like into KP, obscures it, then releases it knowing the cops will unobscure it and arrest him?
When he claims "it wasn't me" will he be able to prove it? Sure, the cops are supposed to have the burden of proof but when it comes to bogeyman charges like terrorism and KP juries usually go with the prosecution regardless.
I wonder when I'll be able to buy the software that automatically unscrambles all the pixelated regions on my rather specific-content Japanese DVDs.
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sigs are hazardous to your health
How about if they stop molesting children. Period. I doubt it makes much difference to a 4 year old whether or not photography is involved while they are being sexually assaulted.
Dan East
Better known as 318230.
Am I the only one who thinks this guy looks a bit like Dalton McGuinty? Given that we heard about his other habits right before the last Ontario election.....
you might as well just opt for the classic black bar to begin with.
Black bars are so passe. Bluring/pixelating is better. Just don't blur your own face. Take your sheriff's photo and blur it all you like...
Oh wait, this isn't about Doctor Who... never mind.
the thing is cops have a lot of power to fabricate or destory evidence. How is the court supposed to verify that the gun the cops claim was in the victims house and the bullet they claim was recovered from the crime scene really came from those places?
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
There will be some loss at edges, but this "twirl" looks like a completely reversible operation to me. I seriously hope criminals will keep being this stupid.
Blurring is different, it removes inromation. In some cases blurring might just not remove enough information. For example (as one of the lonks in the story shows), blurring keeps the sum of black and white constant in an area. If you then have to distinguish between a sign with little black in it and one with a lot, that is still possible with blurrs. What is not possible is to reconstruct faces from blurrs. Unless you have several blurred images of the same face or a movie. Then unblurring faces could become a reasl possibility.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
...oh wait, that's what this man did. He thought long and hard.
Very long, and very hard.
It is patently ridiculous to imply there is some secret or sophisticated method to undoing the twirl effect as available in Photoshop. All one needs to do is find the bounds of the distortion (which, admitted, is a painful process of trial and error), then perform the distortion with an opposite value to the original. This particular effect is not intended to destroy any pixels, only relocate them, so restoration is intuitive. You can all try this at home: simply load an image, twirl it, then perform the inverse as I describe. And with a little determination, you can successfully reverse the effect on the article photograph (as I did).
Why bother.
The AP article did mention that AP were able to produce an almost recognizable image using commercially available photo editing software but not a good as the one Interpol had produced.
Wild butt guess ahead...
Interpol geeks probably ran some tests to determine approximately how much twirl was applied to the original image and then created a 24bit image slightly larger than the twirled area assigning a unique 24 bit value to each pixel and then applied the same amount of twirl.
They could then look at the twirled test image and come up with a mapping of twirled pixels to untwirled pixels. This information could be used to "untwirl" the original image by grabbing the pixels at the twirled coordinates and moving them back to where the mapping says they probably originated.
Of course there would be some pixels lost and extra pixels created during the original twirling but chances are the original image could be approximated fairly well by interpolating between the recovered pixels. You'd not get a picture perfect result but something somewhat blurry as can be seen in the recovered pixels.
Of course they might have done something more mathematical but if I was going to try this myself I'd probably just give the method I described above a shot first and see if I came up with something looking like a face.
As others have pointed out here, a blur, especially a gaussian blur, is mathematically trivial to undo. The only difficulties come from the fact that the blur an image editing program applies isn't a true gaussian - because of rounding and the fact that the picture plane isn't infinite.
my password really is 'stinkypants'
remember some cases when people deleted data in word documents but did not purged the undo history
or cases when people added black onto a pdf document, without converting the document (open it with acrobat writer & remove the color)
as always, people must know what they do
The world belongs to those who get up early. - I'm far from being the king of Earth then
Am I the only one disappointed to find out that this doesn't have anything to do with the Rockstar game?
sigs are hazardous to your health
If this were an episode of CSI They could have simply drag-and-dropped the photo into their "automatically un-distort face in image" program, then zoomed in over the man's shoulder to read the artist's signature of a painting behind him. Then recognizing that these paintings are only sold from one obscure store in New York City, they drag-and-drop the photo into their "compare to every frame of every NYC ATM to this picture" program and found a frame of him standing conveniently in front of his license plate, which they could also zoom in to read the registration sticker text.
Get with the times Interpol. Sheesh, CSI wouldn't even have had to use their "match a partial fingerprint I zoomed in 6000% to get off of a glass of water in a 72dpi jpeg to every known felon in the US in under 10 seconds during witty banter" program to solve this one!
-- I'm not a pessimist, I'm a realist. It's not my fault that life sucks so much. --
Yes, for the average /.er this is absolutely trivial :
the idiot used a filter that just moved the data around in predictable way (in circles), and the police did transpose the data in the opposite direction and got the picture back. The picture was not blurred at all (in the mathematical sense of lowering the resolution).
Interpol bragged about it not because of some obscure technical feat. They bragged about as a PR stunt, in order to take advantage of the " CSI effect ".
Joe 6 pack, has recently started to understand that incredibly big zooms, with some magical "picture enhancement effects" that keeps incredible amount of details - as done by Deckart in Blade Runner, or regularly featured on CSI - can't be actually achieved in real life. Because everyone is criticizing those shows for the lack of realism in their zooming achievement.
But now Interpol pulls this PR stunt, where they show how they managed to recover the identity of the maniac. Now people every where are starting to think "Oh may god ! They actually have the technology ! They can "enhance" pictures and get the faces back !". The goal of Interpol was to instill fear in would-be criminal who would hope to stay anonymous with some photoshop tricks tricks. Maybe this wasn't the only stuff that was openly criticized in CSI but that was secretly doable by the real police. Now cue-in some armchair conspiracy theorists, who could pretend that the whole criticizing of "unrealistic police TV-shows" was a government conspiracy to cover up technology that actually exist (additional points earned if technology is of alien origin), or they could say that government has put a backdoor inside Photoshop that does keep the blurred faces saved in steganography (bonus point for using buzzword).
They are creating a climate of FUD, in the hope to deter would-be criminals.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
I was afraid to use the word Interpol because I thought some of you young hipsters would have started posting random lyric snippets from the band.
Shiny. Let's be bad guys...
seriously though, the cops aren't paid by how many cases they solve or get bonuses. and in this case, the method to retrieve the face is rather simple. so made up? quite probably not unless they made up the photos they found on the internet too.
point of having multiple levels in justice systems is to get to be relatively sure about things. thus, investigators are different from prosecution who are different from defense who are different from jury who are different from judge...
much better than everyone of those being just one person, like in some systems.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
They apply reverse twirl, probably deconvolution, and some enhancement filters until they got something which looks like a picture of a man. Or they let artist to enhance the resulting image until it looks like a man. But why should anyone believe that the resulting picture is of the same man that was before the image was scrambled ? The only way to prove validity of the method it is to disclose it and let everyone to check it on several dozens of images.
It's a miniature replica of Al Gore's head.
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what i've always found crazy about digital images... i'm looking at a blank monitor screen (don't get smart, i have 2 monitors). on that screen, every possible image no matter how private, or bizzare is available by just activating the correct pixels. seriously, every scene from history. every fantasy. in photo realistic detail. what if there was a program that would plow through every possible combination. what images might pop up? why waste bluegene on chess? creepy.
*sits back and watches slashdot legal "experts" engage in mental masturbation from the confines of their mothers' basements*
I'm sure you all could have passed the bar exams in your respective states if only you'd had the proper motivation. Fucking sunlight-hating faggots.
For their next trick, Interpol will turn dark-side-of-the-earth satellite photos into something legible using their custom-built Photoshop plugin, Turn On the Bright Lights.
Shop as usual. And avoid panic buying.
Please lets get the terminology correct - the perp's image was distorted with a swirl tool, not blurred. The distinction is that distorting moves the image data to different locations based on a mathematical formula, usually with little change to the data, run that formula in reverse regains the original image.
Blurring spreads the data from a single pixel over an undetermined number of other pixels. Depending on how the blur is applied gives varying degrees of difficulty in reversing the blur. Applying a Gaussian blur to the whole image or section usually means that the Gaussian is used once on each pixel so the new pixel's value is a known sum of the pixels around it. However, most image packages have a blur tool that blurs what's under the cursor, so the movement of the cursor determines what the contribution is to the final pixels.
It's great that the prep obviously had no understanding of the difference, as with any luck he'll be caught.
Because I can take the same picture in photoshop and get the same result as them in about 2 minutes. Take off your tinfoil hat its not rocket science.
If interpol or some other "good guys" can do it to identify the bad guys, the bad guys could do it too. How about the many photos in which victims' faces, or vulnerable witnesses, or whistleblowers, are blurred in some similar way. I can't help imagining some poor sod who, years back, gave evidence that put some members of a dangerous gang behind bars, feeling safe in the knowledge that the only photos which appeared had their faces blurred out, then reading this news item ...
Ask me about repetitive DNA
Everyone who's talking about blur/twirl/pixelation has forgoten the important thing. Interpol had multiple images. Think of this as having several frames from a film. This gave them enough information to not only un blur/twirl but to compensate for pixelization. So there was a bit more then that used to get the recovered images
Mod me up/Mod me down: I wont frown as I've no crown
This is what interpol site says:
INTERPOL is seeking the help of the public to try to identify this man, photographed sexually abusing children in a series of images posted on the Internet......
I have seen that guy somewhere, I remember him because of his very distinct features.
You can't handle the truth.
Even easier would be to just paste someone else's face over the face you are trying to obscure. After that, you can apply your favorite distortion technique.
Result: the distorted part of the image will still look like a distorted face. But if someone manages to reverse your whiz-bang distorting technique, all they'll see is that you pasted some other face over the real face.
They don't grade fathers, but if your daughter's a stripper, you fucked up. --Chris Rock
In the practical world we live in this is great for identifying the ****. However in the legal world his lawyers live in surely all they have to do is claim that the prosecution is relying on a doctored digital image as the sole evidence...?
~Pev
"Interpol Unscrambles Doctored Photo In Manhunt"
"Interpol Unlocks Les Paul in Guitar Hero II"
"Interpol Tracks Down Level -1 in Super Mario Bros."
"Interpol Acquires 'Marathon Man' Achievement in Halo III"
"Interpol Microwaves Weird Ed's Hamster in Maniac Mansion"
While this at first seems like an interesting challenge, a little math will reveal the futility of it:
Even assuming only a 640x480x256 monitor, you are talking about 307200 pixels -- each of which can have 256 different colors (definately not the photo realism you are looking for).
307200 ^ 256 = 6.023 x 10 ^ 1404
This number is by a wide margin larger than the estimated number of atoms in the known universe.
(4x10^79 according to http://www.madsci.org/posts/archives/oct98/905633072.As.r.html).
Edit >> Undo
Of course if cops want to be dodgy there is very little that can be done - especially in the short term. That pretty much holds true for anybody in a position of trust. Now obviously we want to keep positions of trust to a minimum, but they certainly seem like a necessary evil.
Interpol discovers the real secret hidden behind the Myspace angles.
...or at least something about it? The twirl filter is a canned algorithm in photoshop so, as others have pointed out, it doesn't seem so shocking that one could untwirl it post hoc if just handed the image. However, given an arbitrary home grown distortion or filter, I'm not so sure it would be so straightforward. I supose if you knew the initial state was a face, perhaps that alone would help leverage some information about the mapping.
i\hbar\dot{\psi}=\hat{H}\psi
-----sig-----
"...and always remember
the last words of my grandfather,
who said '.....a truck!'.....
Fortunately this child molester wasn't smart enough to simply place a layer with another picture over his face. That way the police are able to catch him for his disgusting crimes.
...there is hope for all that Japanese pr0n!
Next time you twist your photo just do it twice. Once to the left and one to the right. A black box always helps.
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
Somewhat off topic: I saw this story on the tv the other night and got to thinking.... /.? that seems unlikely - we can ask if the camera makers are encoding a serial number in the CCD (in the style of the color copier makers) I suppose it would be OK if it's a camera dedicated for the pedophile market.
Can you fingerprint a digital camera? There must be some pattern in the sensitivity of the CCD. And is it reproducible and measurable? It seems you'd need to have a bunch of images to play with, and there is random noise in addition to the image itself to contend with. Police agencies must be working to try to determine how many different images are made by the same perp.
For the paranoids among us - on
This tecnique is similar in principal to laminar flow effects demonstated in the following video;
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p08_KlTKP50
They just twirled the image in the reverse direction?
Sometimes the simplest idea is the least obvious.
-- Boycott Shell
You can blur an image beynod any resorable level, the guy just didn't in this case instead using a blur tool with completely predictable patterns.
Blurring doesn't have to be simple, it can do a lot more than just twist the image around a little bit. Blurring out things like license plates or human faces can easily be done in a non-recoverable way. If not then encryption itself would also be ineffective. However in the case of blurring, unlike encryption, you need not ever reproduce the original, so the data itself can be changed or corrupted in a fashion the ensures it cannot be put back together.
At some point even math will just create pretty pictures out of the possibilities but never re-create data that's been altered or at least never in the sense of human lifetimes.
The key is remembering blurring can't alter the data, it just needs to appear blurred. Unlike encryption which can all technically be broken through brute force, even brute force can't restore an image blurred well since the blurring can be irreversable, unlike encryption.
If the definition of blur meant all the image data had to be kept, but re-ordered then it would be reversable, but why would you want to do that?
So blurring can fully obscure an image because it's an effect and needs not hold the orginal data to appear blurred. However I guess many standard blur effects do preserve most of the data simple to ensure it appears like a blurred version of the orginal, there is no reason a company like google couldn't manufacture a secure blur.
Your "cue" has brought precisely zero people out of the woodwork. The technological aspect of this story is far more interesting that the legal aspect -- I think we can all agree that sexual predation on children is horrific. Nice try. Actually, I take that back. Pathetic try.
Also interesting is the fact that a pixel-based device can only represent a FINITE number of images. At, say, 24-bit color with a resolution of 1280x1024, there are 2^24^1280^1024 possible images. That's an enormous number, but it's FINITE.
What does it mean though? Are there an infinite number of images out there that we can never see, due to the limited ability of our display devices? In actuality the human eye is limited in its ability to distinguish color and spatial variation, and so even our finite screens are probably sufficient to display anything we might ever be interested in looking at.
I simply do not understand this obsession with mosaics, blurs, or twirls to obfuscate data. Why not remove the data? A big black bar of pixels is very difficult to recover from. Or, replace one's face (in the image) with Paris Holton's, or Margaret Thatcher, or any other well-known person.
OTOH, what's to say that the person didn't already do that in THIS case. If they replaced their face in the image with someone else's, and THEN did the blur/twirl, that might be a very clever form of misdirection.
Imagine this, you set up a site where people can upload a friend's picture, then the site generates a page identical to: http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5jEqujs4XznURU-pQRQutqHHr4nfwD8S54O0O0 but with one twist... both pictures are of your friend (one twirled, one untwirled).
Oh god... I wonder if I can get a pic of the CEO....
Of course you need to figure out the size and center of the twirl and its angle, but I'm guessing the twirl function didn't just relocate pixels but overlapped them and averaged them. In a way, the overlapped areas would be like a one-way hash function: there would be no direct way to calculate/decrypt what the original data was, but a program could be written to guess-and-check all the possible inputs to find ones that match the output (like a hash collision) and then determine which was the most likely input.
It actually sounds like a fun program to write...
This program was probably built with BHS SDK, the Bank Hacking System; a very advanced kit which can do many other things automagically.
The saddest poem
And further, if you had some ultra-new bitchin' LCD screen with 1 microsecond refresh rate and ran through the changes at the limit of the screen, it would take 6.023e+1404 / 1e6 seconds which is about 1.9e+1385 million years, quite a bit longer than the age of the universe, and more than enough time for every star currently burning in the universe to cool to a black cinder a degree or two above absolute zero.
Uber uncrackable image doctoring script:
1. Select a rectangle around your face
2. Fill with black
3. ????
4. PERVERT!!!!!!!
For everything else, there's unsharp mask. You'd be surprised the kind of things you can "enhance" from a chunky low-resolution image.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
During the 18th and 19th centuries there was a brief art movement, heavy on the optical illusions. Basic mathematical gridwork would create massive smears of paint along a dozen yards of wall. But stand at one end and look down the length, the mush would coalesce into the intended landscape or portrait. One of the popular parlour techniques was to create a seemingly random "swirl" of color on a flat table/canvas. The viewer would place a mirrored or polished metal cylinder or inverted cone onto the table, and the swirl would transform into a face upon the cylinder.
In other words, this trick is SO old, that if Interpol had brought H.G. Wells in for questioning about trying to tamper with a time machine museum "mock up", and Wells saw this photoshopped photo with the face swirl sitting on the inspector's desk, he would have made a cone out of an empty paper towel roll and some tinfoil, and easily revealed the identity of the suspect.
Then he would probably have recognized the face as belonging to his old nemesis Jack the Ripper, and would then quickly dismantle his makeshift viewer and begin to look for a means of escape.
The BBC's coverage of the story is as usual far less sensational and more informative: "The pictures had been manipulated to disguise the man's face with a swirl pattern, but computer specialists at Germany's federal police agency, the BKA, worked with Interpol's human trafficking team to produce identifiable images.". The other news (that story is from yesterday) is that there have already been quite a few reported sightings, although naturally most are probably just overreactions.
every possible image no matter how private, or bizzare is available
Yup. That's how it would work, all right: random noise... random noise... random noise... WHOA! A PIC OF WHO REALLY SHOT JFK!
Mod down people who tell people how to mod in their sigs
Interpol must have the technical resources to do a better job than a fudged untwirl. The image, with distorted left side, is still rather vague. But, perhaps encouraging folk to take their suspicions about their neighbours more seriously, is a good "side-effect".
Also, read The library of Babel
Try double ROT-13. Twice as secure!
Now you've heard about cars that didn't explode. :P
A twirl, for the most part, just moves pixels around, and you can recover the original by simply moving the pixels back.
A blur is a transformation in which information is actually lost as pixel values get averaged and quantized. When people recover information from blurred images it's based on knowledge about what was originally there; for example, if you know it's one of 10 digits in a particular font, then you can often figure out what the digit was even if the image is blurred. You can probably not recover high resolution face images from blurred images because it's the fine details that matter.
on that screen, every possible image no matter how private, or bizzare is available by just activating the correct pixels. seriously, every scene from history. every fantasy. in photo realistic detail. what if there was a program that would plow through every possible combination. what images might pop up? why waste bluegene on chess?
Yes, but beware the subset of images containing Muhammed....
- T