Police In China Are Scanning Travelers With Facial Recognition Glasses (engadget.com)

Baron_Yam shares a report from Engadget: Police in China are now sporting glasses equipped with facial recognition devices and they're using them to scan train riders and plane passengers for individuals who may be trying to avoid law enforcement or are using fake IDs. So far, police have caught seven people connected to major criminal cases and 26 who were using false IDs while traveling, according to People's Daily. The Wall Street Journal reports that Beijing-based LLVision Technology Co. developed the devices. The company produces wearable video cameras as well and while it sells those to anyone, it's vetting buyers for its facial recognition devices. And, for now, it isn't selling them to consumers. LLVision says that in tests, the system was able to pick out individuals from a database of 10,000 people and it could do so in 100 milliseconds. However, CEO Wu Fei told the Wall Street Journal that in the real world, accuracy would probably drop due to "environmental noise." Additionally, aside from being portable, another difference between these devices and typical facial recognition systems is that the database used for comparing images is contained in a hand-held device rather than the cloud."

Comments

China leads the way

[DNS-and-BIND]

Once again the fearful USA is left behind by the boldness of China in adopting and utilizing advanced technology. Under globalism, those who do not keep up are destined to be left behind in the dust. There is also a significant first-mover advantage as whoever adopts these technologies first realizes a distinct advantage over the timid ones who wait too long. The American response has been one of avoidance and evasion. Why? Because Americans seem to fear that if they stare at reality squarely, they will find reality staring back in a most discomforting way.

A lot of smart people are starting to argue in favor of the China Model. It avoids the pitfalls of American dumbocracy, of which the hazards are only too clear after the results 2016 election. Political meritocracy has a lot of upside, in fact a better word for it might be "vertical democratic meritocracy". Democracy works well at the lower levels of government. But, in a huge country, as you go up the political chain of command, the issues become more complex and mistakes become more costly. Thereâ(TM)s a need to institutionalize a system to select and promote leaders with superior qualities. China has it, and America is trying with all its might to pretend globalism doesn't exist and it can still get by with its antiquated system. Democracy on the bottom, experimentation in the middle, and meritocracy on top is a good way of thinking about how to govern a large country.

The Moon is a Harsh Mistress

[Anonymous Coward]

Seriously fuck this, we were supposed to have a colony on the Moon, Mars, or the belt in time for this shit. We were supposed to secede and leave the wealth hording lords and ladies and their simpering jackboot glassholes to oppress the unemployed welfare cases in the gravity well of Earth while we took the high frontier where we could easily defend ourselves from their machinations.
Was that Falcon Heavy launch of a suited dummy in a car just to remind us that we did too little too late to escape and thrive as humans?

Computer assisted/enhanced police work

[VeryFluffyBunny]

To me this looks like an example of how these technologies should be used. Rather than for illegal dragnet surveillance and profiling that turns everyone into a suspect, they're using facial recognition to help cops do what they've always done: Look for criminal suspects for whom the police already have probable cause or an arrest warrant. It's probably a lot cheaper and easier to manage than the massive databases of innocent citizens that the NSA, CIA, FBI, DEA, etc., are collecting and is far less likely to suffer from false positives and negatives.