I mean, Walz outright called him out on it.

The only reason trump allowed vance to be his VP (aside from all the ties to right wing tech billionairres…) is that he has committed to not having a spine. pence had a spine for all of one day and did his job and obeyed the will of the people. vance obeys the will of trump and knows he will be fired (if not given some Novichok) should he turn from that.

The thing is? Ignoring the apparent void that black skin creates on all cameras (oy), it doesn’t take much time. It takes computing power.

As poops and giggles a few friends and I took the public (rumble…) traffic camera feeds that a nearby county has online. Set up a simple python script to scrape those and then configured an off the shelf tool to track a buddy’s general car (green hatchback) and told him to just drive around for an hour.

We were able to map his route with about 70% accuracy with about two hours of scripting and reading documentation. And there are companies that provide MUCH better products for the people who have access to the direct feeds and all the cameras we don’t have access to.

I mean, you definitely want to wear a mask and some goggles at a protest. If only for the purpose of pepper spray. I totally don’t have a thin gaiter, goggles ,and a beanie and have definitely not heard great things about mountain biking helmets (the ones with faceguards) and totally am not considering grabbing one next time I do an REI run.

But also be aware that, with protests, you are almost always up against the groups who have access to all those “traffic” cameras and the like. And computer vision makes it fairly trivial to identify when a bunch of unmasked people walked into a dark alley and came out with their faces fully covered by tracking them back from the 4th street protest. It isn’t Enemy Of The State levels of asking Baby Busey and Jamie Kennedy to generate a 3d model from a single shot of Big Willy Style ogling some ta-tas, but most of the ways surveillance is used during that sequence are shockingly realistic and feasible.

Rhetorical question (because we clearly can infer the answer) but… have you ever seen a black person?

A bit of melanin does not make you into some giant void that breaks all cameras. Black folk aren’t doing long exposure shots for selfies or group photos. Believe it or not but RDCWorld doesn’t need to use nightvision cameras to film a skit.

Yeah but this is (basically) reddit and clearly it isn’t racism and is just a problem of multi megapixel cameras not being sufficient to properly handle the needs of phrenology.

There is definitely some truth to needing to tweak how feature points (?) are computed and the like. But yeah, training data goes a long way and this is why there was a really big push to get better training data sets out there… until we all realized those would predominantly be used by corporations and that people don’t really want to be the next Lenna because they let some kid take a picture of them for extra credit during an undergrad course.

No. I have worked with phone camera sensors quite a bit (see above regarding evaluating facial recognition software…).

Yes, the computation is a Thing. A bigger Thing is just accessing the databases to match the faces. That is why this gets offloaded to a server farm somewhere.

But the actual computer vision and source image? You can get more than enough contours and features from dark skin no matter how much you desperately try to talk about how “difficult” black skin is without dropping an n-word. You just have to put a bit of effort in to actually check for those rather than do what a bunch of white grad students did twenty years ago (or just do what a bunch of multicultural grad students did five or six years ago but…).

For low contrast greyscale sequrity cameras? Sure.

For any modern even SD color camera in a decently lit scenario? Bullshit. It is just that most of this tech is usually trained/debugged on the developers and their friends and families and… yeah.

I always love to tell the story of, maybe a decade and a half ago, evaluating various facial recognition software. White people never had any problems. Even the various AAPI folk in the group would be hit or miss (except for one project out of Taiwan that was ridiculously accurate). And we weren’t able to find a single package that consistently identified even the same black person.

And even professional shills like MKBHD will talk around this problem during his review ads (the apple vision video being particularly funny).

Apple already demonstrated that you can still get pretty darn close from eyes and hair. Combine that with a bit of logic (There is a 40% chance this is Sally Smith but she also lives three streets over and works on that street) and you still have very good odds.

Well… unless you are black, brown, or asian. Since the facial recognition tech is heavily geared toward white people because tech bros.

This has been going on for decades.

It is a bit scary right now. But odds are one side will blink, make a “statement” attack with little to no casualties, and then things will cool down for another year or so until it ramps up again.

A big part of it is that we can’t be certain they don’t already have nukes (or dirty bombs). And removing their nuclear capability is the kind of existential threat that leads to “Fuck it, we ball” levels of counterattacks.

Its comparable to using very measured responses against russian aggression.

And they change nothing? It still boils down to human beings being liable.

It was much more obvious in the first half hour, but vance is basically giving the same speech they would have given if Biden were still running. And Walz doesn’t have a good way to say “you do realize Kamala wasn’t the POTUS for the past 3.5 years, right?”

There isn’t really much respect.

The key is that both of them are basically reading their scripts. Walz because he is inexperienced and vance because he has clearly been yelled at for saying stuff his orange overlord does not like. But they are both making it a point to key in on one or two words the other person said to make it sound like they are listening or whatever.

Hosting costs money. Theoretically (some) cryptocurrency can obfuscate that but… there is a reason graph problems got really popular again for a little bit.

But domain names also cost money. They also need to be registered to a person/company.

That is why a lot of torrent sites end up getting their domain stolen.

Also, all of this ignores the actual developers. But that is par for the course when it comes to discussing liability with open source projects.

Yes. There are millenia of conflicts. There are millenia of conflicts around the globe. You get two groups of humans next to each other and they are going to start stabbing each other.

But it was normal (apologies for the negative connotations) tribal warfare. Different regions would fight other regions as both skirmishes and conquest. But it was largely when Westerners decided to draw up a bunch of maps with no willingness to understand the residents that we began the current cycles of horror. Because lets say you hate the Reds and the Reds hate you. But now? Now you live in a city with one Red and the rest of the Reds live in a city with one You. Eventually someone decides to do some ethnic cleansing which leads to retaliatory ethnic cleansing and more wars and so forth.

And, inevitably, warlords see an opportunity to gain power. Which leads to refugees which leads to ethnic cleansing which leads to…

Yeah. It is why I really like that Proton basically say "We will turn on you in an instant if we get a legal order. But here is what we’ll actually turn over and here is how you can minimize your vulnerability to that.

Well. The current conflict with Israel only really goes back about 80-ish years. And there are strong arguments that the current iranian proxy wars are a different conflict with different root causes but… yeah.

The region itself? Most of that goes back to when The West decided to redraw borders with no real logic other than guaranteeing cyclic wars of ethnic cleansing between warlord. I want to say that is more 150-ish years, but I genuinely forget. So it very well could be centuries in that regard.

But the way to think of it? The former is why EVERYONE hates Israel. The latter is why nobody is actually interested in helping the Palestinians and just view them as a way to bleed IDF resources and give the government rope to hang themselves with.

C&Ds and legal threats still go to a person who isn’t going to go to jail or have their wages garnished by Mario until the end of their days.

At best you have a single gitlab instance running in a country that is known to not cooperate with those kinds of demands. But… just ask the various torrent sites how well that works after actively pissing off an army of lawyers who don’t mind slipping a hosting company a couple hundred bucks to get the identity and address of the person paying for that.

Plenty of hosts and providers over the years have claimed to be super privacy oriented and blah blah blah. Once they get a legal request, they roll over. Because they aren’t going to prison for the customer anymore than they are going to prison for you.

Nope.

C&Ds and legal threats still go to a person who isn’t going to go to jail or have their wages garnished by Mario until the end of their days.

At best you have a single gitlab instance running in a country that is known to not cooperate with those kinds of demands. But… just ask the various torrent sites how well that works after actively pissing off an army of lawyers who don’t mind slipping a hosting company a couple hundred bucks to get the identity and address of the person paying for that.

What is the alternative?

Closed source “I swear this executable that will let you play all the games you want is legit” hosted on sourceforge or random websites that get hugged to death every day that ends in a y?

Also: it isn’t like that would stop this kind of legal action. MS/Github are barely a factor. It is the devs themselves getting the “hey, stop it or we’ll turn you into indentured servants” letters.