I thought the same thing and did some searching. Based on the street price of potatoes in China, it's in the neighborhood of 30k pounds. More if that number is wholesale value.
The other thing we can surmise which is strange about the crime: He had to have stolen a truck worth of potatoes. So he either used his own truck, or he stole a truck and then gave it back after having fenced the potatoes.
>So he either used his own truck, or he stole a truck and then gave it back after having fenced the potatoes.
I wonder if it's possible that he ditched the truck afterwards, it was recovered unharmed, so they didn't bother charging him with that, or the article just didn't bother listing the additional charge of truck theft since the potato theft was far worse financially.
Masks and temporary/permanent face altering techniques will explode as this technology takes hold. I think about it like ad-blocking, something that may work itself into the mainstream despite it's questionable ethics.
> Masks and temporary/permanent face altering techniques will explode as this technology takes hold
Along with a corresponding explosion in legislation to prevent you from covering your face in public. It already exists in France (popularly known as the 'Burqa Ban', but I think it covers other face coverings).
I'm especially curious to see how this will go down in the UK, which is increasingly authoritarian while often painfully politically correct.
An ill-thought-out and ambiguous piece of law will be rushed through Parliament, with various exemptions for religious groups. The far right will become outraged about these exemptions, and stage protests. The "nothing to hide, nothing to fear" brigade will be out in force. The government will make vague statements about protecting us from terrorists. Paedophiles will definitely be mentioned at some point.
Eventually there'll be farcical prosecutions of people who were just cycling to work with a pollution mask, or going to a fancy-dress party. And the police will continue to claim they're under-funded, while somehow finding the resources to pursue bullshit like this.
You're allowed to cover your face in France, just not in such a way that it signals religious affiliation. The point of the French law is to prevent anyone from being able to identify, through observation in a public place, what a stranger's religion is (under the theory that you can't commit hate crimes if you can't identify your outgroup; and that a generation that grew up not seeing any hate crimes committed—even if there were people who wanted to commit them, but just found it impractical—might grow up to be less hateful.)
(Anyone who wonders why France is unique in having such a law should remember that France changed hands between Protestant and Catholic monarchs roughly two dozen times, and each time there was a mini-crusade, with citizens of the religion-in-power urged to "coerce" citizens of the religion-out-of-power to converting with whatever means necessary. That died down enough that there was never a law made to stop it at the time, but France saw the potential for such cyclical violence to begin again when it joined the EU and began getting increasing levels of immigration from non-Christian cultures, and so figured that such a law was long past due.)
> under the theory that you can't commit hate crimes if you can't identify your outgroup
That's such hilariously appalling logic. "What's the common thread in all hate crimes? That's right--minorities! If we force the minorities to stay undercover, no one will be able to attack them! Problem solved."
Or to take the idea further, can you wear a cross necklace and a halloween mask? Or a hijab and a welding mask?
One item is signalling your religion, the other is covering your face. Neither item is covering your face in a way that signals your religion.
I feel like any attempt at imposing anti-privacy laws while keeping some pretence of a free society ultimately descends into farce, because the two ideas are basically incompatible.
No, you misunderstand; the law doesn't say anything about covering your face, it just says "you can't display your religious affiliation in public." A hijab happens to cover your face, but it's illegal to wear in public only because it's a religious telltale, not because of its function.
You can't wear the cross necklace, or have the bumper-sticker; they signal religion. And you can wear the halloween mask, or the welding mask; they don't signal religion. There's nothing more to it than that, and there's no complex interaction.
If you can still see the hijab under the welding mask (and you can; the welding mask doesn't cover the back of your head, or your neck) then the hijab has gotta go. (And, to be extra clear, it's a unilateral rule: nuns and priests can't wear their vestments in public either! They've gotta change into them at the church/nunnery, and change back before they leave.)
On the other hand, if you wear a cross necklace under your clothes where nobody can see it, that's perfectly fine. Because, again, the point is that you can't signal your religion. The symbols aren't against the law; displaying them is.
And so, actually, wearing a hijab would be fine if you wear, say, a motorcycle helmet over your head, and a bandana over the lower half of your face. You're covering all the same area—but, because nobody can tell that you're wearing a hijab, and because neither a motorcycle helmet nor a bandana signal religious affiliation, you're fine. The symbol is hidden, like the cross under your clothes is hidden.
(Interestingly, since the point of the hijab tradition is to cover these areas, not to look a specific way, anything that covers these areas is "functionally" still a hijab as far as Islamic social norms are concerned. So wearing just the motorcycle helmet + bandana would actually be a perfectly legitimate way to cohere to your religious beliefs, without [legibly] signalling your religion. ...until, that is, every Muslim woman started doing it; then it'd become a legible religious symbol, and so be banned as well.)
EDIT: I think we are indeed talking about different laws.
You’re referring to an older one that bans religious symbolism in public institutions. So what you describe is correct, when we’re talking about schools and hospitals.
Hmm... living mostly in France I see at least one person wearing a muslim or hebrew head-thinggy on the street almost every day. Is the law actually unenforced? Or are these people clerics (Imams or Rabis) going to/from work and they are exempt from this? ...just curious, gonna ask around.
Wouldn't that require you to ban all visible religious garb to be effective? But I don't think they ban nuns' habits or priest uniforms or even hijabs, so ...?
It's a class 6 felony, which in VA means you'll be looking at "a term of imprisonment of not less than one year nor more than five years, or in the discretion of the jury or the court trying the case without a jury, confinement in jail for not more than 12 months and a fine of not more than $2,500, either or both".
If the technology just stayed at facial recognition, maybe - I work on stereoscopic vision, so you'd have to change your head geometry too for my cameras if you're in parallax range..... and we're getting to the point of being able to do realtime skeletal pose analysis -- https://storage.googleapis.com/tfjs-models/demos/posenet/cam...
So, it's an arms race :-/
Probably - its an arms race after all - at this time for the stupider systems the following steps can confuse them
1 - use makeup techniques to make the nose fade into the face and don't let it get a profile view - noses are very important - a prosthetic nose probably won't help tho, cause the nose is an orientation characteristic more than an identification one
2 - eyes and the facial geometry around them are secondary, so no nose and giant movie star sunglasses adds to the machines confusion
3 - collar worn sparkle lighting directed upwards is baffling to machine - silly things keep picking up the light sparkles on the face as feature points (heh)
4 - makeup patterns based on the WW2 ship camouflage mess up geometry detection
Now, all of that will defeat a simple recognizer but if the developers had a lick of sense, the system will still pop it out as anomalous.
Mission impossible facial masks could certainly help, but pretty much everyone is removing the IR filters at this point and the facial thermography would be all messed up
Then there's all the work going on in recognizing more than just a face - I've seen some stuff on incorporating more of the body into the recognition pattern (I've always wanted to watch one of those systems misrecognize Mitch McConnell as a turtle :-) As the available horsepower continues to expand, more of the totality of the individual can be recognized (my own accidental contribution to this is that cheap stereoscopic vision makes it a lot easier/more accurater to pick out foreground from background)
At the end of the day, I think Scott McNeally had it right in the '90s - "You have no privacy. Get over it" I am of mixed minds about this stuff in public spaces, the good and bad examples are evenly distributed
Or maybe infrared reflecting material similar to sun block.
The local cancer society came to my workplace to promote skin health and one of the items was a small camera system. You put sun block on one part of your face, stuck your head in a box and a camera and screen showed the sunblock as black paint.
If an IR type of material could be made you could paint geometric dazzle type paint on your face to obscure its geometry.
Slick idea - I'd be concerned tho that, given the semi normal rough distribution of heat on the face (there's a reason head wounds bleed so much) that this attempt to game the system would be easily detected as gaming the system. The good news is any idiots building a product by bolting together parts from OpenCV that they barely understand would probably fall for it. Me, I'd be embarrassed if I didn't tag you as anomalous.
HOWEVER - if you were really really good and accurate with the application of the blocker (cause if its zinc oxide it does work in both directions) and you backed it up with makeup for the visible light side of the house, you probably could fool most by establishing a completely different facial geometry.
Anyway, certainly a concept worth ruminating on. :-) I think it would beat me at my imaginary best if done well. Have to find a counter, I guess.. Like gait :-)
Nice catch - I was completely oblivious to it till you pointed it out, and it was an accident, I swear! Lazarus Long says punsters and practical jokers get keelhauled or staked out on anthills :-( That's no fun
Masks, face altering, stickers, etc. I like this research about "Adversarial Patches" - stickers that confuse image recognition systems. I imagine one may wear a display with ever changing images that are salient and confuse such systems.
There is nothing ethically questionable about ad blocking. Advertisers would like you to believe that there is, and perhaps at some point in the past it arguably was.
However, today [not] using an ad-blocker is as ethically questionable as having [un]protected sex with a stranger. There isn't a single ad network that does not, every now and then, dish out drive by malware.
I'm glad you commented. My original commented mentioned how I thought the fashion industry might take this on. Both as a way to generate new revenue, but also a way to stay "cutting edge" aka trendy.
It's one thing to wear a "face mod" because you're paranoid - it's quite another to wear one because your favorite celebrity does.
sadly the text only version links to the home page not the article, which is odd since one can guess the url from the link -> https://text.npr.org/s.php?sId=613692526
I tend to believe there's still issues with the technology and/or data in/data out issues (unless, for example, the Chinese have REALLY good photos of people to start with -- that's the excuse the British police gave in the above story for the 91 percent false positive rate).
10 years from now frontpage HN: "Thanks to cameras placed in every room of every Chinese house, 10,000 people have been saved from otherwise being abused, kidnapped, raped or trafficked this month alone!"
If you have nothing to hide, you are literally worthless! (In a financial sense, not saying this as an offense.)
People should get it that in a full fledged information economy the only thing that will have value will be information that they only they have. So encrypt, don't share, obsfucate, and when applicable use legal protection like patents for anything you can...
Never know what might be of value. One of the few good ideas I've hear in the crypto space is owning and encripting your personal data so that only you can sell it to advertisers. Sounds retarded, but as more and more things will become worthless there might be some prophecy of a future to come...
No need to thank GDPR, text-only NPR.org has been a thing for a while. It's been in my bookmarks for at least six months (and likely existed before that).
Or I suppose you could thank GDPR for pointing you to it in the first place. :-)
I'm just guessing, but GDPR does require that if a person says "no" to tracking (or rather, if they do not explicitly opt-in), that the service cannot be degraded. So I'm wondering if NPR is just serving completely script-less, ad-less text to provide the same thing to this audience?
I wonder how regulators would look at this practise. It would depend on whether taking away formatting and any image / video content counts as degrading. For some people this is desirable, but for others it may not be.
My interpretation is that they would be free to give the text-only version to EU residents unilaterally, but not to make formatting tied to tracking consent, as tracking is not functionally necessary for formatting.
As an extreme example, I don't think Youtube could have "yes, track me and let me watch the video" and "no, read text transcript of video" as options and claim equivalency.
I think the discussion about this will be had in the coming months - though at least the lawmakers' intent seems to be strongly discouraging "bundling" unessential things together.
> For some people this is desirable, but for others it may not be.
In principle yes, but I have a hard time believing the NPR text-only site was designed for usefulness.
E.g., articles like [1] still contain all the inter-article links of the original - however, instead of linking to the text-only versions of those articles (which would be the reasonable thing to do if you're already on a text-only article) they try to get you back to the full version.
Worse still, if you decline, you get directed back to the front page. There is actually no way to follow the links of the articles without either URL hacking or agreeing to be tracked.
Additionally, the text-only front page only gives access to the latest headlines - no access to archives or even just a search function. So again, without getting a link from anywhere else or URL hacking, it's not possible to do anything else than view the latest headlines.
Yeah, it's an interesting question. I'm sure the lawyer-nerds are really having a great time with it. I've heard it said elsewhere and here on HN that EU courts are mostly concerned about the practical intent of the laws and not the explicit wording of the law like it can be here in the States. I have no idea if that's true, but it does sound reasonable to me, the part about EU courts. That being said, I think personally it's strange to say that the United States isn't also concerned about the practical intent of laws, because anytime I read a ruling or an opinion, it's always trying to drill into the intent behind the law and not picking nits over verbiage. But I'm not a lawyer, so maybe I'm completely wrong. The American system seems to be more about loopholes, though, so perhaps there is a looser interpretation of this comparison that rings true.
the american system is definitely more geared towards the letter of the law, while the rest of the world is more inclined towards the spirit of the law.
While I appreciate them being the first site I've seen that's actually trying to be GDPR compliant (not just giving me a "yes I accept tracking" and "no I don't want to see the content" choice), it's a bit annoying that their "decline and visit plain text site" link goes to the homepage, rather than the article.
$17k potato heist. AI-Powered Facial Recognition. The "Michael Jackson" of China. I can't help but think of how cool it would be if Michael Mann put together an updated Chinese remake of "HEAT".
Many forms of privacy will disappear but these are all modern creations anyway. Think of how a small tribe use to behave. Was there anything that was private in a small community? Would a criminal also too be instantly spotted in the local lodge as the bard plays his tunes?
I don't think you can compare small tribes watching each other with the current situation where someone with access to surveillance systems can record all movements in a whole country and get them analyzed automatically. Surveillance used to be expensive and cost a lot of effort but increasingly it can be done more complete and cheaper. The world may look differently if previous dictators had had the surveillance systems of today or the near future in their hands.
Yes but this is just a further expression of our unaddressed ever-increasing social inequities. Even among the basic primates there is a great variety present in their visible social hierarchies. The shape that our reconstituted tribes take is for us now to choose.
The global village has already brought back the ancient tradition of witch hunts; looking forward to the blessings which will come along with being spied on by powerful panopticons instead of village gossips!
I rather think that when it was the norm for most humans to never go outside their small community, you couldn't, practically speaking, walk over to the next village and start again. They would probably eat you or something. At least, if it was easy to travel and integrate with others, it would be by definition a larger scale society.
Edit: however, I just thought of the story of Cain in the Bible, so that stands as presumably a pretty ancient archetype.
Anyone have thoughts on how the public will feel about this kind of tech being applied to the streets of the U.S.? We seem to be so libertarian, yet it seems like other countries (and even law enforcement currently in the US) have been implementing it with little concern of public opinion and/or public outcry.
I'm confused.