Monday, April 30, 2012

Eyes without a face.

Those Guy Fawkes masks are so last decade. The new hotness? Dazzle camouflage for your mug.
Called CV Dazzle (short for "computer vision dazzle;" more on the name later), Harvey's project is a provocative and largely theoretical response to the rise of surveillance cameras on street corners and face-detecting technology that's been incorporated into social networking sites like Facebook and Flickr.
There are cameras everywhere now, and more and more of them are connected to the intertubes, and when you combine that with the fact that digital storage media has become so cheap, it will eventually be likely, (and sooner than we think), that there will be a central biography of your life, based on cameras, GPS readings, credit card transactions, recordings of phone calls, tracking of your vehicle, et cetera, all on your very own personal DHS hard drive.

Spoof it wherever you can.
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15 comments:

Anonymous said...

What a state we've come to when:

(A) People - even otherwise honest, law-abiding people - have to seriously think about ways to avoid being tracked by their own government through ubiquitous cameras, and;

(B) If this becomes at all widespread (or, more exactly, some do-gooder legislative aide merely hears about it), it'll become illegal.

Bah.

Do you suppose there will be a run at the library on dusty old books showing Navy camouflage measures from the two World Wars? Maybe it could even become a fashion statement.

"Like, you're doing Measure TWELVE??? Dude, like, that's SO last year!"

"Have you seen the latest cover of Cosmo? Kim, like, TOTALLY rocks Measure eight!"

Anonymous said...

There was a bit about camera dazzle clothing in William Gibson's last, Zero History. Sounds like interesting stuff.

Matt
St Paul

Ken said...

Domino mask & fedora like the Green Hornet, or scarf and fedora like the Shadow?

Hahahahahahahahahaha... (exeunt, extra-dramatically)

Ken said...

Actually, make it domino mask and fedora like the Spirit...Blessed St. Eisner is way cooler than the Green Hornet.

Kevin said...

Life imitates cyberpunk.

Robert said...

Since almost all cameras are IR sensitive, simply using several high powered IR LED's arranged around your face will blind the camera. The trick is how to wear the LED's. A hat with the LED's buily in? A fine mesh net pulled over your head? Maybe built into glasses frame?

Anonymous said...

Skimming the comments at the article there is enough "if your not doing anything wrong you have nothing to worry about" and "privacy=terrorism" to make me cry.

Woodman said...

I wonder how much shimmer makeup my daughter would need to wear to have the same affect?

And the interesting part of this is how long after the paranoid people doing this does someone "famous" start wearing it? So you end up with squares wearing revolutionary makeup. Kind of like the guy who wears the Gadsden flag shirt without having any idea what it's for, it's just cool. Or the guy who thinks the Guy Fawkes mask is from V for Vendetta.

Sidetrack: At the TS show this weekend I saw a couple of the DTOM shirts, including on my dad. Dude, you are already at a gun show toting around a Mosin, I think the shirt may be redundant.

Anonymous said...

Not DHS..

NSA.

http://rt.com/news/utah-data-center-spy-789/

mongo78 said...

Came for the reference to "scramble suits" from the Philip K. Dick novel A Scanner Darkly, but left disappointed.

Eric Wilner said...

I keep thinking Cetagandan-style face paint would be a fun fashion to introduce on this planet.
(I actually thought of painting my face for an ID photo once, after the company adopted a "no hats in ID photos" rule. I was pretty sure there wasn't a " no makeup in ID photos" rule. Yet.)

Drang said...

@Woodman: Dude says "no enhancers", not sure if glimmer/glitter/sparkly vampire makeup would count or not.

@Robert: John Cleese did a special on the human face a few years ago, ISTR hats and shades were the best way to counter facial recognition technology, so I'm thinking IR lights in the glasses frames. I also see fashion glasses frames taking on new forms, maybe modular curves and "flares" so you can customize them.

As for mask v scarf, that may depend on the prominence of your schnozola...

Buzz said...

Close with the Philip K. Dick reference, mongo.

I was thinking our future (present) will (has) become an amalgamation of Idiocracy and Minority Report.

Drang said...

@Eric Wilner: Had a photo ID for work once that was taken in a room so poorly lit that all you could see was glare off my glasses' lenses. At the time I was annoyed, maybe I shouldn't have been.

Michael Collins said...

I'm against all this facial image recording.