Become a fan of Slashdot on Facebook

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×

Comment Re:LOL@ Use-case (Score 5, Informative) 45

actually i worked for a company that provided path information (it's really really important) and privacy was absolutely key. they went to a lot of trouble in the design of the software so that, if they were ever compelled, even by a court order, to "identify individual X", they would LITERALLY be unable to comply and, to avoid contempt of court, would need to go to some technical lengths to explain why. they didn't use images (because they don't work) - instead they used GNURadio to do GSM passive decoding and signal-strength detection. and no, you *can't* track the person themselves, nor can you get their telephone number, nor can you decode their phone conversations, nor can you decode their SMS messages (not "and track 1000s of phones on affordable commodity off-the-shelf hardware at the same time"). they also track bluetooth and wifi, but again, the mac addresses are hashed (with salting) *before* being stored on disk. the reason for this kind of paranoia is really really simple: they ABSOLUTELY DO **NOT** wish to be involved in privacy and identification issues. it would destroy their reputation. so they made damn sure it simply could not happen, even if they were compelled by a court order.

anyway - first important thing: the definition of a "path" (and why it's critical). a "path" is, as the word suggests, the places that an individual goes to, and how they got there, how long it took, and how long and where they were stationary. key factors critical for shopping mall owners to be able to provide to their retailers: (1) how many unique shoppers went into *their* store (broken down by time and date is also helpful). (2) how long each unique shopper spent in their store. (3) also useful to know is where they went *before* going to another store. it's therefore necessary to weed out "passers-by", and duplicates (losing the path then picking it up as a *separate* person, repeatedly) is *especially* bad as it completely mucks up this all-important information that the retailers, it turns out, really really like to have once they know it's available.

think about it: this information is really, really important. in attracting retailers, without this equipment (or anything like it), the conversation is "come to our retail park, we have 6 million visitors a year". the retailer isn't interested in that. *with* the equipment (or anything like it), the conversation goes further, "and the unit we would like to interest you in gets 15,000 unique visitors per day if occupied by someone with your type of retail profile, especially because there's a macdonalds / starbucks within 100 / 50 metres and we know that that gets better numbers for you". *that's* powerful stuff, and it allows the shopping mall management to pick (and test, and research) interesting combinations of retailers that will make the whole mall a lively and attractive place to be, instead of being boring, half-empty of both retailers and customers (the other half being tired, stressed and exhausted), and doing a dis-service to everyone who bothers to go there.

so anyway i had to be up on the "competition" so to speak, because we frequently got questions coming in from clients being pitched the "visual tracking" technology.

first flaw in visual tracking technology: balloons, signs, pigeons, dogs, baby strollers - anything that moves in uncontrollable ways that is big enough to block people: you're hosed. pigeons etc. are fun because they randomly block out huge areas directly in front of the camera if they get close enough. even "other people" is enough to block "other people". even identifying "people" from children, babies, animals - this is hard enough as it is and requires enormous CPU resources... the number of people in some of these malls is *enormous* - tens to hundreds of thousands.

second flaw in visual tracking technology: it's intrusive. put a camera in a shopping mall and people automatically get edgy. it changes their "behaviour", which is precisely what you do not want. the last thing you want in a shopping mall is "edgy customers". some shopping centre managers *specifically* request suppliers of this kind of equipment *not* to walk around the store in clothing that is identified with "worker" or "engineer", and they prohibit the carrying clipboards, toolboxes and other stuff that said "annoying person to get away from immediately or be concerned about that they might be carrying a bomb etc. etc". they _really_ have to be careful about this kind of stuff. so: lots of big expensive high-resolution, high contrast ratio cameras with big zoom lenses: Baaaad.

third flaw in visual tracking technology: unless you have a hell of a lot of cameras and some extremely expensive CPUs, tracking upwards of 100,000 people in a single shopping centre means that moving from one camera to the next you lose continuity. once you lose continuity, that's it: it's "Game Over" for the whole concept of "one person". person goes into a toilet? you *really* don't want to go down that kind of tracking route. *but*.... person comes *out* of toilet, now you have a problem: you've lost continuity, and that means "oops, system thinks there's 2 people when there's actually only 1". now you're into lying about the number of people actually in the shopping centre. walk into a shop that has a complex layout (or doesn't want its customers intrusively tracked by cameras?), you lost the path. shops where people change their clothing? you lost the path. corridors with double fire-doors where you don't want people to have a camera staring them in the face no matter where they look? you lost the path. even that "80% success" figure is... it's just nowhere near enough: it genuinely has to be close to 100% to be useful. lose the path, you just lied to the retailer about the number of unique visitors, and you *can't do that*. "blur the face"?? wtf!! you just lost all the unique information needed to recover the path down the line, if it ever gets lost.

fourth flaw in visual tracking technology: drastic changes in lighting conditions. it turns out that to cope with sunlight changes at windows and doorways is drastically beyond both current camera technology *and* the CPU requirements of today's modern cluster computing, it's that CPU-intensive. and doorways are exactly where you really, really need to know about, because that's where the "path" of a unique shopper both begins and ends.

now the irony is that the subtleties of this are completely lost on many shopping mall managers. they *want* to be able to lie to the retailers that there are more people coming to the centre than there actually are, so the "whoops the reported numbers of unique shoppers are 6x higher than reality" is not a problem for such management, but for where it matters and you have retailers and mall management intelligent enough to understand, you *need* something different, and that's where the technology of the company i worked for comes into play, in a non-intrusive, non-privacy-invading fashion. and yes, it can be used for exactly the benefits described: emergency route planning and congestion reduction. just... without the privacy-invasion, thank you.

bottom line is: i really don't see how visual tracking is going to work out any time soon, especially given that face-blurring helps destroy critical information needed to rejoin paths if the tracking is ever lost, and especially given that the CPU usage is so enormous that you would need a supercomputer in the back office and a massively-upgraded power line to run it. no - don't expect visual tracking to be hitting a shopping mall near you in the immediate future.

Comment criticality is.. well... critical (Score 1) 188

my friend dr alex hankey - someone who is himself slightly err critically stable shall we say - has written several papers on exactly this subject, well ahead of their time. from my understanding of conversations with him, criticality of biological systems is critical to life as well as consciousness. from his training which includes two PhDs, one in mathematics and one in physics (MIT and Cambridge), dr hankey actually had to invent a new form of quantum mechanics in order to properly do this justice: one which he calls "self-referral" i.e. it has a feedback loop on the quantum equation itself (just like in neural networks). yes i have asked him if he could write it up as a separate paper (just the QM enhancements) and he is in the process of doing that, but it is going to take time (yes i have told him it's really really important because his work could open up so many different areas: he knows already! it's complicated, and he has a lot going on).

but in a nutshell, if you think of the difference between "normal" math and "chaos" math, the difference is the same between QM and QM-enhanced that he had to invent in order to deal mathematically with critical-instability systems. so for example where normally if you go down in the number of dimensions you are dealing with, when you get to zero dimensions, "normal" math and "normal" QM goes haywire because you get 0/0 or possibly infinity/infinity and it's impossible to determine which and even guessing what the hell is going on is completely out of the question: QM-enhanced is, from what i can gather, actually able to still operate under these insane type of conditions - conditions which are part and parcel every day in dealing with critical instability points.

i believe there was a paper published (and announced here on slashdot) which said that in a neural network (or other system) which is at "criticality", you only need to change *one* bit of information in *one* entity anywhere within the system and the *entire state* of the system may change (i.e. react). now if you think about it, for cells this is really *really* important. think of a cell being attacked by a virus, or going cancerous. you'd, obviously, want the *entire* immune system to react to that, instantly, wouldn't you? otherwise it could well be far too late by the time the virus spreads to more than one cell. so it would make sense from an evolutionary perspective that any system of cells which did *not* react as a whole, instantly, if even a single cell was attacked, would be penalised in terms of successful survival compared to those systems of cells which did.

the next phase will be that the "regular" scientific community begins to catch up with the work on consciousness, the effect of homeopathic medicine and more, and dr hankey's work will be much more widely understood and respected beyond the very small community that currently even understands it. i do have to point out that it is very unfortunate that the language that he uses makes even a highly renowned traditionally-trained physicist's mind freeze and lock up, but, honestly, that's just how it is: if people don't want to be open to new ideas, you just have to be patient....

Comment Re:Short Circuit Redux (Score 3, Insightful) 44

Is it just me, or does this movie sound EXACTLY like Short Circuit, but with the "grittified, modernized" feel to it?

Sam

short circuit was designed to appeal to kids, and also featured a robot that, whilst sentient, never went beyond child-like human-level consciousness. the difference here is that this machine consciousness quickly exceeds human-level intelligence whilst at the same time maintaining both an integrity and naivety that is a product of its fast and harsh yet poignant upbringing. in another post i point out that this film has aspects of other films and sci-fi stories that you will definitely have seen before, but please do consider suspending judgement and just enjoy the story as it is :)

Comment great film! (Score 4, Insightful) 44

i just went to see it at the cinema, i'm a big fan of sci-fi films, and this one i really liked. if you're an afficionado of sci-fi books and films, there will be nothing new, you should be able to predict everything that happens but i was still absorbed by the novel way the story unfolded. yes it was violent - if you're going to tell a story about out-of-control criminal activity then that's hardly not going to happen - but it was also poignant as well.

i think the best part about the film was that the robots, because they've been seen before in other stories by the same director (Elysium for example), are not "glorified", they're just "part of the story". the problem with novice sci-fi writers (book or film, especially film because it's a less mature medium for telling sci-fi stories) is that they tend to not really actually have a good background or story (which is why the marvel comics films are so damn good), so as a substitute the director "glorifies" the technology in a wealth of special effects. by complete contrast, the introduction of an entirely new type of consciousness - and its rapid development from child-like behaviour to above-average human intelligence through incredibly painful learning experiences and its desire to remain alive against a ticking clock - that's what really really makes this story so interesting.

but the best bit i think is how this new being changes the lives of those who initially sought to profit from it (admittedly out of desperation), surprising even themselves by finding that despite their desperation and ganster background they begin to see this robot as a valuable conscious being in its own right.

so although this film has aspects which have been covered before, i don't know of many films that have done proper justice to the emergence of machine consciousness and the respectf it engenders in those who come into contact with computer-based beings, in the way that this film has managed. it's just a pity that i feel that that message is completely over the heads of the average reviewer.

Comment Re:More of this ridiculous (Score 3, Insightful) 134

Gonna be difficult to keep your address book up-to-date.

that's not a problem if you only need a one-time (or limited) campaign. or a IED remote trigger device for example. or you have a dead-drop location (online or otherwise) with up-to-date numbers. or a whole number of other scenarios that are probably and have been standard practice *anyway* for decades.

tell me... how come in a simple public discussion slashdot readers can come up with simple practical scenarios why mass-surveillance "solutions" like this will be completely ineffective, yet the people considering (or actually) deploying them cannot? and: why can the pakistani government not see that this knee-jerk response will have the terrorists celebrating the success of bringing awareness of their campaign to every single mobile phone user across pakistan in a very personal way.

Comment prius in winter: 30mpg. prius in summer: 65mpg (Score 1) 212

i heard of someone who bought a prius: they live in scotland (south west, near ayr). they noticed a huge drop in fuel economy (down to 30mpg) so recorded it, and year after year they found a clear correlation between winter and the drop in fuel economy. the extra cost of the vehicle, the insane pricing for replacement batteries (over $1200 per battery and there are 30 of them), and, finally, the fact that they were not actually getting better fuel economy than an equivalent ICE car, they sold it... and used their daughter's 10-year-old VW diesel Polo which got a consistent 55mpg all year round.

Comment Re:Give it a rest (Score 1) 755

systemd is being implemented in distributions because a) it is good

you are _brainwashed_. absolutely brainwashed. read the independent assessment here:
http://www.softpanorama.org/Co...

and b) the people making that decision are the ones qualified to do so.

FUCK you. fuck you and your attitude thinking you have the right to tell me or ANYONE that i should bow down to other people's decisions. FUCK you and fuck off. you have NO right to tell me that i must worship the ground on which other people walk.

*I* have the freedom to make my *own* assessment. that is my right. and it's people like you who are not helping, by saying "yeah we should all trust someone else to make our decisions for us".

historically we know that when we abdicate responsibility to others for important decisions, it doesn't go so well, does it? what is _wrong_ with you??

sorry, but... you really gave me a shock there, i couldn't believe what you wrote.

Comment Re:Choice is good. (Score 1) 755

There are CONSTANT statements that if you do not use systemd you will not be able to use primary Linux distros in the future, because all software will supposedly be gobbled up by it as a dependency... To try and now make out like those dont exist is pretty silly.

not "supposedly" - *really*. if you run apt-rdepends -r libsystemd0 | a bit of awk | sort | uniq there are four *THOUSAND* five hundred packages that, if you were ever to do "apt-get --purge remove libsystemd0" you would NEVER be able to install. that's a whopping FIFTEEN PERCENT of the entire debian package repository that you are prevented and prohibited from installing, should you ever make the decision that you wish to keep libsystemd0 off of machines that you manage!

the reason for this insane level of *hard* dependency is because lennart pottering is both the developer of libsystemd0 *and* many other packages such as pulseaudio... so of *course* he decided that pulseaudio had to include - as a hard dependency - one of his projects, libsystemd0. libsdl likewise also uses it as a hard compile-time dependency, along with about 100 other applications and libraries.

those applications and libraries then quickly spread as further hard dependencies to include the gimp, apache2-dev, php5 (??!), erlang, libreoffice, cups, bluez/bluetooth (because of the links to pulseaudio), *all* the games that use libsdl (i.e. pretty much all of them), *all* the music software available for GNU/Linux (because of the link to pulseaudio), openjdk7, the eclipse IDE, apache tomcat, the android SDK, i mean.... the list is a _real_ eye-opener. you can review it here for yourself:

      http://lkcl.net/reports/removi...

so yeah, not even _close_ to "supposedly", mate!

Comment Re:fvwm is what I use, anyway (Score 1) 755

unix was supposed to be simple. systemd is an abortion and one that most of us do not want.

good to see this protest post with a hand-tweaked system; but the fact is, we should NOT have to flip over backwards to remove a stupid should-not-be-there-anyway daemon and its evil libs.

*thumbs-up* to both these things. thank you.

Slashdot Top Deals

"One lawyer can steal more than a hundred men with guns." -- The Godfather

Working...