By Tony Wikrent
How Much Do I Need to Change My Face to Avoid Facial Recognition?
[Gizmodo, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 12-09-2024]
An aggregation of quotes from experts in the field. Here’s the most optimistic one: Even the best neural networks struggle with low-quality photos that lack information-rich pixels of the human face, especially when matching against a large list of potential identities. Thus the first step is to deny the algorithm those pixels by occluding the face. Cover the face in cases where that isn’t suspicious, e.g., wear a scarf in the wintertime, sun glasses on a bright day. Hats with wide brims are also a confound, as they can hide the forehead and hair, and cast a shadow on the face. Holding a hand over the face is also good for this. The second step is to look down while in motion so any camera in the vicinity will not capture a good frontal image of the face. Third, if one can move quickly, that might cause motion blur in the captured photo—consider jogging or riding a bike. My best practical advice for evasion: know where facial recognition is being deployed and simply avoid those areas. How long this advice remains useful though depends on how widespread the technology becomes in the coming years.”
Strategic Political Economy
The early American rejection of John Locke
[TW: I want to begin with this, because you will see echoes of the argument over masses versus elites in almost all the subsequent stories. USA is stumbling and faltering because so much of what we are taught and believe is based on lies. One of the biggest lies is that the founding of the republic was based on the ideas of John Locke. It is true that Locke’s ideas later came to predominate American political economy, but it was after a period of ideological combat. Unfortunately, the opponents of Locke lost.
[In the 1820s and 1830s, the Transcendentalist movement in USA, which included Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Ellen Sturgis Hooper, Louisa May Alcott, and Walt Whitman quite explicitly rejected the ideas of John Locke. Universalist minister Orestes Brownson, wrote in The Boston Quarterly Review, in January 1839,
Locke was a great and good man, but his philosophy was defective… Locke reduces man to the capacity of receiving sensations, and the faculty of of reflecting on what passes within us. According to him we have no ideas which do not enter through the senses, or which are not formed by the operations of the mind on ideas received by means of sensation.
[Locke’s] system of philosophy… is no less fatal to political liberty than to religion and morality… This philosophy necessarily disinherits the mass. It denies to man all inherent power of attaining to truth. In religion, if religion it admits, it refers us not to what we feel and know in ourselves [such a sense of fairness and justice], but was said and done in some remote age, by some special messenger from God; it refers us to some authorized teacher, and commands us to receive our faith on his word, and to adhere to it on peril of damnation. It therefore destroys all free action of the mind, all independent thought, all progress, and all living faith. In politics it must do the same. It cannot found the state on the inherent rights of man; the most it can do, is to organize the state for the preservation of such conditions, privileges, and prescriptions, as it can historically verify….
The doctrine, that truth comes to us from abroad, cannot coexist with true liberty… The democrat is not he who believes in the people’s capacity of being taught, and therefore graciously condescends to be their instructor; but he who believes that Reason, the light which shines out from God’s throne, shines into the heart of every man, and that truth lights her torch in the inner temple of every man’s soul, whether patrician or plebian, a shepherd or a philosopher, a Croesus or a beggar. It is only on the reality of that inner light, and on the fact that it is universal, in all men, and in every man, that you can found a democracy, which shall have a firm basis, and which shall be able to survive the storms of human passions.
But the disciple of Locke denies the reality of this light, he denies the teachings and the authority of the universal Reason…. It is folly, therefore, to repose confidence in the people, to entertain any respect for popular decisions. The disciple of Locke may compassionate the people, but he cannot trust them; he may patronize the masses, but he must scout universal suffrage, and labor to concentrate all power in the hands of those he looks upon as the enlightened and respectable few.
[Merriam-Webster offers this definition of “scout”: “to reject scornfully.”]
[ — The Transcendentalists – An Anthology, edited by Perry Miller. Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1950, pp. 207-208. ]
So, Mangione assassinated Brian Thompson, the CEO of United Healthcare, the US health insurance company with the highest denial rate in the industry.