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from the physical-assault-in-a-virtual-world dept.
Newsweek journalist Kurt Eichenwald, who is known to be suffering from epilepsy, reported on twitter that someone tweeted him a seizure-inducing image. This is not the first time it happened, but this attempt was (apparently) successful in triggering a seizure.
This might be the first physical attack on a person perpetrated via the internet. A sad point in history, in my view.
Links: coverage from Ars Technica, Eichenwald's Twitter feed. I'm not linking to the offending image - you're big enough to find it on your own and apparently it is quite horrible even for people who do not suffer from epilepsy.
Eichenwald has tweeted that he is involving law enforcement.
Any ideas on how hard it would be to filter out seizure-inducing media (make it click-to-view/play)?
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 18 2016, @07:11PM
Maybe he shouldn't allow the downloading of images or running of gifs (and scripts), given that this isn't the first time he's been a victim of this.
"Fool me once... shame on me... fool me twice... errr... err.... you can't fool me twice"
(Score: 2) by FakeBeldin on Sunday December 18 2016, @07:20PM
Well... on the one hand yes, on the other: it'd kind of break his normal usage of the web.
So that's specifically what I was wondering about: can we design a plugin that would block seizure-inducing media, but not other media?
Then you could make the "click-to-play" image a big fat warning "seizure hazard".
Of course, you'd get false positives (non-seizure media being labelled as such) and false negatives (seizure-inducing media not being blocked). So I am rather curious how far this could be pushed to minimize false negatives while keeping false positives reasonable - and thereby the web experience mostly normal.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Sunday December 18 2016, @07:27PM
I suppose something that checks contrast between frames would catch some.
Short videos could be much harder to check than GIFs.
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 18 2016, @07:37PM
> Short videos could be much harder to check than GIFs.
Its just cpu time. And with hardware assisted decode probably not very expensive.
I think the hardest part, from a usuability perspective, would be having to wait for the media to completely download because you can't say if its clean or not until you've checked every last frame. Even animated gifs can be multiple megabytes in size nowadays.
(Score: 2) by TheLink on Sunday December 18 2016, @08:01PM
Maybe someone could create such a plugin. Problem is it won't catch everything for everyone. Maybe some tuning depending on the person. Is it common for fits to also be triggered if it's alternating blue/red of the same brightness, and not just dark/bright?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 18 2016, @09:41PM
That's a pretty good idea. "Just in time" detection seems a lot more do-able.
As for the question of what specific sequences, I think it probably depends on the patient. It wouldn't be hard to optionally detect a variety of patterns.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Sunday December 18 2016, @10:05PM
I was thinking there could be a problem with DRM. We have those on non-Flash web vids, right?
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 18 2016, @10:44PM
I think the intersection of video with DRM and video that induces epilepsy is near zero because if the video is valuable enough to put DRM on it, chances are the owner's got deep enough pockets to sue for causing a seizure.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 18 2016, @07:51PM
Simple enough.
(Score: 2) by mojo chan on Monday December 19 2016, @12:00PM
Direct from Google for Chrome: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/animation-policy/ncigbofjfbodhkaffojakplpmnleeoee?hl=en [google.com]
Makes GIFs click-to-play. I'm sure Firefox has something similar.
This is a life-and-death reason to block ads, flash, and all animation in general.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)