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: 2, Informative) by khallow on Sunday December 18 2016, @07:51PM
Yup, that'd work... but what I was wondering is can we make a plugin that loads all sorts of non-seizure-inducing contents but has "click-to-play" over seizure inducing contents?
While googling around, I see that there are already proprietary tests out there for detecting seizure-inducing video (for example, the Harding test [wikipedia.org]). It wouldn't be hard for a plug in to run all video through such a test before playing it, particularly on system/pipelines with adequate buffering. I don't know if anyone is already doing it, but if they're pretty far along, if it's not currently happening.
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Monday December 19 2016, @01:03AM
there are already proprietary tests out there [...] It wouldn't be hard for a plug in to run all video through such a test before playing it
Of course it would, because the test is proprietary and paywalled: 25 GBP for a video under 2 minutes (source [hardingtest.com]). A plug-in targeted at people with photosensitive epilepsy would run up a bill that I doubt health insurers would be willing to pay.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday December 19 2016, @09:59AM
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 19 2016, @08:21PM
Requirements are here [slyip.com].