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posted by cmn32480 on Sunday December 18 2016, @06:52PM   Printer-friendly
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)?


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  • (Score: 1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 18 2016, @09:05PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 18 2016, @09:05PM (#442806)

    Nobody mentioned WHY Eichenwald is getting harrassed online. He's a standard Liberal journalist who has thrown away even the slightest pretense of objectivity this election. He shows up on Fox claiming he has documents that prove President Trump is a drug abuser. He has proof, but even though he hates Trump, he isn't going to publish the proof. You just have to take his word for it. Real scumbag move. While this doesn't mean he should be sent life-threatening flashing images, he isn't some poor innocent marytr that was minding his own business before being assaulted.

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  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by FakeBeldin on Sunday December 18 2016, @09:26PM

    by FakeBeldin (3360) on Sunday December 18 2016, @09:26PM (#442815) Journal

    Nobody mentioned WHY Eichenwald is getting harrassed online.

    That was actually quite deliberate on my part.

    What is known is that someone actively tried to induce a seizure against someone else via the internet (the offending tweet said so).
    Around here, we know the internet. We understand the possibilities for filtering, and I'm convinced there will turn out to be several SN'ers who know a thing or two about the limitations of visual processing. That's an interesting discussion for a tech site.

    The fingerpointing part? That's focussing on the non-tech aspects of this story - there's plenty of other sites where those discussions are raging. Moreover, that ignores a most interesting tech aspect of this story: that people with a certain condition can be attacked via the internet - irrespective of their political stance, their moral qualities, or anything else. Just based on that condition.

    To me, that's exactly the type of thing where techies gather round and figure out if we can make the internet a better place. We've done so with respect to spam, we're currently doing something with respect to ransomware, and this is another issue we could perhaps figure out (see the comment above on the Harding test).

    • (Score: 1) by RS3 on Monday December 19 2016, @12:09AM

      by RS3 (6367) on Monday December 19 2016, @12:09AM (#442868)

      Thank you for the article and starting this discussion.

      We understand the possibilities for filtering, and I'm convinced there will turn out to be several SN'ers who know a thing or two about the limitations of visual processing.

      I don't quite understand, by "visual processing", do you mean human processing, as in, what happens to the epileptic?

      • (Score: 2) by FakeBeldin on Monday December 19 2016, @12:58AM

        by FakeBeldin (3360) on Monday December 19 2016, @12:58AM (#442883) Journal

        That's not what I meant, but that is indeed also interesting!

        I just figured there would be some SN'ers who are into computer vision or video processing (someone who worked on Youtube's content-id system? you never know... ;-). I don't know a lot about video encodings, so I don't know if you (basically) need to render the video for a detection algorithm, or if it's possible to do some far more lightweight processing based on the various frames.

        E.g. perhaps it's sufficient to just compute the average brightness of each frame to detect outrageous flickering. That sounds like something that could be done quicker than processing each frame to determine what changes where.

        • (Score: 1) by RS3 on Monday December 19 2016, @02:30AM

          by RS3 (6367) on Monday December 19 2016, @02:30AM (#442910)

          Thank you again. I've done some programming here and there, and in college (BSEE) did some interesting image processing.

          One could create a video in which the frames alternate light and dark areas- flickering- but that each frame has the same average brightness, so you could not detect the flickering that way.

          I did a quick search for "seizure inducing image" and some of them just had very subtle "jiggling". IE: a simple image that moves side-to-side by 1 pixel or so, but at a problematic rate.

          It should be fairly easy to algorithmically analyse an image/video to determine flickering. Frame-by-frame comparisons, blocks of frames compared to other blocks, etc., then compute the variance, and check the result against flickering rates which are known to cause epileptic problems.

          Regardless of what the variation is, it's more the repetition rate that causes the seizure, so you'd look for that.

          Seems like a browser plugin is in order.

          For pop email clients (ThunderBird, Outlook, etc.) you'd need something else- maybe a TCP/IP filter.

          • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 19 2016, @04:09AM

            by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 19 2016, @04:09AM (#442948)

            Thunderbird has tons of plugins. Even adblockers.

            https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/ [mozilla.org]

            • (Score: 3, Informative) by jasassin on Monday December 19 2016, @09:20AM

              by jasassin (3566) <jasassin@gmail.com> on Monday December 19 2016, @09:20AM (#443033) Homepage Journal

              Thunderbird, by default, blocks remote images (for privacy). Seems that setting would be good to prevent this.

              --
              jasassin@gmail.com GPG Key ID: 0xE6462C68A9A3DB5A
  • (Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 18 2016, @09:31PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 18 2016, @09:31PM (#442818)

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurt_Eichenwald [wikipedia.org]

    In 2005, Eichenwald wrote a group of articles about online child pornography. One of those articles was about Justin Berry, a then-18-year-old who was selling pornographic images and videos of himself both as a minor and as an adult, creating and selling pornography involving other minors and adults. Eichenwald stated in testimony before Congress that his contact with Berry began as an effort by him, his wife, and his minister to rescue someone who seemed like a child in danger. He stated that it was only a month later, when Berry contacted him saying he wanted to expose the child pornography business, that he began reporting on the story. This led to criticism because, during the time Eichenwald was working to rescue Berry, he—along with his wife and minister—decided to pretend they were Berry's customers and use money to convince him to identify himself. Once Eichenwald began reporting, he demanded repayment because of the potential conflict of interest. However, Eichenwald only asked for $2,000 that was paid by check to be returned; he later stated he did not remember another $1,100 was paid through PayPal. Berry did not return that money. In an October 19, 2007 interview with NPR's David Folkenflik, Eichenwald stated that, due to the severe backlash from the Justin Berry story, he felt compelled to disclose that his epilepsy had caused "severe memory disruptions" and that he had a "deeply unreliable memory for names, facts and events" which he compensated for by his "meticulous reporting methods."

  • (Score: 2) by Bogsnoticus on Sunday December 18 2016, @09:34PM

    by Bogsnoticus (3982) on Sunday December 18 2016, @09:34PM (#442820)

    So in other words, he's playing the exact same game as Trump. Makes wild accusations with no proof, and demands people take his word for it.
    However, Trump actively promoted violence by rallying the "second amendment people" to do something about Hillary should he lose the election.

    Which was the biggest scumbag move?

    --
    Genius by birth. Evil by choice.
  • (Score: 5, Informative) by KilroySmith on Sunday December 18 2016, @09:47PM

    by KilroySmith (2113) on Sunday December 18 2016, @09:47PM (#442829)

    So I understand why some people are upset. That isn't an excuse for someone to attempt to cause him personal injury.