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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: 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.

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  • (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