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Epilepsy Patient Assaulted Via Twitter

posted by cmn32480 on Sunday December 18 2016, @06:52PM   
from the physical-assault-in-a-virtual-world dept.

FakeBeldin writes:

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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Original Submission

• Re:Trivial solution Re:Trivial solution (Score: 2, Informative) by khallow on Sunday December 18 2016, @07:51PM

  by khallow (3766) on Sunday December 18 2016, @07:51PM (#442781) Journal

  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.

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• Because it's proprietary Because it's proprietary (Score: 2) by Pino P on Monday December 19 2016, @01:03AM

  by Pino P (4721) on Monday December 19 2016, @01:03AM (#442885) Journal

  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.

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  • Re:Because it's proprietary Re:Because it's proprietary (Score: 1) by khallow on Monday December 19 2016, @09:59AM

    by khallow (3766) on Monday December 19 2016, @09:59AM (#443042) Journal

    Eh, I gather the test requirements that the Harding Test implements are open source. So open source tests could be possible.

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    • Re:Because it's proprietary (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 19 2016, @08:21PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 19 2016, @08:21PM (#443304)

      Requirements are here [slyip.com].

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