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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: 3, Insightful) by SomeGuy on Sunday December 18 2016, @08:46PM

    by SomeGuy (5632) on Sunday December 18 2016, @08:46PM (#442801)

    It would be interesting to hear if the sender actually gets in to any kind of trouble. Quite unlikely though.

    It seems like visual products and the media in general are increasingly becoming inconsiderate to epileptics. Most advertisements on TV or even the internet (if you are dumb enough to browse with no ad blocker) are made up of bright flashing, loud sounds, hypnotic scrolling or movement, and so on. Turn on the TV news and you are almost guaranteed to spend the first few minutes staring at looping images of police cars with their flashers running.

    At the rate they are going, eventually we will see real blipverts and actual exploding heads!

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  • (Score: 2) by mhajicek on Sunday December 18 2016, @09:16PM

    by mhajicek (51) on Sunday December 18 2016, @09:16PM (#442812)

    I've seen some fairly extreme bright flashing digital billboards that made it hard to focus on my driving even though I'm not epileptic.

    --
    The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek