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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)?
(Score: 5, Insightful) by FakeBeldin on Sunday December 18 2016, @09:26PM
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
Thank you for the article and starting this discussion.
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
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
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
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
Thunderbird, by default, blocks remote images (for privacy). Seems that setting would be good to prevent this.
jasassin@gmail.com GPG Key ID: 0xE6462C68A9A3DB5A