Daisy chain enough non-unique ID's together and you get something that's close enough to unique for the purposes of the people who will be implementing this.
While the guy who's getting droned or the dude getting the shit kicked out of him by a bunch of cops may care about identification, the people doing those things don't really care as long as they get the right guy often enough compared to the wrong guy.
It bothers me that browsers leak info like a font list and extensions. Specify the font you want to display, and if my browser doesn't have that font it should fall back gracefully, perhaps with a warning.
If you allow a page to specify a font, the page can tell whether you displayed that font or the fallback by looking at things like the size of a div containing a particular character.
Preventing font fingerprinting means limiting font use to default system fonts and web fonts only. If a page can use user installed fonts, they can tell whether or not those fonts were installed.
Safari’s fingerprint protection does this already, I don’t know if other browsers do.
>If you allow a page to specify a font, the page can tell whether you displayed that font or the fallback by looking at things like the size of a div containing a particular character.
Only because the relevant APIs choose to allow this. Javascript served from the website should not be able to read this kind of data including element sizes.
My browser should report a minimum of info such as viewport size and rendering engine, and if you (by this I mean the general "you") require more info then either you're a bad developer or your design needs to be rationalized.
Edit: and to the guy whose comment got flagkilled asking about how I want to solve the "problem" of breaking sites that rely on crutches like knowing the rendered size of an element, I say this:
I don't propose to fix the problem because it isn't a problem for anyone but advertisers, and fuck those people.
If you cant directly measure the size, you can do it indirectly, put a character into a fixed size box with overflow scroll on and if scroll bars appear its less than the fixed size. Do you now want to remove the ability to set sizes on elements or to detect when scroll bars appear? I think this is a rabbit hole that only ends with removing javascript from the browser, which I certainly would be against.
I think a much more reasonable solution would be to enact and enforce laws that protect private information.
Or even just draw the text in a canvas and check pixel colors. Which feature do you take away? Drawing text in canvas? Or inspecting the current content you’ve drawn in it?
This sort of thing is used for even deeper GPU fingerprinting because the exact results of graphics commands can vary slightly. I’m not sure what browsers can/are doing to prevent that.
It would break sites that use canvas drawing for actual features like image editors, but it doesn't seem unreasonable to me. Browsers probably don't like breaking essential functionality of sites like that though, and permission prompt spam for every web feature might end up training users to just click "yes" on everything like Vista's UAC did.
Still, an interesting middle ground between "JS can do whatever it wants" and "JS is disabled entirely" might be "JS can send data and styling to the DOM but has very limited access to read anything back."
Maybe include some very basic functionality like ability to read the content inside a tag, but nothing more detailed about how an object is styled, how large it is, where it's positioned on the page, whether its hover or visited state is active, whether there's scroll overflow, etc.
As long as JavaScript is enabled in the browser, there will always be some clever way to use it for fingerprinting, even if you effectively have to use side channels to get information like installed fonts. There's no avoiding it.
I disagree with the assumption that there will always be a way to fingerprint with it, and I reject the notion that we should just give up the arms race.
If what you assert is true then JavaScript needs to die. Now.
You could try to prove me wrong, but from everything I've seen, I think the consensus is that it will always be possible unless there's a complete overhaul of how browser scripting works. JavaScript has almost complete control of your browser, and if you try to sandbox it or mitigate certain fingerprinting techniques (by disabling/nullifying/randomizing things), people will almost always find some workaround. And the more restrictive you get, the more websites you'll break, since many legitimate code relies on those features (like screen resolution, device type, browser language, browser timezone, what formats and features the browser supports).
> There are a lot of people who walk kind of like you. What's more, it's easy not to walk kind of like you -- just take one shoe off. Of course, you'll always walk like you-with-one-shoe-off in that case, so the cameras will eventually figure out that it's still you. Which is why I prefer to inject a little randomness into my attacks on gait-recognition: I put a handful of gravel into each shoe. Cheap and effective, and no two steps are the same. Plus you get a great reflexology foot massage in the process (I kid. Reflexology is about as scientifically useful as gait-recognition).
Sure this is cool and could certainly reduce the demand for "signature strikes" (not that we should be droning people as often as we are in the first place) but it sounds like yet another thing we'll be seeing big city police departments using to enhance their dragnet 10yr from now.
The military and various intelligence agencies have done an extraordinary amount of research on ultra-long distance facial recognition, and it turns out that it requires gigantic, super expensive lenses from a long distance. This method is much easier.
Yes. Numerous hacks have been shown over the last decade and if you're a tinfoil hat aficionado, then some people believe it's why Barnby Jack was murdered before presenting at Defcon.
There are always irregularities in the heart beat. A perfectly regular heartbeat would likely be unhealthy, given that hear rate variability (HRV) is a desirable trait.
These tools are often created to augment current and future technologies. It can serve to confirm an actor when other technologies are inconclusive (e.g. Face mask), it can serve to increase the likelihood of identification via multiple confirmations (e.g. visual, audio, heart) among other things.
I saw a demonstration of this technology a few years back, at a European military-industrial contractor for which I worked.
It was being pitched as the ideal way to assassinate people in a crowd - identify them by heartbeat signature, fly a drone in to drop a small explosive package on their heads.
When I later saw that biometric information was being harvested by the same company at airports around the world, I figured - time to get a different job. So I quit.
And now, the tech of individually-targeted assassinations is coming to market.
Yes, this is all too real to me. What is really scary though, is just how much support the idea of autonomous weapons has in the military-industrial sector - it seems that everyone is working on similar programs.
The most shocking angle of all, is how willing people are to build this technology - like, the cool factor overrides any moral or ethical issues, and even bringing up a question of ethics around these technologies will get you segregated from the 'cool hunter' classes...
I'm down for it. There's no stopping acceleration.
And war, especially modern war, isn't a human task. Humans are bad at it, and it's bad for humans. Cool, precise machines though? No fear, no boredom, no hunger, no sleep. What's not to love?
And it's chic and cyberpunk af. They better be smart and unhackable and free of bugs though.
Yeah, this is the rub. Better weapons systems mean easier tyranny.
I couldn't imagine what life is going to be like when there are fleets of these things patrolling cities, but I guess we're going to find out soon enough.
I imagine a scenario akin to Hong Kong - 2 million people, whose leaders are suddenly rendered unconscious mid-march by a fleet of drones.
Of course some crimes are committed by soldiers who are actively disobeying orders. An autonomous weapon is not going to feel any of the emotions that lead soldiers to do terrible things.
This. Also a machine doesn't come back with PTSD, wounded or in a coffin, so there are no parents, relatives and friends finally realizing the true costs of war.
Is a gun unethical for having a trigger that never 'refuses' to shoot? And on the other side of that argument, machines lower the risk of atrocities like the rape Nanjing to zero.
The moral and ethical issues aren't unidirectionally bad - you're building things that keep your side safe/secure and ensure a win. Those are your friends and neighbors on the battlefield - they aren't unthinking stormtroopers, they're the people you went to school with.
Even guided missiles, which seem indiscriminate, are much more precise and limit collateral damage. 50 years ago the alternative was carpet bombing - a guided missile produces much more targeted damage. You can argue that guided missiles save lives - if you want someone dead enough that you're willing to kill everyone around them, having an option to just knock them out seems much more humane (especially to the kids on the nearby playground).
Plus, I'd absolutely hate to be the side that didn't uparmor with autonomous systems - you'd get creamed. Like it or not, it's a part of the battlefield now. I'm not a fan of us bringing back tactical nuclear (low yield) munitions, but that's apparently also happening.
AND the work can be totally badass, the stability/pay is good, and you just get more valuable as you age (unlike being, say, a front end web developer). Plus seeing something you built go out to the range and tear apart a tank/knock down an RPG/launch into space/whatever is really, really dang cool.
If these existed, would people continue attempt to cross illegally? The thought-provoking argument is that these pieces of technology, if foolproof, would go completely unused as people inherently value their lives (but not laws.)
140 documented victims of the clearly demarked killing zones of the Berlin Wall suggests they probably wouldn't go unused. Also can't imagine such technology being successful at actually stopping migrant flows somewhere like the US border unless the government moved to line the coast with them...
Any real technology has dual uses; I cannot say that the things I've worked on are always a positive good for humanity as a whole, they depend on the people wielding them.
I wish I could have lived in a bubble, developing "tech" that didn't matter and was only positive, but even the most disconnected web jockey is paid for by the surveillance-capitalism dollars of the modern internet. That tech might be worse for society overall - it gave us the creeping global eye at a pace faster than legislation could keep up with it, or that society could adapt, and it seemed innocuous at first.
No, it was snipers or specialist teams if it was about taking out one person or a small group with minimal collateral damage. Carpet bombing was for taking out unknown opponents in a specific area with no concern for collateral damage. They could switch off stuff like drones and guided missiles to get more precision using the trained specialists. This is exactly what Richard Marcinko of SEAL 6 wanted after watching SIGINT and technical solutions screw up missions for so long that the human soldiers then had to salvage.
>The most shocking angle of all, is how willing people are to build this technology - like, the cool factor overrides any moral or ethical issues
People tell themselves all sorts of things to justify this kind of cognitive dissonance. The predominant arguments I've seen are:
A) Technology isn't good/bad, it's how you use it. And fortunately for the engineers, the tech will be used far away by people they'll never meet and the details of which will remain classified. Out of sight, out of mind.
B) If we don't build it, someone else will. And we don't want this tech to fall into our enemy's hands first, do we? Best defense is a good offense.
>B) If we don't build it, someone else will. And we don't want this tech to fall into our enemy's hands first, do we? Best defense is a good offense.
I'm not actually clear on what's incorrect about this logic -- unless there's some kind of agreement across all superpowers not to research this subject, or the subject itself is not actually beneficial to research.. why would you assume that none of your potential adversaries are researching it?
And once you recognize that they might research it, and that if they did research it, and you didn't, they might switch from potential adversary to actual adversary (as they now believe themselves to have the upper hand), the only moral and ethical thing to do ... is to research it yourself!
Perhaps the more moral and ethical thing is to give away the technology once you have it, so that you yourself won't have the chance to be aggressor ... but otherwise, I'm not sure how you can justify not researching it (war, and the potential for it, exists regardless of whether you want it to)
The main problem with this logic is it is much easier to steal technology than invent it, so by doing this you are not only assuring your enemies will end up with that scary tech, you are building it for them.
Without an absurd premise (eg pretending war isn't an ever-present threat for any nation-state), and without requiring some Oracle or superior governing body to determine behaviors without the fog of war, what superior and general logic should have been applied that would have avoided the cold war?
That this particular bit of logic leads us to the Cold War is well and fine; was the Cold War avoidable with some other reasonable mode of operation?
> what superior and general logic should have been applied that would have avoided the cold war?
The logic that the entire population is stuck on this planet (then and now for the time being), and the resources/ideologies being fought over don't mean a thing if everyone is dead.
> It was being pitched as the ideal way to assassinate people in a crowd - identify them by heartbeat signature, fly a drone in to drop a small explosive package on their heads.
> It was being pitched as the ideal way to assassinate people in a crowd - identify them by heartbeat signature, fly a drone in to drop a small explosive package on their heads.
Wouldn't be surprised if this isn't already happening in the Middle East, the unregulated and far away land we like to test all of the West's/Israel's new toys in.
And there I was keeping quiet about the nasty horrible weapons, just like that, which my brain cooks up at 3 am when I can’t sleep, in the hope that no real company would develop them.
I guess I shouldn't have mentioned my idea of artillery shells carrying pumped x-ray lasers as payload, fired straight up for some nice over-the-horizon frying of enemy materiel...
I thought the mean free path of x-rays in air would limit you to, effectively, “radiation mines”? (Or short-range death-rays, robot-mounted because the backscatter would kill a human operative)?
If I'm reading this chart correctly[0], visible light has much worse mean free path than x-rays, so wouldn't x-ray lasers work even better than visible ones?
As for backscatter, that's only an argument for a shell instead of a ground installation - you pulse the laser high up, where the backscatter is of no concern to you.
How do you make an x-ray mirror that won't ablate and burn up when trying to reflect that kind of energy?
Also, I said "pumped x-ray laser" for a reason; this type of design usually involves blowing up the energy source and/or the laser medium. Fits the missile or shell use cases.
When talking about lasers pumping out enough energy to be usable as weapons over distances of hundreds of kilometers - to bounce them off a satellite - you will need a mirror that can reflect that ray almost perfectly, or you'll just blast your own satellite out of the sky. And to do that, that mirror will only be able to reflect your ray at a shallow angle, which pretty much rules out bouncing an X-ray off it (unless your target is in orbit or, I suppose, if you have a fleet of such satellites, and coordinated enough to bounce the ray down 2° at a time).
> It was being pitched as the ideal way to assassinate people in a crowd - identify them by heartbeat signature, fly a drone in to drop a small explosive package on their heads.
Hmm, if you're already shining a laser on your target it seems to me there are simpler ways to achieve your goal...
Even putting aside from the inevitable "misuse", I even wonder about it's intended use. For example:
>Jetson can achieve over 95% accuracy under good conditions
What does this even mean? I can see enormous incentive to avoid false negatives. But I don't see as much incentive to avoid false positives.
For example, the incentives are even less than for drug testing for which there is some semblance of legal proceeding. And yet which are still flawed.
I'm sure it's better than bombing indiscriminately. But it'd be nice to be confident that it isn't going to increase wrongful assassinations due to over confidence.
Did the test you saw attempt to show a low false positive rate too?
I wasn't building weapons, but rather rail systems, in the SIL-4 (life-protection) category, but one encounter with the 'cousin' teams with rockets and shiny shoulders was enough for me. I'm okay doing things elsewhere to counter the threat ..
I wonder what methods exist to alter your heart's distinctive rhythm. Presumably if you had a pacemaker installed, you could tinker with it (albeit at great risk.) But could I alter my heart's signature by taking medication?
If the scanning system has a database of your regular pulmonary patterns, can't this be used, albeit crudely, to detect the emotional state of a subject?
With automation I can't help but think that this is unfortunately going to bring George Orwell's dystopian vision closer to reality.
Polygraphs supposedly detect intentional lies. That seems much harder than just trying to get a general sense of "are they relaxed or anxious", "are they happy or sad."
The sham related to polygraphs is trying to divine some correlation between a person's instantaneous emotional state and the veracity of their communications. The biometrics polygraphs measure are very real.
You don't even need a database of pulmonary patterns. The human baseline and deviations from it is plenty strong enough for crude emotion state detection.
The paranoid in me wonders if this isn't released because it's irrelevant now, since even in the civilian world with civilian technology the "laser" would seem to be nearly superfluous.
I took a class in college on lie detection technology from someone who worked doing research. Lie detectors don't detect lies or emotions, they measure heart rate, respiration rate, and galvanic skin response, which only tell you when the individual is experiencing something; could be pain, anxiety, fear, anger, happiness, a lot of things. Maybe they are lying, maybe not, not really good enough evidence with those things.
Heart rate isn't going to give you as much information, and you aren't in a controlled environment, so I imagine things like exercise could effect it. It can be detected with a camera recording your face and a simple algorithm though, so biometric data from an airport could definitely give you someone's pattern.
This laser presumably detects vibrations, so I'd be interested to see if something as simple as listening to music with a bit of base as you walk could effect it.
I kind of imagine that the targets folks are looking for would likely be wearing body armor a significant percentage of the time as a precaution. I wonder if this always requires the chest as a target area or if you could also focus on other exposed areas like the neck to calculate this...
> He claims that Jetson can achieve over 95% accuracy under good conditions
Isn't it critical to state how many signatures are in the database when quoting an accuracy? 95% accuracy among 4 different heartbeats is much easier than 95% accuracy among 2^32 heartbeats, many of which will resemble one another.
While the article and the other comments are about military uses this could also be used for physical access security instead of finger or iris (or badge.) The next question would be if there is a way to spoof someone else's heartbeat signature. Maybe a flat panel speaker playing a recording of the other person's heartbeat. Good morning Mr. Phelps.....
"The algorithm can find subtle changes in motion and amplify those, too. By pointing a camera at an artery, we see the imperceptible beat of a wrist become a pounding great pulsation that's straining to burst out of an arm. The rise and fall of a breathing chest can also be turned up.
MIT computer scientist Fredo Durand predicts that his algorithm will be used primarily for remote medical diagnostics. He also imagines that structural engineers could borrow the tech to measure the way wind makes a building sway or deform slightly."
Pentagon has a laser that can identify people at a distance by their heartbeat
Ha! Joke's on them. My ex says I don't have a heart!
Seriously, though. Imagine the medical diagnostic possibilities of something like this. Not this thing exactly, obviously. But something that won't kill people.
I looked through all the comments but still haven't seen an answer to an obvious limitation(that is posed near the end of the article): Where are they getting their library of heartbeats from? I'm sure the CIA is collecting, but being able to positively ID someone with their heartbeat is useless unless you already have a verified record of their heartbeat.
Imagine the case of finding an elusive person (such as Saddam Hussein or Osama Bin Laden), somebody has to go collect a verified sample BEFORE an assassination takes place. But if you are in a position to collect a sample of someone's heartbeat and you KNOW that it's the right person through some other verifiable means (you need to know if you actually got OBL instead of a body double), then what does this really get you? You already had some trustworthy source, and you can probably use this previous source to verify that you assassinated the right person.
So this heartbeat ID tech may be more accurate and robust compared to facial recognition, but it's less useful in actuality. We already have verified pictures of most adults in the world via passports and driver's licenses and such, which makes facial recognition a ton more useful in real life.
The problem that this heartbeat tech "solves," the ability to ID someone with great accuracy, is hamstrung by the fact that the elusive people we have the greatest need for an ID like this won't have their data available. For non-elusive people we can already find them by getting their picture and address out of a database.
But you can bet the CIA realizes this limitation and will work diligently over the next few years to get heartprints of Kim Jong Un, Vladimir Putin, and other notorious figures at every public appearance so that they can slowly build a library that will be useful down the road.
I see people are pointing out the 95% accuracy. I think it’s worth reminding everyone that the current American criteria for killing people with drone strikes requires that they 1) be male and 2) appear from orbit to be above a certain height. There’s no requirement to have someone on the ground to pick out targets or make sure afterwards that the right person was killed.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 224 ms ] threadhttps://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/96321
While the guy who's getting droned or the dude getting the shit kicked out of him by a bunch of cops may care about identification, the people doing those things don't really care as long as they get the right guy often enough compared to the wrong guy.
I’m not sure that’s always accurate. The infamous “We don’t do body counts” episode comes to mind.
Preventing font fingerprinting means limiting font use to default system fonts and web fonts only. If a page can use user installed fonts, they can tell whether or not those fonts were installed.
Safari’s fingerprint protection does this already, I don’t know if other browsers do.
Only because the relevant APIs choose to allow this. Javascript served from the website should not be able to read this kind of data including element sizes.
My browser should report a minimum of info such as viewport size and rendering engine, and if you (by this I mean the general "you") require more info then either you're a bad developer or your design needs to be rationalized.
Edit: and to the guy whose comment got flagkilled asking about how I want to solve the "problem" of breaking sites that rely on crutches like knowing the rendered size of an element, I say this:
I don't propose to fix the problem because it isn't a problem for anyone but advertisers, and fuck those people.
I agree with you. But the reality is that there are a lot of bad developers and badly designed sites.
Now if you enforce this, you’ll break those sites. So how do you propose to solve that problem?
I think a much more reasonable solution would be to enact and enforce laws that protect private information.
This sort of thing is used for even deeper GPU fingerprinting because the exact results of graphics commands can vary slightly. I’m not sure what browsers can/are doing to prevent that.
Why can't that be whitelisted per domain by the user?
Still, an interesting middle ground between "JS can do whatever it wants" and "JS is disabled entirely" might be "JS can send data and styling to the DOM but has very limited access to read anything back."
Maybe include some very basic functionality like ability to read the content inside a tag, but nothing more detailed about how an object is styled, how large it is, where it's positioned on the page, whether its hover or visited state is active, whether there's scroll overflow, etc.
Related - a quick search suggests that Brave's tracking protection feature does kill the getImageData() function. https://community.brave.com/t/getimagedata-does-not-work-in-...
If what you assert is true then JavaScript needs to die. Now.
-Little Brother, by Cory Doctorow [0][1][2]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Brother_(Doctorow_novel...
[1] https://craphound.com/category/littlebrother/
[2] https://craphound.com/littlebrother/download/
I think it would still be your unique signature.. only faster
Then of course the next question is: I wonder if you can hack someone else's pacemaker.
(and then, apple watch is a countermeasure)
It was being pitched as the ideal way to assassinate people in a crowd - identify them by heartbeat signature, fly a drone in to drop a small explosive package on their heads.
When I later saw that biometric information was being harvested by the same company at airports around the world, I figured - time to get a different job. So I quit.
And now, the tech of individually-targeted assassinations is coming to market.
The most shocking angle of all, is how willing people are to build this technology - like, the cool factor overrides any moral or ethical issues, and even bringing up a question of ethics around these technologies will get you segregated from the 'cool hunter' classes...
And war, especially modern war, isn't a human task. Humans are bad at it, and it's bad for humans. Cool, precise machines though? No fear, no boredom, no hunger, no sleep. What's not to love?
And it's chic and cyberpunk af. They better be smart and unhackable and free of bugs though.
I actually can't think of something more cyberpunk dystopia we-are-the-bad-guys than mindless killing machines that uphold imperialism.
> They better be smart and unhackable and free of bugs though.
Damn it, this is a joke that I misread, right? Surely you're not serious?
Yeah, this is the rub. Better weapons systems mean easier tyranny.
I couldn't imagine what life is going to be like when there are fleets of these things patrolling cities, but I guess we're going to find out soon enough.
I imagine a scenario akin to Hong Kong - 2 million people, whose leaders are suddenly rendered unconscious mid-march by a fleet of drones.
In est: guerilla drone war.
I don't trust humans to avoid war crimes. Robots could have protections built in in a way that international orgs can verify.
Even guided missiles, which seem indiscriminate, are much more precise and limit collateral damage. 50 years ago the alternative was carpet bombing - a guided missile produces much more targeted damage. You can argue that guided missiles save lives - if you want someone dead enough that you're willing to kill everyone around them, having an option to just knock them out seems much more humane (especially to the kids on the nearby playground).
Plus, I'd absolutely hate to be the side that didn't uparmor with autonomous systems - you'd get creamed. Like it or not, it's a part of the battlefield now. I'm not a fan of us bringing back tactical nuclear (low yield) munitions, but that's apparently also happening.
AND the work can be totally badass, the stability/pay is good, and you just get more valuable as you age (unlike being, say, a front end web developer). Plus seeing something you built go out to the range and tear apart a tank/knock down an RPG/launch into space/whatever is really, really dang cool.
They aren't but the bots and drones are.
If these existed, would people continue attempt to cross illegally? The thought-provoking argument is that these pieces of technology, if foolproof, would go completely unused as people inherently value their lives (but not laws.)
I wish I could have lived in a bubble, developing "tech" that didn't matter and was only positive, but even the most disconnected web jockey is paid for by the surveillance-capitalism dollars of the modern internet. That tech might be worse for society overall - it gave us the creeping global eye at a pace faster than legislation could keep up with it, or that society could adapt, and it seemed innocuous at first.
No, it was snipers or specialist teams if it was about taking out one person or a small group with minimal collateral damage. Carpet bombing was for taking out unknown opponents in a specific area with no concern for collateral damage. They could switch off stuff like drones and guided missiles to get more precision using the trained specialists. This is exactly what Richard Marcinko of SEAL 6 wanted after watching SIGINT and technical solutions screw up missions for so long that the human soldiers then had to salvage.
People tell themselves all sorts of things to justify this kind of cognitive dissonance. The predominant arguments I've seen are:
A) Technology isn't good/bad, it's how you use it. And fortunately for the engineers, the tech will be used far away by people they'll never meet and the details of which will remain classified. Out of sight, out of mind.
B) If we don't build it, someone else will. And we don't want this tech to fall into our enemy's hands first, do we? Best defense is a good offense.
I'm not actually clear on what's incorrect about this logic -- unless there's some kind of agreement across all superpowers not to research this subject, or the subject itself is not actually beneficial to research.. why would you assume that none of your potential adversaries are researching it?
And once you recognize that they might research it, and that if they did research it, and you didn't, they might switch from potential adversary to actual adversary (as they now believe themselves to have the upper hand), the only moral and ethical thing to do ... is to research it yourself!
Perhaps the more moral and ethical thing is to give away the technology once you have it, so that you yourself won't have the chance to be aggressor ... but otherwise, I'm not sure how you can justify not researching it (war, and the potential for it, exists regardless of whether you want it to)
It's this same logic that gave us The Cold War.
Without an absurd premise (eg pretending war isn't an ever-present threat for any nation-state), and without requiring some Oracle or superior governing body to determine behaviors without the fog of war, what superior and general logic should have been applied that would have avoided the cold war?
That this particular bit of logic leads us to the Cold War is well and fine; was the Cold War avoidable with some other reasonable mode of operation?
The logic that the entire population is stuck on this planet (then and now for the time being), and the resources/ideologies being fought over don't mean a thing if everyone is dead.
Reminds me of this little presentation [0]
[0] https://youtu.be/9CO6M2HsoIA
Wouldn't be surprised if this isn't already happening in the Middle East, the unregulated and far away land we like to test all of the West's/Israel's new toys in.
As for backscatter, that's only an argument for a shell instead of a ground installation - you pulse the laser high up, where the backscatter is of no concern to you.
--
[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mean_free_path#/media/File:Pho...
Also, I said "pumped x-ray laser" for a reason; this type of design usually involves blowing up the energy source and/or the laser medium. Fits the missile or shell use cases.
> The whole point of ordinance is its cheap
Not in the US, with how much missiles cost.
Mostly the fact that
1. as someone mentioned already, x-ray lasers are not easy to generate, with designs sometimes using nukes to pump them [see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Excalibur ];
2. while x-rays can be reflected, x-ray mirrors don't behave like optical mirrors because the wavelength of an x-ray is in the same ballpark as the size of atoms (10 nm to 0.1 nm, with atomic radii being in the 0.1-0.01 nm range), and they only reflect 100% of incident radiation when it hits them at very shallow angles ("For gold at 1 keV, the critical reflection angle is 2.4 degrees") [see https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/128247/how-would... http://henke.lbl.gov/optical_constants/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-ray_optics ].
When talking about lasers pumping out enough energy to be usable as weapons over distances of hundreds of kilometers - to bounce them off a satellite - you will need a mirror that can reflect that ray almost perfectly, or you'll just blast your own satellite out of the sky. And to do that, that mirror will only be able to reflect your ray at a shallow angle, which pretty much rules out bouncing an X-ray off it (unless your target is in orbit or, I suppose, if you have a fleet of such satellites, and coordinated enough to bounce the ray down 2° at a time).
[Also see http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/spacegunconvent... , C-s for "X-ray" and "grazing", but that whole website is a goldmine]
Hmm, if you're already shining a laser on your target it seems to me there are simpler ways to achieve your goal...
>Jetson can achieve over 95% accuracy under good conditions
What does this even mean? I can see enormous incentive to avoid false negatives. But I don't see as much incentive to avoid false positives.
For example, the incentives are even less than for drug testing for which there is some semblance of legal proceeding. And yet which are still flawed.
I'm sure it's better than bombing indiscriminately. But it'd be nice to be confident that it isn't going to increase wrongful assassinations due to over confidence.
Did the test you saw attempt to show a low false positive rate too?
The words "biometric certainty" were flashed, lets just put it that way.
Aren't all assassinations individually targeted?
With automation I can't help but think that this is unfortunately going to bring George Orwell's dystopian vision closer to reality.
See also https://news.mit.edu/2016/detecting-emotions-with-wireless-s... (using wifi to detect heartbeat) , https://web.stanford.edu/class/cs231a/prev_projects_2016/fin... (various video-based methods) , https://people.csail.mit.edu/mrub/evm/ (and see the video), and a lot of other things.
The paranoid in me wonders if this isn't released because it's irrelevant now, since even in the civilian world with civilian technology the "laser" would seem to be nearly superfluous.
You only need to look across the globe to find a situation where this exists.
https://www.businessinsider.com/china-emotional-surveillance...
Heart rate isn't going to give you as much information, and you aren't in a controlled environment, so I imagine things like exercise could effect it. It can be detected with a camera recording your face and a simple algorithm though, so biometric data from an airport could definitely give you someone's pattern.
This laser presumably detects vibrations, so I'd be interested to see if something as simple as listening to music with a bit of base as you walk could effect it.
Yeah, well having a drone flying at 200 meters from the target while aiming what must be a heavy laser is not exactly a piece of cake either.
and why heavy?
In addition to the unmanned bombers that fly at high altitude, the military also has low-altitude surveillance drones like:
https://www.avinc.com/uas/view/raven
Interesting - mind if I ask why?
I hate that I even have to think about this.
Isn't it critical to state how many signatures are in the database when quoting an accuracy? 95% accuracy among 4 different heartbeats is much easier than 95% accuracy among 2^32 heartbeats, many of which will resemble one another.
A thief can't steal your heart.
A thief could still threaten your life.
You can't repudiate your heart.
If you get a heart transplant, at first the 'system' might not have a workflow for changing your expected heart signature.
Looks at Apple watch.. looks at fitbit.. looks at Samsung phone with heartbeat monitor..
huh
This is what does it.
You can just keep going and see what comes next...
Or you can kill yourself today, and escape this shitty world as fast as possible, before they get a chance to clamp down harder.
Reminded about remote diagnostics using camera https://www.wired.co.uk/article/mit-algorithm
"The algorithm can find subtle changes in motion and amplify those, too. By pointing a camera at an artery, we see the imperceptible beat of a wrist become a pounding great pulsation that's straining to burst out of an arm. The rise and fall of a breathing chest can also be turned up.
MIT computer scientist Fredo Durand predicts that his algorithm will be used primarily for remote medical diagnostics. He also imagines that structural engineers could borrow the tech to measure the way wind makes a building sway or deform slightly."
Ha! Joke's on them. My ex says I don't have a heart!
Seriously, though. Imagine the medical diagnostic possibilities of something like this. Not this thing exactly, obviously. But something that won't kill people.
Imagine the case of finding an elusive person (such as Saddam Hussein or Osama Bin Laden), somebody has to go collect a verified sample BEFORE an assassination takes place. But if you are in a position to collect a sample of someone's heartbeat and you KNOW that it's the right person through some other verifiable means (you need to know if you actually got OBL instead of a body double), then what does this really get you? You already had some trustworthy source, and you can probably use this previous source to verify that you assassinated the right person.
So this heartbeat ID tech may be more accurate and robust compared to facial recognition, but it's less useful in actuality. We already have verified pictures of most adults in the world via passports and driver's licenses and such, which makes facial recognition a ton more useful in real life.
The problem that this heartbeat tech "solves," the ability to ID someone with great accuracy, is hamstrung by the fact that the elusive people we have the greatest need for an ID like this won't have their data available. For non-elusive people we can already find them by getting their picture and address out of a database.
But you can bet the CIA realizes this limitation and will work diligently over the next few years to get heartprints of Kim Jong Un, Vladimir Putin, and other notorious figures at every public appearance so that they can slowly build a library that will be useful down the road.
Will wearing a winter jacket (e.g. in airports) still be legal in a couple of years?