Masking came along at the perfect time for reasons of personal privacy (not a pro-mask/anti-mask rant)
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As I said in the title - this is not a pro-mask or anti-mask rant.
I've noticed something very strange in recent years - anytime I go into any kind of big "name brand" store, or go near any kind of established government or community building or center - there are now cameras literally EVERYWHERE recording my every move. Every traffic light seems to have a camera now, many street lamps have them. And now probably up to half of my neighbors have "Ring" doorbells (or other nitwit doorbell security cameras) that record everything. And cars are being built with cameras all over the body to help with self-driving. I'm suddenly living in a complete surveillance state, where my every step is tracked with pinpoint precision by thousands of local cameras. I live in a little neighborhood right behind a shopping center. Just within 1 square mile of my house, I would not be surprised if there aren't several thousand cameras now, running 24/7, recording my every move from multiple angles as soon as I step out my front door.
And I have to assume that somewhere between 50% and 100% of all this digital recording is being sucked up into various cloudy storage locations, where facial recognition software is hard at work recognizing me in every moment of video. And between Amazon, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, the NSA, etc etc etc, all this data about my face is being stored and passed around among numerous databases.
Which brings me to my point. Masking may be the greatest thing to ever come along in terms of clawing back some semblance of privacy. I might never stop wearing this mask. And I don't just wear a little paper mask - I wear a big wrap-around thing that covers nearly my entire face and my neck and the back of my head. Years from now, when people laugh at me because I'm still wearing my big masks, I'll have the last laugh. Their most recent pimples are all being analyzed by a massive AI bot army. My dimples and wrinkles will be safely tucked away. I'll stand out like a sore thumb because no one else will be wearing a mask. But no one will be analyzing satellite imagery of my razor stubble with a Chinese super computer.
In this thread, I'll explore some other related issues. How to take advantage of covid19 best practices to start to take back your biometrics (think wearing gloves, sunglasses and masks at all times, except in your own home or yard). How to blend into your environment and "disappear" (these techniques will be different than full-head masking in many cases). Reverse engineering the surveillance state - using masks with pre-printed human features to confuse and defeat the AI bot armies. Getting a completely anonymous burner phone. Leaving your phone at home in a faraday cage - what was once the realm of the tinfoil hat crazy brigade is suddenly a very real concern of anyone with a shred of concern about personal privacy. Confusing and defeating the constant attempts at biometric detection of your eyes and fingerprints. We can go in many different directions with this thread.
Let's have fun. Wrap that tinfoil tightly around your head before you post your responses here...
People's privacy is only possible in democratic countries. There are two types of countries, democratic and fascist.
Fascist regimes cannot become democratic ones without proletarian violent revolution, but democratic countries can become fascist ones gradually and peacefully, as their crises worsening.
Therefore, cherish your democracy when you still have it. It can be lost at any singular time (i.e., when fascists seize power).
> "democratic countries can become fascist ones gradually and peacefully, as their crises worsening."
> "Therefore, cherish your democracy when you still have it. It can be lost at any singular time (i.e., when fascists seize power)."
All that you say there is true. America is not a democracy but instead is a Constitutional Republic, but I'm sure you are talking about the general concept of democracy.
But it's not only fascists that can grab power. Currently we have a situation in both our countries where the wealthy elites have grabbed power in a form of oligarchy.
A scholar named Jeffrey Winters has defined a form of oligarchy that describes America fairly well - a "civil oligarchy".[1] It's a structure in which wealthy elites are actually ruling, but the nation retains certain democratic processes, and independent civilian bodies are allowed to control certain aspects of society such as the police.
From what I know of China, I would say it is controlled by a "ruling oligarchy", which Winters defines as a collective of oligarchs that rule over a country with a high degree of coordination in order to defend and enhance their own personal wealth. Ruling oligarchies are usually contrasted to "warring oligarchies", where oligarchs are pitted against each other individually for conflicts over wealth and power.
One of the characteristics of fascist rule is the mobilization of an entire population for war. I think that the oligarchs that rule America and China want to avoid real war because of its significant financial risks. They aren't afraid of a small amount of war among goat-herders in a far off place like Iraq or Syria or Afghanistan or in the Himalayan mountains along the borders with India, but I don't think they want a real war that requires complete national mobilization like during World War 2.
I think you are right. I think the USA is the fundamentally peaceful country of Mikey Mouse, hell-bent on bringing peace and democracy to Earth by any means, at any cost, whatever that means. And with the massive support of the generous donations of an entire population of captive benevolent taxpayers. Were it not for those stubborn, quarrelsome, parochial goat herders, all would already be living in cosmic harmony. Drat them.
Afghanistan will likely have its own billionaire oligarch class soon, as they begin to trade hundreds of billions of dollars worth of lithium and other rare earth metals (some say trillions) with a battery-craving western world. They may explore other types of oligarchy described by Jeffrey Winters as "warring oligarchy" (tribal or feudal oligarchs at war with each other to control one country) and "sultanistic oligarchy" (one ruling oligarch has autocratic control, handing out fiefdoms to lower oligarchs to control according to the ruler's wishes). Middle eastern nations seem to use these two methods more frequently.
Which brings up an interesting privacy-focused question: of the billions and trillions the world will throw into battery production and use over the next decade, what percentage of the battery power of each device will be used to spy on its owner and report back to a big tech corporation and/or a government surveillance organization?
Probably the smart privacy-minded people have already gotten rid of anything with a battery in it.
This is a set of different human faces masks that can be bought on ebay. If someone were to buy a bunch of different ones, rotate them daily, wear them all the time when not at home, I think it would break all the facial recognition AI.
It would be like using an anti-fingerprinting extension on your web browser like the Chameleon extension, that can report a different user agent string for your browser every ten minutes or so. It might report that you are using the latest Chrome on Windows 10, and then ten minutes later it reports that you are using Safari on a Mac, and ten minutes later says you are using Firefox mobile on an Android tablet, and then that you are using Firefox on a Linux desktop, and just constantly shuffles the data. Internet browser fingerprinting AI has to look for some other way to identify and track you.
Not so long ago, France passed harsh laws to ban face covering in public places. You were not even supposed to wear a scarf around your chin in winter, according to these so-called "anti-terrorist" laws. We are now left wondering where these laws have suddenly gone, at some point last year.
The laws came at a time when "video protection" (i.e. video surveillance) had already become widespread in both public and private spaces. I had taken to wearing party glasses which changed the color of my eyes and gave me a reddish nose and a small mustache, but mandatory masks made this totally unnecessary.
Morphing into a toad was the nail in the coffin of my worries.
Yup
What if you wear a burka? Lol
New report out today on the US federal government's expanding use of facial recognition technology[1].
It's a Brave New World out there folks - mask up for privacy!
These magic glasses might prove much more useful than I thought they would when I bought them, about twenty years ago, for that fancy-dress party. Now the fancy-dress party is going to be permanent. Investment in a full wardrobe of outfits is required, because if you always wear the same one, you'll easily be tracked.
Except of course if we manage to choose stricly identical costumes, including headgear, and we all wear them all the time in public places. It's tricky. It seems that whatever we do, we'll end up as clones, serving the powers that be.
Although, as a toad, I will always stand out in a crowd of humans. I'm doomed. If only I could morph back to penguin and join the throng.
My Chinese neighbor told me today that China's body recognition software is so good that they can track you regardless of what you wear on your face. Going to have to wear a full medieval suit of plate armor every time I walk to the grocery I guess. Whatever surveillance technology China is using well today will be hungrily slurped up for use against us by our western oligarch masters in a very short window of time.
When you think about it, they seem to have already managed to make their tracking job much simpler by permanently bombarding the masses with such frightening news that nobody wants to leave their home anymore. That is a clever tactic: the easiest way to track people is to keep them in one place, so you do not have to track them at all. The similarity with online tracking is striking: just entice your docile cattle to gather on the same few platforms and you do not need to go for their data any more, only to grab them all at once, censor at will and curate discourse. Fear and laziness are the two best assets of Big Brother.
Anyway, my amphibian brain cannot really grasp such a big picture. It all feels like some smarter forms of life have managed to make their own life easier at the expense of the rest of us, willy-nilly. Although we always have a choice, whatever it means for us poor lower forms of life. If evolution has produced our current corrupted system, maybe we can only accept it, or die, both of which would in effect reinforce the current state of things. Maybe, to the contrary, enough people are going to awaken and realize that another society is possible, and that it is worth giving it a try. Sometimes it is when things seem to have become totally grim and helpless that a new path is found, out of the darkness. For the time being, I cannot see much momentum to any sort of lasting change, nor any decent and coherent enough proposition for that to happen. I hope I am being too pessimistic.
Evil Genius: "God isn’t interested in technology. He cares nothing for the microchip or the silicon revolution. Look how he spends his time: forty-three species of parrots! Nipples for men!"
Samurai did it right. Even their horses were well disguised against facial recognition AI.
True. In fact it is impossible to tell which one is the horse, and which one is the samurai.
EDIT: I seem to have been spotted nearby my favorite pond: https://redandthepeanut.blogspot.com/2015/08/an-american-toad-visits-pond.html. Not sure how to mitigate that unfortunate tracking mistake.
Must be rather unsettling for those unlucky wives of samurais. To not be able to tell if they are kissing their husband or his horse.
Oh the merry wifes of samurais.
> EDIT: I seem to have been spotted nearby my favorite pond: https://redandthepeanut.blogspot.com/2015/08/an-american-toad-visits-pond.html. Not sure how to mitigate that unfortunate tracking mistake.
And naked as the day you were born too. You shouldn't be dragging this thread down into the depraved depths of toad pR0n though.
> dragging this thread down into the depraved depths
Was it not foreseeable that a topic with "masking" in its title could only go astray?
Even irony seems to have been lost in the process, which is always a bad omen.
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