Raze your glasses!

[ffutures]

A story in last night's Evening Standard claimed that someone in a US bar was beaten up for wearing Google Glasses. I'm not convinced it's true - details were sketchy - but it does seem to bear out the idea that these things will not be popular because of the invasion of privacy they represent.

So... there has to be a business opportunity here, for anti-Google Goggle devices.

I'm thinking mainly in terms of wearable QR codes that lead to malware or sites that chew up bandwidth / processing power one way or another, or are just intensely annoying; badgers, for example. But there must be other possibilities; strobes that work just outside the visible spectrum but are seen by cameras, for example. Obviously we don't want to be too antisocial, but I have a feeling that there will be a lot of things like this in days to come.

Bujold-related SF thought - did this happen to Simon Illyan a lot? It's canon for Manfred Maxx in the Accelerando universe, of course.

Comments

[bugshaw.livejournal.com]

The EURion constellation?

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

Looks like that's only effective against photocopiers, but nice idea.

[beer-good-foamy.livejournal.com]

I like XKCD's take on it. (This one seems a bit violent now, though I reserve the right to change my mind if they really become common...)

But yeah, badgers would probably do it. Or just simply a core dump of "*.tumblr.com"; I'm not sure if there's a limit to how many animated .gifs of Benedict Cumberbatch a Google Glass can take, but I'm sure someone is willing to find out.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

I know I've seen both of those before - can't think why I didn't remember them when I made this entry.

Lasers are a bit too wholesale for my liking - something that messes with the cameras without the potential to hurt anyone seems a better bet.

You must have a very clean mind - one of my thoughts on this was linking to really bad porn...

[beer-good-foamy.livejournal.com]

You must have a very clean mind - one of my thoughts on this was linking to really bad porn...

It occurred to me, but blocking porn is easy. Forcing people to see everything on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, etc would force them to block all the sites they actually do want to see, making the glass pointless.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

Good point.

[jhall1.livejournal.com]

I saw the same story somewhere else, possibly on the BBC's website,

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

Still doesn't guarantee it's true.

[jhall1.livejournal.com]

Indeed. It's possible that both were relying on the same agency report, which may or may not have been accurate.

[gonzo21.livejournal.com]

I've always thought the real problem will occur when somebody wears the glasses and is hanging about near a school or a park, and somebody cries 'pedo!'.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

It'll come. Though you'd think the real ones would be using something a lot less conspicuous by now.

[jeriendhal.livejournal.com]

I'd think we'd need something like The World's Ugliest T-Shirt from Gibson's Zero History, which interfered with the ability of CCTV cameras to photograph the person wearing it.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

Many years ago one of my nieces (as a toddler) had a knitted top in very bright colours that practically strobed if you looked at it - photos of it had a weird 3D depth effect. Unfortunately I don't seem to have any pictures of it now, but the effect of that on computers might have been interesting.

[nojay.livejournal.com]

There was something on Slashdot, maybe via Boing Boing a couple of years ago about infra-red LED wearables that interfered with CCTV and face-recognition systems, supposedly, without being distracting in the range of human vision. Tighter-bandwidth optical filters would get round this sort of obscuration of course.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

The trick would be to pick a frequency the cameras use e.g. to recognize bar codes.

[nojay.livejournal.com]

This was more like wearing a hat or a necklace with high-intensity IR LEDs, something close to the face so glare and auto-exposure controls would obscure facial features, like shining a torch directly into the camera but at a frequency the human eye isn't particularly sensitive to.

You could experiment, try taking a long exposure picture of a remote control or similar while pressing one of the buttons to see how it works. Most cameras have an IR filter but bright enough near-visible IR will get through this filter and register on the sensor as "light".

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

Or weave some "leaky" optical fibres into your clothing (or even a hairpiece) radiating at the right frequency. Wear chemical light things as necklaces, hair-bands, etc.

You can see infra-red from a remote on my bridge camera's screen, but my iPad camera shows nothing, I suspect that's true of many other cameras. Earlier generation iPhone and iPad cameras did show it - the physics teachers at my school used to demonstrate infa-red that way.

[beamjockey.livejournal.com]

Sounds akin to Dave Langford's "basilisk" stories, which feature optical designs that can interfere with the human brain. (See also the seizure-inducing episode of Pokemon.)

Except that you're looking to crash the glasses, not the wearer.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

Sounds about right, but I'd settle for making the user embarrassed or so fed up that he stops using the glasses.

[dsample.livejournal.com]

Simon didn't have much of a social life, while he still had his chip. The only times he'd been to the theatre were when he was working. If Simon ever did enter a bar, he probably would have had a security escort.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

True. Also, I doubt many people outside ImpSec knew about the implant, and those who did would probably realise that pissing off Illyan was a VERY bad idea. But if other invasions of privacy along these lines were common there might be defences against them that accidentally gave Illyan trouble. For instance, incoming visitors from high-tech worlds might be covered in them.

[major-clanger.livejournal.com]

If it had been that easy to crash Illyan's memory chip, then that's the attack vector that would have been used, rather than a very complex bioengineered toxin.

As it is, it's not really clear (and I've re-read most of the books recently) whether Illyan's chip processes and indexes data or just gives him perfect eidetic memory. One would think that you would need a degree of indexing to make sense of perfect memory, but on the other hand perfect memory would mean instantly recognising Joe Vorbloggs and remembering every occasion you'd seen him before, which might obviate the need for any additional database functions.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

That's true enough - it used his eyes as its camera, not some fancy optical array. I got the impression that there was some degree of organization, if only by date and time, but it was never very clear.

[averageshmoe.livejournal.com]

Well, some restaurants and bars are beginning to ban the use of Google Glasses out of fear that they can be sued should someone post images of their clientele without their permission.

So I guess the best way to screw up Google Glasses is a lawyer!

pfgavigan

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

Well, IANAL but see the comment below from major_clanger.

The thing that occurred to me is that wearing those into say the British Library would make it very easy to take pictures of every page of a book, which is banned by their rules.

[major-clanger.livejournal.com]

I'm waiting for the first prosecution for using Google Glass in court; taking photographs in a court is an offence under section 41 of the Criminal Justice Act 1925 as well as being contempt of court.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

That ought to be interesting, especially if the counter-claim is that it's a tool of the trade for e.g. a reporter who is using it to make notes.