i built a small system that tracks a fixed cohort of business jets (from FAA registry data, matched via ICAO hex) and counts how many are airborne at a given time.
it ingests ADS-B exchange heatmap files (30 min intervals), backfills historical counts, and compares the current value to a baseline for similar times of day/week.
the output is a simple deviation, shown as an "emergency level".
in practice it mostly shows a strong daily cycle, with occasional spikes during holidays, or on april 6th when trump threatened "a whole civilization will die tonight".
I made a few interactive art installations last year using SDXL Turbo with a multi-GPU on-site setup. After we got a request to show a piece in Europe, I researched whether it would be possible to run the installation in the cloud instead of shipping super expensive computers. It turns out that it is doable, but there are a lot of little gotchas. I wrote about my experience developing this system, and also include links to the GitHub repository if you want to try it yourself.
super fascinating to see this comment! it gave me the chance to take a step through my memories, and try to guess who might have felt this way. if i was an asshole to you and never apologized, send me a message and i would be very happy to take responsibility <3
my impression was that apple initiated contact based on an assumption that i was running a keylogger or other information that could be used for identity theft. they quickly learned it was an art project but decided to apply force via the secret service to keep it from gaining too much publicity. after that caused a bit of a streisand effect, they decided not pursue a civil case. i would guess that the judge decided not to pursue a criminal case because it would have been an obvious waste of resources.
author here. i'm deeply, genuinely grateful that you all care enough to revisit and discuss this decade-old work. special thanks to throwayyy479087 for stirring some shit on my behalf, saving me the work of creating a sock puppet just to cast shade and spread rumors. i'd be happy to answer any questions if you have them.
Real change should come from a reduction first, then offsetting what you can't reduce (until you can). So, in theory, yes. And probably for much less even, because there is still a lot of lower-priced carbon credits/offsets that are totally valid.
Hi everyone :) This is from some new research I just published. You can read about the full methodology in this 22-page writeup[1] and I also made a tracker [2].
Hi everyone :) This is from some new research I just published. You can read about the full methodology in this 22-page writeup[1] and I also wrote a short summary [2].
Just want to say thanks again for the great comment. I was following Van Buren, and it was a certainly vindication. I agree with you there is a push and pull. Here's hoping that debate & discussion that needs to happen plays out in a way that puts the people first, instead of expanding protections to the government and big corps.
Wow, incredible response! I appreciate you taking the time to respond :)
I am very familiar with Aaron's case. I think your analysis is correct: some people believe I made a bad judgement call, and the CFAA is broad enough that this created a liability, even though we cannot know whether it was legal. I think my frustration with most armchair-analysis (not including you, CaptArmchair) is that folks confuse their moral certainty (I "made a bad judgement call") with legal certainty ("this is the kind of thing the CFAA protects us from"). But the law is a lot more complicated.
For me the concern is exactly (d)(1). When the CFAA is overly broad, and the ability to investigate is granted to all "offenses", where does that leave us? Can Apple cry "CFAA!" at anything they don't like? In practice, there are some checks and balances: in this case, Judge Lois Bloom decided to sign the warrant; Judge Judith Philips refused to prosecute. Is this enough? To me, seeing the ways the CFAA has been abused in other cases, it's not so clear.
Thanks for spending time thinking through some of this :)
I think it "felt like 30" because I was nervous. Not because I thought it was illegal or unethical, but because I was breaking social norms. I see this as different from acting "unethically", and closer to what Erving Goffman would call a "breaching experiment".
I definitely did not want to raise any flags in the store itself, hence the staggered exit and furtive behavior. Again, not because I thought it was illegal or unethical, but because there was a certain way I wanted to see everything play out. If I got kicked out before I had a chance to exhibit the work, it would have made for a distractingly complicated story. I think this point is difficult for some folks who can only see this as a prank or security research, and don't understand how artists think and work and craft stories.
Regarding the question of what constitutes "public space" and legality of of using peoples likenesses for profit, there are some other great responses in this thread which explain the details (like the one here by sellyme). It's interesting for me to hear how most folks on HN assume that photography in the US operates more like the EU.
OP here. Thank you for sharing this. I'm lucky in that this is the only bad knock I've had. And after a few years this effect slowly disappeared for me.
Hi, OP here. Do I know you? Thanks for your thoughts :) I would hope that anyone evaluating this project today not look at it alone, but examine it as part of a much larger body of work I've made since around that time. By itself, it was a small gesture that got overblown. In context, I like to think that it has more to offer. In case anyone is curious, see on my website https://kylemcdonald.net/ "Facework", "Vibe Check", "ICESpy", "How We Act Together", "Sharing Faces", "us+", "FaceOSC" and "Face Substitution" (now people call it "face swapping").
OP here. The only reason I wasn't charged is because AUSA Judith Philips refused to prosecute me. Also, Aaron Swartz was investigated by both the FBI and the USSS.
OP here. syshum has it correct. If you take a photo with your lens on one side of the Apple Store's massive glass wall, it is legally the same from a privacy perspective as taking a photo on the other side (unless Apple explicitly forbids it).
Hi, OP here. Just some technical clarification. There were two apps. The first one took a photo once a minute and uploaded it to a PHP script on my server. Apple probably identified this one because it sent a ping to my server even when it didn't send a photo. The second app was essentially a screensaver that regularly checked a URL to see whether it should go fullscreen or not, and then it quit after one minute. These were both custom-built apps, less than 100 loc each and missing all of the functionalities of spyware and RATs. I would expect that real RATs have been installed on Apple Store machines in the past, and perhaps Apple suspected this was another. If I had been sniffing and posting keystrokes, the situation may have turned out completely different. But this project was focused on face analysis.
Hi, OP here. Just wanted to add one point of technical clarification: it wasn't a RAT, it was a C++ app that used the QuickTime SDK to connect to the camera, OpenCV to run face detection, and curl to regularly send the results to a hacked-together PHP script that uploaded them to Tumblr. It sat in the dock while it was running, with a silver Apple logo as the icon.
OP here. Not going to disagree about folks underestimating where the real danger is. But the fear of photography is not unfounded. There are many examples of people suffering from being captured in public settings. Sometimes it is because of their behavior (every "Karen" video), sometimes it is an abuser getting a lead on their ex's location from a tagged Facebook pic. For this project I tried to make sure that I didn't "feature" anyone, so attention was diluted across thousands of photos. When I eventually exhibited the work, I worked with a watercolor artist to create paintings from the photos to further disconnect the work from the customer's identity.