London Installed AI Cameras To Monitor Social Distancing, Lockdown Restrictions (standard.co.uk) 65
schwit1 shares a report from The Evening Standard: Artificial Intelligence cameras are being used in London and other cities in the UK to monitor social distancing. The sensors were initially developed by Vivacity to track the flow of traffic, cyclists and pedestrians and monitor how roads are being used. But when the country went into lockdown in March, Vivacity added on an extra feature to the AI scanners so it could register the distance between pedestrians. This data is shared in a monthly report with the Government.
Vivacity Labs said they have more than 1,000 sensors installed across the UK, in cities including London, Manchester, Oxford, Cambridge and Nottingham. Chief Operating Officer at Vivacity Peter Mildon told BBC Radio Kent on Wednesday that the data is potentially "useful for informing policy decisions" regarding lockdown measures. He stressed that the cameras are not CCTV but that they operate as a data collating device rather than a camera that stores footage. "They are not recording any footage, they are not streaming any footage and no one is actually watching it," he said. Mr Mildon added: "We're creating a set of statistics on how behavior is changing in terms of how people are staying close together or apart. And it is that data that is then useful for informing policy decisions on whether there should be a two meter rule or a one meter plus rule or whether local lockdown measures are having the impact they are envisioned to."
Vivacity Labs said they have more than 1,000 sensors installed across the UK, in cities including London, Manchester, Oxford, Cambridge and Nottingham. Chief Operating Officer at Vivacity Peter Mildon told BBC Radio Kent on Wednesday that the data is potentially "useful for informing policy decisions" regarding lockdown measures. He stressed that the cameras are not CCTV but that they operate as a data collating device rather than a camera that stores footage. "They are not recording any footage, they are not streaming any footage and no one is actually watching it," he said. Mr Mildon added: "We're creating a set of statistics on how behavior is changing in terms of how people are staying close together or apart. And it is that data that is then useful for informing policy decisions on whether there should be a two meter rule or a one meter plus rule or whether local lockdown measures are having the impact they are envisioned to."
warm fuzzies (Score:5, Insightful)
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Ever notice that the UK is the test market for dystopian, Orwellian totalitarianism?
Re: warm fuzzies (Score:2, Funny)
Re:warm fuzzies (Score:4)
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the current government have made so many IT cock-ups, its probably not going to work anyway
But eventually it will.
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the current government have made so many IT cock-ups, its probably not going to work anyway
But eventually it will.
Hi; I can see you aren't from the UK and haven't been following us in much detail. I'm afraid that's not how it works in the UK [independent.co.uk] - if it's failing it will be cancelled eventually. In the end the contractors will successfully sue the government [bbc.co.uk] and we'll end up paying for it anyway. There was a brief time between about 2012 and 2018 when Government IT spent a little time pretending to be sane, but now it's just a way of handing money over to friends of our real leader, Dominic Cummings [theneweuropean.co.uk].
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Yeah yeah .. I don't still know anyone (non violent criminal) who something bad happened to because of surveillance. Meanwhile there are thousands of murders and rapes that are unsolved because of lack of leads. How about we wait until more people are killed from over-surveillance than violent criminals who get away and re-commit crimes because of lack of surveillance?
When say there are 1,000 murders and 10,000 rapes that happened because of abuse or hacking of surveillance systems .. then maybe we should
Re:warm fuzzies (Score:4, Informative)
Chinese people who have been fucked by their social credit score lowering due to being spotted doing something minor that didn't agree with CCP's policies make a great example.
Obviously you don't know about them, because you don't care to find out.
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Umm, that's not the US .. last I checked they won't let me vote for or against Xi Jinping .. my China voter registration was rejected for some odd reason. I'm mad they haven't yet even mailed me a ballot. Anyway, back to the US .. we're nowhere near social credit via surveillance in the US. I'm against social credit BS. I could easily say El Salvador has high crime and no surveillance as an example on my side .. it'll be just as irrelevant. When we are at the point of social credit
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Foundational principles used for Chinese surveillance are Marxism.
Foundational principles currently being taught as most important to university students who are already seeping into your nation's bureaucracy and will be your nation's leaders in a decade are based on Marxism.
I don't think you quite thought this one through. Principles matter, and just because you haven't been fucked in the ass yet, doesn't mean your next boyfriend won't try.
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Since most murders are by poor young black men, by a substantial margin, why not simply put the cameras on them? There is a reason the police profile young black men: they're the most likely to commit violent crime, by a substantial margin, and the most likely to kill police by an even larger margin. Equal treatment under tha law is great, but put the cameras where the crime is happening.
Re:warm fuzzies (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm willing to risk murder and rape in order to retain my freedom.
I'm even more willing to risk you suffering those crimes.
Freedom isn't easy, isn't cheap, isn't perfect, but it's worth killing for. Why wouldn't I be willing to risk death for it too?
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Raping and murdering for freedom is wrong on so many levels.
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The point in our Western civilizations is that we agreed upon that: It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffers. This is known under the name of Blackston's ratio.
Thus we have adopted systems where the burden of proof is on those who make the claim that a crime was committed. They have to provide sufficient evidence to convict the accused of a crime. As a result some people who are guilty escape the system, because the evidence is not conclusive. We pref
Re: warm fuzzies (Score:2)
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don't be so sure. he stated that freedom is worth killing for.
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It is, and many people have killed and died for it in the past.
But no, I was not advocating rape or murder in the cause of freedom. I think we'll put you down as a reading comprehension failure there.
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Murdering for freedom is killing for freedom. So pardon me if I don't believe you.
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What the fuck sort of logic is that?
"I'm going to pretend you said something that you didn't say, and when you point out that you didn't say it I'm going to call you a liar so that I can continue to pretend you said it."
I'm truly fascinated.
Re: warm fuzzies (Score:2)
I'm even more willing to risk you suffering those crimes.
The second sentence indicates that his risk in the first would be to suffer those crimes. I don't see any way to interpret it as rape for freedom, whatever that might be. He didn't write murdering for freedom, but killing for freedom, and there's historically been a lot of that. Heck, there's been a lot of murdering for freedom too.
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Yeah yeah .. I don't still know anyone (non violent criminal) who something bad happened to because of surveillance. Meanwhile there are thousands of murders and rapes that are unsolved because of lack of leads.
Obviously if everyone was identified at all times then crime would go down. Is that what people want? I don't know. Would it be misused by governments? Certainly.
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What my history tells me is that it strongly depends on who is in charge. If people are in charge that do not respect the basic human rights that are protected by the constitutions of various countries or even rewrite those constitutions to suit their needs, things can get ugly very quickly. How do you guarantee that it will be always mor
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Re:warm fuzzies (Score:5, Insightful)
I'd be interested to know how this data can "inform policy decisions".
Let's just review where the UK is. We are into our second wave of infections, having wasted the summer and failed to set up a working track & trace system. The rules are complex, vary from city to city and are poorly communicated by the government. Many people feel that the rules are little more than suggestions anyway given people like Dominic Cummings break them based on their own judgement and apparently that's fine.
So how will knowing that people or are not social distancing correctly really help inform anything?
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Covid tyranny not yet dystopian enough for you? Just wait 'til they roll out the deathbots!
Just wait until Republicans hear about the death panels in Texas because of covid-19 [theguardian.com].
They won't be happy until (Score:2)
everyone has a 24x7 360 degree camera implanted into their skulls.
Umm... (Score:1)
The AI witness account (Score:2)
In a few years there will be a new word added to the vocabulary: the AI witness account. Just like an eye witness it will deliver an interpretation of something it has observed, just like eye witnesses it is not all that reliable. The AI witness circumvents laws on the storage of surveillance data by interpreting it before the data is "destroyed" (i.e. put in cold storage to be used later in case needed, should the cold storage be discovered it will turn out to be "that bad contractor who had been ordered t
They'll take them down when they're done (Score:3)
I'm absolutely certain of it!
1776 (Score:3, Insightful)
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We Americans have our own difficulties. Have you examined Edward Snowden's revelations on wholesale, illegal monitoring of American citizens by the NSA?
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And this is why I'm glad America's founders fought a war to gain independence from the very country that would do this kind of shit.
So glad that the US avoided the Orwellian dystopia that is Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Well worth all the dead.
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Well, the way things are going in Australia it might not be the best example for your attempted pun. Arresting pregnant women for the heinous crime of planning a protest on the 'net and accosting people on lonely beaches because they're not wearing masks are not things I would have associated with Australia a few years ago.
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because they're not wearing masks are not things I would have associated with Australia a few years ago.
Yeah, a lot has happened that nobody was expecting "a few years ago".
A few over-zealous cops is the least of it. We closed the state borders, which had not happened since the 1918 pandemic.
Nobody can travel interstate or overseas without a permit. But with no new cases here in 6 months (aside from arrivals in quarantine), nobody is complaining.
Am not trying to directly compare here with the US or your country, too many differences, but we are feeling very grateful for some of those lost freedoms now, when
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It's nice being an island. Much harder to reach.
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It's nice being an island. Much harder to reach.
No, not really. It arrived many times by air, the same way it got to Italy or the US. Still does.
But quarantine, social distancing, and contact tracing have been successful, touch wood.
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It's nice being an island. Much harder to reach.
North America is an island too. No way to get to it from South America without crossing the Panama Canal, and no other connections elsewhere.
What’s your point?
not recording is a opt out... made in ? (Score:2)
they have the facility to record and will do for "debug" purposes
I'll bet they didn't make the cameras and certainly didn't do the firmware so that's a great start... install devices you don't have the ability to secure...
they have an IP address even if they run over VPN for Command and Control its got to have an IP to connect from... that means vulnerability
On the bright side... (Score:2)
Any technological artifact that isn't actively maintained has a working half-life of 18-36 months... maybe.
The city in Florida where I live has red light cameras everywhere. The city admitted last year that they haven't actually *worked* for a least a year...roughly 2/3 of them were malfunctioning (or outright dead) within a year of commissioning, and they just shut down the network (without bothering to remove the cameras) after deciding it wasn't worth the cost to repair the dead cameras.
Actually, that's
The Irony (Score:2)
Happily over the hill (Score:3)
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In my limited experience, CCTV can be pretty useless anyway. At an industrial estate where I had some offices, there was a spate of thefts from cars. As my company was known to do computers and stuff, the police were sent to us. They wanted us to "enhance" the images off the CCTV, so they could identify the suspects. This does not happen in real life. The images were too dark and fuzzy. You could see a human shaped thingy open a car door, and that was it. I think the police did eventually catch the crims by
Big Brother is watching you (Score:2)
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But who actually watches the CCTV? I have experience of live police surveillance, not CCTV, and it involved a great deal of police time with no result. This was related to a known crime outbreak in a specific area. Nobody just sits watching CCTV on the off-chance that something criminal might happen.
The CCTV recordings can be useful in investigations. One thing the police need at an early stage is pointers as to where to investigate next, and sufficient evidence for things like search warrants. So if there
Be well (Score:2)
"John Spartan, you are fined one credit for violation of the verbal morality code."
What exactly IS the hunka-chunka?