Schneier on Security

Clive Robinson • March 28, 2025 10:58 PM

@ Bruce, ALL,

UK’s first permanent facial recognition cameras

Is the hook in the title,

https://www.theregister.com/2025/03/27/uk_facial_recognition/

But that is not exactly true there is that set of “private” cameras adjacent to London St Pancreas Railway Station.

This set of cameras in Croydon South East London,

“According to the police they will only be turned on when officers are in the area and in a position to make an arrest if a criminal is spotted.”

So a technology upgrade to what was once prior to Sir Robert Peal called “thief taking”.

Basically those of thuggish disposition in uniform just grabbing people off of the streets because they “look likely” to be criminals.

It takes no great brains to see how this will sink into iniquity, with a new variation on “The computer says…” from AI that almost certainly will be or become biased in how faces appear on the “Live Facial Recognition”(LFR) watchlist.

Worse as noted by Rebecca Vincent of “Big Brother Watch”,

“For its part, the Met’s ‘LFR watchlist’ expands beyond those suspected of criminal activity, including vulnerable persons and even victims of crimes.”

So further traumatising victims and putting them in fear of being treated like they have the curse and mark of Cain (Genesis book 4),

“Behold, Thou hast driven me out this day from the face of the land; and from Thy face shall I be hid; and I shall be a fugitive and a wanderer in the earth; and it will come to pass, that whosoever findeth me will slay me.'”

Clive Robinson • March 29, 2025 10:22 AM

@ ResearcherZero,

With regards,

“If one was such a great deal maker promising peace and security in Europe and the Middle East, then why exactly would they require another landmass for their own self defense?”

There is a 1950’s treaty already in place that allows the US access for setting up installations for “defence purposes”

So it’s clearly not for “defence”. Likewise nice as it is if you like rugged landscapes and winter weather, it’s no great value for growing food and other agriculture.

And the number of people there would not even fill some US towns, in part because although there is land it’s not exactly habitable in the urban sense. And lets just say building skyscrapers etc would not be a good idea either. So “growing room” is out.

But… It’s ontop of vast mineral etc resources…

So the real reason is the same as Russia’s for the last thousand years or so. Occupy enslave and pillage as “Rights of Empire” it’s exactly why Russia has gone after the Ukraine.

It’s because authoritarians especially their leaders really could not think their way out of a wet paper bag except by making it rotten.

I’ve warned for well over a decade what has been coming and you can look back on this blog where I’ve made it clear the two hotspots were the Middle East around Iran. And Asia around China where I expected things to go WWIII.

Unfortunately for the likes of John Bolton both Iran and China do actually think ahead thus have so far avoided conflict with the US no matter how US authoritarians have tried to provoke things.

The other place US authoritarians hate is Europe, because it clearly shows that socially the US is a failed society and has doomed it’s citizens “for the few” and now the cupboard is completely empty having been squandered by the self entitled.

Hence the usually not said but active attitude of the GOP authoritarians that Europe has to be destroyed. It leaked out in Trumps first term when his selected ambassador to europe straight up told EU diplomates his job was to destroy europe… Now we have Trumps close clique, coterie, or cabal –take your noun pick– caught out on a Signal Group Chat saying the same thing. Further US behaviour in the Middle East was deliberately designed to create a refugee crisis that really only had one choice move into Europe to overwhelm it.

But as I’ve indicated China has been cornering world wide raw resources via various techniques with untapped resources in Africa and South America in their cross hairs. Russia seeing it was “falling behind” decided on pushing into both Africa and Europe.

The GOP authoritarians seeing they are falling behind have decided North America, the North pole and Atlantic environs now belong to them by “Right of Might” and no doubt if they get them then South America, the South Pole and the Pacific will be next.

That is the game we are seeing being put on the board, all that is now required is “a match to the powder” to legitimise it with a major war of conquest falsely called “liberation”.

I’m hoping genuine “natural causes” claims me first as I’m to old to do anything other than protest now and morn when it happens.

Clive Robinson • March 30, 2025 1:11 PM

@ not important,

“In technical terms, a DAO (decentralized autonomous organization) operates without central leadership. It’s governed by protocols. Rules emerge through interactions between nodes in the system, not from any overarching intelligence.”

In short to put in a way most have seen at some point, it functions like “Conway’s Game of Life”.

But not only no intelligence, no reason, and importantly no agency to gain awareness and environmental context.

Which brings us to,

“They operate by assembling meaning probabilistically, drawing on latent structures without recalling anything in the traditional sense. They produce useful, even startling responses without possessing awareness or continuity.”

They are in effect “a filter” that forms a response curve based on probability that is adaptive.

As I’ve previously indicated the equivalent of a “DSP Adaptive filter”. The only “memory” in the system is the “filter weights” based on the multidimensional spectrums that results from the tokenisation vectors.

In effect the filter is a “one way function”, kind of like a “Galton board” or “pin board” that produces a spectral curve that generally demonstrates a “normal distribution” but,

“Boards can be constructed for other distributions by changing the shape of the pins or biasing them towards one direction, and even bimodal boards are possible.”

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galton_board

Thus you “change the weight” at each node…

Is this “knowing” because it’s certainly not “articulable information”. Arguably it’s not even an “engine” and it lacks recursion so it’s not a Turing engine. Likewise LLM’s do not have “recursion”.

But a Galton board can be given recursion “in theory” by making it like a “pin ball machine”… But it still will not be able to tell you what the “weights” encode for.

Clive Robinson • April 1, 2025 4:13 PM

@ Bruce, ALL,

LLM extinction by CapEx…

Here in the UK, outside of politicians and one or two others with questionable cognative bias we tend to take a different view on current AI LLM and ML systems.

In fact here the Hype Bubble appears to have started deflating rather than blowing out like “a shoddy tire on the freeway”.

For example this non-puff piece from a well known trade media outlet,

https://www.theregister.com/2025/03/31/llm_providers_extinction/

“LLM providers on the cusp of an ‘extinction’ phase as capex realities bite”

“Gartner says the market for large language model (LLM) providers is on the cusp of an extinction phase as it grapples with the capital-intensive costs of building products in a competitive market.”

They also think it will be more of a slow demise rather than rapid cull.

Personally I think it’s going to roll up backward. Currently there is a lot of silicon from NVidia burning up fossil fuels at ever increasing prices. The thing is it’s doubtful that any paid income –rather than investment– is enough to keep the lights on let alone the servers creating enough heat to keep thousands of homes warm…

Worse LLMs are clearly not scaling currently so throwing NVidia chips at the issue is showing less and less actual returns let alone bankable ones. Then there is the crap input data the GIGO principle appears to hold and the good data is long ago in the DNN, what is going in now is at best questionable from human generation. Then there is the issue of AI Generated Garbage Input.

The net result is it “flattens the curve” by significantly “broadening the skirt” for what is basically a statistical model with a bit of random thrown in… None of that flattening is good news, it just makes garbage out more probable and so it goes back in flattening the curve even more…

If the current AI LLM is to survive, it needs not just high quality input, it needs a better way to generate the curve. Which means the current ML systems are not just not upto the job they need replacing with something several orders of magnitude better.

Clive Robinson • April 3, 2025 8:18 AM

@ Who?, ALL,

With regards your thought,

“I would say it is time for an open source project to map all known cameras at London, so a “shadow map” can be build.”

Whilst London might have the most cameras there are many other places that need this sort of thing.

There kind of is a map system of “cameras” already in London that show motorists where those “speed cameras” are.

There is no reason I can see technically why that system could not be extended / broadened out for all sorts of other cameras.

That said, the system does not appear to have reduced the number of people getting fined by speed cameras.

Which suggests,

1, There are “fixed cameras” missing from the data.
2, There are a lot more “temporary or mobile cameras” than there were.
3, Motorists are not consulting the map data for some reason
4, Some people don’t care about the cameras for some reason.

I suspect that (1) newly installed cameras take time to get in the data.

But also that the temporary/mobile cameras (2) should be added, because there is only a limited number of places they can legally be put. Thus “grey zones” would be helpful to both sides of an honest debate about “reducing speed” on the roads.

But aside from being unaware (3) of the map existence I’m unsure as to why people would not be interested. Even if they are a model driver, the map will change the driving behaviour of some drivers in those areas in a non obvious manner. As someone who used to cycle a lot, that information would have been a life saver.

That said I did use to know people who (4) did not care about speed cameras as back then you could buy-then-sell a car in short order as a Dealer/Trader and not have to “re-register the vehicle”… so in the short period they had the vehicle what fines etc they accrued would go to someone else so “not their problem”. This obviously became sufficient of a problem that they changed the way a vehicles “title” of ownership was transferred to close this loop hole.

I suspect these two very human issues (3&4) will carry on, even with facial recognition cameras that do “Arrest on Sight” and similar.

Some people never learn, or want to learn and think things do not apply to them for some reason…

Clive Robinson • April 3, 2025 10:02 AM

@ Australian Wayfarer,

I’ll not make my usual flippant “coining it” or “minting it” jokes.

But I will not “the signalers” go back a lot further than a Century.

Aside from Message flags and letter
semaphore there was Aldis Lamp mores code and telescopes. Also look up the “Field Auxiliary Nursing Yeomanry”(FANY) as they were called when I first knew them. Their more than century old independent assistance to the army as Medics, Intelligence and Communications still goes on today,

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Aid_Nursing_Yeomanry

But also consider there are early pictures of the Military Cartographers “surveying India” and other places, what is not mentioned but can be seen in the equipment that they were probably also sending back intelligence and the like…

The “Royal Signals” actually did not start untill quite late in the history of battlefield communications, with field telephones and eve’s dropping on them with “ground loop” pickups well established in the “Great War” but kept very secret (untill Churchill blew the gaff).

So in the UK 29th Feb 2020 was the Royal Signals centenary. They were formed after most of these who were signallers during WW1 had returned to civi street, and the senior brass finally realised that as important if not more so at times than “bullets and bandages” was information sent by fast, reliable and secure communications. Though not much said, WWII was a technological war and communications was the hub of all things happening.

I’ve been told off by some of my nearest and dearest because I won’t pick up the medals I’m entitled to.

Whilst I did not hang around long enough for a “long service”(and not getting caught) medal there are the “I was just leaning on my rifle over there” campaign medals that I could collect but… Truthfully the only heroic things I ever did in green were keeping my temper and off the battlefield saving people who had had accidents for which they don’t hand out military medals as bullets are not buzzing around etc.

I actually know people who absailed un-armed out of helicopters under heavy fire to give life saving surgery in a hole in the ground and behind sandbags and similar places. I would be embarrassed to stand next to them with ribbons on my chest.

Look at it this way “I got myself home alive” with a little help from others. Where as “They got home alive many who would not otherwise have done so” often without help or much in the way of support. They came home and quietly went back into their “day jobs” in hospitals all up and down the country for long hours and worse treatment from the politicians…

So who deserves a medal? Not me me’thinks.