including a much better quote about the tech relevance:
"Because the performance of smartphone cameras has improved and the image quality has become very fine, privacy information has leaked out in a completely unexpected manner.
...
"Users need to be well aware that there is always a risk of privacy leaks, and new measures are required on the software side, such as the option of degrading image quality."
It should be possible to use exiftool to write any color profile tags you want to keep to a separate file, strip all metadata from the image, and then copy the color profile metadata you saved out earlier back to the image.
There isn't a clear "right" answer to what metadata should be stored and displayed. And, increasingly, metadata doesn't even need to be explicit, e.g. with facial recognition.
So, generally, having software make decisions on its own about how to handle some aspect of metadata seems like a poor choice.
It's on the publishing side, so it seems like photo apps (Google Photos, Apple Photos) and publishing apps (WordPress) would be a better place to manage this?
I'm guessing most of these sorts of photos are posted directly from a smartphone, though, these days. So fancy unix commands or browser extensions would help protect statistically zero people.
Apple, though, with privacy ostensibly being their thing, would be pretty on-brand to set up an iOS capability for getting to see the original image files, with all apps you don't explicitly authorize instead getting to see degraded-resolution images with the exif data scrubbed.
Android could do it, too, but it seems less likely to happen since all that extra information is valuable marketing and tracking signal.
Surely this should be a camera feature or image editing plugin (which Android already supports today).
The swipe against Android is absurd, since Google could easily slurp that information before letting you edit it (as the do with your browsing activity) to prevent others from accessing that information, if they wanted to (which they don't).
I don’t want that feature in my camera since the geo data is phenomenal for organizing and search. I want the metadata in my copy just not in the copy I upload.
The article is pretty clean but the main page is probably a little closer to what you're expecting. Japanese sites do tend to have a certain sort of "busy"/boxy look to them.
Yeah. It's pretty easy for dedicated people to do. I recently watched a bunch of people track down that was spamming a board's home address from a picture of their hand that showed a small patch of front yard in less than a half hour. This was with no exif info. You should always be careful where you post pictures to and what's visible in them.
Fan is an abbreviation for fanatic which is a much more appropriate label for this sort of behaviour. Having said that, I’d like to step back for a moment and look at our broader culture.
Few people talk about it but it’s actually extremely weird to have celebrities at all. It’s a cultural and economic phenomenon that works to hijack our tendency to form relationships and identify with people we find attractive. It takes a mechanism that’s supposed to help us bond with our family members and leverages it for profit. The fact that some people can’t handle this gets overlooked. All blame is placed on the individual, allowing the rest of us to absolve ourselves of guilt and responsibility.
eh, I used to think this too, but time spent studying anarchism (hey, its intellectually interesting) has left me with the conclusion that its a natural human tendency in any social system. Simply put: no matter the idea or society involved (even if the idea is anti-hierarchy, anti-status like anarchism), it is easier to remember the idea if there is a face you can put to the name. Put into practice, that means that most cultural, ideological, social or matters of importance will end up having at least one person associated with them. Those people, in turn, then become celebrities by virtue of the fact that lost of people then associate the idea or phenomenon with the person. Advertising and propaganda then catapult that into the phenomenon we have today of celebrities, but that's ultimately just making 100x more potent what would otherwise be an unavoidable (and I saw unavoidable because even anarchist communities can't get away from it) aspect of how humans interpret and remember things about the world.
Put another way, I think this is a similar side of the coin to the fact that most people tend to (consciously or not) put together lists of: "X knows about this better than me, and I trust X, and don't have time to devote to learning about this topic, therefore if I ever need to know more about this topic I can call X" for almost every aspect of our lives.
Note: I have no source here, this is just personally derived observation. A real study on this would be quite interesting. Though I'm sure when we discussed its results, we would do so by discussing the scientist's name and reputation.
"X knows about this better than me, and I trust X, and don't have time to devote to learning about this topic, therefore if I ever need to know more about this topic I can call X"
"We've got Ja Rule on the phone, let's see what Ja's thoughts are on this tragedy."
It's also a natural tendency to eat calorie dense, sugary foods. That doesn't make morbid obesity any less of a pathological and unnatural culural phenomeon.
I think you're on the right track but I'm betting it's not our symmetrical relationships with peers that are being hijacked, but rather our penchant for asymmetrical relationships with our superiors in a hierarchy. We and the chimps presumably both inherited this from our hypothetical common ancestor.
I'm going to talk about a study right now, but I can't even find it, so I have absolutely no rigor or data about this and it needs many grains of salt. Just pretend I'm holding a drink and talking to you at a party right now. "There was a study" where [species of monkey or ape] were basically encouraged to use money, i.e. they were trained to see a certain token as valuable. From this they began to trade it for food, and then for sex, and weirdly at some point, for the chance to gaze at photos of the alpha of the group. So they essentially ended up inventing trade, prostitution, and celebrity worship from first principles.
The flaw is in the individual. The environment is exploitative, but wantonly acting to harm another person is an individual decision. The only defense could be medical.
Our civilization has evolved much faster than our minds and bodies, but the choice to harm others is still ours.
Let's not go into black and white thinking. Saying the onus is societal/cultural or the onus lies only on the individual are both wrong. Environmental/cultural factors will play on individual decision making - this doesn't absolve the individual but it also doesn't absolve any related societal/cultural forces at play.
Both angles can and should be explored when examining cases where individuals act out in harmful fashions.
And applying the same mentality to drugs results in the American approach of treating drug use as a moral failing instead of drug addiction as a health issue.
and fanatic is akin to or directly derived from Latin, from fanum "temple", and may mean all kinds of things. Celebrated celebrity seems to mean something quite similar doesn't it?
Your criticism is meaningless, too. There are many attacks on family members.
I imagine there's an element of solipsism to these sorts of situations. Perhaps you can only get so obsessed before the object of your obsession starts to become literally an object to you.
> The camera tends to turn people into things, and the photograph extends and multiplies the human image to the proportions of mass-produced merchandise. The movie stars and matinee idols are put into the public domain by photography. They become dreams that money can buy. They can be bought and thumbed more easily than public prostitutes.
The other side of this coin is that celebrity culture tends to literally be the selling of a person as an object.
The number of people who are incapable of understanding that the image portrayed of celebrities in the media is literally them selling you a manufactured image, and nothing to do with an actual human being, lifestyle, or genuinely held belief or personality I imagine must be staggeringly high.
Slightly related, but I once ran an imageboard for friends and set up a hook to output the EXIF geolocation of uploaded photos to a private IRC channel.
It was surprising to see how often something would show up! Even when uploading photos straight from a phone through the browser.
There's a lot of things that strip the info now before it goes to server. Photo apps themselves, image boards etc.
Far bigger leaker is MS Office or pdf metadata. Heck, they even catches that famous serial killer who took creepy pictures of himself in women underwear because eventually he started sending files, not regular letters, to police taunting them.
Edit: BTK was this sick man's nickname. Busted by having his church's computer metadata in files to police https://www.bizarrepedia.com/btk/
It’s an annoying trend, I have also noticed it on other sites. You finish the article or viewing the image or whatever, scroll a bit past the end or flick to the bottom to check you aren’t missing anything, and then try to copy the URL and get some other page you never visited.
Interestingly enough it seems like a lot of people never actually have sex (granted the following article is about japan, but they're not that different). So it almost seems like these extreme stalkers wouldn't actually become physically active, although that doesn't really make it any better.
The idol culture is extremely unhealthy. This is objectification turned to 11. They get a pass in the US because it seems so distant and Japan is "odd and cool" but it is actually really creepy.
Fans like those stars for their whole package (myth, personality, songs, artistic expression, style, etc) not e.g. just for their body (which is usually implied by objectification).
It's also not much different than our pop idols, especially of yore (up until the 00s or so, before several other occupations, such as games, social media, web surfing, selfies, and tons of higher quality TV and movies) basically replaced pop music as the major obsession of western kids.
There have been idols attacked (and even murdered) plenty of times in good ole US.
Further reading seems to show they are different from pop idols of the west, both in fan culture[0] and how much control a talent agency has over the idols' personal life, including forcing idols to remain single so as to seem attainable by their fan base, which "may cause fans to be unable to distinguish between fantasy and real-life" [1].
That was commonplace in the west for musicians and actors with a mass young fan base -- they often were forced by management to be single, or appear single, hide their relationships etc, not to disappoint the fans of the opposite sex. And of course actors/singers/etc who were gay/lesbian/bi/etc were forced to hide it for marketing reasons.
And we grew out of it. Japan did not. I wish we stopped giving Japan a pass for the things it does wrong. In terms of gender equality, minorities inclusiveness, gay rights, it lags far behind.
>I wish we stopped giving Japan a pass for the things it does wrong.
I also wish people stop considering their country's morals and current fashions as the yardstick to measure the whole world...
(Especially if they don't have such a great, past or present, track record even by their own standards, to begin with).
Who are you to give or give not Japan "a free pass"? Who said Japan needs a pass from outsiders?
To quote Feyman:
"The next morning the young woman taking care of our room fixes the bath, which was right in our room. Sometime later she returns with a tray to deliver breakfast. I'm partly dressed. She turns to me and says, politely, "Ohayo, gozai masu," which means, "Good morning."
Pais is just coming out of the bath, sopping wet and completely nude. She turns to him and with equal composure says, "Ohayo, gozai masu ," and puts the tray down for us.
Pais looks at me and says, "God, are we uncivilized!"
We realized that in America if the maid was delivering breakfast and the guy's standing there, stark naked, there would be little screams and a big fuss. But in Japan they were completely used to it, and we felt that they were much more advanced and civilized about those things than we were."
yeah, my main issue with it is it seems really exploitative. Get a bunch of kids and control every aspect of their lives in exchange for fame, subjecting them to all kinds of pressures and limiting their experiences...
Almost 100% of an Idol's life is manufactured by the studios. What is presented to the public is barely even a person, more of a product hyper-tailored for a specific audience.
It's all of the downsides of a celebrity multiplied by 10 and no to much of the upside. The company controls how they look, what they say, who they associated with, their entire creative output, everything. They get treated more like breakfast cereal mascots than actual living human beings.
My understanding is that the pay sucks because the company takes almost all of the income. On the other hand your expenses are also very low because the company provides everything. Housing, food, clothes, etc... Many of which are sponsored so forget about making your own choice.
The fame and fun factor are certainly a big reason why people willingly do it, but that's about it for compensation.
At what point does one differentiate between obsession with idols and obsession with pop stars in other countries? In my experience, J-idols appear to put a lot of work into their personalities as part of the group and their "talent" which goes beyond the fetishization of beauty we usually associate with objectification. In other words, do we know that Japanese fans view idols as people tending to objects?
I don't even think that's the issue. I saw a documentary on Japan and they visited one of these idol "talent agencies". It's an incredibly creepy structure that's just not comparable to anything we have in the West.
That's not too far off. But instead of having overly controlling parents the idols have overly controlling corporations running their lives and 24/7 scrutiny from an extremely fickle and difficult to please fanbase.
Why does everyone feel entitled to give their opinion on Asian idol culture when they clearly have the barest of exposure, usually consisting of watching a documentary or reading a CNN article...
When I hear fertility crisis I always wonder how it is possible to differentiate between people having children later in their lives and people not having children in the first place. As long as the age of child rearing is rising fertility will appear to go down until it spikes up one day.
Outside of a 30 year window female fertility drops to essentially zero. aka you can be reasonably sure looking a few million 55 year old woman that they are not going to have significant numbers of kids.
As the drop below replacement rate started in the 60’s it’s easy to verify the trend is real.
Given that female humans are the only female mammals with this egg limitation I bet we can crack this with stem cells too
In the mean time freezing is subject only to cultural stigma, effort and cost. Should just offer to freeze some every 20 year old’s eggs just like tetanus shots are offered to children. Younger eggs being more viable than a young 30-somethings trump card. Then people don’t have to make a conscious decision to do it and boom replacement age increases by two whole decades if we feel like it
If this became common, I would be worried for the future of humans.
Both sperm and eggs are produced in quantities millions of times higher than apparently necessary. Nature doesn't waste resources without good reason. There's a very good chance the large number of inactive sperm and eggs are part of an as-yet unidentified selection/evolution mechanism.
Freezing eggs might break that mechanism, and we probably wouldn't see the problem for many generations until human evolution suffers...
I mean you could argue that about actually curing cancer and extending our average longevity, maybe there is some additional cellular state we aren’t aware of that is being selected out
So that’s not a good enough reason for me to say “lets not pursue these obvious ideas we already have the technology for”
>Given that female humans are the only female mammals with this egg limitation I bet we can crack this with stem cells too
We can, eventually, I'm sure. Biology is just a mechanism, and with enough work and knowledge, we can figure it out.
However, would it make much difference? I'm thinking most women don't have children because they don't want them (or any more of them), not because they've become infertile due to age. In fact, most mothers seem to lost all interest in having more kids after having 1 or maybe 2: going through the experience shows them the grim reality of child-rearing, so once they've "done their part" with 1 or 2 kids, they've had enough.
Perhaps, if we achieve biological immortality, along with eliminating age-related infertility, people will have more kids, because they could afford to wait a long time between them. They could have the first one at 30-50, after they've gotten themselves financially situated, then they could take a break for a few decades, then have another one, then take another break, etc. Maybe after 2-3 decades, they'll have forgotten what a pain in the ass the previous one was.
Both of your paragraphs are based on a flawed assumption of not wanting any kids or any more kids. As opposed to wanting kids but not wanting to make a choice before a certain age. Some people dont want any or any more and we aren’t referring to them.
I would say the population that would like the possibility of children at a later age is big enough to make a difference.
I am talking about the peak range so 15 + 30 = 45. A 30-34 year old woman is 500x more likely to give birth than a 10-14 year old, and over 100x more vs a 45-55 year old woman. https://www.childtrends.org/indicators/fertility-and-birth-r... (scroll down). You do see even younger and older births, but at even lower rates.
So yes these births do add up, but are effectively ignorable when analyzing trends.
> . A 30-34 year old woman is 500x more likely to give birth than a 10-14 year old
that's heavily skewed by the fact that far more 30-34 year olds are trying to have kids while most 10-14 year olds are either not having sex or actively trying to avoid pregnancy.
I'm sure you're joking, but if there is a massive body of research on 10 year olds having sex I'm not going to go googling for it at work, but I think it's safe to say that more women in their 30s are trying for babies than 10 year olds.
The stats are more clear on 45 year old women having ~1/3 the odds of becoming pregnant and after that over 90% of any pregnancies spontaneously aborting. It’s only after that that the odds are further lowered from ~3% to below 1% because they also have less unprotected sex. Still, based on relative odd it seems that biology is playing a significantly larger role than culture.
Odd that the youngest bracket (14–19) is bounded with a minimum age of 14. There have been a handful of births from younger mothers in the past 30 years (a 10 year old girl in 2006 in the US). Insignificant in the total graph, but weird to exclude given that the oldest bracket is open-ended (>50). Just renaming the bracket to ≤19 would suffice.
The youngest documented mother ever was 5 years and 7 months (Peru, 1939).
The Netflix anime Kakegurui describes a lot about idol culture in Japan through one of its characters. It doesn't try to justify or judge the practice but it presents it thoroughly.
People tend to generalize Akihabara to the rest of dull, boring Japan.
There is one (or two?) underwear vendor machine... in a sex shop. Someone was comparing this myth to the idea that in the US you can have your car washed with stripper boobs, which I am sure you can... somewhere...
The loli genre is frowned upon, but there is a slightly different view of pedophilia here: instead of being seen as psychopaths like in the west, they see them more as immature men-child stuck on highschool fantasies. And let's be frank: Japan is far behind when it comes to fight the rape culture.
'They' in your last sentence is a subset of the otaku culture, what you would now call incels in the west. It is creepy as hell, but it is a fringe minority.
> Japan is far behind when it comes to fight the rape culture.
By which metric? According to the first statistic I found online, it's far below most western countries in rates of rape (of course, statistics might be reflective of underreporting instead of actual occurrence of a crime).
> statistics might be reflective of underreporting instead of actual occurrence of a crime
I wouldn't trust (as in compare globally) any crime stat from Japan, as they have a 99% conviction rate [0]. This obviously cannot be achieved unless you set up your process to make sure only safe cases enter the systems. And guess what especially occurs in private areas, without witnesses leading to he-said-she-said?
A culture were you don't want to bring shame to your family doesn't help either.
> of course, statistics might be reflective of underreporting instead of actual occurrence of a crime
There you go. Almost all of my female friends who I am close enough to hear about that have been assaulted in their past and they have not reported it (and blame themselves for it of course).
On this map, most countries you will see who are below 5.0 probably have some serious under-reporting.
The regulators allow for the toddler sex but somehow normal sex is censored, all this at a national level by regulators chosen by normal citizens. It is the tip of the iceberg reflecting a problem.
> in the US you can have your car washed with stripper boobs
That is also a reflection of a problem, at least adults are involved.
The ethnographic research into the consumers of the people who watch such animations would disagree with you; for them, the more unrealistic the representation is, the more desirable. See the work of Patrick Galbraith and Mark McLelland, who are both respected researchers in Japanese culture studies. It is not clear that a desire for the cartoon form extends to the desire for real child pornography, just as it is not clear that playing violent video games extends to the desire to kill people in real life, or reading erotic Harry Potter fanfiction extends to wanting to haves sex with Daniel Radcliffe.
Some* booru owners complained that realistic 3d tags gained a significant share and views in recent years. I don’t remember if they posted exact percentages.
* not going to post it here, but it’s not hard to figure out
Unrealism doesn't necessarily mean just form of the character in the image, it can also mean what's shown in the image - is something unrealistic happening? Nevertheless, I don't doubt that realism is a significant aspect for some people, but those aren't the same people as the lolicon community, and the people who really do believe in the "2D > 3D" meme. I'd also wager that a good portion of recent stuff tagged with 3d isn't loli or shota, and could be in part explained by the popularity of SFM/Blender porn of 3D games like Overwatch.
In any case, it stands to reason that people who would enjoy real child pornography would also enjoy simulated porn (and likely, the more realistic (3D) the better), but it doesn't therefore follow that the majority of people who enjoy the less realistic content (which by far outstrips the 3D content) have the same tastes.
Assuming it does say something about a persons real life preferences (and I'm not sure that it does) I'd much rather they spend their time in front of a computer watching cartoons than out in the world causing harm. I figure it's best to give anyone cursed with desires they can't morally satisfy any outlet we can give them for those feelings.
Most of it is probably elementary school, with some from middle school. I think putting equal sign between `loli` and `toddler sex` is a bit misleading to put it mildly.
Toddler sex exist but you can name it differently. Maybe my denomination is wrong but the problem is still there. Generally speaking when someone points at the moon looking at the finger is not a good idea.
This comment is like judging the entire US because of the case where a crossdressing kid was stripping at a bar for money.
And I have to say that fictional underage characters being sexualized is not something that bother me, on the other hand, REAL kids being sexualized does bother me a great deal.
It's apparently possible[0] to retrieve fingerprints from a mobile phone photo of someone's hand, which might wind up being a problem for Asians making the ubiquitous peace-sign[1]. I guess they could always just turn it around, though ;)
And of course copying keys from cellphone photos is old hat to the point that it's actually an app, and people have been getting doxxed through the EXIF data on images they upload for years.
in terms of exif data I'd agree, but I don't think most people have to worry about someone figuring out where they are from eyeball reflections. This guy was lucky enough to get a clear reflection, but luckier still that what was captured was meaningful enough to give him a specific location.
It would save so much wasted bandwidth if smartphones actually guided users through a workflow of resizing and compressing photos before they leave the phone or hell even when first saving them locally.
Instead everyone's sending many-megabyte barely-compressed highres JPEGs I presume since cameras have always defaulted to saving the highest quality images with the expectation that you'd post process them before distributing. That and I imagine it's desirable to not have to burn battery power on compressing photos, and maybe at&t and friends kickback some $$ to make the default flow burn more bandwidth. Many people pay for metered data and receive giant photos from friends w/unlimited bandwidth and zero fucks given.
Yes, just like how all the articles about China currently plastering the homepage aren't devolving into outrage laden diatribes. Same goes for articles about global warming, Facebook and RMS. HN is above politics and even emotion itself!... unless it involves subjects that upset the ingroup.
What would you prefer the conversation involve? People get assaulted all the time, the main reason this story is interesting is the technical element. It has really interesting privacy implications and is inherently technical
Well, on most other news sites it would devolve in a conversation on Trump / Brexit / Trudeau... at least on the technical minutiae we can talk about things we know something about.
including a much better quote about the tech relevance:
"Because the performance of smartphone cameras has improved and the image quality has become very fine, privacy information has leaked out in a completely unexpected manner. ... "Users need to be well aware that there is always a risk of privacy leaks, and new measures are required on the software side, such as the option of degrading image quality."