
AVG Announces Invisibility Glasses - krnaveen
http://now.avg.com/avg-reveals-invisibility-glasses-at-pepcom-barcelona/
======
kefka
Speaking of IR... Not about privacy, but DIY medical stuff.

My wife suffers from restless legs syndrome. Pretty much, whenever she goes to
bed, her legs feel as if they have ants crawling on and inside them. I know
that I can use massage (she taught me, she's an MT) to reduce the restless
feelings, but it's just a stop-gap. What causes it?

Turns out, its some -NO precursor that appears to cause this. Why does this
precursor build up? I have no clue. But getting rid of it does alleviate the
pain.

How I found to get rid of it, a medical paper said that NIR light is found to
penetrate in the skin and is enough energy in the photons to break up the
precursor. The medical paper was using a grid of low power IR lasers, with a
total of 3W dispersed over a 12inx6in rectangle.

I made a 30 IR led (matched the frequency of IR from the paper) that outputted
3W of light. I use it on her when her legs acts up, and it settles them down.
Usage over a week gives her days of rest from RLS.

~~~
jonpfeiffer
Do you have any details on this build? My father has RLS and nothing seems to
work for him. A quick google shows me you can buy the units used in the study,
but they are quite pricey.

~~~
kefka
Sure do.

Scientific article I based my device on:
[http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2936319/](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2936319/)

"NIR has a wavelength of 880 nm to 890 nm"

"Researchers hypothesize that the success of NIR treatment lies in its ability
to increase bioavailability of nitric oxide (NO) in the lumen"

"890 nm wavelength light, pulsed at 292 times/s, with a power output of 600
mW/cm2"

"The mechanisms with which NIR can alleviate RLS symptoms are not clear. One
supposition can be made: light has been shown to generate NO in the
endothelium, which through a cascade of events leads to vasodilation.
Vasodilation is also the result of exercise, one of the few non-drug related
treatment options that decreases RLS symptoms."

The above is the basis of my research. From this, I can make a device that
does roughly this.

_____________________________________

My Bill of Materials are the following:

    
    
         12v @500mA wall wart
         30 http://www.digikey.com/product-detail/en/TSHF5410/751-1211-ND/1681346  IR LEDs
         barrel jack to fit wall wart
         perf board to fit LEDs
         project box
         IR-transparent acrylic (window in project box)
    

I used a scrounged wall wart (free), the LEDs are $20, the barrel jack was
scrounged (Free), the perf board was $5, the project box was $9, and the
acrylic was scrounged (Free). Total cost for non-scrounged was $34. I'm also
part of a hackerspace, so scrounging was easy for me. I also used a bit of hot
glue to make smooth interface where the skin would touch.

The circuit design is here:
[http://imgur.com/5Op2ndU](http://imgur.com/5Op2ndU)

Solder them together through perfboard, and put in project box. Cut out a
window on the box and put in the acrylic window. Now, all you need to is plug
in the barrel adapter to the wall wart, and it works.

This is what I use. It puts out roughly 1.35W of IR light. I misremembered
about using 3W. But this works, as it's a reproduction of my build.

~~~
bjelkeman-again
Very very interesting. I have a whole family that suffers from the same, five
siblings. Now we need to try that. Do you have a photograph of the contraption
you made?

~~~
kefka
I'd be glad to. It's at home at the moment. I'll probably, with my wife's
permission, send it up to my github.

Also, feel free to contact me.
[https://keybase.io/jwconway](https://keybase.io/jwconway)

------
aaronbasssett
They're only 7 years late.

[https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2008/07/sunglasses_th...](https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2008/07/sunglasses_that.html)

~~~
drzaiusapelord
Its my understanding that face recognition is tough to crack on a mass
surveilance level. People wear hats, glasses, sunglasses, scarves, etc on top
of things like different hair styles, different glasses frames, etc. CCTV
quality isn't good enough to identify faces and even high quality video can be
tricky if you don't get enough high quality frames of the person's face
looking straight at the camera.

It looks like identifying people via their gait was a bit of a research hurdle
not too long ago and there are a lot of articles from around 2012 that claimed
this problem has been solved. The idea was low quality CCTV footage really
can't be used to identify faces, but can be used for gait analysis. I wouldn't
be surprised if there was a signature gait database somewhere in use by
intelligence and law enforcement services. The same way the Stasi kept a
database of people's scents in jars.

Now with everyone carrying a cell phone, I imagine immediate identification is
easier than ever. IMSI-catcher devices like the Stingray are trivial to
implement. Phone carriers easily give up information about their customers,
including GPS history, sometimes even without a warrant. License plate
tracking is common as camera deployment and plate OCR is very affordable for
many municipalities. Tracking via toll system RFID transponders is common as
well.

Not sure who these glasses are aimed at. It looks like anti-security theater
designed to get press and lighten wallets.

------
TheCraiggers
Not a bad start, but hopefully something better comes later. This would just
be an arms race scenario- they'd only have to develop algorithms to work
around this, and worst of all, they still have your actual picture on-disk so
they have all the time they desire to make it work.

I seem to remember an anti-camera system deployed at movie theaters years ago
which would look for camera sensors, and then blind them with IR lasers. While
probably not as portable, something precise rather than the shotgun approach
they're using here might work better. Bonus: you don't need to have it mounted
to your face, either- it could be attached to your hat, shoulder, chest, etc.

~~~
jkot
> anti-camera system deployed at movie theaters years ago which would look for
> camera sensors, and then blind them with IR lasers

I think it is unlikely. IR lasers can still damage eye sight.

~~~
drzaiusapelord
Looks like shooting IR at the audience is how some/most of these systems work:

[http://archive.wired.com/entertainment/music/news/2004/11/65...](http://archive.wired.com/entertainment/music/news/2004/11/65683?currentPage=all)

but yes, it does sound like its probably like plain old IR light and not a
laser.

------
IanCal
Doesn't defeat the face detection in libccv:

[http://imgur.com/HNPBNTJ](http://imgur.com/HNPBNTJ)

[http://imgur.com/P3XnlwK](http://imgur.com/P3XnlwK)

Edit - I don't mean to kill interesting conversations around this, but be
aware we're looking at an implementation that simply doesn't work, so we
should only really be talking about similar but different possible approaches.
Anything like this is so fundamentally flawed as to _not even currently work_
against currently used algorithms.

So if we want to go down that road, what more extreme things might we need to
do?

~~~
ddetone
The article does not claim that the glasses prevent face detection. It claims
that they prevent face recognition. These two concepts are different.

Face detection - determine the location of a face or faces in an image.

Face recognition - given a location of a face in an image, correctly predict
who's face it is.

Check out the OpenCV Facial Recognition Tutorial for more info:
[http://docs.opencv.org/modules/contrib/doc/facerec/facerec_t...](http://docs.opencv.org/modules/contrib/doc/facerec/facerec_tutorial.html)

~~~
IanCal
> The article does not claim that the glasses prevent face detection.

Their first image seems to be showing the difference between detecting and not
detecting a face ("Facebook detects a face" and "No face detected").

Comments like this, too:

"They claim to break face detection when the lights are on."

So I assumed they were claiming it breaks face detection.

------
bad_alloc
This defeats regular face detection but you are now literally wearing a big,
glowing sign that says "this individual is hiding his/her face!".

~~~
TheCraiggers
Like many privacy tools, this would work best if everyone was wearing them.

~~~
Cthulhu_
It'd be more effective for everyone to vote for people that intend to break
down and illegalize all of these facial recognition things, if we're all going
to organise something anyway.

~~~
TheCraiggers
That's a bit tougher though.

For one, privacy concerns are just one _very_ small part of what people may be
looking for in an elected official. So small that most don't even have an
official stance on the matter, aside from canned politician spin like "I value
the privacy of all citizens" that actually means nothing. On average, I'd say
that most people would still rate economic and diplomatic policies much
higher.

Like just about everything else, this boils down to an education problem. Not
just for the voters, mind you- it's even more important to educate our elected
officials and judges. This way, they'll be able to make rational, informed
decisions when the NSA comes asking for more money / power. (This is of course
assuming the NSA doesn't have huge caches of blackmail evidence on the
officials making the decisions...)

------
yitchelle
I thought April Fools arrived early this year...

~~~
swamp40
I agree. If it's _not_ a joke, they should have tested those pictures on
Facebook's facial recognition system.

I strongly suspect even a simple system will easily still recognize that guy.

~~~
IanCal
I think they tested the first one, and facebook failed, although both
approaches have no effect against the libccv face detector

[http://imgur.com/HNPBNTJ](http://imgur.com/HNPBNTJ)

[http://imgur.com/P3XnlwK](http://imgur.com/P3XnlwK)

------
maemre
Although it is a good start, I wonder if the effect of IR LEDs can be solved
by filtering? I mean, can someone develop a firmware or use color filters to
filter out infrared light?

I think the filtering may be done using better Bayer filters to filter out
infrared, but I know almost nothing about digital photography.

~~~
13
Yes, almost all cameras above the dollar range will include filtering for this
frequency. You can find out by pointing a TV remote at your phone camera and
seeing what the impact is. My iPhone can't see the IR emission at all with
it's rear camera, the front camera doesn't have a filter and gets absolutely
blasted. It would be devastatingly effective against monochrome CCD cameras,
where the same LEDs as used in the article are used for invisible illumination
of a scene.

[https://i.imgur.com/zkI5p0B.jpg](https://i.imgur.com/zkI5p0B.jpg)

[https://i.imgur.com/BfRWTbq.jpg](https://i.imgur.com/BfRWTbq.jpg)

If I remember correctly, a cut piece of floppy disk does a reasonable job of
being a blocking filter for nearly everything that's not near IR, though
that's less of a handy thing to know these days.

~~~
drzaiusapelord
The IR nut is tough to crack if your camera does night vision. Those cameras
with a ring of LEDs around them? They're IR transmitters. The camera is
designed to detect IR, so it can't filter it. This is a popular method of
seeing in the dark and is used on systems way more expensive than dollar store
close-outs.

~~~
seszett
Would it be that difficult though to have a modified Bayer filter with an RGBI
array instead of RGBG?

You would have to use different dyes for all pixels, since the currently used
ones let IR light pass, but it doesn't sound that difficult to do (since we
already have both IR-pass and IR-block filters).

------
MisterNegative
Are they trolling? Those are just some glasses with ir light and ir reflective
coating. These will make your face more visible to cameras in the dark. Also
facial recognition algorithms can easily be adapted to work around the stupid
glow. They only need like 10% of your face anyway.

~~~
iwwr
This is just a 1% solution, which may be enough to defeat mass data collection
as long as it remains niche. For a bigger effect, carry light strong enough to
saturate even a HDR camera.

~~~
kefka
If you remember the old (VHS) Macrovision, it used a pulsing contrast to mess
up automatic gain control circuits. A good way to defeat this is by putting a
POT on the AGC so you can tune it manually.

A way to apply this to the glasses: put a IR strobe on. Pulse it at .5s, with
a .05s IR led on time.

You should be able to get away with this using an array of IRleds, battery,
and a 555 timer.

------
jonlucc
I lived in a city with red light cameras, and I considered building a license
plate cover with the same principles as a tiny form of non-violent protest.

~~~
aylons
Here in Brazil they are common, and I protest by not running red lights. Works
every time!

~~~
martinko
'Do you have anything to hide?'

------
joncrocks
I don't think is much new, they've been made before...

[https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2008/07/sunglasses_th...](https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2008/07/sunglasses_that.html)

Although I think it was meant mainly as a way to prevent you getting recorded
on CCTV.

------
jkot
Surgical mask seems like more effective.

~~~
Cthulhu_
That and a pair of sunglasses

------
stevewilhelm
If you wear a pair of those glasses, everyone is going to know who you are.

