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"Science fiction writers foresee the inevitable, and although problems and catastrophes may be inevitable, solutions are not."
- Isaac Asimov
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| Gait-Cam | ||
| A surveillance camera system that analyzes the unique way in which people walk, to identify them. |
| Class ended in ten minutes, and that didn't leave me much time to prepare. The first order of business was those pesky gait-recognition cameras. Like I said, they'd started out as face-recognition cameras, but those had been ruled unconstitutional. As far as I know, no court has yet determined whether these gait-cams are any more legal, but until they do, we're stuck with them.
"Gait" is a fancy word for the way you walk. People are pretty good at spotting gaits... Gait-recognition software takes pictures of your motion, tries to isolate you in the pics as a silhouette, and then tries to match the silhouette to a database to see if it knows who you are. It's a biometric identifier, like finger prints or retina-scans, but it's got a lot more "collisions" than either of those. A biometric "collision" is when a measurement matches more than one person... ...I prefer to inject a little randomness into my attacks on gait-recognition; I put a handful of gravel into each shoe. Cheap and effective, and no two steps are the same. The cameras used to set off an alert every time someone they didn't recognize stepped onto campus... ...now it just tries to keep track of who's where, when. If someone leaves by the school gates during classes, their gait is checked to see if it sorta-kinda matches any student gait and if it does, whoop-whoop-whoop, ring the alarm! |
| From Little Brother,
by Cory Doctorow. Published by Tor Teen in 2008 Additional resources -
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Gait-Cam-related
news articles:
- Spy Satellite Gait Analysis ID's You
- Chinese Watrix Gait Recognition Watching You Always
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| Robot Hummingbird Hovers Biomimetically |
| Capitalist Big Brother Co-Opts Regular Big Brother |
| Juggalo Face Paint Disrupts Facial Recognition |
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''... major cities of Earth have free electrical power conveniently processed from their own noise.'
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Oh, and now I suppose someone will develop the robotic porch pirate.
'This thing will start at one end of ...a house and build it complete to the other end, following drawings only.'
