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"We [science fiction writers] always wanted to believe in "private sector" space -- hucksters make better characters than a government does."
- Larry Niven
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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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