Bill Gates, Airbus, Softbank back EarthNow plan to cover Earth with real-time video surveillance satellites

[CarlBar]

On 5/12/2020 at 2:35 AM, ARikozuM said:

We said the similar things about cell phones, satellites, and the Moon landing. Where are we now?

 

Here's the thing. As i pointed out to be able to track an individual anywhere on the planet on demand you need a level of resolution so extreme that transmission and storage become a huge issue. Like 6+ orders of magnitude too much of an issue.

 

To try and put it into some kind of perspective. By the time world storage gets sufficient to make such a thing possibble the same miniaturisation that would make it practical would mean the entirety of Linus Media Groups Petabyte project would fit on your PC's ram with most of the ram still unused, and a home NAS would be able to store every bit of data in existence on the planet today. In theory if video quality went up in line with that 300fps monitor would be displaying in around 1 million k resolution. A high end desktop would have more computing power than every supercomputer on the planet combined.

 

All the things you mention are examples of things that when they were declared impossible where actually far closer to practical than this scenario is. Also look at how many other techs came along in the process of going from "this is impossible" to "this is doable". By the time it's possibble to track large numbers of people like this i wouldn't be surprised if wearable fabrics that project a pattern onto themselves electronically, (allowing you to change your wardrobe on demand or use fractal patters to screw with the camera's), would be commonplace. For that matter, just move to a space colony. We''ll have those long before this. We might even have colonies in other star systems by then, (and will be panicking about hostile star system X building an impractically large telescope to watch our movements n planets in our star system from across interstellar space)..

[mr moose]

10 hours ago, Trik'Stari said:

 

I'm surprised you're taking this line.

 

It would be rather simple to ID and track a single person with this. If you know where someone lives, you have an agent outside their house watching the targets car, they can radio back to base saying that the target is leaving, and the people back at base can use this to track that car.

 

I can pick my car out from Google Earth at where I work, simply because I know I park in the same spot every day. I can easily identify my coworkers cars, or some of them anyways.

 

There you are then, you already have to know where the person lives, the car they drive or where they work in order to even have a chance of id'ing them.  Go and pick random person or car on google satellite and try to ID them.  You won't have a chance,  You can't even work out what model a car is without already knowing what you are looking at.  In fact if you don't know anything about the person you can't ID them at all.  The resolution and number of camera's is just way too low and the resolution required to ID an individual would consumer so much data per second it would make the process nonviable for everyone. 

 

EDIT: just as a further experiment, you probably know your car model very well,  GO to an image of a large car pack and see how many cars you could identify as being the same model as yours.   Hell, just trying to differentiate some cars is impossible.

[Rohith_Kumar_Sp]

well, perefect time to rewatch Person of interest again 
 

 

[Delicieuxz]

15 minutes ago, WI-FIultrasnoop said:

The only reason you'll be tracked is if you do something naughty, therefore be a good boy/girl and you won't get coal in the form of a [REDACTED].

"You have nothing to fear if you have nothing to hide" -  Joseph Goebbels, Nazi Germany Minister of Propaganda

 

That argument is a well-known fallacy. Much of the freedoms held in the West today wouldn't have come about if the advocates for those freedoms had been trackable.

 

Political dissenters, rights advocates, court witnesses to crimes, government opponents, lawyers presenting arguments that threaten to undermine corporate profits, people of large fortunes, minorities living near racists, unsupervised children... they, and lots others, all are at risk of being tracked and harmed if the technology to do so is publicly available.

[Trik'Stari]

3 hours ago, mr moose said:

 

There you are then, you already have to know where the person lives, the car they drive or where they work in order to even have a chance of id'ing them.  Go and pick random person or car on google satellite and try to ID them.  You won't have a chance,  You can't even work out what model a car is without already knowing what you are looking at.  In fact if you don't know anything about the person you can't ID them at all.  The resolution and number of camera's is just way too low and the resolution required to ID an individual would consumer so much data per second it would make the process nonviable for everyone. 

 

EDIT: just as a further experiment, you probably know your car model very well,  GO to an image of a large car pack and see how many cars you could identify as being the same model as yours.   Hell, just trying to differentiate some cars is impossible.

From what I understand about the topic, these will be higher resolution camera's. They'd have to be, in order for this project to even have a point.

 

Just to drudge up an old topic, the US Federal Government (I can't remember what agency) currently operates several Aerostats around the country, one of which gain notoriety when it broke loose and someone started a comedy twitter account for it, that can read your license plate from several STATES away. And this is the Federal government, the gold fucking standard of incompetence and wasting money.

 

If you think these camera's won't be able to tell what you're drinking, what your license plate reads or even what radio station you're tuned into, and what porn you have pulled up on your phone whilst driving, you're vastly underestimating the technology likely involved.

[mr moose]

1 minute ago, Trik'Stari said:

From what I understand about the topic, these will be higher resolution camera's. They'd have to be, in order for this project to even have a point.

That's the problem though, with the higher resolutions the data required to make it work is too much for the system to cope with.  Current bandwidth limitations mean that any cameras capable of being used to identify anything smaller than a bus will bog the system down. Maybe if you only had limited users connected, but then it would be quite expensive.

1 minute ago, Trik'Stari said:

Just to drudge up an old topic, the US Federal Government (I can't remember what agency) currently operates several Aerostats around the country, one of which gain notoriety when it broke loose and someone started a comedy twitter account for it, that can read your license plate from several STATES away. And this is the Federal government, the gold fucking standard of incompetence and wasting money.

 

If you think these camera's won't be able to tell what you're drinking, what your license plate reads or even what radio station you're tuned into, and what porn you have pulled up on your phone whilst driving, you're vastly underestimating the technology likely involved.

 

You are now describing stuff that this system is really not capable of,  it is literally 500 satellites with bandwidth limited to current satellite technology.  On top of that it is a private enterprise so it has to have a value in return for it to even be built,  that is the number of customers willing to pay either the higher rate at limited usage or a lower rate at mass usage has to be enough to cover OC and provide a profit.   I don't think it is reasonable to assume on the information given that  it is capable of doing the many things assumed in this thread.

 

 

And just to go one step further, we all are proponents for innocent until proven guilty yeah?  I mean I am, I don't like that someone is treated as guilty until sufficient evidence actually finds them guilty.  So we should apply the same standards here, instead of accusing people of being mistreated with invasion of privacy on the mere proposal of a system, shouldn't people wait until evidence exists?  It seems people are way to trigger happy to accuse everyone of everything these days.

[Trik'Stari]

11 minutes ago, mr moose said:

That's the problem though, with the higher resolutions the data required to make it work is too much for the system to cope with.  Current bandwidth limitations mean that any cameras capable of being used to identify anything smaller than a bus will bog the system down. Maybe if you only had limited users connected, but then it would be quite expensive.

 

You are now describing stuff that this system is really not capable of,  it is literally 500 satellites with bandwidth limited to current satellite technology.  On top of that it is a private enterprise so it has to have a value in return for it to even be built,  that is the number of customers willing to pay either the higher rate at limited usage or a lower rate at mass usage has to be enough to cover OC and provide a profit.   I don't think it is reasonable to assume on the information given that  it is capable of doing the many things assumed in this thread.

 

 

And just to go one step further, we all are proponents for innocent until proven guilty yeah?  I mean I am, I don't like that someone is treated as guilty until sufficient evidence actually finds them guilty.  So we should apply the same standards here, instead of accusing people of being mistreated with invasion of privacy on the mere proposal of a system, shouldn't people wait until evidence exists?  It seems people are way to trigger happy to accuse everyone of everything these days.

Innocent until proven guilty I agree with, except when government and corporations are involved. The more authority or power a body is given, the less trust and more scrutiny it should be given.

 

I have a personal addition to the adage "never attribute to malice that which can be attributed to stupidity", which is "never attribute to malice what can be attribute to stupidity, unless government and money are involved".

 

If I had a million dollars, I would HAPPILY slap that money down and bet you that this will be misused by a government or corporation, within 5 years of deployment. Considering that Bill Gates is attached, I can basically guarantee that that is the end goal.

 

Much as I dislike the "billionaires are evil" shtick, Bill Gates is definitely an evil billionaire. This is a guy who wants to tattoo children with a tattoo that exposes whether or not they have been vaccinated. As much as I am for vaccinations, that's a bit too 1940's Germany for even me.

[Trik'Stari]

45 minutes ago, mr moose said:

 

Please do,  I invite all people to book mark these threads. 

 

But in context of this thread, people are outright claiming it shouldn't be a thing because it will be used nefariously.   Not allowing a business to build a product for a specific end use based on assumptions they will be used for illegal activity is punishing them for something they haven't done.

I would, if I would remember to check my bookmarks.

 

As for your second comment, the very thing they are planning to do is already a violation, in my opinion. This service, constitutes an invasion of privacy at the very get go, because it might look down at my house, my back yard, etc, without my express written consent. I cannot opt out of this, as far as I know, and they are making this without the permission of the people they will be looking at.

 

For example, one can get google to blur out satellite imagery of ones property on Google Earth, allegedly. I assume they don't actually honor this if one is not someone google considers to be important or powerful.

 

I'm all for a free market, but when the CEO of nestle wants to make baby formula that is addictive and causes a baby to reject mothers milk, as well as making it illegal for people to collect rain water, I draw the line. I draw the line with having extremely high definition camera's pointing down at my house, from orbit, without my express written consent. I do not give the smallest of fucks who is using it, the answer is unequivocally "No, get that camera off of my house".

 

It shouldn't be a thing, because the very concept if a violation of the basic human right to privacy.

[mr moose]

1 hour ago, Trik'Stari said:

I would, if I would remember to check my bookmarks.

 

As for your second comment, the very thing they are planning to do is already a violation, in my opinion. This service, constitutes an invasion of privacy at the very get go, because it might look down at my house, my back yard, etc, without my express written consent. I cannot opt out of this, as far as I know, and they are making this without the permission of the people they will be looking at.

 

For example, one can get google to blur out satellite imagery of ones property on Google Earth, allegedly. I assume they don't actually honor this if one is not someone google considers to be important or powerful.

 

I'm all for a free market, but when the CEO of nestle wants to make baby formula that is addictive and causes a baby to reject mothers milk, as well as making it illegal for people to collect rain water, I draw the line. I draw the line with having extremely high definition camera's pointing down at my house, from orbit, without my express written consent. I do not give the smallest of fucks who is using it, the answer is unequivocally "No, get that camera off of my house".

 

It shouldn't be a thing, because the very concept if a violation of the basic human right to privacy.

So if the it violates a law then it won't go ahead, and if it does go ahead,  the class action will be fucking huge with everyone one the planet part of it.  Until then it  is a proposal with insufficient abilities to do what people are accusing it of doing. 

[LogicalDrm]

*** Thread locked ***

 

Thread cleaned of pointless arguments, political posts (including the bookmarking) and personal attacks. You will hear from me.

 

In more ways than one as I'm actually educated on satellite imaging and satellite tracking. Might post Status about those.