LET’S BE FWENDS ISSUE #91:

HERD MENTALITY.

“There are quantities of human beings, but there are many more faces, for each person has several.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

Hi there! This is one of those issues published in the middle of the summer, when nobody has time for reading anyway. So it’s a short one, dealing with recognising faces (and how to fake it), trying to be like everyone else (and how to succeed at it, even it’s a bad thing) and listening to a composition that will play for a thousand years.

Bypass Face Recognition with “Master Faces”

In 2021, face recognition is practically ubiquitous. It’s extensively used by cell phone manufacturers for authentication, and multiple vendors for identification. Face Recognition works by picking up distinctive features of your face, and match it against a template of your face already stored (for authentication) or against a database of known faces (for identification).

Can these algorithms be fooled? Yes, and to an alarming degree: You just need 10 carefully crafted virtual “faces” to impersonate over 40% of the general population.

The Science of Herd Mentality

One of the most dangerous developments for any group of people who wants to get something done is the emergence “group think”, or “orthodoxy”, as I sometimes like to call it. It is a shared believe on how the world looks like, how it works, and how solutions to problems look like. Where does it come from? Watch this video about herd mentality (basically the same thing) to get an overview.

Longplayer

In 1999, Jem Finer of The Pogues fame, started Longplayer, a composition that has been playing ever since, without repeating itself. It will continue to do so until it completes it 1.000 year cycle, and you can listen to it here.

That’s it from this edition of Let’s be Fwends. It’s short, it’s late, but at least it’s here.