Vending machines on the Waterloo campus were discretely...

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Vending machines on the Waterloo campus were discretely using face recognition without any warning.

The only reason people found out was because one of the machines displayed an error message when the app crashed.

https://kitchener.ctvnews.ca/facial-recognition-error-message-on-vending-machine-sparks-concern-at-university-of-waterloo-1.6779835

Like 24 February at 22:57 | Open on mas.to

17 comments

ergifruit

@yogthos god, that's so fucking dark.

24 February at 23:54 | Open on mas.to

starfrost

@yogthos it was nice they put facial recognition in the binary name to let everyone know at least

25 February at 1:24 | Open on wetdry.world

jesterchen42

@starfrost @yogthos Yeah, I'm worried about that as well. The first thing the vendors will do is to rename the file/process to lssass.exe or lsasss.exe or such. 😒

25 February at 7:23 | Open on social.tchncs.de

surfingreg

@yogthos Tell me that company's not connected to the "science" telling covid people not to wear masks.

25 February at 1:52 | Open on fosstodon.org

Andrew Feeney

@yogthos The best kind of @kevlin

25 February at 2:03 | Open on phpc.social

Andrew Feeney

@yogthos @kevlin I actually love the error message here: Exception Unknown Software Exception

25 February at 2:04 | Open on phpc.social

Alyssa Voronin

@yogthos Would have drawn less attention, if they'd called it EvilBadProgram.exe.

25 February at 9:32 | Open on mstdn.social

Nicovel0

@yogthos I suspect the only lesson the company will learn from that is to hide their error messages

25 February at 10:04 | Open on mastodon.social

Yogthos

@Nicovel0 exactly, how to hide their criminal activity better

25 February at 13:32 | Open on mas.to

enthraxxx

@yogthos So nice of them to have named their executable so honestly.
Had it been called 123.exe no one would be the wiser.

25 February at 10:56 | Open on h4.io

Yogthos

@enthraxxx patch v01.2334 will fix that bug I'm sure

25 February at 13:32 | Open on mas.to

Romanov

@yogthos@mas.toTime for another class action lawsuit.

25 February at 11:56 | Open on fosstodon.org

CauseOfBSOD :fediverse:

@yogthos@mas.to you should try bringing a qr code of the eicar test string around vending machines to see if they crash

apparently some surveillance camera software will decode qr codes it detects automatically, and will then get killed by antimalware protection on the machine if said qr code contains a virus signature. (source: https://www.revk.uk/2020/01/eicar-test-qr.html)