Streaming video?
I got no horse in this race - I’m just surprised by the level of outrage heaped on JohnBckWLD for a mostly innocuous aside. But hey, to each his/her own.
He’s been named as Christopher Paul Neil, 32, an English teacher from Canada.
Crap, you beat me to it!
The only person who knows for sure if Pete Townshend is a paedophile is of course Pete Townshend. Didn’t he write “Rough Boys” 
The recent article about the guy in the OP mentions that before they released his photo, they weighed whether they should, becasue of the possible harm that could come to the paedophile if people see him in person and take action. Unreal that that would be a concern- it’s not like there’s any possbility of his innocence.
Ironic, considering his preference for smooth boys. 
I don’t think he’ll turn up alive now. He’ll either be killed by vigilantes, kill himself, or simply never be found (possibly because of one of the previous possibilities happened), I reckon.
I think the concern was more that the offenders will now realise (as noted in this thread) that they need to choose a more secure way of masking their identities.
I would guess a lot of them just use a basic photoshop filter - blur, spin, pixellate etc - now they know it can be undone they will amend their actions.
I guess that was inevitable anyway though - if it means this one guy got caught, that’s probably better than nothing.
Or that somebody else out there might look like his twin brother… :dubious:
I don’t go around hiding identities, but I know my way around photoshop. Many photoshop filters use a translation algorithm. If the algorithm has a one to one correspondence, or close to it, you can make some educated guesses along with trial and error to reverse the effect. The swirl I saw on CNN is this way. The police were clever, but they aren’t magical.
The more basic blur method is not one to one. Depending upon how coarse you go, it will take a certain percentage of pixels (say 1 in 4) and overwrite the complementary percentage of nearest neighbors (3 in our example) with exact copies of itself. In a flattened image (no layer data), such as a jpg, the other 75% of the pixels, which I believe is 50% of the resolution, is lost forever.
Yes. To prove how easy it was, I just took the photo into Photoshop, made a selection that centered around the middle of the spiral, and did Filter > Twirl > -999 and got the same picture as Interpol did.
Now, why the hell somebody covering his identity would do that instead of pasting a black square on top of their face and flattening the layer, I will never understand.
Because he didn’t realize it could be unswirled.
Touche
Oh, dude. Can you imagine if you looked a lot like that guy, and it wasn’t you? :eek: :eek: :eek:
I mean, he’s a pretty average looking (skinny, brown haired) guy, and the unswirled picture is slightly distorted…there are probably thousands of people who could be mistaken for him. That would be awful.
Obviously.
But maybe it’s because I’m a visual person that it looks pretty obvious that there’s at least a chance of it being unswirled. I mean, just why the hell choose a swirl filter in the first place? It seems like such an odd, random choice for blocking one’s identity. Why get all cute and Photoshoppy about it? I mean, heck, obviously this guy has no brains at all, but you could look at the photo and see that there’s a hell of a lot of original data left in the swirl. All the guy has to do to see if his swirl filter is reversible is just run another swirl in the opposite direction on it, while he’s manipulating it in Photohsop. And, guess what, it is.
I guess if this was CSI, it would be because he subconsciously wanted to get himself caught, but since it’s not, maybe we don’t need to jump to that particular trite conclusion.
That guy is so generic looking it’s ridiculous. I’m glad they caught him before someone who looked like him got killed by a vigilante or something.
I had an English teacher who looked just like Carlos the Jackal.
You can imagine how I feel. Every time they arrest a pervert he is an overseas English teacher. Wonderful. I tell people I am a prostitute, just avoid the stigma of being an English teacher.
Or that someone has a similar name, or looks similar, or is a paediatrician…don’t underestimate the stupidity of mob rule.
And even that’s ignoring the moral issue of whether justice should be seen to be done by the state (any state) rather than by any random group of thugs, regardless of their good intentions.
[ETA: hadn’t noticed the page 2 - but I guess now I’m just reinforcing the point!)