Obsessed fan finds Japanese idol's home by zooming in on her eyes

https://www.asiaone.com/asia/obsessed-fan-finds-japanese-idols-home-zooming-her-eyes

by sohkamyung • 7 years ago

211 138 7 years ago

rjzzleep• 7 years ago

I find this whole idol culture extremely odd.

Interestingly enough it seems like a lot of people never actually have sex (granted the following article is about japan, but they're not that different). So it almost seems like these extreme stalkers wouldn't actually become physically active, although that doesn't really make it any better.

https://www.cnn.com/2019/10/08/asia/japan-fertility-intl-hnk...

Iv2• 7 years ago

The idol culture is extremely unhealthy. This is objectification turned to 11. They get a pass in the US because it seems so distant and Japan is "odd and cool" but it is actually really creepy.

claudiawerner• 7 years ago

At what point does one differentiate between obsession with idols and obsession with pop stars in other countries? In my experience, J-idols appear to put a lot of work into their personalities as part of the group and their "talent" which goes beyond the fetishization of beauty we usually associate with objectification. In other words, do we know that Japanese fans view idols as people tending to objects?

coldtea4• 7 years ago

This is objectification turned to 11.

Fans like those stars for their whole package (myth, personality, songs, artistic expression, style, etc) not e.g. just for their body (which is usually implied by objectification).

It's also not much different than our pop idols, especially of yore (up until the 00s or so, before several other occupations, such as games, social media, web surfing, selfies, and tons of higher quality TV and movies) basically replaced pop music as the major obsession of western kids.

There have been idols attacked (and even murdered) plenty of times in good ole US.

eej2ya1K5• 7 years ago

If you disregard immigrants from Africa, the Middle-East and Asia, most European countries have birth rates at the same level or lower than Japan.

baud147258• 7 years ago

I think that with the current access to birth control and abortion, you can't exactly extrapolate sexual activity from birth rates in Western Europe.

imtringued• 7 years ago

When I hear fertility crisis I always wonder how it is possible to differentiate between people having children later in their lives and people not having children in the first place. As long as the age of child rearing is rising fertility will appear to go down until it spikes up one day.

Retric3• 7 years ago

Outside of a 30 year window female fertility drops to essentially zero. aka you can be reasonably sure looking a few million 55 year old woman that they are not going to have significant numbers of kids.

As the drop below replacement rate started in the 60’s it’s easy to verify the trend is real.

rasz• 7 years ago

Over 90% of Japanese pr0n is about sexually assaulting someone, might have something to do with this.

eej2ya1K5• 7 years ago

Not even remotely true.

p3rls• 7 years ago

Why does everyone feel entitled to give their opinion on Asian idol culture when they clearly have the barest of exposure, usually consisting of watching a documentary or reading a CNN article...

Really irritating stuff

mike006322• 7 years ago

The Netflix anime Kakegurui describes a lot about idol culture in Japan through one of its characters. It doesn't try to justify or judge the practice but it presents it thoroughly.

billpg• 7 years ago

Someone actually built the "Enhance" process used by TV police forensics?

number6• 7 years ago

Remember when we laught at this when it was on CSI? Enhance!

DarkWiiPlayer• 7 years ago

Except it doesn't need to be "enhanved"; it's all already there xD

(But yes, I thought the same thing when I read the headline)

kthejoker2• 7 years ago

https://www.enhance.computer/ is a browser game where you get to live out your CSI dreams

sien• 7 years ago

Enhance 224176

Enhance, Stop

Move in, Stop

Pull out, Track right, Stop

Center in, Pull back, Stop

Track 45 right, Stop

Center and Stop

Enhance 34 to 36

Pan right and pull back, Stop

Enhance 34 to 46

Pull back, Wait a minute, Go right, Stop

Enhance 5719

Track 45 left, Stop

Enhance 15 to 23

Give me a hard copy right there.

everlastingfan• 7 years ago

This story doesn't hold a candle to the movie, though... where do I sign for the cyberprivacy arms race?

carrozo• 7 years ago

Not sure why this isn’t the top comment.

SmellyGeekBoy2• 7 years ago

Because it doesn't contribute to the conversation?

ASalazarMX4• 7 years ago

Because jokes shouldn't be top comments. They can lighten a thread, but they shouldn't be the tread itself.

anigbrowl• 7 years ago

Because social quoting is just an ego trip.

sohkamyung• 7 years ago

Off-topic but related: "Blade Runner" takes place in Los Angeles in "November, 2019". :-)

machinecoffee• 7 years ago

It's the "uncrop" feature I'm really waiting for :-)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2aINa6tg3fo

krzat• 7 years ago

Camera apps should offer a feature to erase reflections somehow, without making eyes blurry.

ekianjo• 7 years ago

Or just make picture low res when you share them widely on certain networks.

newnewpdro• 7 years ago

It would save so much wasted bandwidth if smartphones actually guided users through a workflow of resizing and compressing photos before they leave the phone or hell even when first saving them locally.

Instead everyone's sending many-megabyte barely-compressed highres JPEGs I presume since cameras have always defaulted to saving the highest quality images with the expectation that you'd post process them before distributing. That and I imagine it's desirable to not have to burn battery power on compressing photos, and maybe at&t and friends kickback some $$ to make the default flow burn more bandwidth. Many people pay for metered data and receive giant photos from friends w/unlimited bandwidth and zero fucks given.

drdeadringer• 7 years ago

If Google can remove fences from pictures of your child playing baseball, surely they could perform this adjacent ability as well.

Crinus• 7 years ago

Sato admitted to the attack after he was arrested on Sept 17 and revealed that he was a huge fan of Matsuoka.

I always find it weird when self-proclaimed "fans" harm the people they are supposedly fans of.

mumblemumble2• 7 years ago

I imagine there's an element of solipsism to these sorts of situations. Perhaps you can only get so obsessed before the object of your obsession starts to become literally an object to you.

throw0101a5• 7 years ago

Marshall McLuhan remarked that photography turned the entire world into a brothel:

* http://www.sfu.ca/media-lab/426/readings/thephoto.htm

Also:

The camera tends to turn people into things, and the photograph extends and multiplies the human image to the proportions of mass-produced merchandise. The movie stars and matinee idols are put into the public domain by photography. They become dreams that money can buy. They can be bought and thumbed more easily than public prostitutes.

ACow_Adonis• 7 years ago

The other side of this coin is that celebrity culture tends to literally be the selling of a person as an object.

The number of people who are incapable of understanding that the image portrayed of celebrities in the media is literally them selling you a manufactured image, and nothing to do with an actual human being, lifestyle, or genuinely held belief or personality I imagine must be staggeringly high.

chongli• 7 years ago

Fan is an abbreviation for fanatic which is a much more appropriate label for this sort of behaviour. Having said that, I’d like to step back for a moment and look at our broader culture.

Few people talk about it but it’s actually extremely weird to have celebrities at all. It’s a cultural and economic phenomenon that works to hijack our tendency to form relationships and identify with people we find attractive. It takes a mechanism that’s supposed to help us bond with our family members and leverages it for profit. The fact that some people can’t handle this gets overlooked. All blame is placed on the individual, allowing the rest of us to absolve ourselves of guilt and responsibility.

ASalazarMX4• 7 years ago

The flaw is in the individual. The environment is exploitative, but wantonly acting to harm another person is an individual decision. The only defense could be medical.

Our civilization has evolved much faster than our minds and bodies, but the choice to harm others is still ours.

ep103• 7 years ago

eh, I used to think this too, but time spent studying anarchism (hey, its intellectually interesting) has left me with the conclusion that its a natural human tendency in any social system. Simply put: no matter the idea or society involved (even if the idea is anti-hierarchy, anti-status like anarchism), it is easier to remember the idea if there is a face you can put to the name. Put into practice, that means that most cultural, ideological, social or matters of importance will end up having at least one person associated with them. Those people, in turn, then become celebrities by virtue of the fact that lost of people then associate the idea or phenomenon with the person. Advertising and propaganda then catapult that into the phenomenon we have today of celebrities, but that's ultimately just making 100x more potent what would otherwise be an unavoidable (and I saw unavoidable because even anarchist communities can't get away from it) aspect of how humans interpret and remember things about the world.

Put another way, I think this is a similar side of the coin to the fact that most people tend to (consciously or not) put together lists of: "X knows about this better than me, and I trust X, and don't have time to devote to learning about this topic, therefore if I ever need to know more about this topic I can call X" for almost every aspect of our lives.

Note: I have no source here, this is just personally derived observation. A real study on this would be quite interesting. Though I'm sure when we discussed its results, we would do so by discussing the scientist's name and reputation.

posterboy2• 7 years ago

and fanatic is akin to or directly derived from Latin, from fanum "temple", and may mean all kinds of things. Celebrated celebrity seems to mean something quite similar doesn't it?

Your criticism is meaningless, too. There are many attacks on family members.

rdiddly• 7 years ago

I think you're on the right track but I'm betting it's not our symmetrical relationships with peers that are being hijacked, but rather our penchant for asymmetrical relationships with our superiors in a hierarchy. We and the chimps presumably both inherited this from our hypothetical common ancestor.

I'm going to talk about a study right now, but I can't even find it, so I have absolutely no rigor or data about this and it needs many grains of salt. Just pretend I'm holding a drink and talking to you at a party right now. "There was a study" where [species of monkey or ape] were basically encouraged to use money, i.e. they were trained to see a certain token as valuable. From this they began to trade it for food, and then for sex, and weirdly at some point, for the chance to gaze at photos of the alpha of the group. So they essentially ended up inventing trade, prostitution, and celebrity worship from first principles.

eej2ya1K5• 7 years ago

"Something weird and crazy happened in this country of 125 million people"

This is "Florida Man" type clickbait and doesn't belong on Hacker News in my opinion.

theon144• 7 years ago

I thought it was HN-worthy because of the privacy implications.

eej2ya1K5• 7 years ago

Actually, that's fair and makes complete sense. My bad. It's just sad to see it devolve into yet another "Japan is crazy" party :(

The privacy implications are, I agree, interesting...

im3w1l• 7 years ago

Any thoughts on how he did it? Was it one photo that gave it all away, or did it take information from multiple photos being pieced together?

How did he go from having a picture to knowing the location? Guess & test?

ZfPHO5H• 7 years ago

"Saitama Man", not "Florida Man".

https://www.tokyoreporter.com/crime/saitama-man-used-eye-ref...

chippy• 7 years ago

https://www3.nhk.or.jp/shutoken-news/20191008/1000037432.htm... appears to be the original source

including a much better quote about the tech relevance:

"Because the performance of smartphone cameras has improved and the image quality has become very fine, privacy information has leaked out in a completely unexpected manner. ... "Users need to be well aware that there is always a risk of privacy leaks, and new measures are required on the software side, such as the option of degrading image quality."

comboy• 7 years ago

Friendly tip if you are uploading any photo made by you to some untrusted site (works on linux and macos):

      exiftool -all="" filename.jpg

Because oftentimes you don't need to look at the picture to figure out the location.

sml156• 7 years ago

exiftool tool also has a GUI for Windows, It's not pretty to look at but works great

giancarlostoro• 7 years ago

You can also additionally configure your phone not to tag the geolocation on your photos.

TomK32• 7 years ago

Faking the geolocation might be more fun and frustrate any attacker :)

codedokode2• 7 years ago

Why don't browsers do this? Firefox should implement this (warn about geolocation and suggest either remove it or fake it).

throwaway9d0291• 7 years ago

Beware that this can strip colour profile information and lead to incorrect rendering of your image.

I'm not quite sure how to address that properly.

mike006322• 7 years ago

Dumb question: do Twitter, Facebook and Instagram remove location exif data?

throw0101a5• 7 years ago

Another English article that's a little better:

* https://www.tokyoreporter.com/crime/saitama-man-used-eye-ref...

ASalazarMX4• 7 years ago

Woah, first Japanese site I've seen that doesn't look like a casino. To be frank, I don't visit many Japanese sites, I thought all looked the same.

autoexec5• 7 years ago

The article is pretty clean but the main page is probably a little closer to what you're expecting. Japanese sites do tend to have a certain sort of "busy"/boxy look to them.

grawprog• 7 years ago

Yeah. It's pretty easy for dedicated people to do. I recently watched a bunch of people track down that was spamming a board's home address from a picture of their hand that showed a small patch of front yard in less than a half hour. This was with no exif info. You should always be careful where you post pictures to and what's visible in them.

eej2ya1K5• 7 years ago

Slightly related, but I once ran an imageboard for friends and set up a hook to output the EXIF geolocation of uploaded photos to a private IRC channel.

It was surprising to see how often something would show up! Even when uploading photos straight from a phone through the browser.

9HZZRfNlpR• 7 years ago

There's a lot of things that strip the info now before it goes to server. Photo apps themselves, image boards etc.

Far bigger leaker is MS Office or pdf metadata. Heck, they even catches that famous serial killer who took creepy pictures of himself in women underwear because eventually he started sending files, not regular letters, to police taunting them.

Edit: BTK was this sick man's nickname. Busted by having his church's computer metadata in files to police https://www.bizarrepedia.com/btk/

icpmacdo• 7 years ago

WARNING about the crime scene photos of the serial killers murders in that link. Would have preferred to have not seen them right before bed.

codedokode2• 7 years ago

This just shows how poorly software that captures the images and adds geolocation without user knowing is made.

krapp• 7 years ago

It's apparently possible[0] to retrieve fingerprints from a mobile phone photo of someone's hand, which might wind up being a problem for Asians making the ubiquitous peace-sign[1]. I guess they could always just turn it around, though ;)

And of course copying keys from cellphone photos is old hat to the point that it's actually an app, and people have been getting doxxed through the EXIF data on images they upload for years.

[0]https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2018/04/lifting_a_fin...

[1]https://www.asiaone.com/digital/chinas-peace-sign-selfie-tak...

golemotron• 7 years ago

Does this level of resolution make undetectable deep fakes less likely?

Schoolmeister• 7 years ago

That's odd. When you scroll past the article the URL is rewritten to just https://www.asiaone.com. I wonder what would be the benefit of that.

reustle• 7 years ago

Lower bounce rate? +1 pageview?

lonelappde4• 7 years ago

Because then you aren't on the article anymore.

ubercow13• 7 years ago

It’s an annoying trend, I have also noticed it on other sites. You finish the article or viewing the image or whatever, scroll a bit past the end or flick to the bottom to check you aren’t missing anything, and then try to copy the URL and get some other page you never visited.

rjsw• 7 years ago

Looks like a hog to me ... [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twin_Peaks

ourcat2• 7 years ago

Suddenly, all those odd-looking 'cartoony face' apps begin to make sense..

[edit] This might sound like a glib response (thanks down-voter). But I'm serious.

Apps could easily be created to thwart this.

stevefan1999• 7 years ago

Another case of stan...why are these people so fanatic about someone?

burntoutfire• 7 years ago

"Enhance."

marci• 7 years ago

Now, how long before this* isn't a parody anymore?

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xbCWYm7B_B4 (Enhance, Enhance, Enhance | NTSF:SD:SUV | Adult Swim)

magic_beans• 7 years ago

Only on HN does an article about a woman being attacked and sexually assaulted devolve into conversation about technical minutia.

GhostVII• 7 years ago

Isn't that the point of HN? Everyone agrees that it was terrible that it happened, so repeating it isn't very productive or interesting

jameslk• 7 years ago

Yes, just like how all the articles about China currently plastering the homepage aren't devolving into outrage laden diatribes. Same goes for articles about global warming, Facebook and RMS. HN is above politics and even emotion itself!... unless it involves subjects that upset the ingroup.

toyg• 7 years ago

Well, on most other news sites it would devolve in a conversation on Trump / Brexit / Trudeau... at least on the technical minutiae we can talk about things we know something about.

anchpop• 7 years ago

What would you prefer the conversation involve? People get assaulted all the time, the main reason this story is interesting is the technical element. It has really interesting privacy implications and is inherently technical

RenRav• 7 years ago

Someone should build a phone app that removes eyeball reflections and exif data.

I have a feeling that, when people take selfies, they are using other apps and not their camera app itself.

autoexec5• 7 years ago

in terms of exif data I'd agree, but I don't think most people have to worry about someone figuring out where they are from eyeball reflections. This guy was lucky enough to get a clear reflection, but luckier still that what was captured was meaningful enough to give him a specific location.

avatarbl• 7 years ago

Did I see a future detective ?

Obsessed fan finds Japanese idol's home by zooming in on her eyes

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