I doubt this is a censorship, or a anti-counterfitting feature. It's most likely something wrong with the codec used to display images, possibly 10-bit heif photos are being interpreted as 8-bit jpegs. See other people getting the exact same shade of green in random photos:
There is nothing special about this shade of green that causes it to come from a codec issue. This green is what you get when you convert a 0-buffer from YUV to RGB. Depending on what colorspace you convert with it will be a slightly different shade.
You can play around with this yourself in imagemagick:
Conversion from YUV to RGB will be at one of the last steps of the image capture pipeline. Anything in between could wipe the buffer to 0s. It could be due to a simple bug in the image pipeline or it could be censorship. It tells you nothing.
Note that in the OPs photo (https://imgur.com/a/SCHGo4N) it happens to every other image consistently. If you were shooting raw (with Pixel, not familiar with Xiaomi camera), it would save the raw and jpeg together. The gallery not being able to display the raw image results in the green image would be consistent with whats being shown.
FWIW the redmi note 8 pro main 64mp camera (it's a Samsung sensor shared by many phones) can shoot in raw but only with a gcam port, not with the default Xiaomi camera app.
Making a guess here, the envelope has a distinct shade of pink, which may trigger some processing. It looks like it is in "AI" mode, and who knows what "AI" does.
Now that Apple has changed the rules, everyone should be under their impression that their phone is a cop and will snitch them out to the re-education board for punishment. This is reality.
But if it was, I would suggest using a different phone. Maybe a fairphone running /e/ - that's my setup, with almost exclusively open source software. I can recommend it.
What they built is a way of scanning things on your phone and reporting that to Apple. The chance of multiple governments not passing laws eventually to force this into scanning for whatever they wish is low. Previously to this Apple could have fought back on privacy terms but now its argument will be much weaker.
edit: It's also a model based scanner so they scan for types of things and similar things instead of explicit copies of things. Which makes it an even more powerful tool for governments than a simple direct scanner.
All of which has been common for a long time. You where already sending your unencrypted phots to Apple, that’s the point when you should be concerned. Apple and all other service providers are required by US and most other countries laws to do searches on their servers.
The only difference is Apple is upfront about what their doing on iCloud where most backup providers are keeping silent.
>You where already sending your unencrypted phots to Apple
No, I wasn't. The whole point here is that Apple is not scanning server side, they've built the functionality to scan device side. You need never use iCloud in any way whatsoever in order for Apple's new scanning tech to be used against you. That is a major difference.
>Apple and all other service providers are required by US and most other countries laws to do searches on their servers.
No, they are not, even if that was the new thing Apple is doing which it isn't. If a company builds server-side scanning, then they may be required to fulfill certain requirements. But companies are not required to actually do that in the first place even if many choose to do so. Apple already did scan uploaded photos and voluntarily chose not to have E2EE for iCloud data in order to please law enforcement agencies, but that's a voluntary choice by Apple. This new client side scanning is a different beast. Please try to gain even the slightest fucking clue what you are talking about before spouting off on something so important.
Edit: to add for those interested in more details on the law, the federal reporting requirements are under 18 U.S. Code § 2258A [0]. What you'll see there is a "Duty To Report", and the reason for that is to evade Constitutional protections. If the government compelled companies to scan, as well as any legal challenges (by very well funded actors) and public blow back, as a practical matter those companies would become State Actors for the purposes of 4th Amendment evaluation. However, even if it's heavily incentivized so long as it's "voluntary" courts have repeated ruled that 3rd parties can do searches that would be illegal for the government, turn discovered evidence over to the government who in turn may then use it freely. Walter v. United States (1980, [1]) is a good example, covering the [righteous and just prosecution] of someone transporting "films depicting homosexual activities" after it was mailed to the wrong address and turned over to the FBI which I'm sure everyone here on HN would applaud and definitely is what they have in mind when they think of client side scanning in the US. Tim Cook is carrying on that tradition with Pride no doubt.
You are missing the point. It’s too easy to make excuses “for the children”. We are tying to fight against dystopia here, against a global technological panopticon. Even if this feature was made with entirely the best intentions, with the strictest controls and best audits — it’s still a cop in your pocket. And that cop always wants more. And more. History has demonstrated this.
Fantasy is believing that granted powers will not be abused because the powerful claim they won’t abuse them. Yes, we extrapolate and this might seem outlandish to the naive. Some of us know how history rhymes and call out the patterns that are paving the road the hell.
I just took a picture of every Euro banknote (which of course have EURion on them) in my wallet with my Poco Phone (which has the same MIUI version / camera app) and all photos are perfectly normal
But could of course be a special change in this Xiaomi model :-)
The german postal voting documents do, with 99,9% certainty, not include any EURion constellations (---and they have no window, the return address is printed directly on the envelope--- EDIT: they do in cologne! See [1], last image, sorry for the misinformation). Wouldn't make much sense, as the envelope is thrown away immediately and the inner letter (which is not the ballot) contains a unique number per postally voting citizen that's not trivialy guessable.
They are however made from non-bleached (only coloured) recycling paper, so maybe the camera is picking up some artifacts from the different visible paper fibers?
I think you'd be surprised at how light and subtle these things can be. I remember seeing some on something printed back in early 2000s and they were yellow dots barely registerable under a magnifying loupe, never mind by eye up close.
Which, if the same sort of case here, makes the CCD(s) on the phone here particularly impressive.
There is something really scary about this being all secret functionality. How do I know my scanner/printer/camera/... isn't snitching on me when connected to the internet?
Also can I put those dots in any picture/document to mess with cameras/editing software? Or is there more than those few dots to it? Would be kinda useful for public images, to at least annoy some stalkers, impersonators and other creeps. Doing this all over the place could also really support open source projects like GIMP!
The unofficial Google Camera port I've been using silently discards photos containing the sun's reflection in water. Rather than assuming Google is intentionally concealing the appearance of a celestial body, I've chalked this up to a bug in post-processing code that only kicks in when a specific image recognition pattern matches. Modern ML-driven camera systems make for some fun "500 mile email" [0] esque failure modes.
I’ll bet someone slapped a common QR code library in there that also matches other barcode types, made a few modifications and didn’t test the unusual types.
- The strings "Entgeltfrei im Bereich der Deutschen Post" (free shipment in Germany), "Wahlbrief" (postal voting document), "An <address of your local election office>"
- The name of the manufacturer and an order number for the envelope (which is identical on all envelopes), "Fachverlag Jüngling-gbb, Bestell-Nr 109 024 9319 099"
- Two fields that are filled out by hand (with a pen) by the election office before sending them to the citizen, "Wahlscheinnummer" (serial number) and "Stimmbezirk" (polling station)
They have not changed in the last... 30 years? :-)
I don't think any of that could trigger a barcode library :-D
EDIT: This is not true for all postal voting documents in all German municipalities, every municipality can order their own postal documents from several sources (or even print their own), but the specific envelope with the "green image problem" still does not contain a barcode, as seen in the last image the user posted: https://imgur.com/a/SCHGo4N
In some countries it is allowed to vote, but your employer or landlord may request you to prove to you that you voted for the „right“ guy by sending them a picture of your filled out ballot.
A feature like this (properly implemented) could actually be great for those countries.
The slippery slope argument still applies of course.
A question - does Photoshop/AfterEffects/Premiere automatically embed a similar sort of a "watermark" to e.g. make tracking back meme authors possible? How about cameras?
Modern camera stacks use a lot of machine learning to figure out what kind of scene is being captured; primarily to apply specific tuning for that scene. For example, certain settings are applied for night time, portrait, landscape, beach, etc.
Xiaomi might be using an ML detector to figure out it is looking at something that resembles an official document, and refusing to take a picture of it.
The title assumes, with "censoring". A more appropriate title would be "Strange quirk when photographing German postal voting documents with the Xiaomi Camera".
But what a quirk, a real life object causing issues in software.
People and their conspiracy theories... Cell phone cameras do a lot of post-processing, like skin smoothing, color enhancing and edge sharpening. Before jumping to this censorship conspiracy without evidence, I would investigate if one of those algorithms are buggy, and somewhere on the photo there is a combination of pixels that trigger the bug. Or sure, I'd investigate if there's censorship code, but I'm not going to assume there's some evil stuff going on before I see the code.
Maybe it's as simple as flash memory corruption on the guy's phone, the photo of mostly table and just the edge of the envelope is "simpler" (lots of the table which is just white), so maybe it takes less space. The more complicated photo would take more storage space, what if it's hitting a bad block or a period of bad blocks because of the physical memory layout (e.g. a sequence of bytes every 4MB is bad).
It’s probably unintended, but intentional censoring methods exist, as documented elsewhere in this thread. The most likely explanation seems to be this being a side-effect of those.
Your explanations appear less likely, as I’d expect those types of bugs to show differently.
https://forums.androidcentral.com/ask-question/912123-photos...
https://www.reddit.com/r/oneplus/comments/4p2ief/pictures_on...
https://forums.oneplus.com/threads/solid-green-photos.453215...