from 58008@lemmy.world to nostupidquestions@lemmy.world on 14 Aug 2025 11:56
https://lemmy.world/post/34432251
I was thinking about those outfits celebrities wear that mess with flash photography equipment, and I was watching a dude on TV just now whose shirt pattern was going apeshit because of the camera, and I wondered if there could ever be a pattern or material that, when filmed, caused the camera irreversible damage. And if that were physically possible, I wondered if intentionally showing up to camera-heavy events wearing said shirt would constitute a crime on my part.
It’s just a shirt after all. It’s not like I’m grabbing a camera and smashing it on the ground. But at the same time, I know it will have that effect, so I’m accountable. But it’s not like my shirt is emitting damaging laser beams or anything, it’s entirely passive.
Also, is there anything like this scenario in real life/law?
#nostupidquestions
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It’s not possible to damage cameras passively, so there isn’t an answer. But if it was possible it probably would be made illegal to wear those around cameras.
More like illegal to wear anywhere in the USA considering that we’re quickly becoming a surveillance state.
Quickly?
Every country is already a surveillance state, and has been for multiple decades.
Just look at Britain with cameras everywhere since at least the 1980’s.
Fucking Ring crap just doubled down on it, and idiot people don’t even care they’re providing the means. 1984 nailed it.
The sensors can definitely be damaged by too much light
Right, I just mentioned that in another comment. I’m not quite sure it would count under OPs restrictions:
maybe if its emitting lots radiation
Probably aliasing aka moiré effect. Harmless to the equipment.
Speed bumps do something similar? Entirely passive, harmless, untill encountering certain equipment - a vehicle.
Best i can do is an Elton John style jacket. Dazzle them to hell and back.
Now the kilt was only for day-to-day wear. In battle, we donned a full-length ballgown covered in sequins. The idea was to blind your opponent with luxury.
if you invent some passive way to damage tech by just being in its vicinity. not only would it be illegal. it would be a super weapon.
A weapon to surpass metal gear?
A weapon to defeat metal gear
How better to surpass something than to defeat it?
Instructions unclear: Ran a marathon, got disqualified for defeating the other runners instead of running past them.
Snake?!
Snaaaaaake!!!
bro’s got the level 9 EMP aura
How they gonna find out? No cameras to witness it
eyes
Eyes aren’t electric…… unless your a bird
you dont neds electric eyes to witness something. i witness stuff all the time and my eyes are analogue.
But if our eyes aren’t eyes, are our eyes eye eyes?
To those saying it’s not possible - modern cameras are highly complicated devices, constantly using little motors to change focus and exposure, driven by AI informed algorithms. Leave it up to some nerd to device a pattern and/or material that could maybe drive those sensors and motors nuts, or something like that.
Unless they invent some kind of new force of physics all you can do here is reflect ambient light.
The only pattern/material that comes close to what OP is looking for would be a parabolic mirror. If you attach one of these to your shirts and then stand at the exact right angle and distance to a camera, you could damage it. However that is already stretching “passive” because it would require a lot of deliberate actions to position yourself that way. And it pretty much only works when the sun is out.
A even worse option would be wearing a shirt made from a radioactive material. (but is it still passive when you’re using something radioactive?). And of course this wouldn’t just damage the camera but also very much the cameraman, the wearer and anyone else that is around.
Damaging a camera is very different from something that makes taking a picture impossible. It doesn’t matter if it is passive or active, only the end result is important.
A celebrity might get away with it when just trying to get home but would probably be required to pay for damage to the camera. Anyone at a large venue is going to be ruining everyone’s cameras and that would be a huge deal.
Invent?!? Bro, just use infrared LEDs 😂
Not passive. Won’t damage cameras.
Yes not passive but you’re not thinking big enough.
<img alt="" src="https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/ce23881e-0ad7-41ab-aa26-bf835a6779b2.jpeg">
That just brings us back to lasers, though.
No, but you will basically look like a bloomed-out version of this:
<img alt="" src="https://sh.itjust.works/pictrs/image/9cfb3da9-f3c5-48ee-93cb-8ee80423a17c.png">
This is my thought: unless everyone uses it, they just have to track the one glowing dude. Eventually you’ll be in front of a camera or person who will identify you clearly, and it will be that much easier because you’re glowing.
I think Lidar can do this in certain circumstances. Not really practical for a shirt though.
Not passive.
True. I seem to have skipped that requirement when reading the post.
Yes it would be. You're wearing it with clear intent of damaging equipment.
“I had no idea it would do that. It was a gift/I found it at a thrift store/estate sale/in the trash.”
If you take away the intent, and with no obvious signs that your shirt is anything other than clothing, I don’t know that it would be.
This reminds me of a movie or a tv show where people were sneaking into a compound and disabled the security cameras with a laser pointer.
I think it depends on whether it’s active or passive. Active - e.g. a laser that damages a camera sensor, then yes, your device is actively damaging someone else’s camera - deliberate property damage. Passive - e.g. reflective strips so the exposure is bad, a pattern that is hard to focus on or similar- that’s fine - camera owner is making a decision to expose their gear to the environment. Even if, say, it’s a changing pattern that deceives the autofocus into working constantly (no, I don’t know exactly how that would work, but it’s the best I can think of at short notice) so it wears out faster.
There, technically, hypothetically, could be a situation where such shirt is possible. But it would require a bug in the camera firmware, which would probably work on just one camera model. For example, a shirt with a pattern that tricks the camera into detecting more faces than it was designed to, causing a buffer overflow and a crash. Reasonable, although extremely unlikely
I rolled my eyes at your optimism that such a material would exist but I took it all back by the end. Despite it being incredibly niche and unrealistic, that is by far the most clever suggestion in the thread!
It depends a lot where your story happens. Laws are quite different.
In my country, this little detail would save you …
… unless you were deliberately wearing this for the purpose of doing such damage, and somebody could prove that.
Looking to get an eicar QR code shirt?
www.youtube.com/watch?v=cIcbAMO6sxo
That’s incredible!
I just recently read a short story with a similar concept, all pictures and videos have been banned since there was found to be images that will kill anyone when they look at them.
When I get back to my anthology book I’ll look up what one it was, it’s in the Big Book of CyberPunk.
Linky to the story
Yeah even if it wasnt ilegal i bet people would find a way to charge you for it or stop you from using it to protect yourself.
Take the simple option of putting on a balaclava and smashing the cameras.
Black Mirror S7E4 - Plaything
<img alt="" src="https://media.piefed.social/posts/Uk/yp/Ukyp9Kzrzc2jmCo.jpg">
That was an episode that ended right where it started getting good. Not that the episode was bad before that, but it left me wanting more of that, not a jump to a new premise in the next episode.
The story of this episofe had enough potential for a 6 episode spinoff series. Or maybe 4. Anyway 1 was way too soon.
Is that Doctor Who?
Same actor, but it’s from the latest season of black mirror
What you describe is simply not possible with a passive material. Funnily your example of something shooting lasers is probably the only thing that could come close to actual damage
The most you can do is one of those adversarial patterns that just confuses the white balance and autofocus. There is nothing you can do to affect someone shooting in manual mode
If you could damage a camera by pointing it at something, the manufacturer would fix the issue before selling it, because no one is buying a camera that does.
Recently, there were news about the LIDAR of Volvo cars destroying camera sensors when they were aimed into the direction of the IR laser beam. Yet, this is not a passive item.
Even that was debated. No one proved it continued when you took another video, just that it broke the video of the lidar itself.
Here is a video demonstrating the lidar killing pixels in a phone camera sensor.
They also tried cameras on other vehicles but those were not affected, only the cellphone aimed directly at the lidar suffered damage.
So I tried watching it and never saw them close the camera app or restart the phone, so again, waiting on some actual proof with some science behind it rather than “dude totally said so”. That only proves that the software controlling the picture adjustments has been sent out of whack(as evidenced by the fact that it would show true colors eventually when pointed at something else). If the pixels were “dead”, they wouldn’t reset. We have a separate phrase for that. It’s “stuck pixel”.
It’s the same effect as being in a truely white lit room and everything looks orange in a camera. It’s the color correction when you shine a crazy bright light at the sensor. It assumes you’re on the sun and adjusts accordingly.
I am thinking if you could wear a mirror that would direct all the sunlight right at the camera. That would have to be an active tracking system, but wouldn’t emit any light itself.
It would have to be parabolic and yeah as you suggest you would either need a big robotic rig to aim it or you would have to be very very obvious with your intent to damage given there’s pretty much only one specific place a given parabolic mirror can be to damage something else.
Parabolic would only work if the camera is in the focal point, so you’d need a different part of the parabola or a different parabola depending on where you are standing relative to the camera. This is in addition to the aiming mechanism.
And even then, I’m not convinced it will damage all camera techs instead of just overexposing the image or frame for some. If they just clamp the affected pixels instead of trying to maintain the relative brightness, they might be able to still see your face clearly.
You could maybe defeat LIDAR with retro reflectors or something. Probably not, but that’s the only case it’d be possible realistically, since it’s actively shooting lasers out that you could reflect back, without actually locating the camera. Anything else, yeah it’d require actively finding the camera and attacking it, since it is only receiving light. I guess if you wore something bright enough to damage any camera looking in your direction that would also work, but I don’t think it’d be considered passive, and you’d also blind everyone else who can see you, probably permanently, and it’d require huge amounts of energy.
Rick and Morty did this once, Rick simply put on a hat with a QR code that made a robot army recognize him as a high level commander.
A few days ago I read a short story,
comp.basilisk.faqby David Langford, which sketched a world in which specific images could irreversibly crash the brain, leading to a full scale worldwide ban on images on the internet and many other places as well. The story postulated hundreds of potential info-hazards with many of them simple enough to be applied via stencil and spray paint. Two of them are branch families of the Mandelbrot set ‘and no we won’t tell you where, do not look’Other examples;
“Keep your eyes peeled or we’ll peel them for you wholesale!”
My dude is trying to create a shirt that just continuously recharges and fires EMPs lol
There are things that damage a camera when you point at them, but they aren’t passive. Things like x-ray sources could do that. Also the sun.
So no, even if you reflected 100% of the light from the flash back into the lens, there’s just not enough of it to do any damage.
If you were somehow able to focus all of it on one single pixel on the sensor, you might be able to damage that pixel, but that would require a large piece of optical equipment basically on top of the camera.
No
Strap a lidar emitter to yourself. Those car sensors have been shown to damage cameras.
If you want privacy from cameras, there are those hats with strong ir leds. Not sure how well they work.
The Camera Shy Hoodie works.
But what if I just want to buy one?
I don’t have time to make my own; I have a job.
There are some companies making them for sale.
www.paragonjackets.com/…/camera-shy-hoodie/
Thanks but that’s 3x more than I’m willing to pay for a piece of clothing. There’s no reason why it can’t be $20 tops.
Oh come now, surely we can think of one reason.
Greed?
Okay fine, two reasons.
Ding ding ding
We would also have accepted capitalism, avarice, or pathological financial hoarding.
Might not cause damage but there is the Camera Shy Hoodie: www.macpierce.com/the-camera-shy-hoodie
Instructions for how to DIY provided, so it doesn’t have to be a hoodie.
<img alt="" src="https://sh.itjust.works/pictrs/image/c503ffb4-7bdb-4848-be62-2a3ad3a21c54.png">
Although that really only works as long as the camera doesn’t have an IR filter in place.
If the camera has an IR filter, how would IR be able to make night viewing possible?
It works in the opposite. With the IR filter you get a nice colorful image in daytime, but not the IR lights at night
It wouldn’t, and I think the other responder, while saying a true fact, may have misunderstood this question’s purpose.
The hoodie will only work with cameras that support IR night vision (most security cameras, no IR filter), but won’t work for most others (phones, dash cams, SLRs (filtered)).
And the dork in me must say, Raspberry Pi offers their Camera Modules in both formats, because noyce.
there was an x-file episode, where the guy emits radiation, which pratically jams cameras, which also gives him xray vision. and also posess the ability regenerate a whole body.
happy cake day
Thanks :)
OK you’re going to need CO2 gas, 2 mirrors, a glass. Container and a high voltage capacitor.
…
Step 3454674) charge the capacitor to 60078V.
Step 5746678) now run!
ITT: People debating whether such a shirt is possible and not answering the actual question.
Im all for this. Im all for all the side discussions that emerge from a post like this
maybe if its wearing a shirt with radioactive elements, usually its lethal amounts.
A similar thing that might be possible is to create a shirt that shows something that exploits a vulnerability in software. Some hardware can be bricked by software (this used to be the case for MacBook batteries).
Creating something that damages nearby electronics? Yeah, that’s probably not going to fly. It really doesn’t matter if it only damages things that actively film/photograph you. Like, it’d be illegal if I walked up and hammered every camera that photographed me too.
It’d also be illegal to point a laser light into a camera to damage the sensor
The FCC has (had? Do they still exist?) rules about this, very straightforward.
Pretty sure those devices that block cellphone and radio signals are illegal in public and people have gotten in legal trouble for that
Yes you cannot start jamming common used frequencies, or any frequencies really