this post was submitted on 14 Aug 2025
194 points (95.8% liked)

No Stupid Questions

43448 readers
628 users here now

No such thing. Ask away!

!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.

The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:

Rules (interactive)


Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.

All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.



Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.

Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.



Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.

Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.



Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.

That's it.



Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.

Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.



Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.

Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.

On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.

If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.



Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.

If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.

Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.



Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.



Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.

Let everyone have their own content.



Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here. This includes using AI responses and summaries.



Credits

Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!

The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

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?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] 9point6@lemmy.world 83 points 1 month ago (4 children)

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.

[–] Successful_Try543@feddit.org 28 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] fishos@lemmy.world 13 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Even that was debated. No one proved it continued when you took another video, just that it broke the video of the lidar itself.

[–] Skysurfer@slrpnk.net 5 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] fishos@lemmy.world 9 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

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.

[–] Periodicchair@lemmy.world 8 points 1 month ago (1 children)

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.

[–] 9point6@lemmy.world 11 points 1 month ago (1 children)

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.

[–] Buddahriffic@lemmy.world 1 points 1 month ago

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.

[–] tankfox@midwest.social 4 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

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.faq by 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;

  • Snow Crash — Neal Stephenson
  • Blit — David Langford
  • The Atrocity Archives — Charles Stross
  • Doctor Who — “Blink” / “The Time of the Doctor”
  • SCP Foundation — SCP-096
  • SCP-7387 (“The Mathematician’s Grin”)

"Keep your eyes peeled or we'll peel them for you wholesale!"

[–] Cethin@lemmy.zip 1 points 1 month ago

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.