After @navalny was taken away by police, his wife, lawyer and aid remained waiting behind passport control...this means there's a chance he might be released tonight... possibly with a writ of simmons. Let's hope for that.
A press release by the prison authority announced just now that he has been detained until a court decision on their request to convert his suspended sentence to a real one.
Here is a full video of his detention.
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Got a few questions about how we did the (partial) face comparison in our latest investigation. This is a valid question given that the standing man in the Omsk hospital wears a mask. As this issue is bound to pop-up in the foreseeable future in our Covid times, I will explain.
Obviously, the publicly available professional-grade face-verification services like Azure are not geared up to compare partial faces to other faces. In fact, they don't recognize a mask-covered face as a face at all.
So we need to cheat the system and use a proxy for the missing half-face of our unknown suspect. The idea is to force the software to give us a face match based on the upper face section (eyes, skull shape, ears = signal), while ignoring the lower part (nose, mouth, chin = noise)
In a video address to court recorded October 22, indicted suspect Pulatov claims he said things on the phone shortly after the MH17 shoot-down that were "meant to mislead the enemy". Funny because there's no reason to mislead the enemy that you shot down a commercial airliner.
"Whenever we said nonsense like "we have a BUK" that was meant to mislead the enemy that we have more superiority than we did" << ouch. Borat-level cringeworthy.
Hard to watch his lawyer's face as she has to pretend she buys it.
The account that appeared to take credit for the Vienna terror attack (before being suspended) has a photo that overlapped with the avatar photo on this (alleged) ISIS account.
This appears to be the profile image of the account holder who (appeared to) take credit for the Vienna attacks - and threatened more. The account tweeted in English and Russian before being suspended.
A friend was telling me an anecdote of how dizygotic (nonidentical) twins of a friend were able to mutually unlock their phones using face recognition. I remembered that actually that's a bug that helped us identify a GRU spy a couple of years ago.
We only had a photograph of him under his fake name. The Russian government had deleted all records of him under his real name once they knew we were onto unit 21955. But they didn't delete his twin sister's passport file. Borderline ethically we used her photo to compare to his.
But totally ethically we never published that photo, not used the finding as basis of our final identification. It was very useful insight though.