Every Transaction an Ad, Every Machine a Spy

February 24, 2024 7:27 AM

When a student at University of Waterloo waited for a vending machine to reboot after a crash, they noted a curious error message for an app titled Invenda.Vending.FacialRecognitionApp.exe. They posted a Reddit message "Hey, so why do the stupid M&M machines have facial recognition?" which eventually led the school to disable the vending machine software until the machines could be removed.

It turns out that in this case, the software was "relatively harmless," and used facial recognition to create a database of the estimated gender and age of the users.

That's not true of similar machines in operation elsewhere. For example, ZKTeco offers a model that "supports photo registration and matching with as large storage capacity as 50,000 photos" for better "targeting of advertisements."

As author Philip K. Dick tried to warn us in Minority Report, surveillance is everywhere. Not just from shadowy government agencies and your neighbor's doorbell, but social medial companies and even lowly vending machines.

posted by CheeseDigestsAll (63 comments total)

If you can think of a less intrusive way to estimate the age of the people using a vending machine in the middle of a university campus, I'd like to hear it.
posted by The Card Cheat at 8:10 AM on February 24 [72 favorites]

Let me guess.
Average age somewhere between 18 - 22 years old.
posted by yyz at 8:13 AM on February 24 [28 favorites]

I thought they'd already made M&Ms PG anyway, so no need for age verification.
posted by ambrosen at 8:17 AM on February 24 [9 favorites]

Basic tradecraft failure.

You don't call it FacialRecognitionApp.exe. You call it DBBackupMgr.exe
posted by seanmpuckett at 8:19 AM on February 24 [91 favorites]

I work at a large university in the U.S. I was originally hired as a research analyst and I've written many reports using student data. Although the national picture has changed significantly in the past several decades - depending on your definition of "traditional," the majority of undergraduate students in the U.S. are now "nontraditional" students - the undergraduate portion of my university is still very much a traditional, residential experience. In many cases when I tried to include student age in my analyses, I discarded those data because there was too little variance for them to be meaningful. In other words, nearly every undergraduate student at my university is very, very close to the same age (within their class bands, of course - first-year students, sophomores, etc.). For that specific variable, it's a very homogenous population.
posted by ElKevbo at 8:22 AM on February 24 [8 favorites]

Huh. Gonna have to start carrying electrical tape with me to cover up the cameras on vending machines now, I guess.
posted by Reverend John at 8:23 AM on February 24 [35 favorites]

I am looking at the company’s site and these are of course the vending machine equivalent of those awful cooler-door screens: a big opaque screen instead of a window that lets you see the actual products in the machine. With a flashy touchscreen interface. And “the best of AI, IoT, and cloud technology to provide you with sales opportunities and ease of management never before seen in the automated retail industry.” It is “the result of listening to customer feedback and exploring solutions to meet the highest operational and environmental standards” but I guess they threw out all the feedback saying “what’s wrong with a machine that just has a big window and a keypad that isn’t constantly running ads”.
posted by egypturnash at 8:24 AM on February 24 [28 favorites]

the other day i was filling up my work vehicle with gasoline, in the rural area between 2 towns 60 miles apart, and the tv on the gaspump played a video ad for TikTok. what part of any of that makes sense?
posted by glonous keming at 8:32 AM on February 24 [18 favorites]

Is there a reason the vending machines need to know how old you are?
posted by corb at 8:43 AM on February 24 [22 favorites]

"The machines are owned by Mars" -- worse and worse!
posted by pracowity at 8:45 AM on February 24 [4 favorites]

It's Phil Dick's world. We just live in it.
posted by doctornemo at 8:47 AM on February 24 [13 favorites]

The chances of anything coming from Mars are a million to one.
posted by flabdablet at 9:04 AM on February 24 [12 favorites]

Boy I already want to take a ball peen hammer to those screens on the gas pumps that insist on playing ads while you stand there.

This makes me want to go Office Space on every vending machine I see.
posted by heyitsgogi at 9:05 AM on February 24 [25 favorites]

Heyitsgogi, if it's a BP station, you can press the second or third button on the right to mute it.
posted by TheKaijuCommuter at 9:07 AM on February 24 [15 favorites]

3M makes a Very High Bond Strength tape that's the very devil to remove once it's been stuck on. Just sayin.
posted by flabdablet at 9:08 AM on February 24 [21 favorites]

The chances of anything coming from Mars are a million to one.

But still, apparently, they come.
posted by Pope Guilty at 9:12 AM on February 24 [5 favorites]

Do not run. We are scanning your face.
posted by snuffleupagus at 9:20 AM on February 24 [6 favorites]

“what’s wrong with a machine that just has a big window and a keypad that isn’t constantly running ads”.
posted by egypturnash at 8:24 AM on February 24

The customers in this case are probably the machine owners, not the people buying things. Many of them probably want the ads because it potentially offers a new revenue stream for them. After a certain point it's probably difficult to add revenue since every place that would support a vending machine probably already has one.
posted by Dr. Twist at 9:22 AM on February 24 [7 favorites]

Is there a reason the vending machines need to know how old you are?

Because their right to know supersedes your right to exist, off course.
posted by thecincinnatikid at 9:44 AM on February 24 [7 favorites]

>"what’s most important to understand is that the machines do not take or store any photos or images, and an individual person cannot be identified using the technology in the machines. The technology acts as a motion sensor that detects faces, so the machine knows when to activate the purchasing interface—never taking or storing images of customers."

What's most important is the ability to recognize utter horseshit when you encounter it in the wild. If the technology was going to "act as a motion sensor" they'd just have motion sensors. When somebody says "of course there are rumors started by some alarmists that we're using our facial recognition hardware and our facial recognition software to do facial recognition" you're dealing with a professional liar who has been sent out to placate the crowd.
posted by Sing Or Swim at 9:56 AM on February 24 [63 favorites]

It's Phil Dick's world. We just live in it.

Or so it appears.
posted by billjings at 10:10 AM on February 24 [23 favorites]

In other Canadian surveillance news... Toronto Police were actively surveilling the crowd from the end of the Pride Parade route last year.

And then, for good measure, parked their little surveillance van on Church Street for the rest of the day to surveil the revelers walking by.

Probably connected to the Clearview AI facial recognition program?
posted by pjenks at 10:42 AM on February 24 [8 favorites]

previously
posted by j_curiouser at 11:08 AM on February 24

If it's a BP station, you can press the second or third button on the right to mute it

Only in some jurisdictions, apparently. I've never successfully performed this 'hack' on my own. Nor would smashing the screen stop the audio.
posted by Rash at 11:17 AM on February 24 [2 favorites]

What's most important is the ability to recognize utter horseshit when you encounter it in the wild. If the technology was going to "act as a motion sensor" they'd just have motion sensors.

Why would you do that when it costs the same or less to use a camera and it works better for the primary purpose of detecting when someone intends to interact with the machine?

Assume that the main goal of presence detection on a vending machine is to know when to switch from attract mode to purchasing mode, which you want to do because showing gaudy animations bumps your sales up by a few percent by grabbing attention. If you use PIR or radar, you're going to constantly be triggering on random passersby who aren't giving the machine a second look and thus find yourself out of attract mode at the very moments it is most useful. If, instead, you use face detection tuned such that it only triggers when someone stops in front of the machine and looks at it, you'll drastically increase the effectiveness of the scheme.

I don't endorse making public spaces look like a goddamned casino floor, but the logic is undeniably on the side of using cameras for those who profit from making public spaces ever more visually overwhelming. That the cost is essentially the same in this era of stupid cheap camera modules and cheap SoCs that still have an image processing IP core that can do face detection for free only tips the balance further towards using a camera if there's even a small chance it could make an extra sale or two a day.
posted by wierdo at 11:42 AM on February 24 [7 favorites]

Why would you do that when it costs the same or less to use a camera and it works better for the primary purpose of detecting when someone intends to interact with the machine?

Small quibble: motion-detection (eg PIR) is still cheaper. But when a camera plus a small platform for doing the basic face recognition can be had for under US$20... not a whole lotta difference, on the hardware side. Doing something more complex with that camera than just signalling "nearby human!" - like analyzing, saving, and matching faces - is an order or two of magnitude more complex than PIR... but still pretty doable.

Cameras in public spaces for security and loss-prevention is pretty much a given these days (-sigh-), but letting any old business stick them in vending machines or similar, and having unrestricted use of that data, should not be permitted, as far as I'm concerned.
posted by Artful Codger at 12:10 PM on February 24 [5 favorites]

In this brave new world, even if you are paying for it you are still the product.
posted by TedW at 12:19 PM on February 24 [24 favorites]

Speaking of students and facial scanning, one of my Chinese students told me a good story.
When they were in 9th grade, they all had their faces scanned for ID purposes. They got used to facial scanners for going in and out of buildings, etc.
But in 12th grade, the scanners started malfunctioning. Why?
Turns out the sheer amount of biological aging the students experienced in those years changed their faces enough for records to no longer work.
The school ended up re-scanning everyone.
posted by doctornemo at 12:53 PM on February 24 [14 favorites]

It's amazing how the Corporate Rim dystopia of the Murderbot series is so realistic. Everyone who can possibly manage to suck up data for data-mining does.

3M makes a Very High Bond Strength tape that's the very devil to remove once it's been stuck on. Just sayin.

I'm a big fan of sticking it to the decentralized late stage capitalism man but caution should be exercised when vandalizinginteracting with a facial recognition camera.

In other Canadian surveillance news... Toronto Police were actively surveilling the crowd from the end of the Pride Parade route last year.

They totally should be allowed to march in uniform. /hamburger
posted by Mitheral at 1:06 PM on February 24 [4 favorites]

Small quibble: motion-detection (eg PIR) is still cheaper.

A camera module costs about what a PIR sensor does now. There is a small difference, but it's not big enough to matter when the product costs as much as a vending machine. Time was that the processing would be more expensive for the camera, but these days it's a matter of integrating a library to use the image processing core that comes in any SoC you're going to use for a user facing application where you don't want people to give up in anger/frustration at the poor responsiveness of the machine.

If I could be sure that they were only being used for face detection and not for anything else like recognition or profiling, I would not give the least bit of a shit about vending machines having cameras in them. Thing is, a generic SoC's video core is perfectly capable of doing most of the work of the tasks I don't want the machines doing, so I'm inherently skeptical that they're not taking the money, especially now that they're nearly certain to have a network connection unlike in days gone by.
posted by wierdo at 1:46 PM on February 24 [5 favorites]

> Is there a reason the vending machines need to know how old you are?

in all sincerity, if the vending machine is displaying ads, it's useful to be able to tell advertisers the demographic that will see the ads and how many people will see them. that's why you'd do it. but of course it sucks to have yet more ads being shown to me in more places, the vending machine itself already serving as an ad for whatever it sells.
posted by dis_integration at 2:17 PM on February 24 [2 favorites]

I would disable the camera on the parcel pickup lockers in the lobby, which shows ads on the idle screen, but the camera is used to scan bar codes and take photos of the parcels on delivery. Also I’d have to disable the security camera that points at the lockers as it is also owned by the locker provider. Don’t know how to deal with that situation unfortunately when the camera is essential functionality and also used nefariously.
posted by seanmpuckett at 2:55 PM on February 24 [5 favorites]

every place that would support a vending machine probably already has one

/laughs in bad visitor-level Japanese
posted by ctmf at 3:32 PM on February 24 [4 favorites]

it's useful to be able to tell advertisers the demographic that will see the ads
College students make up a pretty specific demographic already, don't they? You already know the school where the machine is located, too.
posted by soelo at 3:44 PM on February 24 [3 favorites]

Not related to facial recognition, but I did see a brilliant use of a vending machine here recently. Mom and pop coffee roaster, fantastic coffee but only open for certain hours in the day. Put a vending machine outside the shop, and when they're closed, they put bags of coffee beans in it so you can still buy them.
posted by ctmf at 4:12 PM on February 24 [8 favorites]

But does the demographic distribution that specifically buys from those vending machines match the overall demographic distribution? Speaking as a private individual I'm actually idly curious about it now that I'm thinking about it. What they did was wrong, but the question itself isn't as foolish as it might appear on the surface.

And, its one of those things we were surprised by but should have expected. It's a shitty, awful, intrusive, and in retrospect not at all surprising action from corporate America, because there is data to mine there, so they're by God going to mine it!

And we're going to see more and more. Moore's Law is likely to hold for another decade, if not longer, and we're already at the point where cameras and CPU's are cheap enough that a vending machine company didn't think putting them into a vending machine was a waste of money. I'd be surprised if the actual electronics that did the work cost more than $50.

So... In the interests of not being taken by surprise by things that we should expect what else should we start expecting to see equipped with cameras and analysis software for corporate America? Remember, advertisers want to know more details about you than the FBI does.

I'ma make some predictions:

1) They didn't just add the info to a database tracking age, sex, and race. They kept it on individual people. They may not (yet) be able to buy access to government records and match your face to your name, but they can assign you an ID number in their system and track you individually that way. They might not know it's sotonohito who buys a bag of regular Doritos roughly every 10 days, but they'll know customer ID 123456 did.

2) ATM's have been taking video since they were first introduced, they are flat out guaranteed to be running facial recognition software and your bank probably got your picture when you signed up for your account, even if you didn't know they did. Just the security camera footage could let them assign picture A to customer B.

3) They're going to put them on automatic doors, and maybe even manual doors, at chain restaurants, grocery stores, basically all the retailers. Customer ID 123456 entered McDonalds #123 at 1458 on Monday, January 3rd.

4) Self checkouts are either already using facial recognition, or they will be shortly, and that will let them tie the face of customer ID 123456 to your credit card which means everything about you.

5) Any place where you pay with credit card can be expected to be running facial ID software.

6) We're going to see some assholes, on a do it themselves basis, put up cameras at the door of public toilets and start shrieking about how many people go to the "wrong" bathroom.
posted by sotonohito at 4:24 PM on February 24 [11 favorites]

Unless the vending machine is in the freshman dorm, there can be a huge diversity of people on campus, grad students, professors (and underpaid adjuncts), other research staff, admin staff, facilities staff, food service staff. religious crackpots handing out literature, corporate folks going to career fairs, families trying to convince their 17 (or 13 year old) they need to go to college., folks attending an art or sporting event.

That being said, I don’t think the vending machines need to know everyone’s face. But 18 years ago I started seeing card enable vending machines and they could have easily know that I got a drink before class every Tuesday and Thursday with the same card
posted by CostcoCultist at 4:30 PM on February 24 [3 favorites]

Meanwhile logging on to the Kaiser Permanente web site or app I am blithely informed that by using either I am consenting to sharing my data with unnamed third parties. This is more insulting as the website for me is a crap user experience and I just end up calling to make appointments and asking for US mail for notifications. It is all so stupid. Maybe it is really hard to craft a good portal or whatever but I keep encountering repeated cases of extravagant mediocrity which make me think it is more about giving a damn than anything else.
posted by Pembquist at 4:42 PM on February 24 [11 favorites]

Amazingly, the company that did this has an office in Chicago. Illinois has a biometric privacy law that would make it illegal for this company store any images they collect. All the bigs have been sued over this, some multiple times, and I've made about two grand in settlements from it. I don't use vending machines so I won't be making off this but I am sure now that the news about this is all out there I am sure some legal firm will find customer and launch a class action.
posted by srboisvert at 4:46 PM on February 24 [13 favorites]

Vending machines playing ads sound even more annoying than fast food restaurant menus that play ads. In both cases, the only advertising I want to see is ' a list of what this literal place I am in able to sell me at this exact moment in time and how much will it cost'. Drives me fucking nuts when I can't read the goddamned menu because it is constantly flipping from one thing to another and taking little breaks to advertise one particular burger.

I don't want an ad from a vending machine either, I want to see what is in stock in the vending machine, and ideally also I want to see which channels of the vending machine have some random item stuck in them from a previous transaction so I can try for a two-fer. Nothing else. That is all. Only those.
posted by jacquilynne at 7:31 PM on February 24 [6 favorites]

I took my cat to the vet today and she was using some "AI" bullshit to record our conversation which then spat out a summary of the visit.

I could immediately see a real benefit of the vet not having to take extensive notes but the summary was a weird hodge podge of info specific to my cat and some bullshit that didn't apply to her in particular.

I was a bit too flabbergasted to say no in the moment but I will follow up by email. Love some random AI company with who knows what bullshit privacy policy recording then re-selling me.. and my cat??!!
posted by latkes at 9:00 PM on February 24 [7 favorites]

I thought Moores law had already started to plateau, at least in terms of clock cycles. Thus the shift to multiple and special purpose cores and languages designed for concurrency. The M1 chip runs at around 3ghz, the M3 around 4. Despite that AMD was making 5ghz plus chips ten years ago.
posted by snuffleupagus at 9:37 PM on February 24

Though, I suppose that cramming more cores into the same space is still increasing density, so maybe the focus on clock speeds when discussing it was always something of a simplification.
posted by snuffleupagus at 9:46 PM on February 24

latkes I work in IT and our helpdesk ticketing system added in an AI summary of action on a ticket and it's often actually fairly handy. And sometimes just bonkers and doesn't have much to do with what actually happened in the ticket at all.

We're in early days of the GPT stuff, it may improve significantly. Or it may not. There are inherent limits to just how much you can get out of the GPT model, there's some fairly good arguments that it might get better but it will never actually stop hallucinating or sometimes just tossing out weird shit.
posted by sotonohito at 10:55 PM on February 24 [4 favorites]

We're in early days of the GPT stuff

and to me it feels a lot like being in the early days of multi-touch screens. Just as it became de rigeur to ruin every existing class of device by slapping a touch screen on a version that works less well, I'm expecting to see much the same thing happen with LLM-driven data-mining UI.

It's not so much that large language models are drunk at the wheel as that the wheel is now a touch screen and we're all being actively encouraged to forget what driving even is.

I say fuck this Thelma and Louise bullshit. If I have to buy an Anonymous mask as well as many many rolls of VHB tape, so be it.
posted by flabdablet at 11:48 PM on February 24 [4 favorites]

I propose we do a "go fund me" sort of thing and put in a vending machine somewhere that anytime someone looks at it tells them to fuck off, stop looking at me, this in none of your business". And we call it an art project. The "vending" machine that's abusive to people who even look in it's direction. Think of the LOLs of a persnickety vending machine. Give it all the way up to GPT and speech recognition. Make an odd sorta antisocial vending machine that you have to sweet talk to just right to make it work. I think it's a worthy project... can you make friends with the vending machine??

Somebody should do this.
posted by zengargoyle at 12:22 AM on February 25 [6 favorites]

Vending machine probably also sells sugar at us as well.
posted by my-username at 2:02 AM on February 25

an odd sorta antisocial vending machine that you have to sweet talk to just right to make it work

and when you do, the only product it's actually stocked with is Twinkies at least three years past their Best Before date.
posted by flabdablet at 2:14 AM on February 25 [1 favorite]

Ctrl+F "GDPR".
posted by gakiko at 3:29 AM on February 25 [2 favorites]

Boy I already want to take a ball peen hammer to those screens on the gas pumps that insist on playing ads while you stand there.

IME if you hit the "help" button it mutes it for a couple of minutes. This has worked in every gas station I've done it in. Not once has anyone ever offered to help as a result of pressing that button.
posted by newpotato at 3:58 AM on February 25 [1 favorite]

Ball peen hammer is not pocketable nor easy to use covertly. You want a spring loaded centre punch.
posted by seanmpuckett at 4:07 AM on February 25 [10 favorites]

Make an odd sorta antisocial vending machine that you have to sweet talk to just right to make it work. I think it's a worthy project... can you make friends with the vending machine??

Phillip K Dick has you covered:

The door refused to open. It said, “Five cents, please.”
He searched his pockets. No more coins; nothing. “I’ll pay you tomorrow,” he told the door. Again he tried the knob. Again it remained locked tight. “What I pay you,” he informed it, “is in the nature of a gratuity; I don’t have to pay you.”
“I think otherwise,” the door said. “Look in the purchase contract you signed when you bought this conapt.”
In his desk drawer he found the contract; since signing it he had found it necessary to refer to the document many times. Sure enough; payment to his door for opening and shutting constituted a mandatory fee. Not a tip.
“You discover I’m right,” the door said. It sounded smug.
From the drawer beside the sink Joe Chip got a stainless steel knife; with it he began systematically to unscrew the bolt assembly of his apt’s money-gulping door.
“I’ll sue you,” the door said as the first screw fell out.
Joe Chip said, “I’ve never been sued by a door. But I guess I can live through it.
posted by Insert Clever Name Here at 4:30 AM on February 25 [15 favorites]

Sure, college-aged students will be using the vending machines at colleges... but my assumption is that these cameras are now (or going to be) in all vending machines. And a company isn't going to pay to remove the camera/tracking because in this particular instance they already know the demographic profile.
posted by armacy at 5:56 AM on February 25 [5 favorites]

Have to admit to a small amount of vicarious pride in seeing a story of this nature broken by a publication of which I was briefly editor.
I mean, UW is one of the best CS/Software Engineering schools in the world, not surprised they could figure this stuff out.
posted by TomFrog at 7:28 AM on February 25 [7 favorites]

> an odd sorta antisocial vending machine that you have to sweet talk to just right to make it work

> and when you do, the only product it's actually stocked with is Twinkies at least three years past their Best Before date.

Instead of Twinkies, I'd suggest years-expired sandwiches now crunchy, just like Mom used to make. /Bill McNeal
posted by Fiberoptic Zebroid and The Hypnagogic Jerks at 8:17 AM on February 25 [2 favorites]

acts as a motion sensor that detects faces, so the machine knows when to activate the purchasing interface
balaclava fanciers, your money's no good here
posted by Iris Gambol at 10:13 AM on February 25 [1 favorite]

> an odd sorta antisocial vending machine that you have to sweet talk to just right to make it work

To drink, it would serve a liquid which is almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea.

Forget P.K. Dick. I think we're in Douglas Adams' domain.
posted by cheshyre at 10:51 AM on February 25 [2 favorites]

Meanwhile logging on to the Kaiser Permanente web site or app I am blithely informed that by using either I am consenting to sharing my data with unnamed third parties.

Hmmm... I don't get that when I sign in, but if you're in a different state than me things might not be the same.

FWIW Kaiser's privacy statement is here. They're not sharing health information with third parties, though stuff can be tracked and assumptions made, no doubt. However calling doesn't necessarily remove oneself from third party information sharing.
posted by oneirodynia at 11:31 AM on February 25 [1 favorite]

I've long held that those restaurant bars at airports with an iPad at every seat (and the seats bolted in place on the floor) that only offer credit card payments were surreptitiously taking photos and using them to guess age/gender/ethnicity and other data about the person identified by the credit card.

After a decade of living and working in silicon valley, I hold this maxim: If it's feasible for a tech company to do it, they are definitely doing it.
posted by AlSweigart at 8:03 AM on February 26 [5 favorites]

I would disable the camera on the parcel pickup lockers in the lobby, which shows ads on the idle screen, but the camera is used to scan bar codes and take photos of the parcels on delivery..... Don’t know how to deal with that situation unfortunately when the camera is essential functionality and also used nefariously.
posted by seanmpuckett at 4:55 PM on February 24

I haven't seen one of these vending machines in the wild yet, or the setup you describe, but I have been thinking that instead of plain electrical tape I might print up and carry some cardboard squares with the words "lift to consent to video" or something similar on them, with the tape along the top edge so it can be attached and lifted as a flap.
posted by Reverend John at 10:24 AM on February 26 [2 favorites]

How many of these vending machines are in hospitals? Seems like a privacy/HIPAA lawsuit just waiting to happen.
posted by blueberry at 5:42 PM on February 26 [2 favorites]

On parts of youtube - the tales of retail loss prevention section - one can find videos from 2016 how the retail stores had the infrastructure to track people from store to store and provide alerts when the suspect would go into the store. Best way to find the videos is find one or 2 then create a new account, watch and like those couple you found and let the panopticon serve you up more.

The systems has only gotten better. Systems come from China. Systems being talked about WRT the Uyghur people. An example would be the ratio of 1 camera per every 3 people.

What can you do personally? Pay cash, wear a hat, mask and glasses. Bonus if you are willing to wear things that look like faces for the software to lock in on. A real culture jamming pro would use local mugshots of shoplifters for the faces but that is a hard look to pull off without the cops showing up asking you what the hell you are doing. COVID is a gift as it lets you wear a mask in public without getting stopped by the cops.
posted by rough ashlar at 6:09 AM on February 27 [3 favorites]

Oh and if the world of touchscreens and GPT is getting you down there is the claim the Sun caused outages at Apple, Twitter, and even Pokemon. And the cell phone networks, of course.

The magnetic field is weakening - pink aura borealis being seen farther south when weaker flares hit.

Look at the cars that have touchscreens and ponder how they can survive such a future. Same with the cameras, GPT, and lots of other things.

Having GPT/cameras/touchscreens may be bad but them getting wiped out by a solar storm is gonna be worse as they won't be the only things wiped out.
posted by rough ashlar at 7:06 AM on February 27