"Hey, do you know where I could find more information on hammers?"

"Yeah, look for all the idiots with broken windows because they decided they didn't like using keys! Hahuhaha"

It's quite fun to assume everyone but you is an idiot, but I am in fact aware of that xkcd, and more importantly the myriad benefits of blending in. That doesn't mean that having another potential tool wouldn't be useful in specific situations.

I enjoy keeping up with red team style covert infiltration tools and hearing about what actually works in the field for the professionals that do this shit for a living. This video is mostly a guy having fun showing off how much of his own company's stuff he can fit in a suit, but it gets the point across and touches a little on sureptitious use when he talks about his RFID cloner.

My specific interest in a group investigating this sort of thing was in the actual testing and investigation. To see if anyone had managed to actually test the "overwhelm them with IR" urban legend against any modern equipment, because the last serious test of it that I'm aware of was a decade ago, and the resulting "hat" was obvious as fuck like the hypothetical in the XKCD.

I've done a quick search and found a slightly more recent experiment done in 2018 attempting to fool facial recognition instead of just blinding it. Vice overview here, arxiv paper here.

The hat is still pretty damn conspicuous if you ask me:

But it's also 8 years old.

I'm curious on if modern camera equipment like FLOCK has just spent the extra few cents per 100 units for an IR filter, and if the massive strides forward with LED tech might allow for something less horrendously obvious.

I suspect that the most easy and covert method (if you don't care about adding property damage and the like to your rap sheet if caught) is still just to use a stupid high powered laser to burn out the camera sensor from outside the angle it covers.