ISC News Fakes Fever Screening, Falsely Quotes FDA

Lest Reed or others try to pin this just on their ISC News staff, this reflects Reed and SIA's overall approach to 'education'. Recall The Embarrassing Story of ISC West's Best New IP Camera and the ongoing drama with ISC West 2020, e.g. ISC West 2020 Moves To The Basement.

Pretty sure that is not even an actual thermal image, just a stock image recolorized to look like thermal. It has too much detail, and things like the sign are wrong. The sign would either be a blown-out hotspot if it were backlit (common), or just a flat square if were a poster-style image. But either way, you would not expect to see things like a sign with a high degree of color variation in that way. You would also expect to see some latent heat on at least some of the seats, and on the floor.

Is "not" such a hard word to miss? If it's written, it's just three letters, I guess. But this was a webinar, so... how exactly do you mis-hear a speaker to say the complete opposite?

I chose the image as being worse because ISC refused to change it or add a note that says "NOT an actual thermal image" or "for illustration purposes only" Both are examples of poor reporting. It is ISC NEWS not ISC marketing hype.

Dropping the NOT is not just a regrettable error it is false reporting (as opposed to "fake news" .which has lost it's actual meaning). If IPVM weren't fact checking these things they would persist as accepted truth.

Stock photos are good for many things, but technical articles is not one of them. It doesn't matter what field. Stock photos are there to look nice, not display technical accuracy. For examples see:

• The Real Scandal of AI: Awful Stock Photos
• Is this hooded cyber-bandit the web's most prolific hacker? (and another discussion about hoodies)
• Everyone is Sharing Hilariously Bad Stock Photos of Their Jobs

My official CompTIA Security+ text book had a picture of a retina scan, obviously faked. That was really annoying.

If Reed were a general news outlet talking to the general public, I would give them a little grace. But that's not what they are.

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There's another example I wanted to link to, with a name like "Don't learn programming from stock photos", but I just can't find it right now. It was either a blog post or a presentation at a conference. If somebody else remembers it, can you please post the link so I can be happy?

Not a good look for ISC nor the industry.

Reverse image search is great, isn't it? LOL.

it's not just the single word 'not' being inserted that changes the spin/slant... it's also the supporting points that follow that sentence.

“It’s probably clear it should be one of the primary tools,” said Zane Arp, director of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s division of biomedical physics. “Should it be used as the primary device for screening for Covid? Can it be used with other things to figure out who has this disease?”

that's how they wrote it - by following with two questions that they don't try and answer?

when the two (unanswered) questions are listed following the sentence with 'not' inserted incorrectly, these questions are supporting the 'not' sentence.

This is what that paragraph looks like now:

“It is fairly clear that this probably should not be a primary tool in the fight against Covid,” said Zane Arp, director of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s division of biomedical physics. “That’s not to say that it can’t be part of a toolbox in detecting people with Covid.”

what happened to the two questions now that 'not' is missing?

also - the slant becomes much clearer when you read what he actually said (from above in this OP):

"And on the effectiveness front the primary tool, it is fairly clear that this probably should not be a primary tool in the fight against COVID. That's not to say that it can't be utilized as a part of a toolbox in detecting people with COVID or triaging people in a hospital that are known to have the disease, but if it's utilized for as a primary triage method or evaluation that that it would be fairly poor."

Using an image from Reed's own website, I also made a fake fever camera image. This only takes about 3 - 5 minutes for a proficient Photoshop user.

My fake fever camera is breaking new ground with analytics developed by the Chinese government to determine if the target is a native metric or imperial user, then displays the temperature in their native format.

if you're going to make something up, at least have it make sense...

it's "probably clear" is like saying it's "probably certain".