Germany will outlaw the morphing of passport photos, in which pictures of two people are digitally combined, making it possible to assign multiple identities to a single document. Reuters reports: Morphing can trick artificial intelligence used at passport control into recognizing different individuals. The government on Wednesday backed a law requiring people to either have their photo taken at a passport…
Tag: manipulation
If Robots Steal So Many Jobs, Why Aren’t They Saving Us Now?
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: Modern capitalism has never seen anything quite like the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2. In a matter of months, the deadly contagious bug has spread around the world, hobbling any economy in its path. […] This economic catastrophe is blowing up the myth of the worker robot and AI takeover. We’ve been led to believe…
Personal Data of All 6.5 Million Israeli Voters Is Exposed
A software flaw exposed the personal data of every eligible voter in Israel — including full names, addresses and identity card numbers for 6.5 million people — raising concerns about identity theft and electoral manipulation, three weeks before the country’s national election. The New York Times reports: The security lapse was tied to a mobile app used by Prime Minister Benjamin…
Google Releases a Tool To Spot Faked and Doctored Images
Jigsaw, a technology incubator at Google, has released an experimental platform called Assembler to help journalists and front-line fact-checkers quickly verify images. MIT Technology Review reports: Assembler combines several existing techniques in academia for detecting common manipulation techniques, including changing image brightness and pasting copied pixels elsewhere to cover up something while retaining the same visual texture. It also includes a…
YouTube’s Algorithm is Pushing Climate Misinformation Videos, and Their Creators Are Profiting From It
An anonymous reader shares a report: When an ad runs on a YouTube video, the video creator generally keeps 55 percent of the ad revenue, with YouTube getting the other 45 percent. This system’s designed to compensate content creators for their work. But when those videos contain false information — say, about climate change — it’s essentially encouraging the creation of…
Uploading your brain will leave you exposed to software glitches
Think a digital version of your mind will allow you to live forever? It might, but it will also open you up to software manipulation and server problems, says Annalee Newitz Source: https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg24532652-900-uploading-your-brain-will-leave-you-exposed-to-software-glitches/?utm_campaign=RSS%7CNSNS&utm_source=NSNS&utm_medium=RSS&utm_content=home…
Massive New Cambridge Analytica Leak Will Show Global Voter Manipulation on ‘Industrial Scale’
A new leak of more than 100,000 documents from Cambridge Analytica’s work in 68 different countries “will lay bare the global infrastructure of an operation used to manipulate voters on ‘an industrial scale,'” writes the Guardian. Long-time Slashdot reader Freshly Exhumed shares their report: The release of documents began on New Year’s Day on an anonymous Twitter account, @HindsightFiles, with links…
Twitter Removes Nearly 6,000 Saudi-Backed Accounts For Platform Manipulation
Twitter announced Friday that has removed nearly 6,000 accounts for being part of a state-backed information operation originating in Saudi Arabia. Reuters reports: In a public blog post, Twitter said it had removed about 5,929 accounts, which targeted discussions about Saudi Arabia, for violating its “platform manipulation policies.” It had also published data about these accounts, it added. Twitter said these…
Facebook Has a Neural Network That Can Do Advanced Math
Guillaume Lample and Francois Charton, at Facebook AI Research in Paris, say they have developed an algorithm that can calculate integrals and solve differential equations. MIT Technology Review reports: Neural networks have become hugely accomplished at pattern-recognition tasks such as face and object recognition, certain kinds of natural language processing, and even playing games like chess, Go, and Space Invaders. But…
Reddit Bans 61 Accounts, Citing ‘Coordinated’ Russian Campaign To Interfere In UK Vote
“The prospect of Russian interference in Britain’s election flared anew Saturday after the social media platform Reddit concluded that people from Russia leaked confidential British government documents on Brexit trade talks just days before the general U.K. vote,” reports the Associated Press: Reddit said in a statement that it has banned 61 accounts suspected of violating policies against vote manipulation. It…