Tag: mask

The Rich Are Preparing for Coronavirus Differently

The new coronavirus knows no national borders or social boundaries. That doesn’t mean that social boundaries don’t exist. An anonymous reader shares a report: “En route to Paris,” Gwyneth Paltrow wrote on Instagram last week, beneath a shot of herself on an airplane heading to Paris Fashion Week and wearing a black face mask. “I’ve already been in this movie,” she…

Frustration Grows In China As Face Masks Compromise Facial Recognition

schwit1 shares a report from Quartz: Face masks are mandatory in at least two provinces in China, including the city of Wuhan. In an effort to contain the coronavirus strain that has caused nearly 500 deaths, the government is insisting that millions of residents wear protective face covering when they go out in public. As millions don masks across the country,…

What Happens When ‘Ring Neighbors’ Are Always Watching?

The New York Times reports on “Ring Neighbors,” a local social networking service launched by Amazon in 2018 where users “share videos of delivery people carelessly throwing packages, or failing to wait for an answer at the door; others share footage of mail people navigating treacherous ice, or merely waving at the camera.” On a U.S. Postal Service forum, a mail…

Companies Are Using AI-Generated People To Appear More Diverse

AI startups are selling images of computer-generated faces that look like the real thing, offering companies a chance to create imaginary models and “increase diversity” in their ads without needing human beings. From a report: One firm is offering to sell diverse photos for marketing brochures and has already signed up clients, including a dating app that intends to use the…

Baidu Has a New Trick For Teaching AI the Meaning of Language

Baidu, China’s closest equivalent to Google, has achieved the highest score at the General Language Understanding Evaluation (GLUE) AI competition. What’s notable about Baidu’s achievement is that it illustrates how AI research benefits from a diversity of contributors. MIT Technology Review explains: GLUE is a widely accepted benchmark for how well an AI system understands human language. It consists of nine…

Researchers Fooled Chinese Facial Recognition Terminals With Just a Mask

Public facial recognition terminals in China can be fooled with just a mask, as some recent experiments have shown. The Verge reports: An AI company, Kneron, shared a video with The Verge of tests it ran at facial recognition terminals in China where it appeared to fool the systems. Kneron asked us not to publish the video, so we will describe…

Facebook AI Can Now Alter Videos to ‘Hide’ People From Facial Recognition

Facebook AI Research created a system for the de-identification of individuals in videos, reports VentureBeat: It maps a slightly distorted version on a person’s face in order to make it difficult for facial recognition technology to identify a person… Like faceswap deepfake software, the AI uses an encoder-decoder architecture to generate both a mask and an image. During training, the person’s…

Russian Cyberattackers Stole Iranian Tools, Then Attacked 35 Countries

An anonymous reader quotes Bloomberg News: A Russia-linked group is believed to have utilized Iranian tools to conduct cyber attacks against dozens of countries, in an apparent effort to mask their identities, according to joint advisories by the U.S. and the U.K. The group, known as Turla, used tools from suspected Iran-based hacking groups and deployed them against old and new…

Blizzard Cancels Overwatch Event as It Tries To Contain Backlash

Activision Blizzard, reeling from harsh reactions after it punished a tournament player for backing Hong Kong’s anti-Beijing protesters, canceled a New York launch event for an edition of its Overwatch game. From a report: The event, scheduled for Wednesday at Nintendo’s store in Rockefeller Center, was planned to support the release of Overwatch: Legendary Edition for the Nintendo Switch portable game…