GFPGAN—first made it onto our radar when it was featured in the August 28 edition of the (excellent) Recomendo newsletter, specifically, a post by Kevin Kelly. In it, he says that he uses this free program to restore his own old family photos, noting that it focuses solely on the faces of those pictured, and “works pretty well, sometimes perfectly, in color and black and white.”
The tool is incredibly easy to use. If you are accessing GFPGAN on your phone, you have the option of selecting a photo from your library, or taking a new photo to use. When we accessed the page on a laptop, the only option was choosing a file from your computer.
Anyway, once you upload the photo, tap or click the green “Restore photo” button, and then wait for the final product. While the results aren’t instant, the restoring process takes roughly 15 to 20 seconds.
First, your original image will show up on the left, and then a few seconds later, the restored image will appear on the right. There’s a link you can click directly underneath the restored photo to download it. That’s it!
Of course, if a photo is damaged and part of someone’s face has torn off, GFPGAN can’t make it reappear, but the tool can improve the quality of what’s there. As an example, here’s a screenshot from the version of the program on the Baseten web page, featuring one of my own family photos:
Screenshot: Elizabeth Yuko
I never knew who the woman on the bottom left of the photo was, but in the restored image, I can easily identify her as my great-aunt.
The move comes in response to growing pressure on app store operators to give developers options, as Epic Games sought in its dispute with Apple and the government of South Korea required with legislation. The EU’s Digital Markets Act also seeks to limit Big Tech’s gatekeeping powers and was designed to stop Google prioritizing its own goods and services over those of competitors.
The test, foreshadowed in March 2022 when Spotify’s Android app offered its own payment system alongside Google’s, will see the search giant offer developers the chance to offer users the chance to employ payment systems other than its own.
The trial covers digital content and services, such as in-app purchases and subscriptions. Web-based payments as an alternative payment method in an embedded webview within their app are also possible under the pilot.
The program is detailed in a support document that states it will run in European Economic Area (EEA) countries – not the UK – plus Australia, India, Indonesia, and Japan.
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The test will require alternative payment systems to be compliant with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard and developers must provide customer service for their chosen system. Payment systems used must provide a process to dispute unauthorized transactions.
Games are not eligible for the test, and Google’s not explained why other than to say they’re not eligible but that decision might change.
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“Google Play’s service fee has never been simply a fee for payment processing. It reflects the value provided by Android and Play and supports our continued investments across Android and Google Play, allowing for the user and developer features that people count on.”
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If you fancy trying the scheme, apply here – but don’t bother unless you already have a Play Store developer account, as that’s required to apply for inclusion
China’s National Medical Products Administration approved CanSino’s Ad5-nCoV for emergency use as a booster vaccine, the company said in a statement to the Hong Kong Stock Exchange on Sunday.
The vaccine is a new version of CanSino’s one-shot Covid drug, the first in the world to undergo human testing in March 2020 and which has been used in China, Mexico, Pakistan, Malaysia and Hungary after being rolled out in February 2021. The inhaled version can stimulate cellular immunity and induce mucosal immunity to boost protection without intramuscular injection, CanSino said.
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CanSino’s initial one-shot vaccine was found to be 66% effective in preventing Covid-19 symptoms and 91% effective against severe disease, but it trails vaccines from Sinovac Biotech Ltd. and state-owned Sinopharm Group Co. in use outside China. Those two companies account for most of the 770 million doses China has sent to the rest of the world.
The vaccine, which uses a modified cold-causing virus to expose the immune system to the coronavirus, is similar to those developed by AstraZeneca Plc and Johnson & Johnson.
It works like Dall-e and is now very popular because a user used this to win a digital art competition (using attribution)
Jason Allen entered the artwork titled “Theatre d’Opera Spatial” in the “Digital Arts / Digitally-Manipulated Photography” category of the Colorado State Fair fine arts competition but created the piece using a popular text-to-image AI generator named Midjourney.
A Twitter post describing Allen’s win went viral earlier this week (and was first covered by Vice). The post elicited a strong response, with many users claiming that Allen had been deceptive in submitting the piece, particularly as most of the public is unaware of how text-to-image AI generators work. Allen, though, has defended his actions.
“I wanted to make a statement using artificial intelligence artwork,” he told The Pueblo Chieftain. “I feel like I accomplished that, and I’m not going to apologize for it.”
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Responses to Allen’s win, though, have been mixed, with many accusing him of deceiving the judges. From Allen’s description of his win, it seems that the fair’s judges were not fully aware of how the piece was created. Writing in the Midjourney Discord, Allen says the artwork’s “description clearly stated I created them via Midjourney,” but when another user asks if he explained what the software does, Allen replies, “Should I have explained what Midjourney was? If so, why?” eliciting face-palm emoji reactions from others in the chat.
Allen said he’s been telling people at the show that the piece is “digital art created using a.i. tools” and that he doesn’t need to explain what Midjourney is any more than a digital artist might explain how Adobe Illustrator works
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The rules of the competition Allen entered describe his category only as “Artistic practice that uses digital technology as part of the creative or presentation process.”
grommunio efficiently summarizes all requirements of modern, digital communication and collaboration. This includes the device and operating system independent management of sensitive data such as e-mail, contacts, calendar, chat, video conference, file sharing and much more – in real time.
With open source technology based on Linux, grommunio is scalable and meets the highest security requirements. Thanks to its advanced architecture, grommunio can be integrated into existing systems without great effort. Thanks to its advanced architecture, grommunio can be integrated into existing systems without great effort.
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As the first open source solution – with a fully functional implementation of Outlook Anywhere (RPC-over-HTTP) and MAPI-over-HTTP, grommunio is the alternative to proprietary backends for native interoperability with Microsoft Outlook.
Android Auto Store is free app for Android Phones to downloads best Android Auto apps and installs them in the correct way to have them in Android Auto.
This Store will install Android Auto Apps on non-rooted Android devices for free with NO DOWNLOAD LIMITS NO PAY. Select an app you want to install on your phone and wait the installation process finish. Once completed, connect your smartphone to the car and use the app.
Where are we in the Milky Way? And where is the Milky Way in the Universe? How many galaxies are in the observable Universe? Find answers in this infographic.
New rules from India’s Computer Emergency Response Team
India’s Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT) has said that new rules will apply to VPN providers from September 25. These will require services to collect customer names, email addresses, and IP addresses. The data must be retained for at least five years, and handed over to CERT on demand.
This would breach the privacy standards of major VPN services, and be physically impossible for services like NordVPN, which keep no logs as a matter of policy. The company is registered in Panama specifically because there are no data-retention laws there, and no international intelligence sharing.
Major VPN services shut down Indian servers
The Wall Street Journal reports that major VPN services have shut down their Indian servers.
Major global providers of virtual private networks, which let internet users shield their identities online, are shutting down their servers in India to protest new government rules they say threaten their customers’ privacy […]
Such rules are “typically introduced by authoritarian governments in order to gain more control over their citizens,” said a spokeswoman for Nord Security, provider of NordVPN, which has stopped operating its servers in India. “If democracies follow the same path, it has the potential to affect people’s privacy as well as their freedom of speech,” she said […]
Other VPN services that have stopped operating servers in India in recent months are some of the world’s best known. They include U.S.-based Private Internet Access and IPVanish, Canada-based TunnelBear, British Virgin Islands-based ExpressVPN, and Lithuania-based Surfshark.
ExpressVPN said it “refuses to participate in the Indian government’s attempts to limit internet freedom.”
The government’s move “severely undermines the online privacy of Indian residents,” Private Internet Access said.
Customers in India will be able to connect to VPN servers in other countries. This is the same approach taken in Russia and China, where operating servers within those countries would require VPN companies to comply with similar legislation.
Massive amounts of private data – including more than 300,000 biometric digital fingerprints used by five mobile banking apps – have been put at risk of theft due to hard-coded Amazon Web Services credentials, according to security researchers.
Symantec’s Threat Hunter Team said it discovered 1,859 publicly available apps, both Android and iOS, containing baked-in AWS credentials. That means if someone were to look inside the apps, they would have found the credentials in the code, and could potentially have used that to access the apps’ backend Amazon-hosted servers and steal users’ data. The vast majority (98 percent) were iOS apps.
In all, 77 percent of these apps contained valid AWS access tokens that allowed access to private AWS cloud services, the intelligence team noted in research published today.
Additionally, almost half (47 percent) contained valid AWS tokens providing full access to sometimes millions of private files via Amazon S3 buckets. These hard-coded AWS access tokens would be easy to extract and exploit, and reflect a serious supply-chain issue, Dick O’Brien, principal editor on Symantec’s Threat Hunter Team, told The Register.
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In one case, a provider of B2B services gave out a mobile SDK to its customers to integrate into their applications. It turned out the SDK contained the provider’s cloud infrastructure keys, which potentially exposed all of its data — including financials, employee information, files on more than 15,000 medium and large-sized companies, and other information — that was stored on the platform.
The SDK had a hard-coded AWS token to access an Amazon-powered translation service. However, that token granted full access to the provider’s backend systems, rather than just the translation tool.
