On Monday, Vladimir Putin, President of the Russian Federation, issued a decree [PDF, not secure] naming Snowden (#53), among others, as being granted the boon of Russian citizenship.
Snowden has been living in Russia since 2013 when the US charged him with espionage and he flew from Hong Kong to Moscow’s Sheremetyevo International Airport with the help of WikiLeaks and ended up stranded in Russia with a canceled passport. He was granted asylum in Russia and temporary residency until October 2020, when he became a permanent resident. He and his wife Lindsay reportedly applied for citizenship the following month.
The citizenship comes at an awkward time. Putin last week signed what he described as a “partial mobilization” order to conscript soldiers for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The war has resulted in severe losses for the Russian military, which now needs to replenish its forces. Per its regulations, Russia can call up men and women between the ages of 18 and 60, even reportedly recruiting those in prison to fight.
The Russian callup is supposed to be for citizens with military training, which Snowden has. He enlisted in the US Army but was invalided out due to injuries suffered during special forces training.
While the U.S. is a dominant player in both oil and natural gas production, China holds the top spot as the world’s largest fossil fuel producer, largely because of its significant production and consumption of coal.
Over the last decade, China has used more coal than the rest of the world, combined.
However, it’s worth noting that the country’s fossil fuel consumption and production have dipped in recent years, ever since the government launched a five-year plan back in 2014 to help reduce carbon emissions.
The U.S. is the world’s largest producer of nuclear power by far, generating about double the amount of nuclear energy as France, the second-largest producer.
While nuclear power provides a carbon-free alternative to fossil fuels, the nuclear disaster in Fukushima caused many countries to move away from the energy source, which is why global use has dipped in recent years.
Despite the fact that many countries have recently pivoted away from nuclear energy, it still powers about 10% of the world’s electricity. It’s also possible that nuclear energy will play an expanded role in the energy mix going forward, since decarbonization has emerged as a top priority for nations around the world.
It’s an increasingly common sight on vacation, particularly in tourist destinations: An influencer sets up in front of a popular local landmark, sometimes even using props (coffee, beer, pets) or changing outfits, as a photographer or self-timed camera snaps away. Others are milling around, sometimes watching. But often, unbeknownst to everyone involved, another device is also recording the scene: a surveillance camera.
Belgian artist Dries Depoorter is exploring this dynamic in his controversial new online exhibit, The Followers, which he unveiled last week. The art project places static Instagram images side-by-side with video from surveillance cameras, which recorded footage of the photoshoot in question.
On its face, The Followers is an attempt, like many other studies, art projects and documentaries in recent years, to expose the staged, often unattainable ideals shown in many Instagram and influencer photos posted online. But The Followers also tells a darker story: one of increasingly worrisome privacy concerns amid an ever-growing network of surveillance technology in public spaces. And the project, as well as the techniques used to create it, has sparked both ethical and legal controversy.
To make The Followers, Depoorter started with EarthCam, a network of publicly accessible webcams around the world, to record a month’s worth of footage in tourist attractions like New York City’s Times Square and Dublin’s Temple Bar Pub. Then he enlisted an artificial intelligence (A.I.) bot, which scraped public Instagram photos taken in those locations, and facial-recognition software, which paired the Instagram images with the real-time surveillance footage.
Depoorter calls himself a “surveillance artist,” and this isn’t his first project using open-source webcam footage or A.I. Last year, for a project called The Flemish Scrollers, he paired livestream video of Belgian government proceedings with an A.I. bot he built to determine how often lawmakers were scrolling on their phones during official meetings.
“The idea [for The Followers] popped in my head when I watched an open camera and someone was taking pictures for like 30 minutes,” Depoorter tells Vice’s Samantha Cole. He wondered if he’d be able to find that person on Instagram.
[…]
The Followers has also hit some legal snags since going live. The project was originally up on YouTube, but EarthCam filed a copyright claim, and the piece has since been taken down. Depoorter tells Hyperallergic that he’s attempting to resolve the claim and get the videos re-uploaded. (The project is still available to view on the official website and the artist’s Twitter).
Depoorter hasn’t replied directly to much of the criticism, but he tells Input he wants the art to speak for itself. “I know which questions it raises, this kind of project,” he says. “But I don’t answer the question itself. I don’t want to put a lesson into the world. I just want to show the dangers of new technologies.”
Luis Eduardo Garrido couldn’t wait to test out his colleague’s newest creation. Garrido, a psychology and methodology researcher at Pontificia Universidad Católica Madre y Maestra in the Dominican Republic, drove two hours between his university’s campuses to try a virtual reality experience that was designed to treat obsessive-compulsive disorder and different types of phobias. But a couple of minutes after he put on the headset, he could tell something was wrong.
“I started feeling bad,” Garrido told The Daily Beast. He was experiencing an unsettling bout of dizziness and nausea. He tried to push through but ultimately had to abort the simulation almost as soon as he started. “Honestly, I don’t think I lasted five minutes trying out the application,” he said.
Garrido had contracted cybersickness, a form of motion sickness that can affect users of VR technology. It was so severe that he worried about his ability to drive home, and it took hours for him to recover from the five-minute simulation. Though motion sickness has afflicted humans for thousands of years, cybersickness is a much newer condition. While this means that many of its causes and symptoms are understood, other basic questions—like how common cybersickness is, and whether there are ways to fully prevent it—are only just starting to be studied.
After Garrido’s experience, a colleague told him that only around 2 percent of people feel cybersickness. But at a presentation for prospective students, Garrido watched as volunteers from the audience walked to the front of an auditorium to demo a VR headset—only to return shakily to their seats.
“I could see from afar that they were getting sweaty and kind of uncomfortable,” he recalled. “I said to myself, ‘Maybe I’m not the only one.’”
[…]
In order to make VR more accessible and affordable, companies are making devices smaller and running them on less powerful processors. But these changes introduce dizzying graphics—which inevitably causes more people to experience cybersickness.
At the same time, a growing body of research suggests cybersickness is vastly more pervasive than previously thought—perhaps afflicting more than half of all potential users.
[…]
Garrido and his team decided to run their own study, recruiting 92 people to try the same VR program that first made him sick.
[…]
In sharp contrast to the 2 percent estimate Garrido had been told, the results from his study, published earlier this year, indicated that more than 65 percent of people experienced symptoms of cybersickness, and more than one-third of these people experienced severe symptoms. Twenty-two participants decided to stop the simulation before the 10 minutes were up.
[…]
Cybersickness doesn’t just arise from the controls of a VR experience. It can be built into the fabric of hardware (individual headsets) and software (experiences, apps, and simulations). Kyle Ringgenberg, an AR and VR developer and the co-founder of software company Dimension X, said that there are two major sensory conflicts that lead to cybersickness in VR. The first is the same brain-body mismatch that leads to car and seasickness, but the second is a different physiological response—and potentially even harder to fix. When we look out at the world in front of us, our eyes automatically focus on an object based on its perceived distance from us. A VR headset projects images a set distance away from a viewer, but when a virtual object appears close, it may seem blurry since the person’s eyes are trying to focus on it as if it truly were.
The massive virtual worlds created by growing numbers of companies and creators could be more easily populated with a diverse array of 3D buildings, vehicles, characters and more — thanks to a new AI model from NVIDIA Research.
Trained using only 2D images, NVIDIA GET3D generates 3D shapes with high-fidelity textures and complex geometric details. These 3D objects are created in the same format used by popular graphics software applications, allowing users to immediately import their shapes into 3D renderers and game engines for further editing.
The generated objects could be used in 3D representations of buildings, outdoor spaces or entire cities, designed for industries including gaming, robotics, architecture and social media.
GET3D can generate a virtually unlimited number of 3D shapes based on the data it’s trained on. Like an artist who turns a lump of clay into a detailed sculpture, the model transforms numbers into complex 3D shapes.
With a training dataset of 2D car images, for example, it creates a collection of sedans, trucks, race cars and vans. When trained on animal images, it comes up with creatures such as foxes, rhinos, horses and bears. Given chairs, the model generates assorted swivel chairs, dining chairs and cozy recliners.
“GET3D brings us a step closer to democratizing AI-powered 3D content creation,” said Sanja Fidler, vice president of AI research at NVIDIA, who leads the Toronto-based AI lab that created the tool. “Its ability to instantly generate textured 3D shapes could be a game-changer for developers, helping them rapidly populate virtual worlds with varied and interesting objects.”
[…]
GET3D can instead churn out some 20 shapes a second when running inference on a single NVIDIA GPU — working like a generative adversarial network for 2D images, while generating 3D objects. The larger, more diverse the training dataset it’s learned from, the more varied and detailed the output.
NVIDIA researchers trained GET3D on synthetic data consisting of 2D images of 3D shapes captured from different camera angles. It took the team just two days to train the model on around 1 million images using NVIDIA A100 Tensor Core GPUs.
[…]
GET3D gets its name from its ability to Generate Explicit Textured 3D meshes — meaning that the shapes it creates are in the form of a triangle mesh, like a papier-mâché model, covered with a textured material. This lets users easily import the objects into game engines, 3D modelers and film renderers — and edit them.
Once creators export GET3D-generated shapes to a graphics application, they can apply realistic lighting effects as the object moves or rotates in a scene. By incorporating another AI tool from NVIDIA Research, StyleGAN-NADA, developers can use text prompts to add a specific style to an image, such as modifying a rendered car to become a burned car or a taxi, or turning a regular house into a haunted one.
Tiny nets woven from DNA strands cover the spike proteins of the virus that causes COVID-19 and give off a glowing signal in this artist’s rendering. Credit: Xing Wang, University of Illinois
Tiny nets woven from DNA strands can ensnare the spike protein of the virus that causes COVID-19, lighting up the virus for a fast-yet-sensitive diagnostic test—and also impeding the virus from infecting cells, opening a new possible route to antiviral treatment, according to a new study.
Researchers at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and collaborators demonstrated the DNA nets’ ability to detect and impede COVID-19 in human cell cultures in a paper published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.
“This platform combines the sensitivity of PCR and the speed and low cost of antigen tests,” said study leader Xing Wang, a professor of bioengineering and of chemistry at Illinois. “We need tests like this for a couple of reasons. One is to prepare for the next pandemic. The other reason is to track ongoing viral epidemics—not only coronaviruses, but also other deadly and economically impactful viruses like HIV or influenza.”
DNA is best known for its genetic properties, but it also can be folded into custom nanoscale structures that can perform functions or specifically bind to other structures much like proteins do. The DNA nets the Illinois group developed were designed to bind to the coronavirus spike protein—the structure that sticks out from the surface of the virus and binds to receptors on human cells to infect them. Once bound, the nets give off a fluorescent signal that can be read by an inexpensive handheld device in about 10 minutes.
The researchers demonstrated that their DNA nets effectively targeted the spike protein and were able to detect the virus at very low levels, equivalent to the sensitivity of gold-standard PCR tests that can take a day or more to return results from a clinical lab.
The technique holds several advantages, Wang said. It does not need any special preparation or equipment, and can be performed at room temperature, so all a user would do is mix the sample with the solution and read it. The researchers estimated in their study that the method would cost $1.26 per test.
“Another advantage of this measure is that we can detect the entire virus, which is still infectious, and distinguish it from fragments that may not be infectious anymore,” Wang said. This not only gives patients and physicians better understanding of whether they are infectious, but it could greatly improve community-level modeling and tracking of active outbreaks, such as through wastewater.
In addition, the DNA nets inhibited the virus’s spread in live cell cultures, with the antiviral activity increasing with the size of the DNA net scaffold. This points to DNA structures’ potential as therapeutic agents, Wang said.
“I had this idea at the very beginning of the pandemic to build a platform for testing, but also for inhibition at the same time,” Wang said. “Lots of other groups working on inhibitors are trying to wrap up the entire virus, or the parts of the virus that provide access to antibodies. This is not good, because you want the body to form antibodies. With the hollow DNA net structures, antibodies can still access the virus.”
The DNA net platform can be adapted to other viruses, Wang said, and even multiplexed so that a single test could detect multiple viruses.
“We’re trying to develop a unified technology that can be used as a plug-and-play platform. We want to take advantage of DNA sensors’ high binding affinity, low limit of detection, low cost and rapid preparation,” Wang said.
The paper is titled “Net-shaped DNA nanostructures designed for rapid/sensitive detection and potential inhibition of the SARS-CoV-2 virus.”
More information: Neha Chauhan et al, Net-Shaped DNA Nanostructures Designed for Rapid/Sensitive Detection and Potential Inhibition of the SARS-CoV-2 Virus, Journal of the American Chemical Society (2022). DOI: 10.1021/jacs.2c04835
New Fitbit users will be required to sign-up with a Google account, from next year, while it also appears one will be needed to access some of the new features in years to come.
Google has been slowly integrating Fitbit into the fold since buying the company back in November 2019. Indeed, the latest products are now known as “Fitbit by Google”. However, as it currently stands, device owners have been able to maintain separate accounts for Google and Fitbit accounts.
Google has now revealed it is bringing Google Accounts to Fitbit in 2023, enabling a single login for both services. From that point on, all new sign ups will be through Google. Fitbit accounts will only be supported until 2025.
From that point on, a Google account will be the only way to go. To aid the transition, once the introduction of Google accounts begins, it’ll be possible to move existing devices over while maintaining all of the recorded data.
[…]
“We’ll be transparent with our customers about the timeline for ending Fitbit accounts through notices within the Fitbit app, by email, and in help articles.”
Whether that will be enough to assuage the concerns of the Fitbit user base – who didn’t have a say on whether Google bought their personal fitness data – remains to be seen.
So wonderful cloud – first of all, why should this data go to the cloud anyway? Second, you thought you were giving it to one provider but it turns out you’re giving it to another with no opt-out other than trashing an expensive piece of hardware.
Nanoengineers at the University of California San Diego have developed microscopic robots, called microrobots, that can swim around in the lungs, deliver medication and be used to clear up life-threatening cases of bacterial pneumonia.
In mice, the microrobots safely eliminated pneumonia-causing bacteria in the lungs and resulted in 100% survival. By contrast, untreated mice all died within three days after infection.
The results are published Sept. 22 in Nature Materials.
The microrobots are made of algae cells whose surfaces are speckled with antibiotic-filled nanoparticles. The algae provide movement, which allows the microrobots to swim around and deliver antibiotics directly to more bacteria in the lungs. The nanoparticles containing the antibiotics are made of tiny biodegradable polymer spheres that are coated with the cell membranes of neutrophils, which are a type of white blood cell. What’s special about these cell membranes is that they absorb and neutralize inflammatory molecules produced by bacteria and the body’s immune system. This gives the microrobots the ability to reduce harmful inflammation, which in turn makes them more effective at fighting lung infection.
[…]
The team used the microrobots to treat mice with an acute and potentially fatal form of pneumonia caused by the bacteria Pseudomonas aeruginosa. This form of pneumonia commonly affects patients who receive mechanical ventilation in the intensive care unit. The researchers administered the microrobots to the lungs of the mice through a tube inserted in the windpipe. The infections fully cleared up after one week. All mice treated with the microrobots survived past 30 days, while untreated mice died within three days.
Treatment with the microrobots was also more effective than an IV injection of antibiotics into the bloodstream. The latter required a dose of antibiotics that was 3000 times higher than that used in the microrobots to achieve the same effect. For comparison, a dose of microrobots provided 500 nanograms of antibiotics per mouse, while an IV injection provided 1.644 milligrams of antibiotics per mouse.
The team’s approach is so effective because it puts the medication right where it needs to go rather than diffusing it through the rest of the body.
[…]
the researchers say that this approach is safe. After treatment, the body’s immune cells efficiently digest the algae, along with any remaining nanoparticles. “Nothing toxic is left behind,” said Wang.
A federal judge in Texas has ordered the company to pay Voxer, the developer of app called Walkie Talkie, nearly $175 million as an ongoing royalty. Voxer accused Meta of infringing its patents and incorporating that tech in Instagram Live and Facebook Live.
In 2006, Tom Katis, the founder of Voxer, started working on a way to resolve communications problems he faced while serving in the US Army in Afghanistan, as TechCrunch notes. Katis and his team developed tech that allows for live voice and video transmissions, which led to Voxer debuting the Walkie Talkie app in 2011.
According to the lawsuit, soon after Voxer released the app, Meta (then known as Facebook) approached the company about a collaboration. Voxer is said to have revealed its proprietary technology as well as its patent portfolio to Meta, but the two sides didn’t reach an agreement. Voxer claims that even though Meta didn’t have live video or voice services back then, it identified the Walkie Talkie developer as a competitor and shut down access to Facebook features such as the “Find Friends” tool.
Meta debuted Facebook Live in 2015. Katis claims to have had a chance meeting with a Facebook Live product manager in early 2016 to discuss the alleged infringements of Voxer’s patents in that product, but Meta declined to reach a deal with the company. The latter released Instagram Live later that year. “Both products incorporate Voxer’s technologies and infringe its patents,” Voxer claimed in the lawsuit.
[…] In June, more than 3,300 employees across the United Kingdom began participating in a six-month experiment to test the efficacy of a four-day work week, which was organized by the nonprofit 4 Day Global. The pilot program has now reached its halfway point, and 4 Day Global is reporting overwhelmingly positive results. More specifically, 88% of surveyed participants said that the four-day work week is working well for their business.
[…]
Results also include 86% of survey respondents indicating that they would be likely or extremely likely to retain the four-day work week, while a total of 46% of respondents reported some increase in productivity. Businesses also reported a relatively smooth transition from the traditional five-day work week. On a scale of 1 being “extremely challenging” to 5 being “extremely smooth,” 4 Day Week Global found that 98% of respondents rated the transition to the four-day work week a 3 or higher.
Prior to the start of the experiment, 4 Day Week Global said that this is the biggest pilot program of its kind, where, as long as workers maintain 100% of their productivity, they will also maintain 100% of their salary while working 80% of the traditional work week. The nonprofit has been collaborating on the pilot program with labor think tank Autonomy as well as researchers from Cambridge University, Boston College, and Oxford University. Companies taking part in the experiment range from fish and chips shops, to PR firms, to tech companies.
[…]
“We are learning that for many it is a fairly smooth transition and for some there are some understandable hurdles – especially among those which have comparatively fixed or inflexible practices, systems, or cultures which date back well into the last century,” O’Connor said.
[…]
Microsoft flirted with a four-day work week in Japan and saw higher sales figures and levels of happiness in employees. The big hurdle moving forward will be getting buy in from enough companies and executives to make the four-day work week a permanent fixture in the world’s labor market—but results from large projects such as the one from 4 Day Week Global are only getting us closer to that end goal.
[…] Spawning AI creates image-generation tools for artists, and the company just launched Have I Been Trained? which you can use to search a set of 5.8 billion images that have been used to train popular AI art models. When you search the site, you can search through the images that are the closest match, based on the LAION-5B training data, which is widely used for training AI search terms.
It’s a fun tool to play with, and may help give a glimpse into the data that the AI is using as the basis for its own. The photo at the top of this post is a screenshot of the search term “couple”. Try putting your own name in, and see what happens… I also tried a search for “Obama,” which I will not be sharing a screenshot of here, but suffice it to say that these training sets can be… Problematic.
An Ars Technica report this week reveals that private medical records — as many as thousands — are among the many photos hidden within LAION-5B with questionable ethical and legal statuses. Removing these records is exceptionally difficult, as LAION isn’t a collection of files itself but merely a set of URLs pointing to images on the web.
In response, technologists like Mat Dryhurst and Holly Herndon are spearheading efforts such as Source+, a standard aiming to allow people to disallow their work or likeness to be used for AI training purposes. But these standards are — and will likely remain — voluntary, limiting their potential impact.
The listing allegedly includes 350 million Ask.FM user records, with the threat actor also offering 607 repositories plus their Gitlab, Jira, and Confluence databases. Ask.FM is a question and answer network launched in June 2010, with over 215 million registered users.
“I’m selling the users database of Ask.fm and ask.com. For connoisseurs, you can also get 607 repositories plus their Gitlab, Jira, Confluence databases.”
The posting also includes a list of repositories, sample git, and sample user data, as well as mentions of the fields in the database: user_id, username, mail, hash, salt, fbid, twitterid, vkid, fbuid, iguid. It appears that Ask.FM is using the weak hashing algorithm SHA1 for passwords, putting them at risk of being cracked and exposed to threat actors.
[…]
In response to DataBreaches, the user who posted the database – Data – explained that initial access was gained via a vulnerability in Safety Center. The server was first accessed in 2019, and the database was obtained on 2020-03-14.
Data also suggested that Ask.FM knew about the breach as early as back in 2020.
Multiple branches of the U.S. military have bought access to a powerful internet monitoring tool that claims to cover over 90 percent of the world’s internet traffic, and which in some cases provides access to people’s email data, browsing history, and other information such as their sensitive internet cookies, according to contracting data and other documents reviewed by Motherboard.
Additionally, Sen. Ron Wyden says that a whistleblower has contacted his office concerning the alleged warrantless use and purchase of this data by NCIS, a civilian law enforcement agency that’s part of the Navy, after filing a complaint through the official reporting process with the Department of Defense, according to a copy of the letter shared by Wyden’s office with Motherboard.
The material reveals the sale and use of a previously little known monitoring capability that is powered by data purchases from the private sector. The tool, called Augury, is developed by cybersecurity firm Team Cymru and bundles a massive amount of data together and makes it available to government and corporate customers as a paid service. In the private industry, cybersecurity analysts use it for following hackers’ activity or attributing cyberattacks. In the government world, analysts can do the same, but agencies that deal with criminal investigations have also purchased the capability. The military agencies did not describe their use cases for the tool. However, the sale of the tool still highlights how Team Cymru obtains this controversial data and then sells it as a business, something that has alarmed multiple sources in the cybersecurity industry.
“The network data includes data from over 550 collection points worldwide, to include collection points in Europe, the Middle East, North/South America, Africa and Asia, and is updated with at least 100 billion new records each day,” a description of the Augury platform in a U.S. government procurement record reviewed by Motherboard reads. It adds that Augury provides access to “petabytes” of current and historical data.
Motherboard has found that the U.S. Navy, Army, Cyber Command, and the Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency have collectively paid at least $3.5 million to access Augury. This allows the military to track internet usage using an incredible amount of sensitive information. Motherboard has extensively covered how U.S. agencies gain access to data that in some cases would require a warrant or other legal mechanism by simply purchasing data that is available commercially from private companies. Most often, the sales center around location data harvested from smartphones. The Augury purchases show that this approach of buying access to data also extends to information more directly related to internet usage.
[…]
The Augury platform makes a wide array of different types of internet data available to its users, according to online procurement records. These types of data include packet capture data (PCAP) related to email, remote desktop, and file sharing protocols. PCAP generally refers to a full capture of data, and encompasses very detailed information about network activity. PCAP data includes the request sent from one server to another, and the response from that server too.
[…]
Augury also contains so-called netflow data, which creates a picture of traffic flow and volume across a network. That can include which server communicated with another, which is information that may ordinarily only be available to the server owner themselves or to the internet service provider that is carrying the traffic. That netflow data can be used for following traffic through virtual private networks, and show the server they are ultimately connecting from.
[…]
Team Cymru obtains this netflow data from ISPs; in return, Team Cymru provides the ISPs with threat intelligence. That transfer of data is likely happening without the informed consent of the ISPs’ users. A source familiar with the netflow data previously told Motherboard that “the users almost certainly don’t [know]” their data is being provided to Team Cymru, who then sells access to it.
It is not clear where exactly Team Cymru obtains the PCAP and other more sensitive information, whether that’s from ISPs or another method.
[…]
Beyond his day job as CEO of Team Cymru, Rabbi Rob Thomas also sits on the board of the Tor Project, a privacy focused non-profit that maintains the Tor software. That software is what underpins the Tor anonymity network, a collection of thousands of volunteer-run servers that allow anyone to anonymously browse the internet.
“Just like Tor users, the developers, researchers, and founders who’ve made Tor possible are a diverse group of people. But all of the people who have been involved in Tor are united by a common belief: internet users should have private access to an uncensored web,” the Tor Project’s website reads.
Just a few weeks after Hook Up: The Game released on Android, developer Sophie Artemigi was surprised to see the visual novel flagged for inappropriate sexual content.
By the game’s own description, you play as Alex, “a sex positive twenty-something” who matches with her old high school bully on a dating app, so of course, sexual themes are part of the package. But inappropriate? That was unexpected.
Google Play does warn developers that content designed to be “sexually gratifying” is not allowed on the platform, but it can be tricky to know how exactly that’s being enforced. Take 7 Sexy Sins, for example, a game which has the player removing the armor from anime demon girls, only to “snap some pictures… for personal uses”. It’s got an age rating of 12+ and has been downloaded more than 10,000 times without being pulled from the platform.
By contrast, Hook Up: The Game is a narrative game about dating, relationships and learning to deal with past trauma.
Artemigi appealed the decision to find out exactly what had crossed the line in this case.
In response she was told that Google “don’t allow apps that contain or promote sexual content or profanity”, or “appear to promote a sexual act in exchange for compensation”.
“For example”, the response continued, “your app screenshots currently contain an image that depicts sexually suggestive poses and sexual nudity”.
The following image was included as proof, with red rectangles drawn over the offending content.
Image: Sophie Artemigi
You’ll note that the character’s breasts have been highlighted, but so has her belly button, which is just totally bizarre. Accordingly, Artemigi emailed back with her counterarguments.
First of all, Hook Up has nothing to do with sexual acts being performed in “exchange for compensation”, she explained. In an email shown to Kotaku, Artemigi asked why Google was conflating provocatively dressed women with sex workers?
As for the image itself, Artemigi argued that it’s meant to be reflective of the kind of pictures you might find on a dating app, which typically do not allow for pictures that are too revealing. It’s worth clarifying that Alex is not nude in this screenshot, but even if she was, the Play Store’s own policy states that nudity “may be allowed if the primary purpose is educational, documentary, scientific or artistic, and is not gratuitous”.
The illustration, Artemigi pointed out, was a direct reference to the statue of Napoleon’s sister and imperial princess, Pauline Boneparte, which you can see for yourself in Rome’s Galleria Borghese. It’s also pictured at the top of this article.
“That pose was specifically based on classical statues because there’s a reference to Alex feeling like her bully was this Greek god,” said Artemigi. “It’s meant to be about objectifying yourself and finding beauty in one’s self.”
But hey, sex is complicated and so, perhaps, are belly buttons.
After receiving another short reply stating that the screenshot depicts a “sexually nude and gratifying pose of a woman presented in a non-artistic way”, Artemigi asked to escalate the issue to somebody higher up in the policy team in the hopes of speaking to somebody who might appreciate the nuance of the situation.
The final response from her official Google contact once again pointed out that Hook Up was in violation of the platform’s policy, but this time ended with the following sentence:
“Regarding your concern about escalation, I am the highest form of escalation. Next to me is God. Do you wanna see God?”
Yikes.
“It was almost nice though,” said Artemigi, “because it kind of confirmed the vibe I’d been getting. I felt very dismissed, talked down to. At least they were honest in that one email, I’ll give them that.”
When asked for comment, Google told Kotaku that the person who wrote this email has now been removed from the developer support team.
Hook Up: The Game is still available to purchase on the Play Store, although it seemingly remains in breach of the company’s policy, meaning that Artemigi hasn’t been able to publish updates as she usually would.
It’s unclear whether this will have also affected the game’s standing on the platform, but it’s worth noting that despite hundreds of downloads and almost 40 reviews, searching “Hook Up: The Game” on the Play Store doesn’t bring up the game in my search results. Like, at all.
In fact, the only way I was able to find it via search was to use the full name of the developer.
There’s been no such problems over on iOS, although different screenshots are being used to market the game for that platform.
Meta was sued on Wednesday for alleged undisclosed tracking and data collection in its Facebook and Instagram apps on Apple iPhones.
The lawsuit [PDF], filed in a US federal district court in San Francisco, claims that the two applications incorporate use their own browser known as a WKWebView that injects JavaScript code to gather data that would otherwise be unavailable if the apps opened links in the default standalone browser designated by iPhone users.
The claim is based on the findings of security researcher Felix Krause, who last month published an analysis of how WKWebView browsers embedded within native applications can be abused to track people and violate privacy expectations.
“When users click on a link within the Facebook app, Meta automatically directs them to the in-app browser it is monitoring instead of the smartphone’s default browser, without telling users that this is happening or they are being tracked,” the complaint says.
“The user information Meta intercepts, monitors and records includes personally identifiable information, private health details, text entries, and other sensitive confidential facts.”
[…]
However, Meta’s use of in-app browsers in its mobile apps predates Apple’s ATT initiative. Apple introduced WKWebView at its 2014 Worldwide Developer Conference as a replacement for its older UIWebView (UIKit) and WebView (AppKit) frameworks. That was in iOS 8. With the arrival of iOS 9, as described at WWDC 2015, there was another option, SFSafariViewController. Presently this is what’s recommended for displaying a website within an app.
And the company’s use of in-app browsers has elicited concern before.
“On top of limited features, WebViews can also be used for effectively conducting intended man-in-the-middle attacks, since the IAB [in-app browser] developer can arbitrarily inject JavaScript code and also intercept network traffic,” wrote Thomas Steiner, a Google developer relations engineer, in a blog post three years ago.
In his post, Steiner emphasizes that he didn’t see anything unusual like a “phoning home” function.
Krause has taken a similar line, noting only the potential for abuse. In a follow-up post, he identified additional data gathering code.
He wrote, “Instagram iOS subscribes to every tap on any button, link, image or other component on external websites rendered inside the Instagram app” and also “subscribes to every time the user selects a UI element (like a text field) on third party websites rendered inside the Instagram app.”
However, “subscribes” simply means that analytics data is accessible within the app, without offering any conclusion about what, if anything, is done with the data. Krause also points out that since 2020, Apple has offered a framework called WKContentWorld that isolates the web environment from scripts. Developers using an in-app browser can implement WKContentWorld in order to make scripts undetectable from the outside, he said.
Whatever Meta is doing internally with its in-app browser, and even given the company’s insistence its injected script validates ATT settings, the plaintiffs suing the company argue there was no disclosure of the process.
“Meta fails to disclose the consequences of browsing, navigating, and communicating with third-party websites from within Facebook’s in-app browser – namely, that doing so overrides their default browser’s privacy settings, which users rely on to block and prevent tracking,” the complaint says. “Similarly, Meta conceals the fact that it injects JavaScript that alters external third-party websites so that it can intercept, track, and record data that it otherwise could not access.”
The EU Copyright Directive contains one of the worst ideas in modern copyright: what amounts to a requirement to filter uploads on major sites. Despite repeated explanations of why this would cause huge harm to both creators and members of the public, EU politicians were taken in by the soothing words of the legislation’s proponents, who even went so far as to deny that upload filters would be required at all.
The malign effects of the EU Copyright Directive have not yet been felt, as national legislatures struggle to implement a law with deep internal contradictions. However, upload filters are already used on an ad hoc basis, for example YouTube’s Content ID. There is thus already mounting evidence of the problems with the approach. A new report, from the Colombian Fundación Karisma, adds to the concerns by providing additional examples of how creators have already suffered from upload filters:
This research found multiple cases of unjustified notifications of supposed violation of copyright directed at content that is either part of the public domain, original content, or instances of judicial overreach of copyright law. The digital producers that are the target of these unjust notifications affirm that the appeal process and counter-notification procedures don’t help them protect their rights. The appeals interface of the different platforms that were taken into account did not help resolve the cases, which leaves digital creators defenseless with no alternative other than what they can obtain from their contacts. This system damages the capacity of these producers to grow, maintain and monetize an audience at the same time that it affects the liberty of expression of independent producers as it creates a strong disincentive for them. On the contrary, this system incentivizes the bigger production companies to claim copyright on content to which they hold no rights.
As that summary notes, it’s not just that material was blocked without justification. Compounding the problem are appeal processes that are biased against creators, and a system that is rigged in favor of Big Content to the point where companies can falsely claim copyright on the work of others. The Fundación Karisma report is particularly valuable because it describes what has been happening in Colombia, rounding out other work that typically looks at the situation in the US and EU.
Voyager and Lockheed Martin have found a partner to design astronaut facilities for their space station. Hilton will develop suites and sleeping quarters for Starlab, CNBC reports. Under the partnership, Hilton and Voyager will also look at marketing opportunities related to Starlab and trips to what may be one of the first space hotels.
NASA has granted contracts to four private companies who are building private space stations ahead of the agency’s planned decommissioning of the International Space Station at the end of the decade. Axiom Space, Blue Origin and Northrop Grumman are also working on space stations. Voyager’s operating company Nanoracks received the largest contract, which was valued at $160 million.
Voyager and Lockheed Martin hope to have the first Starlab up and running by 2027.
People feel like they don’t have control over their YouTube recommendations…
Our 2021 investigation into YouTube’s recommender system uncovered a range of problems on the platform: an opaque algorithm, inconsistent oversight, and geographic inequalities. We also learned that people feel they don’t have control over their YouTube experience — particularly the videos that are recommended to them.
YouTube says that people can manage their video recommendations through the feedback tools the platform offers. But do YouTube’s user controls actually work?
and our study shows that they really don’t.
[…]
In the qualitative portion of our study, we learned that people do not feel in control of their experience on YouTube, nor do they have clear information about how to curate their recommendations. Many people take a trial-and-error approach to controlling their recommendations using YouTube’s hodgepodge of options, like “Dislike,” “Not Interested,” and other buttons. It doesn’t seem to work.
[…]
we ran a randomized controlled experiment across our community of RegretsReporter participants that could directly test the effectiveness of YouTube’s user controls. We found that YouTube’s user controls somewhat influence what is recommended, but this effect is meager and most unwanted videos still slip through.
[…]
Even the most effective feedback methods prevent less than half of bad recommendations.
[…]
Our main recommendation is that YouTube should enable people to shape what they see.
YouTube’s user controls should be easy to understand and access. People should be provided with clear information about the steps they can take to influence their recommendations, and should be empowered to use those tools.
YouTube should design its feedback tools in a way that puts people in the driver’s seat. Feedback tools should enable people to proactively shape their experience, with user feedback given more weight in determining what videos are recommended.
YouTube should enhance its data access tools. YouTube should provide researchers with access to better tools that allow them to assess the signals that impact YouTube’s algorithm.
Policymakers should protect public interest researchers. Policymakers should pass and/or clarify laws that provide legal protections for public interest research.
Google is releasing a tool that makes it easier to remove search results containing your address, phone number and other personally identifiable information, 9to5Google has reported. It first revealed the “results about you” feature at I/O 2022 in May, describing it as a way to “help you easily control whether your personally-identifiable information can be found in Search results.”
If you see a result with your phone number, home address or email, you can click on the three-dot menu at the top right. That opens the usual “About this result” panel, but it now contains a new “Remove result” option at the bottom of the screen. A dialog states that if the result contains one of those three things, “we can review your request more quickly.”
[…]
“It’s important to note that when we receive removal requests, we will evaluate all content on the web page to ensure that we’re not limiting the availability of other information that is broadly useful, for instance in news articles. And of course, removing contact information from Google Search doesn’t remove it from the web, which is why you may wish to contact the hosting site directly, if you’re comfortable doing so.”
Stonk bros are mad at the doc for a few different reasons, but the two big things that keep coming up are the supposed lack of input from investors on r/SuperStonk and r/WallStreetBets and because of the final line of the trailer, spoken by journalist Taylor Lorenz. The trailer ends with her seemingly poking fun at the Redditors who set out to fight the GameStop short sellers, saying, “Yolo, let’s destroy the economy.” That line seems to have really angered a particular group of Reddit investors.
“I’m ready to cancel Netflix anyways…yolo lady gave me a reason. Slater Netflix,” said one user on r/SuperStonk. “Cancel Netflix and use that money to buy GME [stock]?” replied another. Of course, very few have shared images or other evidence proving that they have canceled their subscriptions, or that they even had one to begin with. And other users on r/SuperStonk expressed disbelief at the idea of people canceling a sub over a documentary that hadn’t even been released yet.
Still, over on Twitter, you can find tons of angry replies to Netflix’s trailer, with people claiming it’s just a hit job meant to make retail investors look terrible. Even Taylor Lorenz has come out and clarified that she is adamantly opposed to the broken and unfair economic system of Wall Street, calling it “undeniably unhealthy.” But that doesn’t matter to angry investors. I guess all you need is one soundbite from an unreleased movie’s trailer to know it’s a hit piece.
Just – wow, calling retail investors who caught and exposed a massive illegal short on Gamestop and then managed to actually do something about it Stonkbros is also a hit piece.
Chrome’s enhanced spellcheck & Edge’s MS Editor are sending data you enter into form fields like username, email, DOB, SSN, basically anything in the fields, to sites you’re logging into from either of those browsers when the features are enabled. Furthermore, if you click on “show password,” the enhanced spellcheck even sends your password, essentially Spell-Jacking your data.
[…]
shows employee credentials(password) being sent to Google while logging into the company’s Alibaba Cloud Account.
otto-js co-founder & CTO Josh Summitt discovered the spellcheck leak while testing the company’s script behaviors detection.
“If ‘show password’ is enabled, the feature even sends your password to their 3rd-party servers. While researching for data leaks in different browsers, we found a combination of features that, once enabled, will unnecessarily expose sensitive data to 3rd Parties like Google and Microsoft. What’s concerning is how easy these features are to enable and that most users will enable these features without really realizing what is happening in the background.” Josh Summitt
[…]
oth security teams from AWS and LastPass have responded to the outreach and both have already mitigated the issue.
Office 365
Alibaba – Cloud Service
Google Cloud – Secret Manager
AWS – Secrets Manager (UPDATE: has already fully mitigated the issue)
LastPass (UPDATE: has already fully mitigated the issue)
If someone showed you a photo of a crocodile and asked whether it was a bird, you might laugh—and then, if you were patient and kind, help them identify the animal. Such real-world, and sometimes dumb, interactions may be key to helping artificial intelligence learn, according to a new study in which the strategy dramatically improved an AI’s accuracy at interpreting novel images. The approach could help AI researchers more quickly design programs that do everything from diagnose disease to direct robots or other devices around homes on their own.
[…]
To help AIs expand their understanding of the world, researchers are now trying to develop a way for computer programs to both locate gaps in their knowledge and figure out how to ask strangers to fill them—a bit like a child asks a parent why the sky is blue. The ultimate aim in the new study was an AI that could correctly answer a variety of questions about images it has not seen before.
[…]
in the new study, researchers at Stanford University led by Ranjay Krishna, now at the University of Washington, Seattle, trained a machine-leaning system not only to spot gaps in its knowledge but to compose (often dumb) questions about images that strangers would patiently answer. (Q: “What is the shape of the sink?” A: “It’s a square.”)
It’s important to think about how AI presents itself, says Kurt Gray, a social psychologist at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, who has studied human-AI interaction but was not involved in the work. “In this case, you want it to be kind of like a kid, right?” he says. Otherwise, people might think you’re a troll for asking seemingly ridiculous questions.
The team “rewarded” its AI for writing intelligible questions: When people actually responded to a query, the system received feedback telling it to adjust its inner workings so as to behave similarly in the future. Over time, the AI implicitly picked up lessons in language and social norms, honing its ability to ask questions that were sensical and easily answerable.
Q: What type of dessert is that in the picture? A: hi dear it’s coconut cake, it tastes amazing 🙂 R. Krishna et al., PNAS, DOI: 2115730119 (2022)
The new AI has several components, some of them neural networks, complex mathematical functions inspired by the brain’s architecture. “There are many moving pieces … that all need to play together,” Krishna says. One component selected an image on Instagram—say a sunset—and a second asked a question about that image—for example, “Is this photo taken at night?” Additional components extracted facts from reader responses and learned about images from them.
Across 8 months and more than 200,000 questions on Instagram, the system’s accuracy at answering questions similar to those it had posed increased 118%, the team reports today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. A comparison system that posted questions on Instagram but was not explicitly trained to maximize response rates improved its accuracy only 72%, in part because people more frequently ignored it.
The main innovation, Jaques says, was rewarding the system for getting humans to respond, “which is not that crazy from a technical perspective, but very important from a research-direction perspective.” She’s also impressed by the large-scale, real-world deployment on Instagram. (Humans checked all AI-generated questions for offensive material before posting them.)
Germany’s general data retention law violates EU law, Europe’s top court ruled on Tuesday, dealing a blow to member states banking on blanket data collection to fight crime and safeguard national security.
The law may only be applied in circumstances where there is a serious threat to national security defined under very strict terms, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) said.
The ruling comes after major attacks by Islamist militants in France, Belgium and Britain in recent years.
Governments argue that access to data, especially that collected by telecoms operators, can help prevent such incidents, while operators and civil rights activists oppose such access.
The latest case was triggered after Deutsche Telekom (DTEGn.DE) unit Telekom Deutschland and internet service provider SpaceNet AG challenged Germany’s data retention law arguing it breached EU rules.
The German court subsequently sought the advice of the CJEU which said such data retention can only be allowed under very strict conditions.
“The Court of Justice confirms that EU law precludes the general and indiscriminate retention of traffic and location data, except in the case of a serious threat to national security,” the judges said.
“However, in order to combat serious crime, the member states may, in strict compliance with the principle of proportionality, provide for, inter alia, the targeted or expedited retention of such data and the general and indiscriminate retention of IP addresses,” they said.
Excellent work by the court – targeted investigation has been proven to be much more effective than blanket surveillance. Other than that blanket surveillance turns your country into an Orwellian nightmare.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: Morgan Stanley Smith Barney has agreed to pay a $35 million fine to settle claims that it failed to protect the personal information of about 15 million customers, the Securities and Exchange Commission said on Tuesday. In a statement announcing the settlement, the S.E.C. described what it called Morgan Stanley’s “extensive failures,” over a five-year period beginning in 2015, to safeguard customer information, in part by not properly disposing of hard drives and servers that ended up for sale on an internet auction site.
On several occasions, the commission said, Morgan Stanley hired a moving and storage company with no experience or expertise in data destruction services to decommission thousands of hard drives and servers containing the personal information of millions of its customers. The moving company then sold thousands of the devices to a third party, and the devices were then resold on an unnamed internet auction site, the commission said. An information technology consultant in Oklahoma who bought some of the hard drives on the internet chastised Morgan Stanley after he found that he could still access the firm’s data on those devices.
Morgan Stanley is “a major financial institution and should be following some very stringent guidelines on how to deal with retiring hardware,” the consultant wrote in an email to Morgan Stanley in October 2017, according to the S.E.C. The firm should, at a minimum, get “some kind of verification of data destruction from the vendors you sell equipment to,” the consultant wrote, according to the S.E.C. Morgan Stanley eventually bought the hard drives back from the consultant. Morgan Stanley also recovered some of the other devices that it had improperly discarded, but has not recovered the “vast majority” of them, the commission said. The settlement also notes that Morgan Stanley “had not properly disposed of consumer report information when it decommissioned servers from local offices and branches as part of a ‘hardware refresh program’ in 2019,” reports the Times. “Morgan Stanley later learned that the devices had been equipped with encryption capability, but that it had failed to activate the encryption software for years, the commission said.”
Fintech startup Revolut has confirmed it was hit by a highly targeted cyberattack that allowed hackers to access the personal details of tens of thousands of customers.
Revolut spokesperson Michael Bodansky told TechCrunch that an “unauthorized third party obtained access to the details of a small percentage (0.16%) of our customers for a short period of time.” Revolut discovered the malicious access late on September 11 and isolated the attack by the following morning.
“We immediately identified and isolated the attack to effectively limit its impact and have contacted those customers affected,” Bodansky said. “Customers who have not received an email have not been impacted.”
Revolut, which has a banking license in Lithuania, wouldn’t say exactly how many customers were affected. Its website says the company has approximately 20 million customers; 0.16% would translate to about 32,000 customers. However, according to Revolut’s breach disclosure to the authorities in Lithuania, first spotted by Bleeping Computer, the company says 50,150 customers were impacted by the breach, including 20,687 customers in the European Economic Area and 379 Lithuanian citizens.
Revolut also declined to say what types of data were accessed but told TechCrunch that no funds were accessed or stolen in the incident. In a message sent to affected customers posted to Reddit, the company said that “no card details, PINs or passwords were accessed.” However, the breach disclosure states that hackers likely accessed partial card payment data, along with customers’ names, addresses, email addresses and phone numbers.
The disclosure states that the threat actor used social engineering methods to gain access to the Revolut database, which typically involves persuading an employee to hand over sensitive information such as their password. This has become a popular tactic in recent attacks against a number of well-known companies, including Twilio, Mailchimp and Okta.
