Media and News – Page 11

The war on (unwanted) dick pics has begun

Legislators and tech companies are finally working to protect women from receiving unwanted sexually explicit images online – will it work?

The war on (unwanted) dick pics has begun according to a Guardian article about a web developer who asked people to send her “dick pics” so she could train a machine to recognize them and deal with them. The Guardian rightly asks why tech-companies don’t provide more tools for users to deal with harassing messages.

The interesting thing is how many women get them (53% get lewd images) and how many men have sent one (27% of millenial men). (Data from Pew Online Harassment 2017 and the I’ll Show You Mine study.)

Continue reading The war on (unwanted) dick pics has begun

Bird Scooter Charging Is ‘One Level Up From Collecting Cans’–But These Entrepreneurs Are Making a Lucrative Business of It

Scooters have come to Edmonton. Both Bird and Lime dumped hundreds of scooters in my neighbourhood just before the Fringe festival. Users are supposed to use bike lanes and shared-use paths, but of course they tend to use sidewalks. Fortunately most people using them seem to tying them for a lark rather than seriously trying to get somewhere.

I can’t help thinking this business is a bit like the Segway (a company apparently making money now selling the scooters) – a great concept that appeals to venture capital, but not something that will work economically. For example, what will happen in the winter? Will the companies leave them around in the snow or pack them up for the season?

The economic model of these companies is also interesting. They seem to have minimal staff in each city. They pay chargers a to find the scooters and charge them each night. More gig-economy work that may not provide a living! See Bird Scooter Charging Is ‘One Level Up From Collecting Cans’–But These Entrepreneurs Are Making a Lucrative Business of It.

At the end of the day, does anyone make enough to make this viable? One wonders if the scooter companies are selling the data they gather?

Facebook refused to delete an altered video of Nancy Pelosi. Would the same rule apply to Mark Zuckerberg?

‘Imagine this for a second…’ (2019) from Bill Posters on Vimeo.

A ‘deepfake’ of Zuckerberg was uploaded to Instagram and appears to show him delivering an ominous message

The issue of “deepfakes” is big on the internet after someone posted a slowed down video of Nancy Pelosi to make her look drunk and then, after Facebook didn’t take it down a group posted a fake Zuckerberg video. See Facebook refused to delete an altered video of Nancy Pelosi. Would the same rule apply to Mark Zuckerberg? This video was created by artists Posters and Howe and is part of a series

While the Pelosi video was a crude hack, the Zuckerberg video used AI technology from Canny AI, a company that has developed tools for replacing dialogue in video (which has legitimate uses in localization of educational content, for example.) The artists provided a voice actor with a script and then the AI trained on existing video of Zuckerberg and that of the voice actor to morph Zuckerberg’s facial movements to match the actor’s.

What is interesting is that the Zuckerberg video is part of an installation called Spectre with a number of deliberate fakes that were exhibited at a venue associated with the Sheffield Doc|Fest. Spectre, as the name suggests, both suggests how our data can be used to create ghost media of us, but also reminds us playfully of that fictional criminal organization that haunted James Bond. We are now being warned that real, but spectral organizations could haunt our democracy, messing with elections anonymously.

Amazon’s Home Surveillance Company Is Putting Suspected Petty Thieves in its Advertisements

Ring, Amazon’s doorbell company, posted a video of a woman suspected of a crime and asked users to call the cops with information.

VICE has a story about how Amazon’s Home Surveillance Company Is Putting Suspected Petty Thieves in its Advertisements. The story is that Ring took out an ad which showed suspicious behaviour. A woman who is presumably innocent until proven guilty is shown clearly in order to sell more alarm systems. This information came from the police.

Needless to say, it raises ethical issues around community policing. Ring has a “Neighbors” app that lets vigilantes report suspicious behaviour creating a form of digital neighbourhood watch. The article references a Motherboard article that suggests that such digital neighbourhood surveillance can lead to racism.

Beyond creating a “new neighborhood watch,” Amazon and Ring are normalizing the use of video surveillance and pitting neighbors against each other. Chris Gilliard, a professor of English at Macomb Community College who studies institutional tech policy, told Motherboard in a phone call that such a “crime and safety” focused platforms can actively reinforce racism.

All we need now is for there to be AI in the mix. Face recognition so you can identify anyone walking past your door.

Apple News and News+

After a month or so of being subscribed to Apple News+, today I dropped the subscription. It was one more subscription, and they add up. More importantly, it wasn’t giving me the news. When Notre Dame was burning Apple News+ was feeding me inane lifestyle stories. It didn’t seem to be able to gather and present current news, just glossy magazine articles. Perhaps it wasn’t meant to compete with Google News. Perhaps I wasn’t meant to pay for it.

$432 000 painting “by AI” sold at Christie’s

A painting created using GANs (generative adversarial networks) sold for $432 000 at Christies today.

Last year a $432 000 painting “by AI” sold at Christie’s. The painting was created by a collective called Obvious. They used a Generative Adversarial Network. In an essay titled, A naive yet educated perspective on Art and Artificial Intelligence, they talk about how they created the work.

Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) analyze tens of thousands of images, learn from their features, and are trained with the aim to create new images that are undistinguishable from the original data source.

They also point out that many of the same concerns people have about AI art today were voiced about photography in the 19th century. Photography automated the image making business much as AIs are automating other tasks.

Can we use these GANs for other generative scholarship?

Racism, misogyny, death threats: Why can’t the booming video-game industry curb toxicity? – Silicon Valley

Silicon Valley is reprinting a story from the Washington post, Racism, misogyny, death threats: Why can’t the booming video-game industry curb toxicity? The story is one more on how nasty online gaming can be. The usual companies try to reduce the toxicity of game culture and don’t really succeed. So we are left to just ignore it?

With no clear methods to effectively monitor, halt or eliminate toxic behavior, many in the gaming community have simply tried to ignore it and continue playing anyway. Many of the titles cited most for toxic players remain the industry’s most popular.

Finding Lena Forsen, the Patron Saint of JPEGs | WIRED

In 1972, a photo of a Swedish Playboy model was used to engineer the digital image format that would become the JPEG. The model herself was mostly a mystery—until now.

Wired has another story on Finding Lena Forsen, the Patron Saint of JPEGs. This is not, however, the first time her story has been told. I blogged about the use of the Lena image back in 2004. It seems like this story will be rediscovered every decade.

What has changed is that people are calling out the casual sexism of tech culture. An example is Chang’s book Brotopia that starts with the Lena story.

Cybersecurity

The New York Times has a nice short video on cybersecurity which is increasingly an issue. One of the things they mention is how it was the USA and Israel that may have opened the Pandora’s box of cyberweapons when they used Stuxnet to damage Iran’s nuclear programme. By using a sophisticated worm first we both legitimized the use of cyberwar against other countries which one is not at war with, and we showed what could be done. This, at least, is the argument of a good book on Stuxnet, Countdown to Zero Day.

Now the problem is that the USA, while having good offensive capability, is also one of the most vulnerable countries because of the heavy use of information technology in all walks of life. How can we defend against the weapons we have let loose?

What is particularly worrisome is that cyberweapons are being designed so that they are hard to trace and subtly disruptive in ways that are short of all out war. We are seeing a new form of hot/cold war where countries harass each other electronically without actually declaring war and getting civilian input. After 2016 all democratic countries need to protect against electoral disruption which then puts democracies at a disadvantage over closed societies.