Free Republic

Pornography online attracts millions of erotica-hungry people ready to see sex on-demand. You can simply ask your phone to show you anything you desire and there it is: any time, any place. With the advent of deepfake porn, the possibilities have expanded even further, with people who have never starred in adult films looking as though they’re doing sexual acts on camera. Experts have warned that these videos enable all sorts of bad things to happen, from paedophilia to fabricated revenge porn. What are deepfakes? Deepfakes are videos and images that use deep learning AI to forge something not actually...

Washington (AFP) – If you see a video of a politician speaking words he never would utter, or a Hollywood star improbably appearing in a cheap adult movie, don’t adjust your television set — you may just be witnessing the future of “fake news.” “Deepfake” videos that manipulate reality are becoming more sophisticated due to advances in artificial intelligence, creating the potential for new kinds of misinformation with devastating consequences. As the technology advances, worries are growing about how deepfakes can be used for nefarious purposes by hackers or state actors. “We’re not quite to the stage where we are...

Lawmakers and experts are sounding the alarm about "deepfakes," forged videos that look remarkably real, warning they will be the next phase in disinformation campaigns. The manipulated videos make it difficult to distinguish between fact and fiction, as artificial intelligence technology produces fake content that looks increasingly real. The issue has the attention of lawmakers from both parties on Capitol Hill. “It is almost too late to sound the alarm before this technology is released — it has been unleashed … and now we are playing a bit of defense,” Senate Intelligence Committee Vice Chairman Mark Warner (D-Va.) told The...

Scary: What would happen if a hostile foreign power could harness the technology to be able to produce high-quality audio and video of people saying things they never said or doing things they have never done? What kind of an impact could that have on, say, our democratic and electoral processes? It would be devastating and could perhaps even destroy the tenuous civil society that remains after years of Democrats attempting to sow distrust in our systems by claiming elections were “stolen” either by Russians or sinister Republicans. And yet, thanks to artificial intelligence, the day when an adversary can...

AUSTIN, Texas — U.S. leaders say Vladimir Putin used a familiar cyber playbook to “muck around” in the midterm elections last month, but intelligence officials and key lawmakers believe a much more sinister, potentially devastating threat lies just down the road — one that represents an attack on reality itself. Policy insiders and senators of both parties believe the Russian president or other actors hostile to the U.S. will rely on “deep fakes” to throw the 2020 presidential election cycle into chaos, taking their campaign to influence American voters and destabilize society to a new level. The eerie process, which...

WASHINGTON – New technology on the internet lets anyone make videos of real people appearing to say things they've never said. Republicans and Democrats predict this high-tech way of putting words in someone's mouth will become the latest weapon in disinformation wars against the United States and other Western democracies. This technology uses facial mapping and artificial intelligence to produce videos that appear so genuine it's hard to spot what is phony. Lawmakers and intelligence officials worry that the bogus videos — called deepfakes — could be used to threaten national security or interfere in elections, including the U.S. midterms...

Authorities in Los Angeles launched an investigation on Wednesday after a video emerged online showing several high school students covering their faces with dark paint and using racial slurs. The video, originally posted to Snapchat and later shared on Twitter, documents a group of predominantly female students laughing as one male teenager’s face is coated with a dark paint.

BREAKING @Vimeo has REMOVED Project Veritas saying: "You cannot upload videos that are hateful, defamatory, or discriminatory." Perhaps we embarrassed @Google but NOTHING we said was hateful, defamatory, or discriminatory. They're trying to erase us from the internet.

Facebook... posts may be able to predict whether someone will develop diabetes and other conditions including depression, anxiety, alcohol abuse, sexually-transmitted diseases, and drug abuse better than demographic information like age, sex, and race. People who often use the words “God” and “pray” in their Facebook posts are 15 times more likely to develop Type 2 diabetes than people who rarely use those terms on the platform, a new study from the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine finds. Raina Merchant, the lead author of the study and the director of Penn Medicine’s Center for Digital Health, said she didn’t...

Facebook monitors the offline behavior of its users to determine if they should be categorized as a “Hate Agent,” according to a document provided exclusively to Breitbart News by a source within the social media giant. The document, titled “Hate Agent Policy Review” outlines a series of “signals” that Facebook uses to determine if someone ought to be categorized as a “hate agent” and banned from the platform. Those signals include a wide range of on- and off-platform behavior. If you praise the wrong individual, interview them, or appear at events alongside them, Facebook may categorize you as a “hate...

We are living with a new kind of regime that didn’t exist in Orwell’s time. It combines hard nationalism—the diversion of frustration and cynicism into xenophobia and hatred—with soft distraction and confusion: a blend of Orwell and Huxley, cruelty and entertainment. The state of mind that the Party enforces through terror in 1984, where truth becomes so unstable that it ceases to exist, we now induce in ourselves. Totalitarian propaganda unifies control over all information, until reality is what the Party says it is—the goal of Newspeak is to impoverish language so that politically incorrect thoughts are no longer possible....

"Allsop suggested the site needed to take educational context into account rather than rely on automated processes: “I fully support YouTube’s increased efforts to curb hate speech, but also feel that silencing the very people who seek to teach about its dangers could be counter-productive to YouTube’s intended goal.”

WASHINGTON — World View announced June 5 it performed the longest flight to date of its stratospheric balloon, demonstrating its ability to carry out missions traditionally reserved for satellites. The company said its Stratollite balloon system recently completed a 16-day test flight, taking off May 18 from the company’s headquarters in Tucson, Arizona, and landing June 3 in Nevada. Prior to this flight, the longest flight by a Stratollite was five days. In addition to proving its ability for extended flights, the Stratollite also demonstrated its ability to maintain position. That included “multiple” tests where the balloon stayed within an...

The Swedish government is weighing whether it should ban its historical imagery including rune script and Norse symbols, since they may be viewed as “hate” symbols. This isn’t an isolated incident, either. In the United States, historical statues and imagery across the country—from war memorials, to Civil War leaders, to paintings of George Washington—have been targeted for destruction by individuals who find them offensive. A new history is being shown to youth in the United States, and in many other countries, which criticizes their traditional cultures, curses their founding stories, and condemns their founders. They are being taught to hate...

The former Smiths frontman has become an increasingly controversial figure in recent years for a string of remarks and his support for the far right. He voiced support for EDL founder Tommy Robinson in the wake of his sentencing for contempt of court, saying: “It’s very obvious that Labour or the Tories do not believe in free speech … I mean, look at the shocking treatment of Tommy Robinson.” He described halal meat preparation as evil and “requires certification that can only be given by supporters of Isis”

Appearing Friday on The Hugh Hewitt Show, 2020 Democrat White House contender and South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg said events bearing President Thomas Jefferson’s name should be renamed, calling it the “right thing to do.” (VIDEO LINK) Buttigieg on Renaming Things Named After Thomas Jefferson: 'It's the Right Thing to Do' ....HUGH HEWITT: Let’s go to policy now. A very blunt question because you talk about going to every Jefferson-Jackson Dinner in Indiana when you were running statewide. Should Jefferson-Jackson dinners be renamed everywhere because both were holders of slaves? MAYOR PETE BUTTIGIEG: Yeah, we’re doing that in Indiana. I...

Imagine calling a friend. Only instead of hearing a ring tone you hear a police siren, and then a voice intoning, “Be careful in your dealings with this person.” Would that put a damper on your relationship? It’s supposed to. Welcome to life in China’s “Social Credit System,” where a low score can ruin your life in more ways than one. Say you arrive at the Beijing airport, intending to catch a flight to Canton 1,200 miles south. The clerk at the ticket counter turns you away because — you guessed it — your social credit score is too low.

As well as signing up to the largely symbolic document produced in Paris, leading tech companies agreed to a nine-point plan for putting the Christchurch pledges into action. Among their commitments, Facebook, Amazon, Google, Twitter and Microsoft said they would update their terms of use to "expressly prohibit the distribution of terrorist and violent extremist content" and develop crisis protocols to respond to emerging or active events such as a terror attack. The companies said they would also commit to publishing "transparency reports" on the detection and removal of terror or violent extremist content. "Terrorism and violent extremism are complex...

New York (CNN)Facebook barred seven users from its services earlier this week, citing its policies against "dangerous individuals and organizations." Now President Donald Trump is siding with the people who were banned and railing against social media "censorship" -- all while using one of his favorite social sites. The president shared more than a dozen tweets about the subject on Friday night and Saturday morning. And he conveniently avoided the fact that some of the banned users are extremists who make a living by deceiving their fans. His posts were a rallying cry, full of resentment toward Big Tech. He...

If reason ruled in politics, the Democratic party would urge its presidential candidates to eliminate the vitriolic posturing from their campaign, and would then begin to concentrate on the only question that matters: Who can beat Reagan? That is different from asking whether Walter Mondale would make a better chief executive than Gary Hart, or whether Hart’s “new ideas” are preferable to Mondale’s old-line liberal values. What troubles me is that, given the rising nastiness, this campaign begins more and more to resemble the terrible script written in 1972, when another new face, George McGovern, was buried by Richard Nixon’s...