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Using a clip from a recent appearance on Conan, a YouTuber “deepfaked” Arnold Schwarzenegger’s head onto comedian Bill Hader’s body. Photo: YouTube ============================================================ A shadow looms over the 2020 election: Deepfakes! The newish video-editing technology (or really, host of technologies) used to seamlessly paste one person’s face on another’s body, has activated a panic among pundits and politicians. During an appearance on CBS This Morning this week, Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri summed up the general attitude toward deepfakes, which his platform currently doesn’t have a policy against: “I don’t feel good about it.” Earlier this month, deepfaked and manipulated videos...

Jony Ive, Apple’s chief design officer, is leaving the company, Apple announced on Thursday. Apple stock dropped 1% on the news in after-hours trading. Ive is considered one of the most important people at Apple, responsible for the industrial design and the look and feel of all major Apple products, including the iPhone and the Mac. He had worked at Apple for more than 20 years. (please see link for full story)

A small city in Florida has agreed to pay nearly $600,000 in bitcoin ransom to hackers who took control of its computer systems in a ransomware attack, according to reports. The Riviera Beach City Council on Monday unanimously approved its insurance carrier to pay 65 bitcoin — valued at about $592,000 — in hopes of regaining full access to its network, the Palm Beach Post reported. The attack two weeks ago wiped out the city’s entire computer system. The city council was left without email and phone service, direct-deposit paychecks had to be hand-delivered instead and the police department had...

What are these weird directories, and why are they there? If you are new to the Linux command line, you may find yourself wondering why there are so many unusual directories, what they are there for, and why things are organized the way they are. In fact, if you aren't accustomed to how Linux organizes files, the directories can seem downright arbitrary with odd truncated names and, in many cases, redundant names. It turns out there's a method to this madness based on decades of UNIX convention, and in this article, I provide an introduction to the Linux directory structure....

Planned obsolescence, or built-in obsolescence, in industrial design and economics is a policy of planning or designing a product with an artificially limited useful life, so it will become obsolete (that is, unfashionable or no longer functional) after a certain period of time. No company will admit they have this policy, but we can observe this from a products’ average failure rate and the company’s sincerity in fixing it by making available parts required to fix it. This is why I am a huge fan of Japanese products and also Apple. Products are not merely hardware, Apple on the other...

FBI at hearing about Crowdstrike: the EPITOME of Ridiculous BS DEFENSE ATTORNEY: Agent Smith, you testified that the Russians hacked the DNC computers, is that correct? FBI AGENT JOHN SMITH: That is correct. DEF ATT: Upon what information did you base your testimony? AGENT: Information found in reports analyzing the breach of the computers. DEF ATT: So, the FBI prepared these reports? AGENT: (cough)…. (shift in seat) No, a cyber security contractor with the FBI. DEF ATT: Pardon me, why would a contractor be preparing these reports? Do these contractors run the FBI laboratories where the server was examined? AGENT:...

In the future, Facebook won't be a social-media site. Facebook is under a lot of scrutiny and pressure at the moment. It's accused of helping foreign actors to subvert elections by using ads and fake accounts to spread lies—in the US, for example—and of acting as a conduit for terrorism in New Zealand and elsewhere. There are calls to break up the company or at least to rein it in. In an evident attempt to head off those moves, and to limit the damage that recent events have caused to Facebook's reputation, Mark Zuckerberg has been publishing some long, philosophical...

Meltdown, Spectre, Foreshadow, and ZombieLoad are critical vulnerabilities in modern processors. I need a new computer. How long do I have to wait until a new processor will be available that is designed without those problems? Or am I going to have to go ahead and buy and live with the patches that reportedly cripple performance?

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...

FULL TITLE: An NSA cyber weapon is reportedly being used against American cities by the very adversaries it was meant to target In less than three years after the National Security Agency found itself subject to an unprecedentedly catastrophic hacking episode, one of the agency's most powerful cyber weapons is reportedly being turned against American cities with alarming frequency by the very foreign hackers it was once intended to counter. An explosive New York Times story published Saturday detailing how the NSA's Tailored Access Operations lost control of its so-called 'EternalBlue' malware tool to a cadre of hackers known as...

“IT’S CHEATING.” That’s the response you’ll hear from self-proclaimed music purists talking about technological innovation in song creation. Sampling, synthesizers, drum machines, Auto-Tune—all have been derided as lazy ways to make chart-topping hits because they take away the human element. (With apologies to Vanilla Ice, Gary Numan, Prince, and T-Pain.) The new argument among fans and musicians will be about the use of artificial intelligence in songwriting. According to several estimates, in the next decade, between 20% and 30% of the top 40 singles will be written partially or totally with machine-learning software. Today, recording pros can use A.I.-powered programs...

he team moves through a dark, narrow hallway, emerging into a room crammed with an odd sort of contraband: toner and ink cartridges stacked almost to the ceiling. Authorities question a woman who deflects at first before finally admitting that all of them are counterfeits. The video, shot in India and shared with me by Hewlett-Packard (HP Inc), illustrates the raids local authorities have conducted hundreds of times around the world to try and stem the flow of counterfeit ink and toner cartridges. It’s reminiscent of a drug bust, and the economic stakes are nearly as high. According to the...

A decades-old classic that joins the likes of Doom, Tetris, Pokémon, and The Legend of Zelda When selecting new entires for the World Video Game Hall of Fame, judges consider a number of criteria. Is the game widely known and remembered? Has its popularity endured over the years? And did it influence not only other video games, but society in general? Microsoft Solitaire, bundled with the Windows operating system since 1990, might seem like a modest example of video gaming culture, but it easily meets the above benchmarks. And so, as of this month, it’s now an official member of...

[A] bit of heat production from resistance is a desirable characteristic in metallic thin films for spintronic applications such as solid-state computer memory. Similarly, while defects are often undesirable in materials science, they can be used to control creation of magnetic quasi-particles known as skyrmions. In separate papers published this month in the journals Nature Nanotechnology and Advanced Materials, researchers in the group of MIT Professor Geoffrey S.D. Beach and colleagues in California, Germany, Switzerland, and Korea, showed that they can generate stable and fast moving skyrmions in specially formulated layered materials at room temperature, setting world records for size...

"From the data, we can conclude that the Google search results were favoring liberal website. It is also possible to conclude that DuckDuckGo results have a greater political variety compared to Google."

A discrepancy of slightly more than 60,000 votes between the summaries of the valid votes of all parties in the elections and the number appearing on the committee's website may decide the fate of the New Right Party. According to data appearing on the Election Committee's website from early morning, the New Right Party received 3.26 percent of the vote, while the electoral threshold stands at 3.25 percent of the vote, meaning that it exceeded the threshold. However, an examination of total valid votes granted to all parties running in the Knesset elections shows the number at 4,291,707, while the...

A Look at the Short-Lived 3-Inch Compact Floppy Disk Posted on February 25, 2019 by Blake Patterson I was recently listening to the latest episode of Retro Computing Roundtable podcast during which there was mention of a 3-inch floppy disk. No, not 3.5-inch, but 3-inch. These disks are known as Compact Floppy Disks (also “CF2”) and were used in a number of systems outside the US, including some models of Amstrad, Tatung, and MSX machines. And, while the Sony-engineered 3.5-inch disks that those of us who don’t think that they are 3D-printed takes on the “save icon” know well are...

Not sure where to put this one, it could go in so many different sub-forums, so I'll just put it here in 'General'. The other day my laptop crashed and burned. Not sure what happened, but I think the motherboard fried. I managed to get it working enough to attach an external hard drive and mirror off all the data files. Most of it I already had backed up, but I just wanted to get the most recent data. Because many of my keyboard keys were not working I had to use some more global commands to get all the...

I started using Bing over Google as I was sick and tired of Google working with China's military, but not working with ours. They ban gun videos on Youtube. They help authoritarian countries institute censorship in search results. All the while we use them and they make money off of us. Google is Evil. Bing rewards you for your searches no different than the credit card companies do with their rewards. Using Google with no rewards is akin to using a credit card with no rewards. And Microsoft actually is a patriotic company and does not kow tow to the...

Tesla is the first automaker to participate in a Pwn2Own hacking event, which is run by Trend Micro’s Zero Day Initiative (ZDI). The event happened in Vancouver this week and a team of two hackers managed to find an exploit on the last day of competition. Over the past 4 years, Tesla has been running a bug bounty program and according to sources familiar with the effort, the company has given away hundreds of thousands in rewards to hackers who exposed vulnerabilities in its system