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It’s likely the diamondback squid. There’s a video.
As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered.
Read my blog posting guidelines here.
Last month, I gave a 15-minute talk in London titled: “Why technologists need to get involved in public policy.”
In it, I try to make the case for public-interest technologists. (I also maintain a public-interest tech resources page, which has pretty much everything I can find in this space. If I’m missing something, please let me know.)
Boing Boing post.
EDITED TO ADD (10/29): Twitter summary.
Another piglet squid video.
As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered.
Read my blog posting guidelines here.
There’s a really interesting video of protesters in Hong Kong using some sort of laser to disable security cameras. I know nothing more about the technologies involved.
EDITED TO ADD (8/14): LIDAR from self-driving cars has damaged security cameras before.
This is a fantastic video of a young giant squid named Heck swimming around Toyama Bay near Tokyo.
As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered.
Read my blog posting guidelines here.
Stealing packages from unattended porches is a rapidly rising crime, as more of us order more things by mail. One person hid a glitter bomb and a video recorder in a package, posting the results when thieves opened the box. At least, that’s what might have happened. At least some of the video was faked, which puts the whole thing into question.
That’s okay, though. Santa is faked, too. Happy whatever you’re celebrating.
My latest book is doing well. And I’ve been giving lots of talks and interviews about it. (I can recommend three interviews: the Cyberlaw podcast with Stewart Baker, the Lawfare podcast with Ben Wittes, and Le Show with Harry Shearer.) My book talk at Google is also available.
The Audible version was delayed for reasons that were never adequately explained to me, but it’s finally out.
I still have signed copies available. Be aware that this is both slower and more expensive than online bookstores.
Pretty good video.
As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered.
Read my blog posting guidelines here.
This story nicely illustrates the arms race between technologies to create fake videos and technologies to detect fake videos:
These fakes, while convincing if you watch a few seconds on a phone screen, aren’t perfect (yet). They contain tells, like creepily ever-open eyes, from flaws in their creation process. In looking into DeepFake’s guts, Lyu realized that the images that the program learned from didn’t include many with closed eyes (after all, you wouldn’t keep a selfie where you were blinking, would you?). “This becomes a bias,” he says. The neural network doesn’t get blinking. Programs also might miss other “physiological signals intrinsic to human beings,” says Lyu’s paper on the phenomenon, such as breathing at a normal rate, or having a pulse. (Autonomic signs of constant existential distress are not listed.) While this research focused specifically on videos created with this particular software, it is a truth universally acknowledged that even a large set of snapshots might not adequately capture the physical human experience, and so any software trained on those images may be found lacking.
Lyu’s blinking revelation revealed a lot of fakes. But a few weeks after his team put a draft of their paper online, they got anonymous emails with links to deeply faked YouTube videos whose stars opened and closed their eyes more normally. The fake content creators had evolved.
I don’t know who will win this arms race, if there ever will be a winner. But the problem with fake videos goes deeper: they affect people even if they are later told that they are fake, and there always will be people that will believe they are real, despite any evidence to the contrary.
The former CIA Chief of Disguise has a fascinating video about her work.
Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.