Tag: technology

Meta Brings Back Face Scanning

After three years, Meta’s apps will once again include facial recognition (this is currently in the testing phase). The giant is “selling” the move to its users as a way to fight scammers and make account recovery easier.

The feature was abandoned because of widespread criticism of this tech, but Facebook and Instagram users can now expect to have it back on their apps.

The first scenario involves deploying facial recognition to remove what is known as celeb-bait ads, which use photos of public figures to get users to visit scam websites.

Meta said that if it suspects this is happening, faces in the ad will be compared to the public figure’s Facebook and Instagram profile photos using facial recognition.

For now, the feature is applied to a group of celebrities and public figures, on an “opt-out” basis. The company also revealed that since it is happening in real-time, the process is “faster and more accurate” than when done manually.

And now, onto “ordinary people.” The second test involves getting the apps’ users to take video selfies and upload them to Meta. Once again, facial recognition will be used to match these to people’s profile photos, this time in order to speed up the account recovery process.

Meta is clearly counting on the “convenience factor” to persuade users that subjecting themselves to facial recognition carried out by a tech juggernaut is a good idea.

Another promise is that the process will help when accounts are believed to be compromised by hackers logging in with stolen credentials.

The inevitable question is, what happens to this sensitive personal biometric data, especially once in the hands of Meta? The company said it will not use it for any other purposes, that it will be encrypted, and “immediately” deleted once a comparison has been made.

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US authorizes CIA mercenaries to run biometric concentration camps in Gaza Strip

The Biden administration has approved the deployment of 1,000 CIA-trained private mercenaries as part of a joint U.S.-Israeli plan to turn Gaza’s apocalyptic rubblescape into a high-tech dystopia.

Starting with Al-Atatra, a village in the northwestern Gaza Strip, the plan calls to build what the Israeli daily Ynet calls “humanitarian bubbles” – turning the remains of villages and neighborhoods into tiny concentration camps cut off from their environs and surrounded and controlled by mercenaries.

This comes as Israel carries out daily massacres and ethnic cleansing in northern Gaza, enacting the proposal known as The Generals’ Plan, originally crafted by former national security chief Giora Eiland to turn Gaza into “a place where no human being can exist.”

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Smart TVs a ‘Vast System of Digital Surveillance’ That Targets Everyone, Especially Kids

The streaming television industry has morphed into a vast data-driven viewer surveillance apparatus, transforming people’s TVs into tools for monitoring, tracking and targeting, according to a new report from the nonprofit Center for Digital Democracy.

The 48-page report, “How TV Watches Us: Commercial Surveillance in the Streaming Era,” charts the evolution from broadcast, cable and satellite television to connected TV (CTV), a term that encompasses the wide range of content delivered through the internet to smart TVs.

CTV includes popular apps like YouTube TV, Free Advertiser-Supported TV (FAST) channels, and streaming services like Disney +, Netflix and Amazon Prime. It also includes Roku, smart TVs and smart TV devices themselves.

The report documents how CTV, whose surge in viewership is largely driven by young audiences, harvests user data through a “sophisticated and expansive commercial surveillance system” that privacy advocates argue undermines existing consumer protections.

“CTV has become a privacy nightmare for viewers,” said Jeff Chester, report co-author and executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy, in a press release. “It is now a core asset for the vast system of digital surveillance that shapes most of our online experiences … as it gathers and uses sensitive data about health, children, race and political interests.”

Over the past five years, CTV corporations have teamed up with data brokers like Experian and TransUnion to create new data-mining tools that capture and aggregate everything an individual user does on their smart TV. This information can be integrated with data captured from other devices and real-world activities.

Existing privacy policies don’t explain or protect people from these new forms of data capture, the Center for Digital Democracy said — so viewers should disregard any promises companies make about not collecting or sharing user information.

These new data-capture practices form the foundation for a system with “unprecedented capabilities for surveillance and manipulation,” the report warns. “As a consequence, buying a smart TV set in today’s connected television marketplace is akin to bringing a digital Trojan Horse into one’s home.”

The Center for Digital Democracy submitted the report, along with letters to the Federal Trade Commission, the Federal Communications Commission, the California attorney general and the California Privacy Protection Agency, calling for an investigation into the industry.

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Maps Show ‘Multiple Incursions’ of Mystery Drones near US Military Sites

The U.S. military observed drones making “multiple incursions” late last year over or near sensitive military sights, including an air force base, with national and local officials still unable to produce an explanation for violations of heavily monitored airspace.

The Wall Street Journal reported earlier this month that mysterious uncrewed aerial vehicles (UAVs) had been spotted around the Langley Air Force Base in Hampton, Virginia, shortly after sunset during a period of more than two weeks.

One senior official based at Langley told The Journal that multiple drones headed across Chesapeake Bay and further south toward the city of Norfolk. They reportedly traveled across the main base for the Navy’s lauded SEAL Team Six and Naval Station Norfolk, the world’s largest naval port.

The Langley base first saw the drones on the evening of December 6, and then “experienced multiple incursions throughout the month of December,” a spokesperson said in a statement.

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AI scans RNA ‘dark matter’ and uncovers 70,000 new viruses

Researchers have used artificial intelligence (AI) to uncover 70,500 viruses previously unknown to science1, many of them weird and nothing like known species. The RNA viruses were identified using metagenomics, in which scientists sample all the genomes present in the environment without having to culture individual viruses. The method shows the potential of AI to explore the ‘dark matter’ of the RNA virus universe.

Viruses are ubiquitous microorganisms that infect animals, plants and even bacteria, yet only a small fraction have been identified and described. There is “essentially a bottomless pit” of viruses to discover, says Artem Babaian, a computational virologist at the University of Toronto in Canada. Some of these viruses could cause diseases in people, which means that characterizing them could help to explain mystery illnesses, he says.

Previous studies have used machine learning to find new viruses in sequencing data. The latest study, published in Cell this week, takes that work a step further and uses it to look at predicted protein structures1.

The AI model incorporates a protein-prediction tool, called ESMFold, that was developed by researchers at Meta (formerly Facebook, headquartered in Menlo Park, California). A similar AI system, AlphaFold, was developed by researchers at Google DeepMind in London, who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry this week.

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The Pentagon Wants to Use AI to Create Deepfake Internet Users

The United States’ secretive Special Operations Command is looking for companies to help create deepfake internet users so convincing that neither humans nor computers will be able to detect they are fake, according to a procurement document reviewed by The Intercept.

The plan, mentioned in a new 76-page wish list by the Department of Defense’s Joint Special Operations Command, or JSOC, outlines advanced technologies desired for country’s most elite, clandestine military efforts. “Special Operations Forces (SOF) are interested in technologies that can generate convincing online personas for use on social media platforms, social networking sites, and other online content,” the entry reads.

The document specifies that JSOC wants the ability to create online user profiles that “appear to be a unique individual that is recognizable as human but does not exist in the real world,” with each featuring “multiple expressions” and “Government Identification quality photos.”

In addition to still images of faked people, the document notes that “the solution should include facial & background imagery, facial & background video, and audio layers,” and JSOC hopes to be able to generate “selfie video” from these fabricated humans. These videos will feature more than fake people: Each deepfake selfie will come with a matching faked background, “to create a virtual environment undetectable by social media algorithms.”

The Pentagon has already been caught using phony social media users to further its interests in recent years. In 2022, Meta and Twitter removed a propaganda network using faked accounts operated by U.S. Central Command, including some with profile pictures generated with methods similar to those outlined by JSOC. A 2024 Reuters investigation revealed a Special Operations Command campaign using fake social media users aimed at undermining foreign confidence in China’s Covid vaccine.

Last year, Special Operations Command, or SOCOM, expressed interest in using video “deepfakes,” a general term for synthesized audiovisual data meant to be indistinguishable from a genuine recording, for “influence operations, digital deception, communication disruption, and disinformation campaigns.” Such imagery is generated using a variety of machine learning techniques, generally using software that has been “trained” to recognize and recreate human features by analyzing a massive database of faces and bodies. This year’s SOCOM wish list specifies an interest in software similar to StyleGAN, a tool released by Nvidia in 2019 that powered the globally popular website “This Person Does Not Exist.” Within a year of StyleGAN’s launch, Facebook said it had taken down a network of accounts that used the technology to create false profile pictures. Since then, academic and private sector researchers have been engaged in a race between new ways to create undetectable deepfakes, and new ways to detect them. Many government services now require so-called liveness detection to thwart deepfaked identity photos, asking human applicants to upload a selfie video to demonstrate they are a real person — an obstacle that SOCOM may be interested in thwarting.

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If AI Companies Are Trying To Build God, Shouldn’t They Get Our Permission First?

AI companies are on a mission to radically change our world. They’re working on building machines that could outstrip human intelligence and unleash a dramatic economic transformation on us all.

Sam Altman, the CEO of ChatGPT-maker OpenAI, has basically told us he’s trying to build a god — or “magic intelligence in the sky,” as he puts it. OpenAI’s official term for this is artificial general intelligence, or AGI. Altman says that AGI will not only “break capitalism” but also that it’s “probably the greatest threat to the continued existence of humanity.”

There’s a very natural question here: Did anyone actually ask for this kind of AI? By what right do a few powerful tech CEOs get to decide that our whole world should be turned upside down?

As I’ve written before, it’s clearly undemocratic that private companies are building tech that aims to totally change the world without seeking buy-in from the public. In fact, even leaders at the major companies are expressing unease about how undemocratic it is.

Jack Clark, the co-founder of the AI company Anthropic, told Vox last year that it’s “a real weird thing that this is not a government project.” He also wrote that there are several key things he’s “confused and uneasy” about, including, “How much permission do AI developers need to get from society before irrevocably changing society?” Clark continued:

Technologists have always had something of a libertarian streak, and this is perhaps best epitomized by the ‘social media’ and Uber et al era of the 2010s — vast, society-altering systems ranging from social networks to rideshare systems were deployed into the world and aggressively scaled with little regard to the societies they were influencing. This form of permissionless invention is basically the implicitly preferred form of development as epitomized by Silicon Valley and the general ‘move fast and break things’ philosophy of tech. Should the same be true of AI?

I’ve noticed that when anyone questions that norm of “permissionless invention,” a lot of tech enthusiasts push back. Their objections always seem to fall into one of three categories. Because this is such a perennial and important debate, it’s worth tackling each of them in turn — and why I think they’re wrong.

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Logging Into a Brave New World: How Facial Recognition Just Got Personal

Surprising exactly no one paying attention to the slow erosion of privacy, the US General Services Administration (GSA) has rolled out its shiny new toy: facial recognition technology for accessing login.gov. Yes, that beloved single sign-in service, connecting Americans to federal and state agencies, now wants your face—literally. This gateway, clicked into over 300 million times a year by citizens has decided the most efficient way to keep us all “safe” is by scanning our mugs. How very 2024.

But of course, this little “upgrade” didn’t just appear overnight. Oh no, it dragged itself through bureaucratic purgatory, complete with false starts, delays, and some spicy critique from the Inspector General. Apparently, login.gov had been fibbing about its compliance with Identity Assurance Level 2 (IAL2)—a fancy label for a government-mandated security standard that requires real-deal verification of who you are. Up until now, that “verification” meant having someone eyeball your ID card photo and say, “Yep, that looks about right,” rather than dipping into the biometric surveillance toolkit.

Facial recognition was supposed to make its grand debut last year, but things got complicated when it turned out login.gov wasn’t actually playing by the rules it claimed to follow. The Inspector General, ever the fun police, caught them misrepresenting their tech’s adherence to the IAL2 standard, causing the rollout to stall while everyone scrambled to figure out if they could get away with this. Now, after enough piloting to give a nervous airline passenger a heart attack, login.gov has finally reached compliance, but not without leaving a greasy trail of unanswered questions in its wake.

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Battlespace Of The Brain: The Military Conquest To “Master The Human Domain”

In 1970, Zbigniew Brzezinski published his book Between Two Ages: America’s Role in the Technetronic Era.[i]Brzezinski was a futurist who cofounded the globalist Trilateral Commission with David Rockefeller and Jimmy Carter in 1973, and served as national security adviser to Jimmy Carter between 1977 and 1981. Brzezinski understood the impact of science on society:

Speaking of a future at most decades away, an experimenter in intelligence control asserted, “I foresee a time when we shall have the means and therefore, inevitably, the temptation to manipulate the behavior and intellectual functioning of all the people through environmental and biochemical manipulation of the brain.” (Between Two Ages: America’s Role in the Technetronic Era, p. 15)

Another threat, less overt but no less basic, confronts liberal democracy. More directly linked to the impact of technology, it involves the gradual appearance of a more controlled and directed society. Such a society would be dominated by an elite whose claim to political power would rest on allegedly superior scientific know-how. Unhindered by the restraints of traditional liberal values, this elite would not hesitate to achieve its political ends by using the latest modern techniques for influencing public behavior and keeping society under close surveillance and control. (pp. 252–253)

In an August 2017 seminar at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s Center for Global Security Research (CGSR) guest speaker Dr. James Giordano, of Georgetown University Medical Center, offered a sobering view of the calculated war on our brains, the temptation to manipulate the behavior and intellectual functioning of all the people, and the potential for weaponizing neuroscientific discoveries and neurotechnologies.

Dr. Giordano is a professor in the Departments of Neurology and Biochemistry, Chief of the Neuroethics Studies Program, and Co-director of the O’Neill-Pellegrino Program in Brain Science and Global Health Law and Policy at Georgetown University Medical Center in Washington, DC. He is a Senior Researcher and Task Leader of the Working Group on Dual-Use of the EU Human Brain Project, and has served as a Senior Science Advisory Fellow of the Strategic Multilayer Assessment group of the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the Pentagon.

His 2017 briefing, “Brain Science from Bench to Battlefield: The Realities—and Risks—of Neuroweapons,”[ii]explores the potentials of brain science in the context of public/private research for national defense, including using nano-pharmaceutical low-dose toxins or other chemicals as a controlled vector.

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Drone swarms targeting US military bases are operated by ‘mother ship’ UFO, claims top Pentagon official

A retired, senior Pentagon official has confirmed that UFO ‘mother ships’ were spotted ‘releasing swarms of smaller craft’ — adding further mystery to the still-unexplained intrusions over multiple US military bases.

His statements come amid the release of 50 pages of Air Force records related to provocative ‘drone’ incursions, that one general calls ‘Close Encounters at Langley.’

For at least 17 nights last December, swarms of noisy, small UFOs were seen at dusk ‘moving at rapid speeds’ and displaying ‘flashing red, green, and white lights’ penetrating the highly restricted airspace above Langley Air Force Base in Virginia.

Senior ex-Pentagon security official Chris Mellon told DailyMail.com that the episode was ‘part of a much larger pattern affecting numerous national security installations.’

‘Two of the notable aspects,’ he said, ‘are the fact our drone signal-jamming devices have proven ineffective and these craft are making no effort to remain concealed.’

‘In fact, in some instances,’ as Mellon took pains to emphasize, ‘it is clear they want to be seen as though taunting us.’

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