Tag: technology

FACIAL RECOGNITION SEARCH ENGINE PULLS UP “POTENTIALLY EXPLICIT” PHOTOS OF KIDS

ABUSIVE PARENTS SEARCHING for kids who have fled to shelters. Governments targeting the sons and daughters of political dissidents. Pedophiles stalking the victims they encounter in illicit child sexual abuse material.

The online facial recognition search engine PimEyes allows anyone to search for images of children scraped from across the internet, raising a host of alarming possible uses, an Intercept investigation has found.

Often called the Google of facial recognition, PimEyes search results include images that the site labels as “potentially explicit,” which could lead to further exploitation of children at a time when the dark web has sparked an explosion of images of abuse.

“There are privacy issues raised by the use of facial recognition technology writ large,” said Jeramie Scott, director of the Surveillance Oversight Project at the Electronic Privacy Information Center. “But it’s particularly dangerous when we’re talking about children, when someone may use that to identify a child and to track them down.”

Over the past few years, several child victim advocacy groups have pushed for police use of surveillance technologies to fight trafficking, arguing that facial recognition can help authorities locate victims. One child abuse prevention nonprofit, Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore’s Thorn, has even developed its own facial recognition tool. But searches on PimEyes for 30 AI-generated children’s faces yielded dozens of pages of results, showing how easily those same tools can be turned against the people they’re designed to help.

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‘CRISPR 2.0’ Used To Change Patient’s DNA For First Time

Scientists are rewriting the code of life with a new technology that promises to cure inherited diseases by precisely correcting genetic typos. Known as base editing, the technology empowers researchers to pick a single letter amongst the three billion that compose the human genome, erase it, and write a new letter in its place.

Base editing is an updated version of the gene editing tool CRISPR, which has revolutionized life sciences research and is making strides in treating genetic blood and liver diseases. But some scientists think base editing, sometimes billed as CRISPR 2.0, could be safer and more precise than the original. And this summer, the sequel technology is being used in patients for the first time.

On Tuesday, the Boston biotech firm Verve Therapeutics announced that it had edited the DNA of a person with a genetic condition that causes high cholesterol and predisposes them to heart disease. The base editor is designed to tweak a gene in the liver, curtail the accumulation of cholesterol, and hopefully lower the risk of heart attacks.

Verve chief executive and cofounder Sekar Kathiresan likens the approach to “surgery without a scalpel.” Although the trial is focused on people with the genetic condition familial hypercholesterolemia, Kathiresan hopes that the one-and-done therapy may one day be used more broadly, to permanently reduce the risk of heart disease in millions of people with high cholesterol. “We are completely trying to rewrite how this disease is cared for,” he said.

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Japan Wants to Bring Artificial Gravity to the Moon

Interest in the Moon has been reignited recently, and Japan is looking to get in on the fun. Researchers and engineers from Kyoto University and the Kajima Corporation have released their joint proposal for a three-pronged approach to sustainable human life on the Moon and beyond.

The future of space exploration will likely include longer stays in low gravity environments, whether in orbit or on the surface of another planet. Problem is, long stays in space can wreak havoc on our physiology; recent research shows that astronauts can suffer a decade of bone loss during months in space, and that their bones never return to normal. Thankfully, researchers from Kyoto University and the Kajima Corporation are seeking to engineer a potential solution.

The proposal, announced in a press release last week, looks like something ripped straight from the pages of a sci-fi novel. The plan consists of three distinct elements, the first of which, called “The Glass,” aims to bring simulated gravity to the Moon and Mars through centrifugal force.

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Data-grabbing biometric health monitoring is starting to make its way into cars

“Smart cars” – whether or not connected to the internet – are already harvesting massive amounts of data not only regarding locations and movements of vehicles but also from drivers themselves.

Many are starting to see this as a concerning trend in the way it impacts security both of individuals and countries – a heavily chip-dependent vehicle can be hacked, and even weaponized, some are warning – but development and deployment of these technologies don’t seem to be slowing down.

On the contrary, the industry of biometric sensors used in vehicles is growing and is projected to be worth over $1.1 billion in three years, according to a recent report from Market Research Future.

Korea’s Hyundai is now pioneering biometric-data-based healthcare monitoring with its upcoming biometric sensors system marketed as the first anywhere in the world healthcare-focused cabin controller, “that can integrate and analyze multiple bio-signs.”

It essentially aims to turn your car into a mobile healthcare center that monitors your posture, heart rate, and brain waves. The elaborate and intrusive system’s purpose is said to be to detect drunk and drowsy drivers, while the biometric dataset that will be built with its use will help improve “the smart cabin” and equip it to solve issues like stress and motion sickness – and, even block drunk driving, Korean media are reporting.

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Sen Liz Warren Now Pivots to Government Control of Big Tech … Charger Cords?

Is Elizabeth Warren hitting the bottle again? The Massachusetts senator, who just declared war on crisis pregnancy centers, has now pivoted to … charger cords.

Fauxcahontas is vewy, vewy, angwy about why it takes so many different types of charger cords to power a variety of devices at home and work.

Warren said on Twitter on Thursday that “consumers shouldn’t have to keep buying new chargers all the time for different devices. We can clear things up with uniform standards—for less expense, less hassle, and less waste.”

It’s annoying and expensive to have to get a new charger cord with every device. But should Warren and her aging far-Left Senate kin, Ed Markey and Bernie Sanders, the backers of a standardized power cord, really be the high-tech big idea guys in such a venture? Thankfully, in a letter to Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, they don’t actually give ideas on how to standardize cords. No, they simply want to compel it.

The trio contended, “we cannot allow the consumer electronics industry to prioritize proprietary and inevitably obsolete charging technology over consumer protection and environmental health.”

Can anyone check to see which side of the Blockbuster versus Netflix issue Warren, Markey, and Sanders were on? Do you suppose these three thought “nah, Betamax all the way”?

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Feds Accessing Location Data from Millions of People Through Private Brokers

Big Brother is tracking your location with the help of private data brokers.

According to a recent report by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), data brokers harvest location data from mobile apps and then sell it to government agencies including state and local law enforcement, ICE, the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Defense.

Many of the apps on a mobile device track and record location data. These include navigation apps, social media apps, and weather apps, among many others. According to EFF, once a user gives an app permission to access location data, it typically has “free rein” to share it with just about anybody. Government agencies take advantage of these loose standards to purchase troves of location data relating to millions of individuals from data brokers.

“Once in government hands, the data is used by the military to spy on people overseas, by ICE to monitor people in and around the U.S., and by criminal investigators like the FBI and Secret Service.”

There is a tangled web of companies buying and selling data in this multi-billion-dollar industry. According to the EFF report, it’s virtually impossible to determine which apps share data. But apparently, a lot of them do. Data broker Venntel, a subsidiary of Gravy Analytics, claims to collect location data from over 80,000 apps.

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Scientists in China claim to have developed ‘mind-reading’ artificial intelligence

Researchers in China reportedly claimed this month that they had developed artificial intelligence capable of reading the human mind, though full information about the alleged breakthrough remains elusive shortly after it was announced. 

Multiple media outlets reported this week that a since-deleted video posted online from the Hefei Comprehensive National Science Centre claimed to have produced software that can monitor both brain waves and facial recognition in order to determine if subjects are being sufficiently attentive to state propaganda.

The tool will reportedly be used to further solidify … confidence and determination to be grateful to the party, listen to the party and follow the party.”

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Quantum Processor Completes 9,000 Years of Work in 36 Microseconds

Technology continues to move forward at incredible speeds and it seems like every week we learn about a new breakthrough that changes our minds about what is possible.

Researchers in Toronto used a photonic quantum computer chip to solve a sampling problem that went way beyond the fastest computers and algorithms.

The paper the researchers published says that the Borealis quantum chip took only 36 microseconds to solve a problem that would take supercomputers and algorithms 9,000 years to figure out.

Yes, you read that right…9,000 years.

The Borealis chip uses bursts of light to transmit quantum information and the researchers believe that this is a huge leap forward for quantum chips.

The authors of the study said,

“This work is a critical milestone on the path to a practical quantum computer, validating key technological features of photonics as a platform for this goal.”

Quantum computers are different from traditional computers and one major way is to process three units of data instead of only two. The computers we are used to use binary (0, 1) and quantum computers use what is called qubits (0, 1, both).

While this news is certainly exciting, quantum computers still have a long road ahead of them. The UK Ministry of Defence purchased its first quantum computer in order to run tests, but it could be years before we know how or when they’ll be used regularly.

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Higgs Boson researchers mark 10 year anniversary with return to particle studies 

July 4th marks 10 years since scientists at CERN, the world’s largest research centre based near Geneva, announced the existence of the Higgs Boson. A team of 6000 researchers working with the world’s first atom splitter, the Large Hardron Collider.

The discovery of the long-sought for particle behind the origin of mass saw François Englert and Peter Higgs awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics. 45 years later after they proposed the theory, they cracked the practical side too. 

For this iconic anniversary, CERN has announced it will restart its Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the machine which studies the origins of matter, and the universe.

Halting the activity of LHC for three years, CERN took the time to upgrade it. On July 5th, For the third time in its history, the Large Hadron Collider, will restart to an unprecedented level of collision energy (13.6 trillion electronvolts).

Delphine Jacquet, an engineer in charge of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), explains the technicalities the team will carry out to continue the studies.

“We will put in a collision, for the first time, in the LHC, protons at an energy record of 6.8 tev per beam. At this energy the collision will be at 13.6 tera electron volts (tev), and this will be a very nice record for the experiment.”

Jacquet continues: “From this moment on, it will be the data taken from the experiment, for a long run of 3 years, hoping that we will have new discoveries and interesting things coming out from these collisions.”

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As Chicago Crime Sends Businesses Packing, Scientists Create Algorithm To Detect In Advance

Chicago’s legendary crime has caused businesses to leave town amid the growing threat of violence.

“We would do thousands of jobs a year in the city, but as we got robbed more, my people operating rollers and pavers we got robbed, our equipment would get stolen in broad daylight and there would usually be a gun involved, and it got expensive and it got dangerous,” said Gary Rabine, who pulled his road paving company out of the city after his crews were repeatedly robbed.

Rabine told Fox News that the increased costs of security and insurance for “thousands” of jobs in the city eventually caused expenses to be “twice as much as they should be” per employee.

Billionaire Ken Griffin moved his firm, Citadel, from Chicago to Miami, after saying in October 2021 that “Chicago is like Afghanistan, on a good day, and that’s a problem,” adding that he saw “25 bullet shots in the glass window of the retail space” in the building he lives in.

“If people aren’t safe here, they’re not going to live here,” he told the Wall Street Journal in April. “I’ve had multiple colleagues mugged at gunpoint. I’ve had a colleague stabbed on the way to work. Countless issues of burglary. I mean, that’s a really difficult backdrop with which to draw talent to your city from.”

AI to the rescue?

Scientists from the University of Chicago have created a new “AI” algorithm that can predict crime a week in advance.

By learning patterns in time and geographic locations from publicly available data on violent and property crimes, the “AI” can predict crimes up to one week in advance with around 90% accuracy.

The tool was tested and validated using historical data from the City of Chicago around two broad categories of reported events: violent crimes (homicides, assaults, and batteries) and property crimes (burglaries, thefts, and motor vehicle thefts). These data were used because they were most likely to be reported to police in urban areas where there is historical distrust and lack of cooperation with law enforcement. Such crimes are also less prone to enforcement bias, as is the case with drug crimes, traffic stops, and other misdemeanor infractions.

Previous efforts at crime prediction often use an epidemic or seismic approach, where crime is depicted as emerging in “hotspots” that spread to surrounding areas. These tools miss out on the complex social environment of cities, however, and don’t consider the relationship between crime and the effects of police enforcement. –PhysOrg

The model isolates crime by analyzing time and spacial coordinates of discrete events and detecting patterns to predict future events. It worked just as well with data from seven other US cities; Atlanta, Austin, Detroit, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Portland, and San Francisco

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