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We need to rethink social media before it’s too late. We’ve accepted a Faustian bargain
March 7, 2021
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Why You Should Stop Saving Photos From iMessage, WhatsApp, And Android Messages
March 6, 2021
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Given you’re reading this story, the chances are that you’re somewhat cyber-aware. If I was to send you a file attachment in a text message—let’s say a Word or PDF document, you’re hopefully programmed to ask a whole set of questions before opening or saving that attachment to your phone. Do I know the sender? Was I expecting the file? But what if it was just a photo—something amusing or attention-grabbing to keep or share? You can view the image within the messaging app, you can see what you’re getting, surely there’s no harm in saving it to your photo album?
If only that was the case. The fact is that a malicious image has the same capacity to damage your device and steal your data as a malicious attachment. The only difference is that it’s a more sophisticated attack, which makes it rarer. We saw the latest example of just such a threat this week, with Facebook confirming that it had patched an Instagram vulnerability disclosed by Check Point’s researchers, one involving a crafted image that could potentially hijack an entire account, maybe even piggyback on Instagram’s permissions to take-over a smartphone.
Facebook disputed Check Point’s claim that the malicious image which crashed Instagram could be used to take-over the smartphone itself, accessing the camera and microphone. Facebook told me that the worst case would be an account hijack, which seems bad enough in itself. And while Check Point claimed that just saving an image to a phone would trigger the attack, Facebook said a user would need to load the image into Instagram. Again, the fact that an image had been crafted as an attack tool was accepted. And that’s the point here.
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Generation Work-From-Home May Never Recover
March 6, 2021
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To have a job without a workplace, you must build an office of the mind. Structure, routine, focus, socialization, networking, stress relief—their creation is almost entirely up to you, alone in a spare bedroom or on your couch, where your laptop might vie for attention at any given moment with your pets or kids. If the coffeepot runs dry, there is no one to blame but yourself.
The first time I undertook this construction process was in 2009, and it was an abject failure. I was nine months out of college and had already been laid off from my first full-time job, thanks to Wall Street’s evisceration of the American economy. A woman I knew only from an internet message board hired me to write blog posts for her fashion website, a stroke of luck that turned me nocturnal within six weeks. I lived like a 13-year-old on perpetual summer break—no gods, no masters, no parents, no bedtime. It took two years for me to meet my co-workers in person, and I often fantasized about eating lunch with a live human being or even just bumping into one on the way to the bathroom. What would it be like to have “work clothes” again? I had never expected to miss driving 45 minutes to sit at a desk in a makeshift office above a country-club pro shop, where, in my first full-time job, I’d done menial tasks in the marketing department.
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Asia Pietrzyk.
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Missed News 510
March 6, 2021
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The Panopticon Is Already Here
March 5, 2021
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Northwest of Beijing’s Forbidden City, outside the Third Ring Road, the Chinese Academy of Sciences has spent seven decades building a campus of national laboratories. Near its center is the Institute of Automation, a sleek silvery-blue building surrounded by camera-studded poles. The institute is a basic research facility. Its computer scientists inquire into artificial intelligence’s fundamental mysteries. Their more practical innovations—iris recognition, cloud-based speech synthesis—are spun off to Chinese tech giants, AI start-ups, and, in some cases, the People’s Liberation Army.
I visited the institute on a rainy morning in the summer of 2019. China’s best and brightest were still shuffling in post-commute, dressed casually in basketball shorts or yoga pants, AirPods nestled in their ears. In my pocket, I had a burner phone; in my backpack, a computer wiped free of data—standard precautions for Western journalists in China. To visit China on sensitive business is to risk being barraged with cyberattacks and malware. In 2019, Belgian officials on a trade mission noticed that their mobile data were being intercepted by pop-up antennae outside their Beijing hotel.
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Xi Jinping is using artificial intelligence to enhance his government’s totalitarian control—and he’s exporting this technology to regimes around the globe.
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Missed News 509
March 5, 2021
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The Hidden Signs That Can Reveal a Fake Photo
March 4, 2021
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The tell-tale signs may not jump out at you, but to Hany Farid, the image is littered with evidence – one of the reflections in the window is misaligned and the shadows do not line up.
This photograph is fake. One of the men was not there at all.
Research suggests that regardless of what you might think about your own abilities to spot a hoax, most of us are pretty bad at it. Farid, however, looks at photographs in a different way to most people. As a leading expert in digital forensics and image analysis, he scrutinizes them for the almost imperceptible signs that suggest an image has been manipulated.
One trick he has picked up over time is to check the points of light in people’s eyes. “If you have two people standing next to each other in a photograph, then we will often see the reflection of the light source (such as the Sun or a camera flash) in their eyes,” he explains. “The location, size, and color of this reflection tells us about the location, size, and color of the light source. If these properties of the light source are not consistent, then the photo may be a composite.”
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What’s fake?
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March 4, 2021
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March 3, 2021
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AI ruined chess. Now it’s making the game beautiful again
March 2, 2021
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Chess has a reputation for cold logic, but Vladimir Kramnik loves the game for its beauty.
“It’s a kind of creation,” he says. His passion for the artistry of minds clashing over the board, trading complex but elegant provocations and counters, helped him dethrone Garry Kasparov in 2000 and spend several years as world champion.
Yet Kramnik, who retired from competitive chess last year, also believes his beloved game has grown less creative. He partly blames computers, whose soulless calculations have produced a vast library of openings and defenses that top-flight players know by rote. “For quite a number of games on the highest level, half of the game—sometimes a full game—is played out of memory,” Kramnik says. “You don’t even play your own preparation; you play your computer’s preparation.”
Wednesday, Kramnik presented some ideas for how to restore some of the human art to chess, with help from a counterintuitive source—the world’s most powerful chess computer. He teamed up with Alphabet artificial intelligence lab DeepMind, whose researchers challenged their superhuman game-playing software AlphaZero to learn nine variants of chess chosen to jolt players into creative new patterns.
In 2017, AlphaZero showed it could teach itself to roundly beat the best computer players at either chess, Go, or the Japanese game shogi. Kramnik says its latest results reveal beguiling new vistas of chess to be explored if people are willing to adopt some small changes to the established rules.
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