Ephemera

Police stop people for covering their faces from facial recognition camera then fine man £90 after he protested

Well, after he told them to “piss off” more accurately, but still…

“The force had put out a statement saying “anyone who declines to be scanned will not necessarily be viewed as suspicious”. However, witnesses said several people were stopped after covering their faces or pulling up hoods.

Campaign group Big Brother Watch said one man had seen placards warning members of the public that automatic facial recognition cameras were filming them from a parked police van.

“There was nothing suspicious about him at all … you have the right to avoid [the cameras], you have the right to cover your face. I think he was exercising his rights.”

Ms Carlo, who was monitoring Thursday’s trial in Romford, London, told The Independent she saw a plainclothed police officer follow the man before a group of officers “pulled him over to one side”.

She said they demanded to see the man’s identification, which he gave them, and became “accusatory and aggressive”.

“The guy told them to p*** off and then they gave him the £90 public order fine for swearing,” Ms Carlo added. “He was really angry.”” (source)

BioHackers Encoded Malware in a Strand of DNA

“In new research they plan to present at the USENIX Security conference on Thursday, a group of researchers from the University of Washington has shown for the first time that it’s possible to encode malicious software into physical strands of DNA, so that when a gene sequencer analyzes it the resulting data becomes a program that corrupts gene-sequencing software and takes control of the underlying computer. ” (source)

Very clever. Would you call this DNA Injection (a la SQL Injection)? Reminds me of Little Bobby Tables.

The AI Text Generator That’s Too Dangerous To Make Public

“(The) OpenAI (Institute was founded) to make new AI discoveries and give them away for the common good. Now, the institute’s researchers are sufficiently worried by something they built that they won’t release it to the public.

The AI system that gave its creators pause was designed to learn the patterns of language. It does that very well—scoring better on some reading-comprehension tests than any other automated system. But when OpenAI’s researchers configured the system to generate text, they began to think about their achievement differently.

“It looks pretty darn real,” says David Luan, vice president of engineering at OpenAI, of the text the system generates. He and his fellow researchers began to imagine how it might be used for unfriendly purposes. “It could be that someone who has malicious intent would be able to generate high-quality fake news,” Luan says.” – Source

This is an understandable reaction, but wrong I think. Understandable because the effect of fake news online has had massive consequences for society and democracy. So I can see why they would be hesitant to release this.

But two things spring to mind:

• Withholding this project won’t stop it. There is enough money being poured into AI research by corporations and nation-states worldwide that this is inevitable. There is no reason to assume that only OpenAI could produce this. For all we know, this technology is already in use by other actors, or if not, will be soon.
• One thing we’ve learned since the wholesale move online of global commerce, secrets don’t stay secret. If it exists, it will get out. This is the same reason government and corporate promises of “We have introduced industry best practice safeguards” should be interpreted as an admission that they can’t guarantee security. However because OpenAI have kept it secret, when it does get out we’ll likely not be aware, so we won’t be looking for its effects.

At some point we have to accept that we are already in the era of large scale AI, and hiding the progress does not stop it. Much better to educate people by publicising this, that what they see or read online can not be trusted . As an example, look at the worldwide news around the Deepfake phenomena. At least in that case it’s out in the open and now future videos will be looked at with an appropriate level of skepticism.

It’s like Uber but for the blood of virgins…

“A controversial startup called Ambrosia, that charges $8,000 to fill your veins with the blood of young people now claims to be up and running in 5 cities across the US and is accepting PayPal payments for the procedure online.” (source)

Surprised the startup is not called Báthory. Maybe the domain wasn’t available?

“His smile was the nightmare in my back pocket.”

“If I were to put together a truly essential thank-you list for the people who most made it possible for me to write my first six novels, I’d have to owe as much to Ronald Reagan as to Bill Gates or Lou Reed. Reagan’s presidency put the girt in my dystopia. His presidency was the fresh kitty litter I spread for utterly crucial traction on the icy driveway of uncharted futurity. His smile was the nightmare in my back pocket.” — William Gibson

A French Teenager Turned the Bible and Quran into DNA and Injected Them into His Body

The most head-fucking thing about this is not mentioned in the headline. The most amazing thing here is that this required no special skills, he just ordered the custom DNA strands from one website and the viruses to sneak them into his cells from another. Mixed them up in his dorm room and away he went.

DNA self-experimentation’s “holy crap!” stage seems to have lasted about 5 seconds before it went straight to Amazon Prime.

A few breeding pairs

“at any point in the future, there will always be at least a few breeding pairs of Rockers in the UK, or Mods, or Goths” – William Gibson

Truth always rests with the minority

“Truth always rests with the minority … because the minority is generally formed by those who really have an opinion, while the strength of a majority is illusory, formed by the gangs who have no opinion.” – Kierkegaard on the Individual vs. the Crowd, Why We Conform, and the Power of the Minority