A “deepfake” robocall using Joe Biden’s voice has been telling voters in New Hampshire not to bother voting in today’s primary. But nobody knows who’s behind it. CC-licensed photo by DonkeyHotey on Flickr.
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A selection of 9 links for you. The call is coming to the inside of the house. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.
Cops used DNA to predict a suspect’s face—and tried to run facial recognition on it • WIRED
Dhruv Mehrotra:
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In 2017, detectives at the East Bay Regional Park District Police Department working a cold case got an idea, one that might help them finally get a lead on the murder of Maria Jane Weidhofer. Officers had found Weidhofer, dead and sexually assaulted, at Berkeley, California’s Tilden Regional Park in 1990. Nearly 30 years later, the department sent genetic information collected at the crime scene to Parabon NanoLabs—a company that says it can turn DNA into a face.
Parabon NanoLabs ran the suspect’s DNA through its proprietary machine learning model. Soon, it provided the police department with something the detectives had never seen before: the face of a potential suspect, generated using only crime scene evidence.
The image Parabon NanoLabs produced, called a Snapshot Phenotype Report, wasn’t a photograph. It was a 3D rendering that bridges the uncanny valley between reality and science fiction; a representation of how the company’s algorithm predicted a person could look given genetic attributes found in the DNA sample.
The face of the murderer, the company predicted, was male. He had fair skin, brown eyes and hair, no freckles, and bushy eyebrows. A forensic artist employed by the company photoshopped a nondescript, close-cropped haircut onto the man and gave him a mustache—an artistic addition informed by a witness description and not the DNA sample.
In a controversial 2017 decision, the department published the predicted face in an attempt to solicit tips from the public. Then, in 2020, one of the detectives did something civil liberties experts say is even more problematic—and a violation of Parabon NanoLabs’ terms of service: He asked to have the rendering run through facial recognition software.
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There aren’t enough facepalms in all the world for this one. But it was buried away until a hacker collective, Distributed Denial of Secrets, hacked police records and this was in it. Even so some of the police offices think it’s a hunky dory method and should continue.
(Explanation: your DNA can’t really describe what your face will look like – the best guess would use your parents’ faces – and as any result from that is a guess, so is anything you put into a facial recognition system. Better, but also probably illegal [it is in the UK, as a current TV drama points out] would be to upload the dead person’s DNA to an ancestry site and see if you get a hit.
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‘Campaigns of misinformation’ around heat pumps says energy minister amid record number of installations • Sky News
Tom Heap:
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The government already provides a grant of up to £7,500 for households making the switch, but the upfront cost can still exceed that of a new gas boiler if other adjustments to the home are required.
We visited a home in Woking, Surrey where the gas boiler was being removed and a heat pump installed. After the government grant, the cost of the pump, water tank, new radiators and extra insulation still came to £6,500 – a cost that’s out of reach for many.
Mike Foster is from the Energy and Utilities Alliance – a trade body which represents gas and boiler companies and lobbies on their behalf. He says the higher upfront cost is a huge barrier.
“If we alienate the consumer on the journey to net zero, my fear and the fear of people in organisations like mine is that we’ll fail to get to net zero, and that will be the biggest crime.”
He rejected accusations that the industry has been spreading misinformation. “Far from it. Our members make heat pumps. They make boilers. They make parts for heat networks, heat interface units. So we are technology agnostic, but we want to do what is right for the consumer,” Mr Foster said.
But the government says that the cost of swapping gas for a heat pump is already coming down – and that some installations are already cheaper than a boiler replacement.
“Fairly soon, as prices come down, the installation routine becomes more efficient, the prices will be very low,” [energy minister in the House of Lords] Lord Callanan said.
The UK had a record year for heat pump installations last year, with 35,000 put into our homes. But that’s still a fraction of the 600,000 a year the government is targeting by 2028.
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The real problem is how astonishingly badly insulated UK housing stock is (shakes fist at putting houses on “lists” on the basis they were built a long time ago) which makes a heat pump a poor choice.
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We may not lose our jobs to robots so quickly, MIT study finds • CNN Business
Catherine Thorbecke:
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“In many cases, humans are the more cost-effective way, and a more economically attractive way, to do work right now,” Neil Thompson, one of the study’s authors and the director of the future tech research project at MIT’s Computer Science and AI Lab, told CNN in an interview.
“What we’re seeing is that while there is a lot of potential for AI to replace tasks, it’s not going to happen immediately,” Thompson added, saying that amid all the headlines about robots taking jobs, “It’s really important to think about the economics of actually implementing these systems.”
In the study, Thompson and his team analyzed the majority of jobs that have been previously identified as “exposed” to AI, or at risk of being lost to AI, especially in the realm of computer vision. The researchers then looked at the wages paid to workers currently doing these jobs, and calculated how much it might cost to bring on an automated tool instead.
A retail worker, for example, might currently be responsible for visually checking inventory or ensuring that the prices listed throughout a store on specific merchandise is accurate. A machine trained in computer vision could technically do this job, Thompson notes, but at this stage it would still make the most economic sense for an employer to pay a human worker to do it.
“There’s a reason that AI has not been everywhere immediately,” Thompson said. “There’s an economics behind that.”
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Quelle surprise – capitalism favours doing things cheaply with easily replaceable elements.
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“Deepfake” Joe Biden robocall tells New Hampshire Democrats not to vote on Tuesday • NBC News
Alex Seitz-Wald and Mike Memoli:
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The New Hampshire attorney general’s office says it is investigating what appears to be an “unlawful attempt” at voter suppression after NBC News reported on a robocall impersonating President Joe Biden telling recipients not to vote in Tuesday’s presidential primary.
“Although the voice in the robocall sounds like the voice of President Biden, this message appears to be artificially generated based on initial indications,” the attorney generals office said in a statement. “These messages appear to be an unlawful attempt to disrupt the New Hampshire Presidential Primary Election and to suppress New Hampshire voters. New Hampshire voters should disregard the content of this message entirely.”
The investigation comes after a prominent New Hampshire Democrat, whose personal cell phone number showed up on the caller ID of those receiving the call, filed a complaint.
“What a bunch of malarkey,” the robocall phone message begins, echoing a favorite term Biden has uttered before. The message says that “it’s important that you save your vote for the November election.”
“Voting this Tuesday only enables the Republicans in their quest to elect Donald Trump again. Your vote makes a difference in November, not this Tuesday,” it says.
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Owning a telephone in the US sounds like one of the inner circles of hell. Imagine getting unwanted calls like that and not having any way to reject them first.
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Vision Pro’s first-weekend pre-order review: expectations in line, but concerns raised • Medium
Ming-Chi Kuo:
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Based on pre-order inventory and shipping time, I estimated that Apple sold 160,000 to 180,000 Vision Pro units during the first pre-order weekend.
As predicted, the Vision Pro sold out immediately after the pre-order opened, with shipping times for all models extending to 5–7 weeks within hours.
The instant sold-out and extended shipping times seem positive at first, but a key concern emerged: shipping times remained unchanged 48 hours after pre-orders opened. It indicates that demand may quickly taper off after the core fans and heavy users place their orders.
Popular iPhone models also sell out immediately upon pre-order, and shipping times typically increase to several weeks within hours. However, unlike Vision Pro, iPhone models usually continue to see a steady increase in shipping times 24 to 48 hours after pre-orders open, indicating that demand continues to grow even after the initial sold-out.
…Achieving a shipment volume of 500,000 units for Vision Pro this year should not be challenging. However, because demand tapers off quickly after the initial sold-out, it’s critical to closely monitor demand in other markets and application updates to assess changes in demand.
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The observation Kuo makes is that the Vision Pro is a niche product. Well, of course. This is the worst Vision Pro that Apple will ever make.
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Apple releases iOS 17.3 and iPadOS 17.3 with Stolen Device Protection, collaborative Apple Music Playlists and more • MacRumors
Juli Clover:
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iOS 17.3 and iPadOS 17.3 can be downloaded on eligible iPhones and iPads over-the-air by going to Settings > General > Software Update. Apple has also released iOS 15.8.1 and iOS 16.7.5 for those running older versions of iOS.
With iOS 17.3, Apple is adding Stolen Device Protection to the iPhone, limiting access to private information just in case someone gets ahold of both your iPhone and your passcode. It requires biometric authentication to do things like access passwords, turn off Lost Mode, make purchases in Safari, and more.
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The Stolen Device Protection bit (to defeat people who watch you enter your passcode in a bar, then steal it and lock you out of your iCloud account) sounds smart, though there are little wrinkles to be figured out: can you choose your “home” and “work” locations? Is the blocking time configurable? But definitely a good thing.
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Inside the collapsing US political-media-industrial-complex • Semafor
Max Tani:
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It was a little-kept secret of Trump’s rise that, even as he attacked American media and was treated by them as a threat to democracy, he rescued their advertising and subscription businesses. As CBS Chairman Les Moonves notoriously quipped to investors in February of 2016, “It may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS.”
Media executives are beginning to reckon with the reality that the 2024 race won’t bring a “Trump bump” to save ad budgets or bring back readers, listeners, and viewers. In a public interview at Davos last week, the new Washington Post CEO, Will Lewis said the publication that boomed during the first Trump era will now be looking for subscribers elsewhere.
“I’m not convinced that will be the case,” Lewis said of predictions of another “Trump bump.”
News consumers are smart, and have internalized a reality that many in the political class are still reluctant to acknowledge: That the options on the ballot in November will, barring some extreme event, be Trump and Biden once again. Recent polls show South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley is within striking distance of Trump in New Hampshire, which could theoretically give her a boost as Republican primary voters consider her a more serious possibility headed into South Carolina. But the electoral path remains extremely narrow.
That’s left the national news media, which is constructed around the four-year election cycles, with not a lot to do on the campaign trail. I bumped into a well-known reporter at a Trump rally in Concord, New Hampshire on Friday who compared himself to an on-air sports commentator filling airtime when a football team is up by 30 points. Trudging through the snow en route Ron DeSantis’ sparsely-attended town hall in Hampton, New Hampshire on Wednesday days before the Florida governor called it quits, another reporter covering their sixth New Hampshire primary described this year’s as “just a bummer.”
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[American] news consumers are smart? I think “sufficiently familiar with this merry-go-round” might describe it better. This of course won’t stop the media trying to amp up anything Trump-related.
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Global warming picks up speed • Open Mind
Grant Foster has a (rather scary) graph showing global warming picking up speed recently:
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James Hansen and others published a new paper recently, claiming that not only will global warming, in the very near future, proceed faster than expected, it is already doing so — that the pace of global warming had accelerated. Temperature increase after 2010, it suggests, will be at 0.027°C/yr, 50% faster than the lazy 0.018°C/yr it had been rising for decades before that. As a result, we have less than a decade until we cross the much-discussed threshold of 1.5°C above pre-industrial, so any idea of keeping global warming below that limit is “deader than a doornail.”
There are other controversial ideas in the paper, including that climate sensitivity is on the high side at 4.8°C per doubling of CO2 rather than the 3°C per doubling considered the “mainstream” scientific estimate. There is no shortage of critics of many of these ideas, but I can only comment on the surface temperature warming rate. My analysis, based on the adjusted data representing the true global warming trend, confirms their claim about recent acceleration.
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Which you’d sort of expect (as you shiver in realisation). Venus is ungodly hot because of runaway greenhouse warming. We seem to be trying to follow it.
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Bill Ackman is a brilliant fictional character • The Atlantic
Kurt Andersen on the hedge fund billionaire who has recently been the latest example of how Twitter can separate billionaires from their sanity:
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“When former [Harvard] president Gay was hired, I knew little about her, but I was instinctually happy for Harvard and the black community,” Ackman posted while on holiday in the Caribbean, the day after he’d helped force her out over her plagiarism. But now, given her handling of the Harvard anti-Israel protests, he’d realized she was “not qualified,” having been chosen by a board looking for “a DEI-approved candidate.” And by the way, “in light of the amount, nature, and degree of plagiarism that had surfaced in her work,” why wasn’t she also booted from her tenured Harvard professorship?
The very next day, speaking of pat parallels and ironies standard in fiction but not so much in real life, came the first Business Insider story about plagiarism by his wife, an artist-designer-technologist and former MIT professor named Neri Oxman. In real life, one would expect a response from the plagiarist like the abashed explanation and apology Oxman immediately posted on X, and then the chatter would run its course over the weekend, and the attention and embarrassment would dissipate.
But that would have been too boring for the Bill Ackman character. Ackman, with his 1.1 million followers on X, surely saw an opportunity for a fight, for more attention, for the story to continue with him as its star. He simultaneously complained and bragged about the attention being given to the news stories about his wife’s misdeeds. “It is now the number one trending item on X,” he posted a couple of days after the articles appeared, “with 35,600 posts versus number two which is the Princess of Wales with 3,174 posts.” Even before he’d really put his weight behind it. An effort that would—tragic irony!—inevitably make his wife’s mistakes still more widely known, extending and perhaps deepening her pain.
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Andersen skewers Ackman – more accurately, narrates the process as Ackman skewers himself – with a delightful light touch. Funny throughout. (He doesn’t mention, but Ackman gained most notoriety for shorting the stock of Herbalife, and losing millions of dollars doing so. Smartest guy in the room, huh.)
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| • Why do social networks drive us a little mad? • Why does angry content seem to dominate what we see? • How much of a role do algorithms play in affecting what we see and do online? • What can we do about it? • Did Facebook have any inkling of what was coming in Myanmar in 2016? Read Social Warming, my latest book, and find answers – and more. |
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