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Zuckerberg isn’t ready for deepfakes

Jun28
by on June 28, 2019 at 12:55 am
Posted In: Around the Web, Opinion


Faced with a potential crisis, the magnitude of which the world has never seen, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg wants us all to slow down. Crises, however, wait for no one. And Facebook’s latest problem, that of altered or faked video, brings with it the democracy destroying power of an atom bomb. “There is a question of whether deepfakes are actually just a completely different category of thing from normal false statements overall,” Zuckerberg told Harvard legal scholar Cass Sunstein at the Aspen Ideas Festival this week. “And I think there is a very good case that they are.” Zuckerberg, of…

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Review: The $1,000 GEESAA robot barista makes a mean cup of coffee

Jun27
by on June 27, 2019 at 11:15 pm
Posted In: Around the Web, Plugged


There are coffee fans, and then there are coffee fans. The GEESAA robot barista is a product for the latter category of people – and it’s not ashamed of it. Essentially, it wants to do for trendy pour-over coffee what the Mr Coffee machine did for bog-standard drip coffee. The machine comes with a robotic arm that purportedly can mimic the movements of a human barista. The GEESAA robot barista is currently crowdfunding on Kickstarter, where it’s raised nearly $40,000 out of a modest goal of $25,000. The makers behind the device sent TNW a pre-release model to play with…

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Deepnudes developer shuts it down, but the damage is done

Jun27
by on June 27, 2019 at 11:09 pm
Posted In: Around the Web, artificial intelligence, Opinion


There’s no positive use case for developing an app with the sole purpose of using AI to predict what a clothed woman, in an image, would look like nude – full stop. Developing such an app, as did the person(s) responsible for Deepnudes, is an act of hate and an attack on women. At best, those who would perpetrate such an action are willfully ignorant misogynists uninterested in understanding the potential impact of their actions. At worst: they are agents of evil who take joy in the knowledge that their work will, almost surely, result in violence against women. Trigger…

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Here’s why your Microsoft Store ebooks won’t work next month

Jun27
by on June 27, 2019 at 9:59 pm
Posted In: Around the Web


The eBook market is most closely associated with four prominent players: Apple, Amazon, Barnes and Noble’s, and Rakuten, which makes the Kobo eReaders. But it’s easy to forget that Microsoft once owned its own eBook marketplace. Now, in 2019, it’s exiting this business. That’s not really a surprise. Microsoft’s good at a lot of things, but it’s historically struggled with anything involving content. It makes no sense for it to throw resources at a niche market that isn’t even core to its business aspirations. But this means that from next month, anyone who bought an eBook from Microsoft will suddenly…

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