"Freedom of speech does not mean freedom to lie." -- Michael Rivero

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An AI-generated Balenciaga pope fooled us all. How much does it matter? MikeRivero Tue, 03/28/2023 - 09:31

But, that said: The Pope Coat Incident makes clear that AI can and will also be used for the equivalent of making hyper-realistic cartoons. For dreaming up fantasy fashion statements, combining any given celebrity with any given clothing ensemble like an infinite set of paper dolls. For creating the photographic equivalent of fanfic. It may have been one of the first true mass AI misinformation events, in other words, but the puffer-pope saga was also … pretty low-stakes.

CHATGPT CAN NOW ACCESS THE INTERNET AND RUN THE CODE IT WRITES MikeRivero Tue, 03/28/2023 - 09:03

Still, OpenAI is keeping everything that happens within its search API separate from the rest of its infrastructure just to be sure. It can’t visit websites that aren’t available through Bing’s “safe mode,” and it won’t visit sites that request not to be crawled in their robots.txt files.

TECHNOLOGY AND A TYRANNY WORSE THAN PRISON MikeRivero Tue, 03/28/2023 - 09:00

In an outstanding piece of political-theoretical writing, titled ‘The Threat of Big Other’ (with its play on George Orwell’s ‘Big Brother’) Shoshana Zuboff, succinctly addresses the main issues of her book, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism – The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power (New York: Public Affairs, Hachette, 2019), explicitly linking it to Orwell’s 

Tax season is upon us and, as with every year, we're seeing tax scammers rearing their heads.

Below, we have an example of a tax scam currently in circulation along with some suggestions for avoiding these kinds of attacks.

An IRS W-9 tax form scam

A Form W-9 is a form you fill in to confirm certain personal details with the IRS. Name, address, and Tax Identification Number are all things you can expect to fill in on one of these forms.

Social media applications are a constant topic of controversy.

While some tout that its great children can connect, there are also downsides. Recently, social media apps and big tech platforms have come under fire for hate speech, misinformation, spying on Americans, and the harmful effects social media can have on teens. Now, one state is paving the way to reign them in and limit the harm they are doing.

The researchers tested 17 popular devices that run the voice assistants and found that they're all ownable using any voice, even robot-generated, except for Apple Siri, which requires emulating or stealing the target's voice to accept commands. Hence, if you can authenticate on your smart device using your vocal fingerprint, it is recommended that you activate this additional security method.

As many know, I have written and spoken extensively about the dangers of transhumanism, also rebranded by the military as human augmentation or human enhancement. One of my more recent essays was titled Physicals, Virtuals, Machines and Overlords: Is the dark vision of a new caste system for the fourth revolution inevitable?

Murphy didn’t know it, but he was in the crosshairs of one of the most prolific and notorious members of a booming underground community of Instagram scammers and hackers who shut down profiles on the social network and then demand payment to reactivate them.