In a national database in Argentina, tens of thousands of entries detail the names, birthdays, and national IDs of people suspected of crimes. The database, known as the Consulta Nacional de Rebeldías y Capturas (National Register of Fugitives and Arrests), or CONARC, began in 2009 as a part of an effort to improve law enforcement […]
Author: nafees
Inside the strange new world of being a deepfake actor
In 2019, two multimedia artists, Francesca Panetta and Halsey Burgund, set about to pursue a provocative idea. Deepfake video and audio had been advancing in parallel but had yet to be integrated into a complete experience. Could they do it in a way that demonstrated the technology’s full potential while educating people about how it […]
Explainer: What “poll watching” really means
President Trump is trying to recruit an “army” of poll watchers for Election Day. As part of his ongoing disinformation campaign about election fraud, these aggressive appeals to his supporters are raising worries about voter intimidation—or worse.Meanwhile, Facebook just announced new rules that will no longer allow “militarized” language for poll watching on its platform. […]
Apple Accused of Arm-Twisting ProtonMail into Adding in-App Purchases
Lately, Apple has been into a lot of trouble for mandating In-app purchases. Remember how Hey email was forced to add in-app purchases right before WWDC 2020? Well, Hey email is not the only app that was forced into IAP. Apple has allegedly arm-twisted ProtonMail into adding in-app purchases. Continue reading → Powered by WPeMatico
Succeed in tough times: Make a digital pivot
When the coronavirus pandemic hit earlier this year, Alonso Yañez, CIO of Walmart’s operations in Mexico and Central America, sprang into action, triggering the retailer’s crisis management plan and leading its ongoing response. After quickly upgrading his remote-access infrastructure, Yañez sent all 1,000 of his IT staffers home, where they have been working ever since. […]
Apple TV+ Free Trial Extended Through February 2021
Subscribers of Apple TV+ will be getting an additional 3 months of free access to the streaming service. Continue reading → Powered by WPeMatico
Asteroid Bennu may have been home to ancient water flows
Ahead of an October 20 attempt to bring extraterrestrial rocks from an asteroid called Bennu to Earth, NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission has delivered new insights into its chemistry and geology. Bennu, currently over 321 million kilometers from Earth, was chosen for study because it’s a carbonaceous chondritic rock—rich in organics, and thought to have formed in […]
Security Researchers Spent Three Months Hacking Apple, Earned $51,500 in Bounty
Apple has awarded a bounty of $51,500 to a team of security researchers for unearthing vulnerabilities in the company’s infrastructure. The team spent three months hacking Apple and found several vulnerabilities that can affect its digital infrastructure. Continue reading → Powered by WPeMatico
A GPT-3 bot posted comments on Reddit for a week and no one noticed
Busted: A bot powered by OpenAI’s powerful GPT-3 language model has been unmasked after a week of posting comments on Reddit. Under the username /u/thegentlemetre, the bot was interacting with people on /r/AskReddit, a popular forum for general chat with 30 million users. It was posting in bursts of roughly once a minute. Fooled ya—again: It’s […]
Rapid covid tests can work—if you avoid making the White House’s mistakes
As of Tuesday evening, 18 people who’ve worked at the White House had tested positive for covid-19. That count is likely to tick upward. Now the White House strategy to prevent such an outbreak is coming under scrutiny—in large part because it hinged mostly on the use of daily rapid testing and nothing else. In […]