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Fake porn involves manipulating a video or photo by putting someone else’s face on a porn star’s body. In recent months, a growing group of Reddit users have used machine learning algorithms to swap celebrities’ faces into porn scenes. And now it seems to have entered the grossest, and most personal, phase yet. Today, Motherboard…
When it comes to streaming platforms for gamers, Facebook Live is often an afterthought. Sites like Twitch, YouTube, or Mixer already do a much better job of hosting gaming content, which is precisely the problem Facebook is trying to address with its new gaming creator pilot program. With this initiative, Facebook is implementing a new…
Google has quietly launched a pilot for a news app that it says will “put a spotlight on inspiring stories that aren’t being told.” Out this week via a limited pilot in Nashville and Oakland, Bulletin is essentially a public, shared blog space that doesn’t require any expertise on content management systems, HTML, or even…
America’s involvement in the First World War was brief, but intense. For a period of 20 months, the government did its best to stir patriotic fervor, in part through the use of eye-catching propaganda posters. A new exhibit at Bruce Museum is showcasing a selection of these works, many of which are seriously lacking in…
Even though we’re still a month out from the Samsung Galaxy S9’s official debut, as usual, in the run up to Mobile World Congress, leaks about Samsung’s upcoming flagship phone are starting to swirl. But today, we might have just hit the motherlode thanks to info found by noted smartphone sleuth @evleaks (aka Evan Blass),…
Through means currently unknown, approximately 500 million NEM tokens were exfiltrated from leading Japanese cryptocurrency exchange Coincheck, valued at approximately $400 million. Bloomberg reports that, aside from Bitcoin, all trading on the platform has been suspended. To give a sense of scale, all the money lost or stolen in initial coin offerings is estimated to…
US Immigration and Customs Enforcement has finalized a contract granting them agency-wide access to a national license plate recognition database, The Verge reported Friday. License plate readers are increasingly common in law enforcement agencies across the US, but this is the first time the agency has gained full access to such a surveillance database to…
When Hawaii accidentally terrified residents earlier this month with a push notification about an imminent “BALLISTIC MISSILE THREAT,” the Internet seemed to cry out in unison: Okay, who pushed the wrong button? An employee at Hawaii’s Emergency Management Agency was apparently responsible for the error. Intending only to test the state’s missile alert system internally,…
Scientists in India are in a furor following comments made by a junior minister who’s openly questioning the theory of evolution by natural selection. India’s Minister of State for Human Resource Development—a position that oversees university education—wants the theory of evolution to be removed from school curricula. Needless to say, this stance isn’t going over…
In 2000, former governor of Utah Michael Leavitt signed into law the nation’s first pornography czar role in an effort to “codify our highest moral aspirations.” Nearly two decades later, the state is trying to eliminate the position. “Of course, the whole thing was a public-relations nightmare and kind of made Utah the laughingstock of…
When it comes to e-readers, Amazon’s Kindles have become so dominant that the brand often gets used interchangeably with the generic term, much like you see with Kleenex for tissues and Frisbees for flying discs. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t viable Kindle alternatives, because for years, Kobo’s e-readers have been lurking in the shadows,…
We’ve featured Seb Lester’s remarkable calligraphy talents before, but in this video, instead of hand-lettering iconic corporate logos, he’s seemingly performing calligraphic magic by making beautifully stylized letters appear right before your eyes with just a few drops of ink. Is it actual magic? It all depends on how you define magic. There’s definitely no…
After a spat about a news story endorsing cuckoldry, a sex researcher suggested on Twitter yesterday that many male conservatives are using “faux scorn” to hide their personal fantasies of having other men sleep with their partners. The saga began on Thursday when CNN published a story titled “Cuckolding can be positive for some couples,…
Today, lawyers for Julian Assange asked a court in the UK to drop the warrant that’s currently standing for the WikiLeaks founder’s arrest. Their argument? It’s perhaps best summed up by the Fonz just saying “eyyyyyyyy” and walking off. Assange’s lawyer argued that the warrant has “lost its purpose” and “has no status” because the…
In an email to Gizmodo, Lyft confirmed that it is investigating an anonymous claim that employees used its customer database to access the personal information of romantic partners and technology executives like Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. As first reported by The Information, a person identifying themselves as having worked at Lyft made the allegations on…
The US Patent Office recently published a patent by Ford for an autonomous police vehicle that could be programmed with “machine learning tools (e.g., deep neural networks) to find good hiding spots to catch violators of traffic laws.” First spotted by Motor 1, the patent—which represents more of a moonshot project than a pending invention—would nonetheless…
Scottish and Australian researchers have found surprising evidence than detonating landmines, lethal explosives that leech toxic chemicals into soil, may actually be better for the environment than removing them outright. Their paper appears in the journal PLoS One. A team of scientists from Dundee University and the James Hutton Institute, both in Scotland, and the…
The next time you find yourself fleeing an oppressive regime across the galaxy, or to just another country, you won’t have to worry about whether or not you’ll be able to plug your lightsaber into some unfamiliar socket. This immobile version of R2-D2 from Brando hides an entire stack of power adapters for 40 different…
Are you a postdoctoral researcher with a hankering to help the US government hone its brain-warfare skills? Well, Uncle Sam has just the job for you! The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) recently posted an opportunity online for a postdoctorate fellow who will “examine how BNNs work and determine if they can…
A woman in Anchorage, Alaska was pulling off an embezzlement scheme so sly that even an IRS audit didn’t uncover the theft. But then her boss’s grandson infected peepaw’s computer with a virus, ultimately leading to the discovery of false checks. Raenette K. Yangson, 42, has been sentenced to three years in federal prison for…
