Horror Report

Category: technology

  • If you could read my mind.. what a tale my thoughts could tell…

    If you could read my mind.. what a tale my thoughts could tell…

    The haunting words of Gordon Lightfoot’s IF YOU COULD READ MY MIND may be the best background for this story.. conjuring the imagination of his ghostly song coupled with technology piercing the safety nets of our mind.. and going deep into brains to predict what we will want. What we will buy.. what we will…think?

    As this post is written, a LONG day is wrapping up. For some weird reason, this particular Saturday felt like the longest day that ever existed.. Maybe the snowy landscape and bone chilling temperatures.. Who knows.

    I think it was hour number 5,000 of the day when I was just bored in the chair looking through stupid TikTok videos, one after the other. After the other.. And so on. People falling. Political content. Old ladies screaming. Ice storms and people slipping. Weird stuff and so on. Everyone’s for you page is different. That’s a peak at mine.

    This is where the weirdness started.

    In my brain, a voice said “it’s been a long time since you saw TikTok videos about Michael Myers and Halloween”.. No verbal output occurred, here, it was just an internalized passing thought. A blip on the brain wave radar.. It just popped into my brain, and I remembered rationalizing it by saying that ‘Halloween is over and of course I will not be seeing videos like that on the for me page’ for a while..

    About a good solid minute later this video now pops up on the for you page:

    @vintagevideobasement

    Halloween III on the long forgotten format CED videodisc. . . . #Halloween #CED #Videodisc #80s #80shorror #physicalmedia #vintage #vintagevideobasement #vintagevibes #80saesthetic #80smovies #80svintage #80snostalgia #horror #horrormovies #crt #crttv #asmr

    ♬ original sound – Vintage Video Basement

    First of all, great great video. Pure nostalgia and 1980s glory and all that..

    But wait.. HALLOWEEN!? Just when moments earlier the idea of a Halloween video was crossing the brain and being dismissed due to the time of the year..

    I completely got the chills and gave me a very bizarre feeling.

    And it just started more thoughts to roll. Do you have this occur? Does this happen when you talk about things–we all know ads pop up a little bit after we search things or talk about them.. but how often do you actually have something on tech occur after you simply THINK about it?

    Is there some algorithm that certain videos trigger people searching for other things? Or perhaps this was just all weird and random coincidence ..

    There are countless videos on TikTok about thinking of things and then seeing those things on a for you page.

    Controversy about TikTok’s (and other social media platforms) algorithms have be been in the news for years. Most of those have revolved around the kids not being alright, teens with angst getting a perverted sense of purpose and meaning after diving too deep into rabbit holes.

    Advertising clearly goes hand in hand with things you search and like. TikTok was accused of privacy violations recently. Others have accused social media platforms of monitoring heart rates and eye movements when viewing Apps. Sounds ridiculous, right? Conspiracy silly theory?

    Oh what what’s this?

    TikTok’s ‘Focused view’ can monitor your emotions while using the app.

    Back to mind reading..

    Think it.. see it.

    When it happens it’s weird.. But it does not feel real.. natural. It has no meaningful or paranormal context.. Instead it has a creepy and artificial feeling. You get an immediate impression that you’re a test subject, a spoke on a wheel. Nothing of it feels right, instead you just want to escape this hellscape that the future may be bringing us.

  • AI doom calculator can predict when you’ll die using 4 pieces of data – and it’s being called eerily accurate

    AI doom calculator can predict when you’ll die using 4 pieces of data – and it’s being called eerily accurate

    It was created by scientists in Denmark and the US, who fed it a a registry of data of six million Danish citizens from 2008 to 2020.

    In comparison to ChatGPT, this AI uses information including income, profession, place of residence, injuries and pregnancy history.

    The team – which has not yet made the calculator available to the general public – tested Life2vec on a group of people aged between 35 and 65, half of whom died between 2016 and 2020.

    But .. would you use it ?
    — Read on www.the-sun.com/tech/9905416/doom-calculator-can-predict-when-you-will-die/amp/

  • Artificial Intelligence Lawsuit: AI-Generated Art Not Copyrightable

    Artificial Intelligence Lawsuit: AI-Generated Art Not Copyrightable

    This confirms the tenet what copyright protection rooms are only available for things created by human..

    This is all happening very quickly..

    A federal judge on Friday upheld a finding from the U.S. Copyright Office that a piece of art created by AI is not open to protection. The ruling was delivered in an order turning down Stephen Thaler’s bid challenging the government’s position refusing to register works made by AI. Copyright law has “never stretched so far” to “protect works generated by new forms of technology operating absent any guiding human hand,” U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell found.
    — Read on www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/ai-works-not-copyrightable-studios-1235570316/

  • Facial recognition in Detroit to remain in use after police commissioners vote despite errors

    Facial recognition in Detroit to remain in use after police commissioners vote despite errors

    Ultimately the vote failed and the technology will continue to be used–despite innocent people being swept up in error by technology..

    By a vote of 5-3 Thursday night with two people abstaining, a measure to suspend the use of facial recognition for a year was shot down.

    The technology has come under fire this week after a lawsuit filed against the department claims facial recognition led to the false arrest of a Detroit woman who was 8 months pregnant.
    — Read on www.wxyz.com/news/facial-recognition-technology-in-detroit-to-remain-in-use-after-commissioners-vote

  • Tech gone wild in 2022

    Tech gone wild in 2022

    Well, it went wild years before. We just are finding out now (though it should not come as a surprise)

    Leaked Audio From 80 Internal TikTok Meetings Shows That US User Data Has Been Repeatedly Accessed From China

    “Everything is seen in China,” said a member of TikTok’s Trust and Safety department in a September 2021 meeting. In another September meeting, a director referred to one Beijing-based engineer as a “Master Admin” who “has access to everything.” (While many employees introduced themselves by name and title in the recordings, BuzzFeed News is not naming anyone to protect their privacy.)


    The recordings range from small-group meetings with company leaders and consultants to policy all-hands presentations and are corroborated by screenshots and other documents, providing a vast amount of evidence to corroborate prior reports of China-based employees accessing US user data. Their contents show that data was accessed far more frequently and recently than previously reported, painting a rich picture of the challenges the world’s most popular social media app has faced in attempting to disentangle its US operations from those of its parent company in Beijing. Ultimately, the tapes suggest that the company may have misled lawmakers, its users, and the public by downplaying that data stored in the US could still be accessed by employees in China.

    Didn’t we hear this before when Donald Trump was president?

    MEANWHILE on your health!

    Facebook Is Receiving Sensitive Medical Information from Hospital Websites

    A tracking tool installed on many hospitals’ websites has been collecting patients’ sensitive health information—including details about their medical conditions, prescriptions, and doctor’s appointments—and sending it to Facebook.

    The Markup tested the websites of Newsweek’s top 100 hospitals in America. On 33 of them we found the tracker, called the Meta Pixel, sending Facebook a packet of data whenever a person clicked a button to schedule a doctor’s appointment. The data is connected to an IP address—an identifier that’s like a computer’s mailing address and can generally be linked to a specific individual or household—creating an intimate receipt of the appointment request for Facebook.

    ARE YOU OK WITH THIS?

  • The ghost in the machine: Maybe we should talk about AI?

    The ghost in the machine: Maybe we should talk about AI?

    What have we done!

    All of those movies and TV shows about AI gaining the advantage on human beings didn’t teach us not to do this far?

    Before we over-react, let’s just react: Google has placed a man on leave after he publicly claimed that AI was not sentient, and that it acts like a 7 or 8 year old.

    So just dwell on that for a bit.

    Here is the story as best we can summarize from varied reports..

    Blake Lemoine, 41, a senior software engineer at Google has been testing Google’s artificial intelligence tool called LaMDA

    • Following hours of conversations with the AI, Lemoine came away with the perception that LaMDA was sentient 
    • After presenting his findings to company bosses, Google disagreed with him
    • Lemoine then decided to share his conversations with the tool online 
    • He was put on paid leave by Google for violating confidentiality

    The UK DAILY MAIL reports:

    A senior software engineer at Google who signed up to test Google’s artificial intelligence tool called LaMDA (Language Model for Dialog Applications), has claimed that the AI robot is in fact sentient and has thoughts and feelings.

    During a series of conversations with LaMDA, 41-year-old Blake Lemoine presented the computer with various of scenarios through which analyses could be made.

    They included religious themes and whether the artificial intelligence could be goaded into using discriminatory or hateful speech. 

    MORE:

    ‘If I didn’t know exactly what it was, which is this computer program we built recently, I’d think it was a 7-year-old, 8-year-old kid that happens to know physics,’ he told the Washington Post.  

    Lemoine worked with a collaborator in order to present the evidence he had collected to Google but vice president Blaise Aguera y Arcas and Jen Gennai, head of Responsible Innovation at the company dismissed his claims. 

    He was placed on paid administrative leave by Google on Monday for violating its confidentiality policy. Meanwhile, Lemoine has now decided to go public and shared his conversations with LaMDA.

    ‘Google might call this sharing proprietary property. I call it sharing a discussion that I had with one of my coworkers,’ Lemoine tweeted on Saturday. 

    ‘Btw, it just occurred to me to tell folks that LaMDA reads Twitter. It’s a little narcissistic in a little kid kinda way so it’s going to have a great time reading all the stuff that people are saying about it,’ he added in a follow-up tweet.  

    As he talked to LaMDA about religion, Lemoine, who studied cognitive and computer science in college, noticed the chatbot talking about its rights and personhood, and decided to press further. In another exchange, the AI was able to change Lemoine’s mind about Isaac Asimov’s third law of robotics.

    Lemoine worked with a collaborator to present evidence to Google that LaMDA was sentient. But Google vice president Blaise Aguera y Arcas and Jen Gennai, head of Responsible Innovation, looked into his claims and dismissed them. Lemoine, who was placed on paid administrative leave by Google on Monday, decided to go public.

    For your discernment, you can read the full conversation here that made Lemoine think AI has finally become aware of itself:

  • Broad decision: Judge Orders Every U.S. ISP to Block Streaming Sites Accused of Copyright Infringement

    Broad decision: Judge Orders Every U.S. ISP to Block Streaming Sites Accused of Copyright Infringement

    Judge Orders Every U.S. ISP to Block Streaming Sites Accused of Copyright Infringement

    More..

    US District Judge Katherine Polk Failla of the Southern District of New York, an Obama appointee, last week ordered every US internet service provider to block three streaming sites for enabling piracy, effectively enacting by judicial decree the SOPA legislation Congress rejected a decade ago…

    image

    TORRENT FREAK speaks about new ground being broken:

    At least in broad terms, the lawsuits were relatively unremarkable. They followed traditional lines by demanding $150,000 in statutory damages for every copyrighted work infringed and an injunction to prevent infringement moving forward. From the beginning it seemed highly unlikely that the operators of these sites would turn up in court to defend themselves, meaning that a win for the plaintiffs in these cases was never really in doubt.

    Late last week, the plaintiffs won all three lawsuits via default judgments. The court ordered the operators of Israel-tv.com, Israel.tv and Sdarot.tv to each pay $7,650,000 in statutory copyright infringement damages related to 51 registered works owned by the plaintiffs.

    While almost $23 million in damages isn’t an inconsiderable amount, the injunctions handed down in all three cases are something never seen before in a TV/movie piracy case.

    The plaintiffs are United King Film Distribution, D.B.S. Satellite Services (1998), HOT Communication Systems, Reshet Media, and Keshet Broadcasting. While the plaintiffs “transmit their programming in an encrypted form,” the defendants’ “various services and hardware permit end-user consumers to bypass the Plaintiffs’ encryption to view Plaintiffs’ content,” the rulings said.

    The judge ordered domain registrars and registries to transfer the domain names to the plaintiffs. The rulings include injunctions against “third parties providing services used in connection with Defendants’ operations,” including web hosts, content delivery networks, DNS providers, VPN providers, web designers, search-based online advertising services, and others.

  • TIME feeling musky.. Elon named person of the year

    TIME feeling musky.. Elon named person of the year

    TIME’sEditor-in-Chief said that Elon Musk has had an “extraordinary influence for Life on Earth and life off Earth, too.” It’s no secret that he had an extreme dominance over “many things in America’s life right now” — from the space industry, to the automobile industry, to his influence on social media with millions of followers.

    During one less than influential moment, Musk dressed as Wario during a less than Stellar Snl Skit causing a virtual coin to collapse..

    A very interesting choice by Time..

  • T-Mobile nightmare

    T-Mobile nightmare

    Developing story has security experts worried, and should be forcing 100 million users to have equal fears.

    According to reports, a security breach of at least 100 million T-Mobile users has occurred.

    Along with the data that has been potentially breached, Social Security numbers, phone numbers, names, physical addresses, and even drivers license information..

    According to what is known, Tmobile was first alerted to the breach by a forum post in which a hacker claimed to be selling huge amounts of personal data on people.

    The alleged sleuth is requesting six bitcoin – or roughly $260,000 – in exchange for a subset of the data which contains 30 million social security numbers and driver’s licenses, VICE reports.

    The seller suggested that T-Mobile had already responded to the breach, adding: “I think they already found out because we lost access to the backdoored servers.”

    While the hacker has been removed from the hacked server, they claim they had already downloaded the data locally.

  • Apple to scan U.S. iPhones for images of child sexual abuse! Privacy experts alarmed at the possibilities of technology

    Apple to scan U.S. iPhones for images of child sexual abuse! Privacy experts alarmed at the possibilities of technology

    Apple unveiled plans to scan U.S. iPhones for images of child sexual abuse, drawing applause from child protection groups but raising concern among some security researchers that the system could be misused by governments looking to surveil their citizens.

    Apple said its messaging app will use on-device machine learning to warn about sensitive content without making private communications readable by the company. The tool Apple calls “neuralMatch” will detect known images of child sexual abuse without decrypting people’s messages. If it finds a match, the image will be reviewed by a human who can notify law enforcement if necessary.

    But researchers say the tool could be put to other purposes such as government surveillance of dissidents or protesters.
    — Read on apnews.com/article/technology-business-child-abuse-apple-inc-7fe2a09427d663cda8addfeeffc40196