UK intel committee on Russia: Social media firms should remove state disinformation. What was that, MI5? ████████?
An influential UK Parliamentary committee has called on social media companies to remove covert hostile state material and said the government must “name and shame” those that fail to act. It also said that there was a “complicated wiring diagram of responsibilities amongst ministers” who might have to act in the event of a major state cyber attack.
After banning Chinese comms bogeyman, UK asks: Huawei in this mess? It was a failure of capitalism, MPs told
Following the ban of the firm’s gear in the nation’s 5G deployment, the government is doing some soul-searching to find out how it became so dependent on one particular vendor.
Twitter has decided to crack down on QAnon, the bizarre conspiracy theory that suggests US president Donald Trump is working to expose a cabal of deep-state Satanist paedophiles that secretly runs the world.
Sick of AI engines scraping your pics for facial recognition? Here’s a way to Fawkes them right up
Researchers at the University of Chicago’s Sand Lab have developed a technique for tweaking photos of people so that they sabotage facial-recognition systems.
The project, named Fawkes in reference to the mask in the V for Vendetta graphic novel and film depicting 16th century failed assassin Guy Fawkes, is described in a paper scheduled for presentation in August at the USENIX Security Symposium 2020.
Fawkes consists of software that runs an algorithm designed to “cloak” photos so they mistrain facial recognition systems, rendering them ineffective at identifying the depicted person. These “cloaks,” which AI researchers refer to as perturbations, are claimed to be robust enough to survive subsequent blurring and image compression.