Post a news story, entertain me!

Financial Times is an instant paywall, so I couldn't read the article, but if this is what I think it is, it's not done by AI trying to recognize the images. They will hash the photos with an algorithm, probably SHA256, and use those hashes to detect images that are known to be child abuse imagery.

This is the same way most services already detect these images being sent via emails or stored on cloud services without needing to distribute the actual images. The new part here is that Apple will be using it on photos on your devices that you haven't uploaded anywhere.

The chances of a hash being identical to another one from a totally different image are so vanishingly small that it's not worth talking about. So, false positives are... not likely.

Whether or not the boundary crossed by checking images on your devices is okay is another matter.

NSMike wrote:

Financial Times is an instant paywall, so I couldn't read the article, but if this is what I think it is, it's not done by AI trying to recognize the images. They will hash the photos with an algorithm, probably SHA256, and use those hashes to detect images that are known to be child abuse imagery.

This is the same way most services already detect these images being sent via emails or stored on cloud services without needing to distribute the actual images. The new part here is that Apple will be using it on photos on your devices that you haven't uploaded anywhere.

The chances of a hash being identical to another one from a totally different image are so vanishingly small that it's not worth talking about. So, false positives are... not likely.

Whether or not the boundary crossed by checking images on your devices is okay is another matter.

Yes this is the method they are using, hash matching against a database of hashes of known child abuse imagery.

NSMike wrote:

The chances of a hash being identical to another one from a totally different image are so vanishingly small that it's not worth talking about. So, false positives are... not likely.

Whether or not the boundary crossed by checking images on your devices is okay is another matter.

Asking out of ignorance as to the math of hashing - How vanishingly small? Because we're talking about a very large sample set.

Google says ~ three-quarter of a billion iPhones currently in use worldwide. On average each has, what, a thousand photos sitting on it?

So if your false positive isn't at least a few orders of magnitude less than one-in-750 billion, you're gonna be ruining lives. And that's a helluva accuracy rate.

Jonman wrote:
NSMike wrote:

The chances of a hash being identical to another one from a totally different image are so vanishingly small that it's not worth talking about. So, false positives are... not likely.

Whether or not the boundary crossed by checking images on your devices is okay is another matter.

Asking out of ignorance as to the math of hashing - How vanishingly small? Because we're talking about a very large sample set.

Google says ~ three-quarter of a billion iPhones currently in use worldwide. On average each has, what, a thousand photos sitting on it?

So if your false positive isn't at least a few orders of magnitude less than one-in-750 billion, you're gonna be ruining lives. And that's a helluva accuracy rate.

https://stackoverflow.com/a/4014407

The usual answer goes thus: what is the probability that a rogue asteroid crashes on Earth within the next second, obliterating civilization-as-we-know-it, and killing off a few billion people? It can be argued that any unlucky event with a probability lower than that is not actually very important.

If we have a "perfect" hash function with output size n, and we have p messages to hash (individual message length is not important), then probability of collision is about p2/2n+1 (this is an approximation which is valid for "small" p, i.e. substantially smaller than 2n/2). For instance, with SHA-256 (n=256) and one billion messages (p=109) then the probability is about 4.3*10-60.

A mass-murderer space rock happens about once every 30 million years on average. This leads to a probability of such an event occurring in the next second to about 10-15. That's 45 orders of magnitude more probable than the SHA-256 collision. Briefly stated, if you find SHA-256 collisions scary then your priorities are wrong.

But, tt's not the standard hash algorithm. It allows for some amount of variation so criminals can't easily evade the algorithm by making small changes. It has some amount of fuzzy matching, like face and fingerprint matching.

The short answer is we don't know how likely false positives and negatives will be because Apple hasn't released the code for independent investigation. However, researchers have been able to reverse and fool it already.

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archiv...

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archiv...

There was some good discussion about this on the Lawfare podcast, and Risky Business.

Noted - when the ivermectin runs out, shove your bike pump hose up there.

Jonman wrote:

Noted - when the ivermectin runs out, shove your bike pump hose up there.

I've been looking for the perfect reason to not have to wear a mask.

Does this mean that my pants-free jaunts to the grocery store could be putting me at risk for getting COVID up the ol yin yang?

After 100 Years, a Royal Wedding in Russia Evokes Days of the Czars

Among the list of royal attendees were Princess Leia of Belgium, Queen Sofia of Spain, Prince Rudolph and Princess Tilsim of Liechtenstein, and the last czar of Bulgaria, Simeon II.

IMAGE(https://th.bing.com/th/id/R.56240f4ba7bf4655ee8bb60d629e0e7e?rik=zet6%2bbT%2fRhcILg&pid=ImgRaw&r=0&PC=EMMX01)

Weight Loss May Not Actually Make You Healthier, Study Reveals

The researchers analyzed hundreds of studies looking at how weight loss, exercise and longevity fit together — focusing specifically on research that examined health outcomes in people who were considered overweight or obese. (The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention considers a BMI of 25 to 30 as overweight; anything over 30 is obese or severely obese.)

Ultimately, the evidence shows being active trumps weight loss when it comes to improving heart health and reducing overall mortality risk, the researchers concluded.

In fact, people who are considered obese may have a lower risk of premature death than those who are normal weight but not in good shape, according to the study.

IMAGE(https://c.tenor.com/Q9UYdX1PQ64AAAAC/thinner-creepy.gif)

Duh?!

A bit of satire

White House Warns Supply Chain Shortages Could Lead Americans To Discover True Meaning Of Christmas

As reports of worldwide shipping issues continued to mount, the White House warned Wednesday that supply chain shortages could lead Americans to discover the true meaning of Christmas. “Unless these unprecedented scarcities are reversed soon, hundreds of thousands of Americans could be forced to learn that there is more to life than material objects,” said White House press secretary Jen Psaki, cautioning that delays in shipping of clothing, toys, and other common gifts had the potential to make this Christmas the most communal and brotherly of any on record.

Employers are getting ghosted by job applicants.

Honestly, this is so delicious to me, I almost want to start applying to jobs and ghosting them for fun. If job hunting didn't suck so much, that is.

I left my admin job earlier this year. Since my title was senior analyst and I have technology buzzwords on my resume I have received quite a few calls that got through from headhunters I won't even bother talking to because they're rude and have no idea the kind of work I used to do. It's a different world out there!

NSMike wrote:

Employers are getting ghosted by job applicants.

Honestly, this is so delicious to me, I almost want to start applying to jobs and ghosting them for fun. If job hunting didn't suck so much, that is.

Your sentiments are shared. Enthusiastically.

NSMike wrote:

Employers are getting ghosted by job applicants.

Honestly, this is so delicious to me, I almost want to start applying to jobs and ghosting them for fun. If job hunting didn't suck so much, that is.

As someone who does a fair bit of hiring in my work I can say this isn't a new phenomenon. This has been happening more often over the last 10 years. I suspect it's because of increased usage of websites like Indeed and Ziprecruiter. Applicants now don't have to print out their resumes on high quality paper stock and mail them to all potential employers. They're able to get their resume out with a click or two and send them to 50 or so positions a lot easier than they used to.

Typically if I have one position to fill I'll call 10 applicants to schedule an interview. Schedule maybe 7 or so and have 3 or 4 show up. If I offer them a position, probably 75% of them show up for their first day of work. Although it's very rare for them to just not show up. They usually will call or email to let me know they've accepted a different position.

Anyway, a longwinded way of saying applicants sometimes send out their resume for a position that after closer review they don't feel is right for them. Also, sometimes they receive more than one offer, and the other one is better.

I don't understand the hiring managers who take this personally.

All the Fast Food You Love Contains Hormone-Disrupting Chemicals, Study Finds

Hormone-disrupting chemicals known as phthalates were found in many fast food meals tested as part of new research. The study authors found several different phthalates, as well as other chemicals meant to replace phthalates, across a variety of fast food takeout items, including fries, burritos, and cheeseburgers. Though the health impact of these chemicals is still being studied, the authors argue that more should be done to keep them out of our foods.
This new research, helmed by some of the same authors, instead looked at the fast foods themselves. They collected 64 food samples from 6 different restaurants in the San Antonio, Texas area, covering burger shops, a pizza place, and a Tex-Mex restaurant; they also collected pairs of food-handling gloves from three of these restaurants. They tested them all for commonly reported phthalates as well as other plasticizers that have started to be used as supposedly safer alternatives to phthalates.
All told, 81% of food items contained the phthalate di-n-butyl phthalate (DnBP), while 70% also contained di(2-ethylhexyl) phthalate (DEHP), which have both been implicated as possible contributors to fertility problems. About 89% of foods contained some di(2-ethylhexyl) terephthalate (DEHT), a non-phthalate plasticizer. Some research has suggested that DEHT may be a safer chemical than other phthalates, but it hasn’t been studied closely yet, so any conclusion about its relative safety in humans is still speculative, the authors argue. Meat items, including cheeseburgers and chicken burritos, generally had the highest levels of any of these chemicals.

The team’s findings were published Tuesday in the Journal of Exposure Science and Environmental Epidemiology.

“We found phthalates and other plasticizers are widespread in prepared foods available at U.S. fast food chains, a finding that means many consumers are getting a side of potentially unhealthy chemicals along with their meal,” said lead author Lariah Edwards, a postdoctoral scientist at George Washington, in a statement provided to Gizmodo. “Stronger regulations are needed to help keep these harmful chemicals out of the food supply.”

Not really news but I found his comments to be thought provoking

Wil Wheaton gave a perfect explanation of how to separate problematic artists from their art

"Answer: I have been precisely where you are, right now. In fact, we were just talking about this a few days ago, as it relates to a guy who wrote a ton of music that was PROFOUND to me when I was a teenager. He wrote about being lonely and feeling unloved, and all the things I was feeling as a teenager.

He grew up to be a reprehensible bigot, and for years I couldn't listen to one of the most important bands in my life anymore.

But this week, someone pointed out that he was one member of a group that all worked together to make that thing that was so important to me. And the person he was when he wrote those lyrics is not the person he is today. And the person I was when I heard those lyrics doesn't deserve to be shoved into a box and put away, because that guy is a sh*t.

This is a long way of saying that Joss sure turned out to be garbage. Because of who my friends are, I know stuff that isn't in the public, and it's pretty horrible. He's just not a good person, and apparently never was a good person.

BUT! Buffy is more than him. It's all the actors and crew who made it. It's all the writers who aren't Joss. Joss is part of it, sure, and some of the episodes he wrote are terrific.

At least one of the episodes he wrote was deeply meaningful to you at a moment in your life when you'd experienced a loss I can only imagine. The person you are now, and the 16 year-old you were who just lost their dad, are more important than the piece of sh*t Joss Whedon revealed himself to be.

His bad behavior is on him. He has to live with it, and the consequences of it.

16-year-old you, who just lost their dad, shouldn't have to think about what a sh*t Joss Whedon is for even a second. That kid, and you, deserve to have that place to revisit when you need to go there.

I can't speak for the other actors, even the ones I know. But I will tell you, as an abuse survivor myself who never wanted to be in front of the camera when he was a kid: it's really okay for you to enjoy the work. The work is good and meaningful, and if nobody is going to watch it because of what one piece of sh*t did two decades ago, what was it all for?

I'm not the pope of chilitown, so take this for what it's worth: I believe that when some piece of art is deeply meaningful to a person, for whatever reason, that art doesn't belong to the person who created it, if it ever did. It belongs to the person who found something meaningful in the art.

If it feels right to you to put it away and never look at it again, that's totally valid. But if it brings you comfort, or joy, or healing, or just warm familiarity to bring it out and spend some time with it, that's totally valid, too.

I've written a lot of words. I hope some of them make sense and are helpful to you."

Now I want to know what that band was...?

One thing after I thought about it more was that is find for Joss who was part of a big show or a member of a band but someone like Bill Cosby I think is differnet. He was his standup, his humor, his brand and the things he did have shattered that to the point where I can't imagine watching "Himself" or listening to any of his routines.

However I do think something like Buffy is more than just one person so I can kind of see that.

Yeah I can't watch an episode of Cosby Show anymore. But I rewatched the entire series A Different World last summer. Still great.

I find it much easier to separate the artist from the art when said artist isn't visible in the work. Joss Whedon is behind the scenes, so aside form his works that have a problem to start with, his presence is pretty ignoble.

Bill Cosby? Hard to ignore.

I have a similar problem with the Naked Gun films. I love them, I think they are brilliant, but the parts with O. J. Simpson are impossible to laugh at now.

fangblackbone wrote:

Now I want to know what that band was...?

The Smiths?

yregprincess wrote:
fangblackbone wrote:

Now I want to know what that band was...?

The Smiths?

Yes, it has to be.

The Smiths were my favorite band. Joss Whedon was my favorite creator of TV and film. Louis CK was my favorite comedian.

I really need to stop liking things...

Tasty Pudding wrote:
yregprincess wrote:
fangblackbone wrote:

Now I want to know what that band was...?

The Smiths?

Yes, it has to be.

The Smiths were my favorite band. Joss Whedon was my favorite creator of TV and film. Louis CK was my favorite comedian.

I really need to stop liking things...

I feel your pain, before Louis CK was my favorite comedian, it was Bill Cosby (facepalm)