Dan Q
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Sure: I think you’ve earned a blowjob, Tailsteak. I think we might need a spin-off of Patreon where you can offer content creators sexual favours in exchange for their work…
(In other news, I’ve said before that you should read Forward, and now’s a great time to start. You can catch up, don’t worry.)
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But while we’ve learned to distrust user names and text more generally, pictures are different. You can’t synthesize a picture out of nothing, we assume; a picture had to be of someone. Sure a scammer could appropriate someone else’s picture, but doing so is a risky strategy in a world with google reverse search and so forth. So we tend to trust pictures. A business profile with a picture obviously belongs to someone. A match on a dating site may turn out to be 10 pounds heavier or 10 years older than when a picture was taken, but if there’s a picture, the person obviously exists.
No longer. New adverserial machine learning algorithms allow people to rapidly generate synthetic ‘photographs’ of people who have never existed. Already faces of this sort are being used in espionage.
Computers are good, but your visual processing systems are even better. If you know what to look for, you can spot these fakes at a single glance — at least for the time being. The hardware and software used to generate them will continue to improve, and it may be only a few years until humans fall behind in the arms race between forgery and detection.
Our aim is to make you aware of the ease with which digital identities can be faked, and to help you spot these fakes at a single glance.
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I was at a conference last month where research was presented which concluded pretty solidly that the mechanisms used to make “deepfakes” meant that it was probably impossible to create artificial intelligence that can learn to distinguish between real and fake pictures of humans. Simply put, this is because the way we make such images is with generative adversarial networks, an AI technique which thrives upon having an effective discriminator component, and any research into differentiating between real and fake images feeds the capability of the next generation of discriminators!
Instead, then, the best medium-term defence against deepfakes is training humans to be able to identify them, and that’s what this website aims to do. I was pleased that I did very well on my first attempt (I sort-of knew what to look for already, based on a basic understanding of the underlying technologies) but I was also pleased that I was able to learn to do better with the aid of the authors’ tips. Nice.
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Rapping about video games is one thing. Rapping about music/beatmatching video games takes this to a whole new level.
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Some people fight their haters. Some people ignore their haters. Madilyn Bailey goes one step further and uses hate comments as the lyrics to a song.
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To enable users to easily navigate to specific content in a web page, we propose adding support for specifying a text snippet in the URL. When navigating to such a URL, the browser will find the first instance of the text snippet in the page and bring it into view.
Web standards currently specify support for scrolling to anchor elements with name attributes, as well as DOM elements with ids, when navigating to a fragment. While named anchors and elements with ids enable scrolling to limited specific parts of web pages, not all documents make use of these elements, and not all parts of pages are addressable by named anchors or elements with ids.
Current Status
This feature is currently implemented as an experimental feature in Chrome 74.0.3706.0 and newer. It is not yet shipped to users by default. Users who wish to experiment with it can use chrome://flags#enable-text-fragment-anchor. The implementation is incomplete and doesn’t necessarily match the specification in this document.
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tl;dr
Allow specifying text to scroll and highlight in the URL:
https://example.com##targetText=prefix-,startText,endText,-suffix
Using this syntax
##targetText=[prefix-,]textStart[,textEnd][,-suffix] context |-------match-----| context(Square brackets indicate an optional parameter)
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This is a feature that I’ve wished that the Web had on many, many occasions. I’m sure you’ve needed it before, too: you’ve wanted to give somebody the URL of (or link to) a particular part of a page but there’s been no appropriately-placed anchor to latch on to. Being able to select part of the text
on the page and just copy that after a ## in the address bar would be so much simpler.
Chrome’s implementation is somewhat conservative, requiring a prefix of ##targetText= (this minimises the risk of collision with other applications which store/pass data
via hashes), but it’s still pretty full-featured, with support for prefixes and suffixes to the text to-be-selected. I quite like it, but of course it needs running down the standards
track before it can be relied upon as anything other than a progressive enhancement.
I do wonder, though, whether this will be met with resistance by ad/subscription-supported content creators as a new example of the deep linking they seem to hate so much.
(with thanks to Jeremy Keith for sharing this)
This checkin to GC6A0FW Melody Marker 11 reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.
Quick and easy find while dropping my sister off at the station. TFTC.
This checkin to GC5MYFN 01 It's a Bugs Life x2 reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.
Some fellow volunteers and I are on an “away weekend” in the forest; this morning before our first meeting I lead a quick expedition of both established and first-timer geocachers around a few of the local caches.
Passed another couple of ‘cachers on the way from GC840TN, but it sounded like they’d been having less luck than us this morning. Coordinates spot on; dropped me right on top of the cache and I was familiar with this kind of container so I picked it up as soon as I got there – quick and easy find, and our last for the morning! TFTC.
This checkin to GC840TN Georassic Diplodocus reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.
Some fellow volunteers and I are on an “away weekend” in the forest; this morning before our first meeting I lead a quick expedition of both established and first-timer geocachers around a few of the local caches.
Coordinates didn’t put us very close: perhaps because of tree cover interfering with the GPSr; we needed to decipher the hint. The hint was good, though, and I went straight to the dino’s hiding place, trampled past a few fresh nettles, and retreived it. Excellent caches; we loved these!
This checkin to GC5MYFW 02 It's a Bugs Life x2 reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.
Some fellow volunteers and I are on an “away weekend” in the forest; this morning before our first meeting I lead Ga quick expedition of both established and first-timer geocachers around a few of the local caches.
Geoff pounced right onto this one, stunning some of our less-experienced ‘cachers who’d never considered the possibility of a container like this!
This checkin to GC3JG9P Georassic - Stegosaurus reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.
Some fellow volunteers and I are on an “away weekend” in the forest; this morning before our first meeting I lead a quick expedition of both established and first-timer geocachers around a few of the local caches.
Our tagalong 5-year-old and 2-year-old co-found this one; they were pretty much an ideal size to get to the GZ. This was the last of the three caches they attended; they went back to their cabin after this but most of the adults carried on.
This checkin to GC840T0 Georassic Parasaurolophus reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.
Some fellow volunteers and I are on an “away weekend” in the forest; this morning before our first meeting I lead a quick expedition of both established and first-timer geocachers around a few of the local caches.
So THAT is what a Parasaurolophus looks like! Swiftly found by our tame 5 year-old, who was especially delighted to pull a dinosaur out of its hiding place.
This checkin to GC3JG92 Georassic - Spinosaurus reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.
Some fellow volunteers and I are on an “away weekend” in the forest; this morning before our first meeting I lead a quick expedition of both established and first-timer geocachers around a few of the local caches.
After a bit of an extended hunt (this dino was well-hidden!) we found this first container; delighted by the theming of this series; FP awarded here for the ones we found.
Prior to the invention of nose-picking by Dr. Edwin Snotter in 1893, a variety of less-effective techniques for the removal of dried nasal mucus were widely practised.
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If the different land uses of the UK were divided up into their percentage-ratio blocks, what would a 100-second tour of the country (with each second covering a single percent of the land usage) look like?
This checkin to GC86MTH Yarnton Lane reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.
Checked-in on this cache. All is well, although the pencil is blunt; I’ll try to get out here with a sharpener if nobody beats me to it first.
