Friday I was at this amazing Asian grocery store, first time there. Checking out, I put my credit card in the little box at the register and it flashed my name and email address. Odd, I've never seen a checkout machine do that before - maybe my name, but never my email address. It asked me to confirm the amount. I hit OK to pay and headed out. Then, as I'm walking out, I get two emails from the store: one thanking me for joining their shoppers' club, and the other telling me about the weekly specials.

Just putting my credit card in the machine got me onto their mailing list!

Bleh.

... literally, with their own security cameras.

It's the summer of 2014. A hacker from the Dutch intelligence agency AIVD has penetrated the computer network of a university building next to the Red Square in Moscow, oblivious to the implications. One year later, from the AIVD headquarters in Zoetermeer, he and his colleagues witness Russian hackers launching an attack on the Democratic Party in the United States. The AIVD hackers had not infiltrated just any building; they were in the computer network of the infamous Russian hacker group Cozy Bear. And unbeknownst to the Russians, they could see everything.

That's how the AIVD becomes witness to the Russian hackers harassing and penetrating the leaders of the Democratic Party, transferring thousands of emails and documents. It won't be the last time they alert their American counterparts. And yet, it will be months before the United States realize what this warning means: that with these hacks the Russians have interfered with the American elections. And the AIVD hackers have seen it happening before their very eyes.

Hong Kong architects design housing made from water tubes.

Clever.

But an architect should surely know that the most efficient way to completely tile an area is with hexagons. And who wouldn't want to live in a beehive?

Though we won't know it.

[Daisy Ridley's face on someone else's body]

In December, Motherboard discovered a redditor named 'deepfakes' quietly enjoying his hobby: Face-swapping celebrity faces onto porn performers’ bodies. He made several convincing porn videos of celebrities—including Gal Gadot, Maisie Williams, and Taylor Swift—using a machine learning algorithm, his home computer, publicly available videos, and some spare time.

Since we first wrote about deepfakes, the practice of producing AI-assisted fake porn has exploded. More people are creating fake celebrity porn using machine learning, and the results have become increasingly convincing. Another redditor even created an app specifically designed to allow users without a computer science background to create AI-assisted fake porn. All the tools one needs to make these videos are free, readily available, and accompanied with instructions that walk novices through the process.

...

Deepfakeapp told me in a Reddit direct message that his goal with creating FakeApp was to make deepfakes’ technology available to people without a technical background or programming experience.

“I think the current version of the app is a good start, but I hope to streamline it even more in the coming days and weeks,” he said. “Eventually, I want to improve it to the point where prospective users can simply select a video on their computer, download a neural network correlated to a certain face from a publicly available library, and swap the video with a different face with the press of one button.”

Thus endeth humanity.

The vice article linked here is totally SFW. But the reddit it refers to is totally not. It's also totally chilling. Some of the videos there didn't turn out well, but they were mostly from first-timers just trying it out. Some of the others, though... there was no way I would have known it wasn't Daisy Ridley or Kristen Bell or whomever. It totally blows away this stuff.

It's a long established fact that Trump lies so often that nobody can believe anything the White House says. If you need evidence, WaPo counts 2140 "false or misleading claims" in his first year of office.

So, should anyone believe other countries won't take advantage of this ?

The US has always been divided on issues. But it used to be that the kinds of problems we argue about today were disagreements within a party or were not partisan at all - there were factions everywhere. But...

The current moment feels divisive because major policy and political questions are “sorted” between the parties — Republicans are mostly unified around one set of answers, and Democrats are mostly unified around another.

I blame Obama.

As always, everything that comes out of the White House is a pile of pure horseshit:

Add all of these factors together, and it becomes clear that an immigrant won’t be able to bring that many relatives to the US over the course of his or her lifetime. Vaughan’s study found that as of 2015, immigrants who came to the US from 1981 to 2000 had sponsored an average of 1.77 relatives to come join them. The most recent immigrants in the study — those who came to the US in the late 1990s — had sponsored the most relatives: 3.46. But both of those numbers include the minor children they brought with them at the time: In other words, they were hardly starting 3.46 new “chains.”

A human chain with 3.46 links, two of which are the minor children of the immigrants, isn't much of a chain.

But, yet again, we have to sit and watch "conservatives" work themselves into an ignorant fury over a complete lie.

Hawaii Gov. David Ige said he and his team took so long to post a message to social media about the recent missile alert being a false alarm because he didn't know his Twitter username and password. Ige told reporters Monday he has since put his username and password into his cellphone. He says he can now use social media without waiting for his staff.

Maybe a password manager like LastPass would help?

Update:

'Instagrammability'

How do you pick your holiday spots? Weather? Value for money? Lack of other tourists? There are various factors at play, but it turns out the most important thing millennials consider when choosing a holiday destination is how Instagrammable it is. A recent study has revealed that two-fifths (40.1 per cent) of millennials choose a travel spot based on its Instagrammability.

sigh

Actual CNN headline:

¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Here comes the government shutdown

And the attribution at the end of the article:

CNN's Phil Mattingly contributed emoji to this report.

Strictly speaking, that is not an emoji. That's an emoticon.