everwas

a blog by Ian Kennedy

Month: July 2020

  • Deep Fake Chaff

    Deep Fake Chaff

    There’s a thing called chaff that fighter aircraft use as a counter-measure against radar. It’s basically strips of aluminum foil which, when deployed in a cloud behind a plane as flies through the air, confusing the enemy radar with multiple targets.

    I think of chaff when I think of how a Boston University team has figured out how to add invisible visual noise to images to throw off Deep Fake algorithms. Clever!

    Source images on top row, distorted images below

    The BU team’s algorithm allows users to protect media before uploading it to the internet by overlaying an image or video with an imperceptible filter. When a manipulator uses a deep neural network to try to alter an image or video protected by the BU-developed algorithm, the media is either left unchanged or completely distorted, the pixels rendering in such a way that the media becomes unrecognizable and unusable as a deepfake.

    Protective Filter Defends Images and Video against Deepfake Manipulation
  • The week that was

    The week that was

    The president will be spending the Forth of July at Mount Rushmore watching a half-million dollar “fireworks extravaganza.” Meanwhile, the Covid situation in Arizona has gotten to the point where Mexico is seriously thinking maybe they should finish that wall themselves, to keep out the Americans.

    Xiaojie Zheng of San Francisco was assaulted while out walking her dog. When the police asked for a description, she did one better. Xiao has a photographic memory and is a renown portrait artist.

    Protestors traveled out to Michael Bloomberg’s estate in the Hamptons to protest income inequality and brought pitchforks* with them.

    Principals from 40 schools in the Bay Area gathered for a in-person meeting to coordinate the complicated procedures required for schools to open in Fall. Public confidence in those protocols were shattered when they learned everyone was exposed to the coronavirus at the meeting.

    A film with a $70 million budget about the dangers of trying to perfect human DNA will have a robot as the lead actor.

    Perhaps taking inspiration from the Barcelona Opera, a local bluegrass band played to the animals at the Oakland Zoo (which have become quite lonely lately). We later read that the zoo is in deep financial trouble.

    After 50 years, Boeing will stop production of the 747 Jumbo Jet.

    The Finger on the App thing announced last week finished last night with the final four contestants winning $20k each for keeping their finger on the app for a 3 whole days. If you haven’t seen it, check out the compilation video of people getting booted after Siri tried to “help.”

    *article updated later to say they were plastic

  • Europe puts up a wall

    Europe puts up a wall

    The headline said, Alabama students throwing ‘COVID parties’ to see who gets infected but the reality is so much worse. It was a contest – they would invite someone they knew tested positive and threw parties as some sort of dare. And they did it multiple times.

    They put money in a pot and they try to get COVID. Whoever gets COVID first gets the pot.

    This is why the European Union has put a ban on travelers from the United States. No country that’s trying to get a handle on the pandemic is going to risk the possibility of letting one of these wing-nuts in.

    Which brings me to the now infamous Palm Beach city council meeting. The meeting went on for hours to make time public comment about a mask-wearing ordinance and provided many choice highlights of unique American craziness. Thankfully the City Council voted 7-0 in favor of requiring masks to be worn in public but the public debate was as ugly as it was ridiculous.

    The states where face coverings are mandatory

    This is how democracy works in America, you open things up in an effort to be transparent and listen to the concerns of your citizens and constituents and the only people that show up are those that have enough time on their hands to fall into YouTube and Reddit rabbit holes and wait for hours for their 2 minutes at the mic. The great American Experiment has gone off the rails. The Dream is a nightmare. We have become a parody of ourselves.

    Heh, Tyler passed this on to me – I’m not the only one who’s made the connection.

  • Dock Ellis and the LSD No-Hitter

    Dock Ellis and the LSD No-Hitter

    On June 12th, 1970 Dock Ellis, a pitcher for the Pittsburgh Pirates threw a no hitter against San Diego – while high on LSD. The story has so many twists and turns that make it even more incredible including one tidbit I only learned about later – Dock woke up the next day and didn’t even recall he pitched or threw a no-hitter.

    “I’m as high as a Georgia pine,” Ellis said.

    Dock Ellis’s no-hitter on LSD, 50 years on

    Would you believe some yarn from a puckish ball player who claimed he “couldn’t pitch without pills” and was known to pull a leg or two (look up the curler incident)? Dunno. There is no footage of the game so any visual evidence has been lost to the sands of time. But it’s a great story and, as a comment on the YouTube video above notes that Dock’s entry in the box score would have been, “Ellis, D.”

    Watch the video above to hear the story in his own words.

    The story of the no-hitter was told by Ellis in an interview on NPR. That audio is used for the animation by cartoonist James Blagden above.

  • Little Big

    Little Big

    Anybody who thinks that the Russians have no sense of humor has not seen Little Big, Russia’s entry in this year’s Eurovision contest.

    With over 125M views, Little Big’s Uno video is the most watched video on the Eurovision channel. The annual contest was unfortunately cancelled this year due to the pandemic but there’s plenty more to see on the Eurovision YouTube channel.