News

Good Monday Morning


Thursday marks the end of the COVID-19 health emergency declaration in the U.S. This likely means that you will have to pay for testing and treatment if you become ill. More than 1,000 Americans still die from the disease each week, more than from gun violence and car accidents combined.

Today’s Spotlight is 1,134 words–about 4 minutes to read.

Facial recognition privacy concerns abound as people queue up at a stadium entrance
image by Midjourney 5.1 prompted by George Bounacos

Spotlight On … Facial Recognition Privacy

It’s increasingly common to have to comply with identity requirements to attend concerts, sports events, or access government records, putting data access at odds with individual facial recognition privacy and security.


Israeli soldiers use Red Wolf software and its red-yellow-green icons to indicate whether Palestinians can cross into the occupied West Bank or be investigated. Amnesty International calls that practice ‘automated apartheid’.

The human rights organization also criticized the Met Police for their plans to deter crime or help with intelligence operations by using live facial recognition. Critics call the technology Orwellian and criticize law enforcement authorities for boasting of only 1 false positive in 6,000. They also call the concept mass surveillance and assert that no one will have an expectation of facial recognition privacy.

Americans already face similar requirements at concerts and sporting events. During a field trip with her daughter’s Girl Scout troop last December, a woman working for a law firm suing Madison Square Garden was denied access to MSG-owned Radio City Music Hall.  State officials and the law firm threatened MSG’s owner, but he doubled down on the technology.

Nine U.S. ballparks this summer are testing similar programs powered by Clear. Clear has used that technology in U.S. airports for years and is branching into offering services to venue owners.

U.S. government agencies also require positive identification to access services. A driver’s license or other photo ID is normally reviewed by an official, but Login.gov uses biometrics instead. Both this program and ID.me, proposed by the Internal Revenue Service last year, have detractors. IRS backpedaled after widespread criticism, allowing Americans to verify their identity by video call or photo ID at 650 branches.

As we reported in January, multiple police departments have jailed individuals based on false facial recognition results. Clearview, a company that made headlines by illicitly downloading 30 billion photos from Facebook and social media sites, claims to have run nearly 1 million reports for law enforcement agencies against a database of those images. Some cities, including Portland and San Francisco, ban police from using that company’s services.

3 More Stories to Know

1) Google announced passkey support has arrived for personal accounts and will migrate to Google Workspace commercial accounts. The secure login uses biometrics or a PIN instead of a password. We wrote about passkeys last November.

Separately, Google announced that it will start displaying a blue checkmark next to commercial email senders’ names when the organization has verified their domain.

2) IBM said that it will pause hiring for nearly 8,000 jobs that it thinks will be performed by automation and machine learning software in the coming years.

3) More shipping and returns information will begin appearing in Google search results. This requires additional merchant coding so look for the information to first begin appearing at big brands and the most savvy of small businesses.

Practical AI

A Reddit community of college professors has been gleefully following the financial results of “education company” Chegg Inc. The $700 million publicly traded company offers “homework help” and similar assistance that facilitates student cheating. Chegg lost 49% of its value the day after it acknowledged that revenues were harmed by the widespread rollout of ChatGPT.

Samsung is banning employees from using generative AI for work. The company said that some sensitive code has been uploaded by employees. It’s a great reminder for your organization–not just developers looking for code troubleshooting, but others using the systems to help write copy about sensitive topics. 

Tool of the Week: This Midjourney prompting tutorial is clearly written and offers solid advice. It’s a great place to start if you’re looking to improve your graphics to the next level.

Trends & Spends

Did That Really Happen? — VP Video Was Doctored

A video of Vice President Kamala Harris that started on TikTok made its way around social media online via tens of thousands of people sharing. PolitiFact reports that the video was doctored and shows her “talking nonsensically” and slurring her speech during an address at Howard University.

 Following Up —  Robocops & Driverless Cars

We told you last week about New York Mayor Eric Adams partnering again with Boston Dynamics and their four legged robots called Spot. Now a firm has outfitted the same robots with onboard ChatGPT access and a Google Text-to-Speech interface. 

Perhaps they can help their human counterparts in San Francisco who are shown in this remarkable bodycam footage trying to corral a driverless vehicle that blundered into a fire and crime scene.

Protip —  Make How-To Guides

If you need to show a colleague or a customer how to do something online, you can now make professional-looking manuals based on your own screen and actions. I’ve played with Scribe for a couple of weeks and think that its free version is fine for casual business use.

Screening Room —  Budweiser Builds Ground Coolers to Combat Climate Change

Science Fiction World —  Sweden Building Electrified Road

Letting the road charge your car as you drive is another mind-boggling way to help mitigate climate change. Sweden plans to build this electrified motorway within two years. The road will connect Stockholm, Gothenburg, and Malmö.

Coffee Break — Tour the Space Station

The European Space Agency published a virtual tour of the International Space Station. Similar to Google Maps’ Street View, you can move though the various modules on the Space Station,

Sign of the Times

Articles

Good Monday Morning


It’s May 1, May Day, celebrating workers’ rights. The Fed Open Market Committee meets on Wednesday. Experts are divided about whether rates will be increased for the tenth time since the beginning of 2022 or if there’s been enough friction applied.

Today’s Spotlight is 1,098 words–about 4 minutes to read

Two features debut this month

  • Practical AI, our new look at how you can leverage AI, will appear after 3 More Stories to Know starting this month.

    We’ve been to this hypergrowth rodeo before, and the rush to control the internet’s next phase has revved up development in every possible industry. We’re dedicating a special area to generative AI so that its constant news doesn’t crowd out other digital news.
  • Spends & Trends adds TikTok data next week:  Hashtags, Songs, and Creator data organized by engagement.

Spotlight On … Hide Your Location Data

Location data is purchased and collated with personal information more often than most Americans realize. Data brokers claim to have 75,000 data points on the average American consumer. Many of those data sets are repackaged at the request of marketers with data combined in new, unique ways.

According to news reports last month, a conservative Catholic group spent millions of dollars tracking priests who used gay dating apps. A lay group spent $4 million legally purchasing the data, then shared the findings with bishops. That kind of punitive tracking led to the outing of an administrator for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and other measures that destroyed the illusion of privacy.

Relying on the industry to police itself harms individuals, but can also create significant national security issues. In 2018, we wrote about Strava, a data company that aggregates data from fitness trackers. Strava reporting revealed the existence of military and other sensitive sites even in countries where the U.S. military was fighting.

Now we’ve learned that a similar situation arose last week with hiking data from AllTrails. The app revealed the confidential whereabouts of a former senior Biden administration official. It included travel information to a residence and the White House. A security researcher also tracked the official’s activity including actual hiking trail locations and date and time information.

Some states are acting now to restrict location data without waiting for federal lawmakers. Washington Gov. Jay Inslee signed a bill last week that shields abortion data of all types, including location data. A first in the U.S., the bill also allows consumers to control their own data even after it’s been captured by tech companies. 

Keep reading & we’ll show you how to turn off some of the location data tracking on your phone before it’s sent back to Google or Apple.

 3 More Stories to Know

1) Windows 10 users got word last week that the software will only receive security updates until Oct. 14, 2025. No new features are planned for Windows 10, and the company advises consumers to switch to Windows 11 before then.

2) You may want to reconsider if you already embraced Google’s 2FA new cloud backup feature. This story shares a researcher’s work claiming that the account details are unencrypted when transmitted to Google. That means all of your account information would be available to anyone searching for them with a subpoena.

Separately, cybersecurity journalist Brian Krebs reported that Salesforce’s Community sites can leak personal information. He was able to demonstrate to Vermont officials that he could access names, Social Security numbers, bank account numbers, and other highly confidential information.

3) The European Union is considering legislation that would require AI companies such as the makers of ChatGPT to disclose all copyrighted materials used in training their models.

 Waiting in the Wings

  • What you can really do with those chatbots
  • How algorithms are automatically denying medical claims
  • The May debut of “Practical AI”

Put your email address in the form at this link and you’ll get a free copy of Spotlight each Monday morning to start your week in the know.

If you’re already a free subscriber, would you please forward this to a friend who could use a little Spotlight in their Monday mornings? It would really help us out.

Did That Really Happen? — Adam Schiff Not Being Impeached … Because He Can’t Be

A video traveling around on Facebook characterizes Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan as “brave” and says that he has “shut down” Rep. Adam Schiff, who will be impeached. The hoax includes clips of a hearing four years ago that shows a Republican representative demanding that Schiff resign. There are two clips of Rep. Jordan, but neither has anything to do with Schiff. House rules don’t allow for representatives to be impeached, and no such action is happening.

Following Up —  Revisiting Amazon

We featured Amazon two weeks ago and wrote that their cost cutting measures were largely performative because Wall Street was concerned about Amazon’s growth rate. Events last Thursday played out as we projected. Revenue growth at the AWS cloud unit was 11%, down from 16% the previous quarter, and the lowest for that unit in its eight year history.

Amazon beat overall expectations and saw profit increase 50% over what analysts expected. Ecommerce sales and the advertising division both beat estimates, but Amazon stock got hit as soon as the AWS numbers came out.

This Statista chart does a great job showing the importance of AWS to Amazon’s future.

Protip —  Hide Your Location Data

You can stop your phone from being a blabbermouth by following these step-by-step instructions to change your Apple Maps and Android settings.  

Screening Room —  Calm Mindfulness App

Science Fiction World — ChatGPT & Google Play Their Own Sims

Using ChatGPT’s models and Google engineers, researchers created an online Sims-like environment where generative AI controlled 25 player characters. Those characters could interact with each other as well as human players. Those AI characters did things like independently planning parties while inviting others to join and other “believable plans, reactions, and thoughts…”

Coffee Break — A New (Short) Daily Game

Where in the USA Is This is from The Pudding, some of the best data visualization people online. They’ve created a game that gives you up to 5 guesses to choose the site of images harvested from Google Maps’ Street View. The maps are usually stripped of street signs and building names, but you can use other visual clues to guess the location. After each guess you’re told how close you are, but not the direction. It’s a lot of fun.

Sign of the Times

Voice Cloning: Crimes & Hit Songs – Spotlight #459
Articles News

Good Monday Morning

It’s April 24th. Friday is Arbor Day. Here’s a WDIV segment showing a Michigan celebration involving champion tree climbers–the arborists themselves.

Today’s Spotlight is 1,108 words–about 4 minutes to read

Spotlight On … Voice Cloning

The music world is livid and wary after the release of the track “Heart On My Sleeve,” credited to Drake and The Weeknd. The song became a viral sensation with millions of plays, proving problematic for the Canadian superstars who have collaborated in the past, but never sang on this track.

“Heart on My Sleeve” was created by voice cloning AI software and was released without the involvement of the artists or their music companies. This has sparked a debate about the potential of generative AI and what it could mean for the music industry. It has also raised questions about copyright laws and how they apply to AI-generated content.

Using sound alikes isn’t new in the music industry. Singer Ral Donner sounded like Elvis on multiple hits between 1959 and 1963. Before he became famous, Elton John recorded nearly 50 top hits between 1969 and 1970 for uncredited sound-alike releases. And even today, singers who leave a band are often replaced by others who mimic their voices.

But vocal cloning poses a different threat to the music industry. The judiciary often lags behind technological advances. Legal battles still rage over key provisions of the nearly thirty-year-old Communications Decency Act. Some legal experts today muse that the software creation could itself be considered a protected work of art.

Voice over artists are also increasingly concerned about synthesized versions of their voices that have cropped up online, usually on websites that promise to provide artificially generated scripts of famous voices.

Criminals are also using voice cloning. An Arizona mother received a call featuring the voice of her daughter crying and apologizing. A man told her that her daughter had been kidnapped while on a skiing trip and then demanded a ransom. In minutes, the woman verified the phone voice was fake and that her daughter was safe.

In Saskatchewan, a couple in their 70s was targeted by a call from their grandson’s voice  claiming he was in jail and needed bail money. After withdrawing $3,000 CAD, they rushed to a second bank branch where they learned he was safe. Another couple lost $21,000 after a voice that sounded like their adult son claimed to be in jail after killing a U.S. diplomat in a car accident.

Voice cloning is cheap, easy, and ubiquitous. Critics also praise its quality. For now, be careful, ask smart questions that may not be public knowledge, and heed these red flags that the FBI identified.

3 More Stories to Know

1) Europe’s air traffic control organization has been under cyberattack by a known Russian hacking gang since April. 19. Officials says that air traffic there remains unaffected.

2) Instagram announced that commercial accounts can now include up 5 links in their profile. Account holders previously had to use a third-party service to include more than one link.

3) An era ended when Netflix announced that it will stop emailing DVDs to customers in September.

You may not know that Silver Beacon-owned website Movie Rewind was one of the first sites to publish the company’s schedule. EIC Sue Millinocket wrote the breakthrough piece, “The Blind Side Not Out On Netflix? I’ll Tell You Why” way back in March of 2010. Since then, Sue and her team of contributors publish genre-specific reviews of older films and television. 

They also still publish a free weekly overview of Netflix release dates. Sign up here.

 Waiting in the Wings

  • Protecting yourself from location data
  • What you can really do with those chatbots
  • How algorithms are automatically denying medical claims

Put your email address in the form at this link and you’ll get a free copy of Spotlight each Monday morning to start your week in the know.

If you’re already a free subscriber, would you please forward this to a friend who could use a little Spotlight in their Monday mornings? It would really help us out.

Trends & Spends

Did That Really Happen? — Bud Light Billboards  & Other Debunked Stuff

Here’s what happened with the Bud Light “boycott.”

  • Anheuser-Busch sent out “influencer packages,” essentially free gifts for hundreds of  people in different communities.
  • One of the goodies was some Bud Light cans with the person’s name on it.
  • One went to an online personality who happens to be transgendered.

From there, all the stories got crazy. Conservative musicians Kid Rock and John Rich both made videos complaining about a transgendered person’s inclusion. Both claimed to cut off Budweiser sales at their restaurants, which Fr. Nathan Monk later proved was untrue.

Others claimed that the company had lost “billions” although the stock price is actually flat this month and up this year. And still others claimed, especially on social media, that the entire marketing department had been fired, which was again, untrue.

Finally, the AP had to debunk claims that Budweiser had bought billboards mocking conservative activists and calling them crybabies.

Following Up —  AI Cutting Academic Paper Mills

Academic paper writers who help students cheat say that the rise of generative AI like ChatGPT has cut into their earnings.

Protip —  Disable ChatGPT on Windows 11

If you’re using Bing and Windows 11, you now have ChatGPT on your taskbar, but this simple diagram shows you how to remove it.

Screening Room —  My Last Lullaby

Science Fiction World — NYPD Robot Dogs Are Back

We wrote about police robots fashioned to look like dogs two years ago. A public outcry ended the program before it really started, but with former police captain and current mayor Eric Adams leading the way, the NYPD is using robots again.

Coffee Break —  Voice Clone Yourself

Here’s one of many free options you can try yourself to see what all the fuss is about.

Sign of the Times

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