Interesting reads, 30 April 2018

Interesting things I read on the Internet this week

• How vulture capitalists ate Toys ‘R’ Us — Devastating. The financial trickery that bankrupted Toys ‘R’ Us while enriching the buyers with $200 million in fees.

• New AI Imaging Technique Reconstructs Photos with Realistic Results — Incredible, it’s unintuitive to me how these models can “invent” missing information, but of course they’ve seen a lot of similar images before.

• We’re underestimating the mind-warping potential of fake video — Fake news will be supercharged by fake video. How are we going to cope with fake history?

• AI Creates Fake Obama — Linked from the previous fake video article, examples of fake video of Obama generated from real speeches.

• Wunderscan — Cute, salvaging a laser barcode scanner to create a home shopping list gadget.

• Electric Buses Are Hurting the Oil Industry — Only 8 years ago electric buses are being laughed at, now you can see their effect in oil sales data.

• The Revolutionary Giant Ocean Cleanup Machine Is About To Set Sail — “Revolutionary” (and necessary) would be to stop creating disposable plastics, but nice effort to clean up what’s already been dumped in the sea.

• To censor the internet, 10 countries use Canadian filtering technology, researchers say — If you’re working on surveillance and censorship technology, think hard about its “dual use” against citizens of oppressive regimes.

• Matrix and Riot confirmed as the basis for France’s Secure Instant Messenger app — Superb to see a Government adopting a (good) open source solution for their internal end-to-end encrypted messenger.

• This ‘Demonically Clever’ Backdoor Hides In a Tiny Slice of a Computer Chip — Terrifying, a single tweak to a processor’s etching mask can insert a remotely exploitable backdoor.