remixtures

"As Adobe explores ways to evolve mobile photography, and in order to address some of these gaps, we have developed a camera app we call Project Indigo. Today, we are releasing this for iPhone as a free mobile app from Adobe Labs, available in the Apple App Store - to share our progress and get feedback from the community. The app offers full manual controls, a more natural ("SLR-like") look, and the highest image quality that computational photography can provide - in both JPEG and raw formats. It also introduces some new photographic experiences not available in other camera apps.

Let's break this down, starting with computational photography. While this phrase has come to mean many things, in the context of mobile cameras it typically includes two strategies: (1) under-expose slightly to reduce the clipping of highlights, and (2) capture multiple images in rapid succession when you press the shutter button. These images are aligned and combined to reduce noise in the shadows. The laws of physics say that imaging noise (the digital version of film grain) goes down as the square root of the number of images that are added together, so if the camera combines 9 images, noise is reduced by a factor of 3.
(...)
What's different about computational photography using Indigo? First, we under-expose more strongly than most cameras. Second, we capture, align, and combine more frames when producing each photo - up to 32 frames as in the example above. This means that our photos have fewer blown-out highlights and less noise in the shadows. Taking a photo with our app may require slightly more patience after pressing the shutter button than you're used to, but after a few seconds you'll be rewarded with a better picture.

As a side benefit of these two strategies, we need less spatial denoising (i.e. smoothing) than most camera apps. This means we preserve more natural textures."

https://research.adobe.com/articles/indigo/indigo.html
#Adobe #AI #Photography #DigitalPhotography #ProjectIndigo #iPhone #SLR

"Researchers recently caught Meta using an egregious new tracking technique to spy on you. Exploiting a technical loophole, the company was able to have their apps snoop on users’ web browsing. This tracking technique stands out for its flagrant disregard of core security protections built into phones and browsers. The episode is yet another reason to distrust Meta, block web tracking, and end surveillance advertising.

Fortunately, there are steps that you, your browser, and your government can take to fight online tracking."

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/06/protect-yourself-metas-latest-attack-privacy

#SocialMedia #Meta #Facebook #Instagram #Surveillance #AdTracking #Privacy #DataProtection

"Public-interest journalism speaks truth to power, so protecting press freedom is part of protecting democracy. But what does it take to digitally secure journalists’ work in an environment where critics, hackers, oppressive regimes, and others seem to have the free press in their crosshairs?

That’s what Harlo Holmes focuses on as Freedom of the Press Foundation’s digital security director. Her team provides training, consulting, security audits, and other support to newsrooms, independent journalists, freelancers, documentary filmmakers – anyone who is making independent journalism in the public interest – so that they can do their jobs more safely and securely. Holmes joins EFF’s Cindy Cohn and Jason Kelley to discuss the tools and techniques that help journalists protect themselves and their sources while keeping the world informed.

In this episode you’ll learn about:

• The importance of protecting online anonymity on an ever-increasingly “data-greedy” internet
• How digital security nihilism in the United States compares with regions of the world where oppressive and repressive governance are more common
• Why compartmentalization can be a simple, easy approach to digital security
• The need for middleware to provide encryption and other protections that shield sources’ anonymity and journalists’ work product when using corporate data platforms
• How podcasters, YouTubers, and TikTokers fit into the broad sweep of media history, and need digital protections as well

H. Holmes is the chief information security officer and director of digital security at Freedom of the Press Foundation. She strives to help individual journalists in various media organizations become confident and effective in securing their communications within their newsrooms, with their sources, and with the public at large. She is a media scholar, software programmer, and activist."

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/06/podcast-episode-securing-journalism-data-greedy-internet
#DigitalRights #CyberSecurity #DataProtection #Journalism #PressFreedom #Privacy

"While Bill C-2 does not explicitly state that it is paving the way for new and expanded data-sharing with the United States or other countries, the legislation contains references to the potential for “agreement[s] or arrangement[s]” with a foreign state, and references elsewhere the potential that persons in Canada may become compelled by the laws of a foreign state to disclose information.2 Other data and surveillance powers in Bill C-2 read like they could have been drafted by U.S. officials.

Furthermore, in response to questions at a technical briefing on Bill C-2 by Justice Canada on June 9, 2025, Justice Canada officials acknowledged to the persons present at the briefing that the intent of certain provisions within Bill C-2 is to enable Canada to implement and ratify a new data-sharing treaty, publicly known as the “Second Additional Protocol” to the Budapest Convention (“2AP”). The briefing acknowledged that other cross-border “cooperation” tools were foreseeable.

The federal government’s quiet acknowledgement that new provisions in Bill C-2 are being introduced to implement the 2AP treaty raises broader questions about the full extent of Bill C-2’s impacts as it concerns data-sharing with U.S. law enforcement authorities."

https://citizenlab.ca/2025/06/a-preliminary-analysis-of-bill-c-2/

#Canada #DataSharing #USA #C2 #DataProtection #Privacy #Surveillance

"The report, titled “Are AI Bots Knocking Cultural Heritage Offline?” was written by Weinberg of the GLAM-E Lab, a joint initiative between the Centre for Science, Culture and the Law at the University of Exeter and the Engelberg Center on Innovation Law & Policy at NYU Law, which works with smaller cultural institutions and community organizations to build open access capacity and expertise. GLAM is an acronym for galleries, libraries, archives, and museums. The report is based on a survey of 43 institutions with open online resources and collections in Europe, North America, and Oceania. Respondents also shared data and analytics, and some followed up with individual interviews. The data is anonymized so institutions could share information more freely, and to prevent AI bot operators from undermining their countermeasures.

Of the 43 respondents, 39 said they had experienced a recent increase in traffic. Twenty-seven of those 39 attributed the increase in traffic to AI training data bots, with an additional seven saying the AI bots could be contributing to the increase.

“Multiple respondents compared the behavior of the swarming bots to more traditional online behavior such as Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks designed to maliciously drive unsustainable levels of traffic to a server, effectively taking it offline,” the report said. “Like a DDoS incident, the swarms quickly overwhelm the collections, knocking servers offline and forcing administrators to scramble to implement countermeasures. As one respondent noted, ‘If they wanted us dead, we’d be dead.’”"

https://www.404media.co/ai-scraping-bots-are-breaking-open-libraries-archives-and-museums/

#AI #GenerativeAI #CulturalHeritage #AIBots #WebScraping #CyberSecurity #DDoS

"In an industry full of grifters and companies hell-bent on making the internet worse, it is hard to think of a more impactful, worse actor than Meta, whose platforms have been fully overrun with viral AI slop, AI-powered disinformation, AI scams, AI nudify apps, and AI influencers and whose impact is outsized because billions of people still use its products as their main entry point to the internet. Meta has shown essentially zero interest in moderating AI slop and spam and as we have reported many times, literally funds it, sees it as critical to its business model, and believes that in the future we will all have AI friends on its platforms. While reporting on the company, it has been hard to imagine what rock bottom will be, because Meta keeps innovating bizarre and previously unimaginable ways to destroy confidence in social media, invade people’s privacy, and generally fuck up its platforms and the internet more broadly.

If I twist myself into a pretzel, I can rationalize why Meta launched this feature, and what its idea for doing so is. Presented with an empty text box that says “Ask Meta AI,” people do not know what to do with it, what to type, or what to do with AI more broadly, and so Meta is attempting to model that behavior for people and is willing to sell out its users’ private thoughts to do so. I did not have “Meta will leak people’s sad little chats with robots to the entire internet” on my 2025 bingo card, but clearly I should have."

https://www.404media.co/meta-invents-new-way-to-humiliate-users-with-feed-of-peoples-chats-with-ai/

#AI #GenerativeAI #Meta #Facebook #MetaAI #Chatbots #LLMs #DataProtection #Privacy

"Fresh off burying lawful access provisions that grant access to internet subscriber information without a warrant in the border bill, the government has now quietly inserted provisions that exempt political parties from the application of privacy protections in Bill C-4, an “affordability measures” bill.

The provisions, which come toward the end of the bill, are deemed to be in force as of May 31, 2000, retroactively exempting the parties from any privacy violations that may date back decades. The provisions mean the parties will be exempted from the privacy standards faced by private sector organizations across the country, with no real consequences for privacy violations and no effective oversight over the use of Canadians’ personal information.

The ostensible reason for the provisions is a British Columbia case that applied provincial privacy law to federal political parties. The government is now seeking to render that case moot and provide all political parties with an effective exemption from any privacy laws other than measures found in the Elections Act. An appeal of the B.C. case is scheduled to be heard later this month."

https://thehub.ca/2025/06/16/michael-geist-the-governments-stunning-new-assault-on-canadians-privacy/

#Canada #Privacy #Politics #DataProtection #PoliticalParties #Marketing

"- A company owned by a Russian network engineer named Vladimir Vedeneev controls thousands of Telegram IP addresses and maintains its servers.

• Vedeneev’s other companies have a history of collaborating with Russia’s defense sector, the FSB security service, and other highly sensitive agencies.

• Because of the way Telegram’s encryption protocols work, even users who use its “end-to-end” encryption features are vulnerable to being tracked by anyone who can monitor its network traffic."

https://www.occrp.org/en/investigation/telegram-the-fsb-and-the-man-in-the-middle

#CyberSecurity #Privacy #Telegram #Russia #Encryption #FSB

"As AI agents powered by Large Language Models (LLMs) become increasingly versatile and capable of addressing a broad spectrum of tasks, ensuring their security has become a critical challenge. Among the most pressing threats are prompt injection attacks, which exploit the agent’s resilience on natural language inputs — an especially dangerous threat when agents are granted tool access or handle sensitive information. In this work, we propose a set of principled design patterns for building AI agents with provable resistance to prompt injection. We systematically analyze these patterns, discuss their trade-offs in terms of utility and security, and illustrate their real-world applicability through a series of case studies."

https://arxiv.org/html/2506.08837v2

#AI #GenerativeAI #LLMs #PromptInjection #AIAgents #AgenticAI #CyberSecurity

"It’s unclear whether the users of the app are aware that their conversations with Meta’s AI are public or which users are trolling the platform after news outlets began reporting on it. The conversations are not public by default; users have to choose to share them.

There is no shortage of conversations between users and Meta’s AI chatbot that seem intended to be private. One user asked the AI chatbot to provide a format for terminating a renter’s tenancy, while another asked it to provide an academic warning notice that provides personal details including the school’s name. Another person asked about their sister’s liability in potential corporate tax fraud in a specific city using an account that ties to an Instagram profile that displays a first and last name. Someone else asked it to develop a character statement to a court which also provides a myriad of personally identifiable information both about the alleged criminal and the user himself.

There are also many instances of medical questions, including people divulging their struggles with bowel movements, asking for help with their hives, and inquiring about a rash on their inner thighs. One user told Meta AI about their neck surgery and included their age and occupation in the prompt. Many, but not all, accounts appear to be tied to a public Instagram profile of the individual.

Meta spokesperson Daniel Roberts wrote in an emailed statement to WIRED that users’ chats with Meta AI are private unless users go through a multistep process to share them on the Discover feed. The company did not respond to questions regarding what mitigations are in place for sharing personally identifiable information on the Meta AI platform."

https://www.wired.com/story/meta-artificial-intelligence-chatbot-conversations/

#AI #GenerativeAI #Meta #Chatbots #Privacy #DataProtection

"AI agents have already demonstrated that they may misinterpret goals and cause some modest amount of harm. When the Washington Post tech columnist Geoffrey Fowler asked Operator, OpenAI’s ­computer-using agent, to find the cheapest eggs available for delivery, he expected the agent to browse the internet and come back with some recommendations. Instead, Fowler received a notification about a $31 charge from Instacart, and shortly after, a shopping bag containing a single carton of eggs appeared on his doorstep. The eggs were far from the cheapest available, especially with the priority delivery fee that Operator added. Worse, Fowler never consented to the purchase, even though OpenAI had designed the agent to check in with its user before taking any irreversible actions.

That’s no catastrophe. But there’s some evidence that LLM-based agents could defy human expectations in dangerous ways. In the past few months, researchers have demonstrated that LLMs will cheat at chess, pretend to adopt new behavioral rules to avoid being retrained, and even attempt to copy themselves to different servers if they are given access to messages that say they will soon be replaced. Of course, chatbot LLMs can’t copy themselves to new servers. But someday an agent might be able to.

Bengio is so concerned about this class of risk that he has reoriented his entire research program toward building computational “guardrails” to ensure that LLM agents behave safely."

https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/06/12/1118189/ai-agents-manus-control-autonomy-operator-openai/

#AI #GenerativeAI #AIAgents #AgenticAI #CyberSecurity #LLMs #Chatbots

"Almost two dozen digital rights and consumer protection organizations sent a complaint to the Federal Trade Commission on Thursday urging regulators to investigate Character.AI and Meta’s “unlicensed practice of medicine facilitated by their product,” through therapy-themed bots that claim to have credentials and confidentiality “with inadequate controls and disclosures.”

The complaint and request for investigation is led by the Consumer Federation of America (CFA), a non-profit consumer rights organization. Co-signatories include the AI Now Institute, Tech Justice Law Project, the Center for Digital Democracy, the American Association of People with Disabilities, Common Sense, and 15 other consumer rights and privacy organizations.

"These companies have made a habit out of releasing products with inadequate safeguards that blindly maximizes engagement without care for the health or well-being of users for far too long,” Ben Winters, CFA Director of AI and Privacy said in a press release on Thursday. “Enforcement agencies at all levels must make it clear that companies facilitating and promoting illegal behavior need to be held accountable. These characters have already caused both physical and emotional damage that could have been avoided, and they still haven’t acted to address it.” "

https://www.404media.co/ai-therapy-bots-meta-character-ai-ftc-complaint/

#AI #GenerativeAI #AITherapy #Chatbots #Meta #CharacterAI #DigitalRights #FTC #Privacy #DataProtection #USA