Sources: as Stellar and others refused to partner and MobileCoin refused to sell, Facebook hired several dozen blockchain experts for several million/year each — Facebook's GlobalCoin project, also known as Project Libra, may face significant hurdles as the social media giant works toward a prospective launch.
Huawei says images with ads, which it had been testing on its Magazine app, were inadvertently published on some users' lock screens and are now off its servers — Ads appeared on the lock screens of Huawei and Honor smartphones on Thursday, causing public outcry and anger from device owners in online forums and social media.
Using Photoshop and other image manipulation software to tweak faces in photos has become common practice, but it’s not always made clear when it’s been done. Berkeley and Adobe researchers have created a tool that not only can tell when a face has been Photoshopped, but can suggest how to undo it.
Right off the bat it must be noted that this project applies only to Photoshop manipulations, and in particular those made with the “Face Aware Liquify” feature, which allows for both subtle and major adjustments to many facial features. A universal detection tool is a long way off, but this is a start.
The researchers (among them Alexei Efros, who just appeared at our AI+Robotics event) began from the assumption that a great deal of image manipulation is performed with popular tools like Adobe’s, and as such a good place to start would be looking specifically at the manipulations possible in those tools.
They set up a script to take portrait photos and manipulate them slightly in various ways: move the eyes a bit and emphasize the smile, narrow the cheeks and nose, things like that. They then fed the originals and warped versions to the machine learning model en masse, with the hopes that it would learn to tell them apart.
Learn it did, and quite well. When humans were presented with images and asked which had been manipulated, they performed only slightly better than chance. But the trained neural network identified the manipulated images 99 percent of the time.
What is it seeing? Probably tiny patterns in the optical flow of the image that humans can’t really perceive. And those same little patterns also suggest to it what exact manipulations have been made, letting it suggest an “undo” of the manipulations even having never seen the original.
Since it’s limited to just faces tweaked by this Photoshop tool, don’t expect this research to form any significant barrier against the forces of evil lawlessly tweaking faces left and right out there. But this is just one of many small starts in the growing field of digital forensics.
“We live in a world where it’s becoming harder to trust the digital information we consume,” said Adobe’s Richard Zhang, who worked on the project, “and I look forward to further exploring this area of research.”
You can read the paper describing the project and inspect the team’s code at the project page.
Black Hat removes Rep. Will Hurd as the 2019 Black Hat USA keynote speaker amid questions about his voting record on women's rights — Rep. Will Hurd will no longer give the keynote address at the Black Hat security conference amid questions about his voting record on women's rights.
OnePlus 7 series of smartphones were recently announced in India, which consist of the OnePlus 7 and the OnePlus 7 Pro. The latter handset has gone up for sale multiple times now but it will be available for purchase today in Almond colour. The new OnePlus 7 Pro is the company's latest flagship phone with which it aims to take on high-end premium devices from other smartphone manufacturers. The smartphone features an almost bezel-less display, thanks to a pop-up front camera module, and comes equipped with a triple rear-camera setup. It is powered by the latest Qualcomm Snapdragon 855 SoC and comes with up to 12GB RAM and 256GB of internal storage.
OnePlus 7 Pro specificationsThe OnePlus 7 Pro features a metal build and both, its front and rear panels are protected by Gorilla Glass. It features a 6.67-inch fluid AMOLED display with a QHD+ resolution, which is HDR10+ certified and sports a refresh rate of 90 Hz. As mentioned, it is powered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon 855 chipset, and the whole package is backed by a 4000 mAh battery. The smartphone runs on Android 9 Pie with OxygenOS on top.
In the camera department, the OnePlus 7 Pro gets a triple rear camera setup that apparently covers focal range of 17mm to 78mm. It consists of a 48MP Sony IMX 586 sensor that is paired with an f/1.6 aperture lens with a custom-made 7-element plastic lens. This main sensor supports OIS and EIS, and is supplemented by an 8MP telephoto lens that offers 3X zoom and a 16MP ultra-wide lens. The 8MP sensor gets an f/2.4 aperture lens with OIS, while the 16MP ultra-wide lens is coupled with an f/2.2 aperture lens with a 117-degree field of view. Read our camera review and comparison of the smartphone here.
OnePlus 7 Pro Almond price, launch offers and availabilityThe OnePlus 7 Pro Almond colour variant will go up for sale at 12 PM today via Amazon.in, Oneplus.in, OnePlus’ exclusive offline stores, Reliance Digital, Croma, and other authorised OnePlus retailers. The handset comes equipped with 8GB + 256GB storage version and is priced at Rs 52,999. (Buy here from Amazon)
For launch offers, OnePlus 7 Pro buyers can avail up to Rs 2,000 cashback when purchasing it with SBI credit and debit cards at Amazon.in, Reliance and Croma. Those who buy the handset via Amazon can also avail a no-cost EMI scheme.
http://bit.ly/2ZqqlKJ
Sources: Comcast and Charter agree to sell iPads and other Apple devices at a discount in iPhone deal; Comcast to pay for the cost of the discount — KEY POINTS — Comcast and Charter agreed to sell thousands of Apple devices as part of a deal to offer the iPhone to customers for its mobile service.
Initial impressions of iPadOS: new multitasking features are powerful but will take time to get used to, and Safari's desktop-class browsing is impressive — When I published my Beyond the Tablet story a few weeks ago, I was optimistic we'd get a handful of iPad-related features and optimizations at WWDC.
Binance says it is setting up a US trading platform in partnership with FinCEN-registered BAM Trading Services, but offers no timeline for its launch — Binance, the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange by volume, is launching a U.S. division. — The Malta-based company said Thursday …
Cheng Ting-Fang / Nikkei Asia : MediaTek says it has started to use Intel Foundry's advanced chip packaging in addition to TSMC's...
