Archives 24 May 2024

In an elaborate scam in January, “a finance worker, was duped into attending a video call with people he believed were the chief financial officer and other members of staff,” remembers CNN. But Hong Kong police later said that all of them turned out to be deepfake re-creations which duped the employee into transferring $25 million.
According to police, the worker had initially suspected he had received a phishing email from the company’s UK office, as it specified the need for a secret transaction to be carried out. However, the worker put aside his doubts after the video call because other people in attendance had looked and sounded just like colleagues he recognized.

Now the targeted company has been revealed: a major engineering consulting firm, with 18,500 employees across 34 offices:
A spokesperson for London-based Arup told CNN on Friday that it notified Hong Kong police in January about the fraud incident, and confirmed that fake voices and images were used. “Unfortunately, we can’t go into details at this stage as the incident is still the subject of an ongoing investigation. However, we can confirm that fake voices and images were used,” the spokesperson said in an emailed statement. “Our financial stability and business operations were not affected and none of our internal systems were compromised,” the person added…

Authorities around the world are growing increasingly concerned about the sophistication of deepfake technology and the nefarious uses it can be put to. In an internal memo seen by CNN, Arup’s East Asia regional chairman, Michael Kwok, said the “frequency and sophistication of these attacks are rapidly increasing globally, and we all have a duty to stay informed and alert about how to spot different techniques used by scammers.”

The company’s global CIO emailed CNN this statement. “Like many other businesses around the globe, our operations are subject to regular attacks, including invoice fraud, phishing scams, WhatsApp voice spoofing, and deepfakes.

“What we have seen is that the number and sophistication of these attacks has been rising sharply in recent months.”

Microplastics have been found in human testicles, with researchers saying the discovery might be linked to declining sperm counts in men. From a report:
The scientists tested 23 human testes, as well as 47 testes from pet dogs. They found microplastic pollution in every sample. The human testicles had been preserved and so their sperm count could not be measured. However, the sperm count in the dogs’ testes could be assessed and was lower in samples with higher contamination with PVC. The study demonstrates a correlation but further research is needed to prove microplastics cause sperm counts to fall.

Sperm counts in men have been falling for decades, with chemical pollution such as pesticides implicated by many studies. Microplastics have also recently been discovered in human blood, placentas and breast milk, indicating widespread contamination of people’s bodies. The impact on health is as yet unknown but microplastics have been shown to cause damage to human cells in the laboratory. Vast amounts of plastic waste are dumped in the environment and microplastics have polluted the entire planet, from the summit of Mount Everest to the deepest oceans. People are known to consume the tiny particles via food and water as well as breathing them in. The particles could lodge in tissue and cause inflammation, as air pollution particles do, or chemicals in the plastics could cause harm. In March, doctors warned of potentially life-threatening effects after finding a substantially raised risk of stroke, heart attack and earlier death in people whose blood vessels were contaminated with microscopic plastics.

A new Pew Research Center analysis shows just how fleeting online content actually is:
1. A quarter of all webpages that existed at one point between 2013 and 2023 are no longer accessible, as of October 2023. In most cases, this is because an individual page was deleted or removed on an otherwise functional website.
2. For older content, this trend is even starker. Some 38% of webpages that existed in 2013 are not available today, compared with 8% of pages that existed in 2023.

This “digital decay” occurs in many different online spaces. We examined the links that appear on government and news websites, as well as in the “References” section of Wikipedia pages as of spring 2023. This analysis found that:
1. 23% of news webpages contain at least one broken link, as do 21% of webpages from government sites. News sites with a high level of site traffic and those with less are about equally likely to contain broken links. Local-level government webpages (those belonging to city governments) are especially likely to have broken links.
2. 54% of Wikipedia pages contain at least one link in their “References” section that points to a page that no longer exists.[…]

As cities and states push to restrict the use of facial recognition technologies, some police departments have quietly found a way to keep using the controversial tools: asking for help from other law enforcement agencies that still have access. Officers in Austin and San Francisco — two of the largest cities where police are banned from using the technology — have repeatedly asked police in neighboring towns to run photos of criminal suspects through their facial recognition programs, according to a Washington Post review of police documents…

Austin police officers received the results of at least 13 face searches from a neighboring police department since the city’s 2020 ban — and appeared to get hits on some of them, according to documents obtained by The Post through public records requests and sources who shared them on the condition of anonymity. “That’s him! Thank you very much,” one Austin police officer wrote in response to an array of photos sent to him by an officer in Leander, Tex., who ran a facial recognition search, documents show. The man displayed in the pictures, John Curry Jr., was later charged with aggravated assault for allegedly charging toward someone with a knife, and is currently in jail awaiting trial. Curry’s attorney declined to comment.

“Police officers’ efforts to skirt these bans have not been previously reported and highlight the challenge of reining in police use of facial recognition,” the article concludes.

It also points out that the technology “has played a role in the wrongful arrests of at least seven innocent Americans,” according to the lawsuits they filed after charges against them were dismissed.