Archive for 2024
October 3, 2024
PRIVACY: Meta smart glasses can be used to dox anyone in seconds, study finds.
In a Google document, AnhPhu Nguyen and Caine Ardayfio explained how they linked a pair of Meta Ray Bans 2 to an invasive face search engine called PimEyes to help identify strangers by cross-searching their information on various people-search databases. They then used a large language model (LLM) to rapidly combine all that data, making it possible to dox someone in a glance or surface information to scam someone in seconds—or other nefarious uses, such as “some dude could just find some girl’s home address on the train and just follow them home,” Nguyen told 404 Media.
This is all possible thanks to recent progress with LLMs, the students said.
“This synergy between LLMs and reverse face search allows for fully automatic and comprehensive data extraction that was previously not possible with traditional methods alone,” their Google document said.
Where previously someone could spend substantial time conducting their own search of public databases to find information based on someone’s image alone, their dystopian smart glasses do that job in a few seconds, their demo video said.
The co-creators said that they altered a pair of Meta Ray Bans 2 to create I-XRAY to raise awareness of “significant privacy concerns” online as technology rapidly advances.
They said that they chose Meta Ray Bans 2 for their project because the smart glasses “look almost indistinguishable from regular glasses.”
Brave New World? Minority Report? 1984? All three?
SHUT UP AND DIE, THEY EXPLAINED: She Survived Nazism and Communism, but Eva Edl Could Die in Prison for Pro-Life Protests.
IT’S THAT TIME OF YEAR: 1,500 Sq.Ft Energy Star Dehumidifier for Basement with Drain Hose. #CommissionEarned
SPACE: Voyager 2 shuts down science experiment as power stores dwindle.
Mission engineers sent a command to shutter the Voyager 2’s Plasma Science, or PLS, experiment — which was used to observe solar winds — on September 26 using the Deep Space Network, a series of massive radio antennae that can beam information billions of miles through space.
It took 19 hours for the message to reach Voyager 2, and a return signal was received 19 hours later, NASA said Tuesday.
Despite the aging probe’s emptying power stores, NASA expects that Voyager 2 will keep operating with at least one science instrument into the 2030s.
Built to last.
FABULIST FUMBLES: An Imprecise Biography Catches Up With Tim Walz.
Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz said Wednesday that “I need to be clearer” after a series of misstatements and exaggerations about his experiences and biography have created a distraction for Democrats weeks before the election.
The vice-presidential nominee suffered his worst moment in Tuesday’s debate with Republican VP nominee Ohio Sen. JD Vance when he tried to explain years of repeated false statements about being in Hong Kong during the Tiananmen Square protests in China. Walz also has gotten into trouble for past claims including about his National Guard retirement rank and a 2018 comment about “weapons of war that I carried in war” when he was never deployed in a combat zone.
Such exaggerations are known in Minnesota as “fish tales”—embellishments often with a basis in fact—and they generally haven’t hurt Walz within the friendlier confines of state-level politics. But on the national stage they can be damaging. Those involving Walz reveal the growing pains he has experienced since his selection as Vice President Kamala Harris’s running mate.
“The national spotlight was sure to expose Walz’s weakness of exaggerating or being less than honest,” said Blois Olson, a nonpartisan political analyst who publishes a newsletter on Minnesota politics and has known Walz since 2006.
Olson said Walz and his team have prevented media interviews that are likely to yield follow-up questions or challenges. “The rule of thumb for Minnesota media and observers is just because he says it convincingly it doesn’t mean it’s true,” he said. “It’s his Achilles’ heel, and at some point he can’t keep running the same way.”
On Wednesday, Walz sought to play down any inaccuracies by presenting himself as an everyday guy, despite more than a decade in Congress and being elected statewide twice. “I speak like everybody else speaks,” he said during brief comments to reporters in Pennsylvania. “I need to be clearer, I will tell you that.”
A person familiar with Walz’s speaking history said the governor’s gaffes aren’t necessarily nefarious or embellishing in nature and are more a result of his casual speaking style.
No, I’d say they’re a bit nefarious, given how Walz acted in 2020, his radical chic appointees, and his “what me worry” attitude with the CCP: Tim, Don’t Try to Pass Off a Lie by Saying You “Misspoke.” Tim Walz’s love affair with China and its communist government.
SO YOU’RE SAYING AI IS SUCCEEDING? AI-generated college admissions essays tend to sound male and privileged, study finds.
OLD AND BUSTED: Partying Like It’s 1999.
The New Hotness? Partying Like It’s 2020! People are panic-buying toilet paper because of the port strike. There is no need for that.
Toilet paper shortages in stores across America are giving folks nightmarish reminders of the pandemic era. But the lack of toilet paper isn’t a direct result of a major port strike Tuesday. It’s because of panic buying.
Reports of shortages filled social media Tuesday, showing empty shelves where toilet paper and, to a lesser extent, paper towels were supposed to be.
“They cleaned out the toilet paper at my local Walmart in Virginia. Toilet paper hoarding 2.0!,” wrote one person in a post on X, along with a photo of empty shelves.
“Shelves at Costco & Target running low or out of paper towels in Monmouth County NJ,” posted another X user. “Seeing people buying TP & water too in reax to port strike. Costco employee told me they were sold out of TP/paper towels this am.”
But the strike at ports from Maine to Texas will have absolutely zero impact on the supply of these products.
The overwhelming majority — more than 90% by some estimates — of U.S. toilet paper consumption comes from domestic factories. Most of the rest comes from Canada and Mexico, which means it most likely arrives by rail or truck, not ship.
Jim Geraghty calls the longshoremen strike the “Self-Inflicted Dagger to America’s Economic Heart:”
In about as vivid an example of the “MacGuffinization of American Politics” as you’re ever likely to find, this morning the New York Times writes, “Scenes of striking workers, hurricane devastation in the Southeast and missiles over Israel represent a rare moment of turbulence for Kamala Harris.”
Yes, but this is also a “moment of turbulence” for everyone else, and perhaps a lot longer than a moment. For Harris, the International Longshoremen’s Association strike that has shut down every port on the East and Gulf Coasts is a political headache to overcome. The Democratic candidate has to finesse the reflexive, unthinking pro-union stance of Joe Biden and the ludicrous demands — a 77 percent raise for workers and zero automation — coming from Harold Daggett, the ILA boss. The guy who enjoys a $900,000 salary and drives a Bentley boasted that his strike would “cripple” the economy. (More on him below.)
* * * * * * * * *
The irony is that the dockworkers’ strike is just about the best friend Donald Trump could ask for right now and, as the Times suggested, a major headache for the Harris campaign. If everybody’s frustrated by higher prices and empty shelves in the coming weeks, does that make voters feel happier or less happy with the incumbent party? The strike is terrible for the hurricane victims, terrible for the economy, and terrible for the country as a whole. But as if that wasn’t bad enough, it’s terrible for the Democrats.
Why can’t the almost-82-year-old president see the logic of this? What’s it going to take to slap some sense into him?
Heh, indeed. Read the whole thing, if only for Daggett’s views on the E-ZPass automated toll collection system, which explains much about his Luddite worldview.
WHAT IN THE ACTUAL HELL, PART II:
🚨NEW – Federal Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg has shut down aid flights into Western North Carolina.
A NOTAM has been issued by the FAA that won’t allow anyone not approved by the state to fly aid missions. They said they would give permission but they’re not being…
— Dr. Ben Braddock (@GraduatedBen) October 3, 2024
Plus: “FAA also restricting airspace for drones. How much of this is legitimate issues with drones and how much is it to try to keep footage of the devastation from getting out?”
There are two teams trying to help. The first team has far fewer resources but can move quickly. The second has far more resources but moves much more slowly.
Buttigieg has benched the first team — and people deserve to know why.
More:
I wouldn’t call them random. Those half-trained awesome people seem to have self-selected for excellence.
— Stephen Green (@VodkaPundit) October 3, 2024
Excellence doesn’t seem to have much constituency with Biden-Harris.
WELL, THIS IS THE 21ST CENTURY, YOU KNOW: Artificial left ventricle mimics the shape and function of the human heart.
HEH: Please Return Your Cargo Cranes to Their Upright, Stowed and Locked Positions.
JoePa can lay back in his beach chair, his spindly legs akimbo, and peacefully bask in the breezes and ocean warmth.
The “president” is making sure that it’s equally as restful and quiet on the normally busy docks of the American East and Gulf Coasts as you might be able to tell from the pictures Bingley snapped of the Port of Bayonne’s waterfront yesterday on his way home.
Normally bustling with ships, people, tiny moving parts of every description as freight and cargo goes up, down, sideways, into, out of, is loaded and unloaded from ships and trucks. Humming with activity.
All was still.
Read the whole thing.
Meanwhile, in Florida, the sound of competence is almost deafening:
#BREAKING: DeSantis says Florida National Guard is being deployed to ports impacted by ongoing strike to maintain order and, if possible, resume operations
"Florida is open – we want to use our resources to get this stuff to the market."
— Florida’s Voice (@FLVoiceNews) October 3, 2024
FL STATE GUARDSMAN: What The Media Is Telling You About Helene Is Complete Bullsh*t, Politicians Don’t Have A Clue And Are Lying. “Jonathan Howard with Florida State Guard Special Missions Unit assisting with aerial recovery in North Carolina following the damage of Hurricane Helene, delivered a video message explaining what is really happening on the ground…‘I don’t know why they’re doing it,’ Howard said of the federal response. ‘I don’t know what kind of conspiracy I’ve heard so many things, whatever you want to come up with, but they are literally allowing these people to f*cking die in the mountains right now because we can’t get helicopters. They got money for everything else in the f*cking world right now.’”
WHEN PEOPLE TELL YOU WHO THEY ARE, BELIEVE THEM: Biden-Harris: Ukraine and Illegal Immigrants First, Hurricane Helene Victims Last.
Even voices from the left are scratching their heads over the lack of engagement by both Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.
“To show this level of cavalier indifference just literally takes my breath away,” former Bill Clinton advisor Doug Schoen told Fox News on Tuesday.
The administration, likely trying to save face in light of the criticism, has since tried to appear more engaged, just barely. For example, the Biden-Harris administration announced Wednesday that a mere $750 would be provided to residents in states devastated by Hurricane Helene. Kamala Harris herself announced this federal aid herself.
“The president and I have been paying close attention from the beginning to what we need to do to make sure the federal resources hit the ground as quickly as possible, and that includes what was necessary to make sure that we provided direct federal assistance,” she said Wednesday. “And that work has been happening.”
She added, “And the federal relief and assistance that we have been providing has included FEMA providing $750 for folks who need immediate needs being met, such as food, baby formula, and the like. And you can apply now.”
Wow. Imagine losing your home, your livelihood, and possibly much more, only for the Biden-Harris administration to hand you a meager $750 if you apply. It’s a slap in the face—plain and simple.
This kind of “relief” is not only insulting, but it begs the question: how much more could have been done if we weren’t pouring taxpayer dollars into giving illegal aliens free housing and rent, or sending billions overseas to Ukraine? Priorities are clearly out of whack, and hardworking Americans are the ones paying the price.
Biden-Harris will question the patriotism of anyone who opposes more aid for Ukraine but can’t give more money to American citizens who’ve lost everything. Biden-Harris has unlimited resources to fly illegals across the country and give them free housing, but offers people who have lost everything less than the average weekly pay for middle class Americans.
Related: Once again, America’s Newspaper of Record is doing straight-up reportage: North Carolina Asks Zelensky For $100 Billion In U.S. Funding.
MEANWHILE, OVER AT VODKAPUNDIT: Did Hamas Just Ghost the Biden-Harris Administration? “You are about to enter another dimension, a dimension not only of darkness and silence but of rejection. A journey into a humiliating land of loneliness. You’ve just crossed over into… the Ghosted Zone.”
PREPARED TO BE A GREAT SLACKER ON DAY ONE: Kamala Harris slammed for ditching hurricane season preparedness briefings.
I WANT TO GET MINE AT A BEACH: Bright-light therapy improves outcomes in treating non-seasonal depression, study shows.
RELIGION OF PEACE UPDATE:
Breaking: Today, students at Tufts University were met with stickers plastered on campus calling for war on campus, with Hamas inverted triangles.
Universities need to stop the appeasement of their terror-supporting students and start taking action. pic.twitter.com/FBxNM2bG5P
— Eyal Yakoby (@EYakoby) October 2, 2024
Ilya Shapiro replied, “Looks like a true threat to me. Arrest, expel, prosecute, deport.”
ALL THIS AND WORLD WAR II: Having attempted to rehabilitate the Nazis and denigrate Winston Churchill last month, Tucker sets his sights on more immediate world events: Tucker Carlson: Do You Really Believe Iran Is a Threat?
I asked whether he meant the FBI’s assertion that there were teams of Iranian-backed groups in the US trying to kill Donald Trump. “You don’t really believe that, do you?” he interrupted. I denied it. “Okay, good. Because, you know, I’ve been around the block, and since 2003 it seems like everyone in the intel community shouts ‘Iran, Iran, Iran,’ every time there is a national security threat,” he said. “It’s truly shocking that people, especially those on the right, still believe that Iran is our greatest national security threat.”
I asked Tucker for his reaction to Mark Levin’s recent suggestion that the United States should treat Iran’s speculated involvement in the assassination attempts on Donald Trump as an act of war. He scoffed, “That’s truly deranged. Hard to believe and take seriously. Anyone who is repeating this line about Iran is a liar. Realistically, Iran does not want a hot war with the United States and has tried to avoid one for the last year. It is one of the most sinister lies out there.”
I asked him whether he thought, despite Donald Trump’s anti-war posturing and his selection of J.D. Vance as a running mate, the neocon/hawkish wing of the Republican Party had been fully ousted from influence of the electorate. “Are you kidding me? We haven’t exorcized the neocon establishment at all!” he said with a laugh. “You have to understand though that this is not a right/left thing. Just look at the second guy who tried to kill Trump. Fundamentally, he believes the same exact things that someone like Bill Kristol, David Frum, and Victoria Nuland believe.”
“That’s the scary thing. You have all of these people telling us that Iran, Russia, North Korea, are the greatest threats to our national security and I just simply don’t believe that,” he continued. “It really seems at this point that the Democratic Party and the national security establishment are in fact our greatest threats to national security.”
I know this is crazy talk, but maybe both could be worrisome in 2024.
Earlier: What Happened to Tucker Carlson?
Becoming a TV superstar can have deranging effects on anybody, as Carlson noted in his 2003 book. “If running for office can encourage you to imagine millions of supporters [who don’t exist], hosting a show can entirely separate you from reality,” he observed. “If you’re not careful, you can permanently lose all critical distance from yourself. One morning you wake up, and you’re living in your own irony-free world.”
That could be the world Carlson is living in today.
Could be.
WHAT IN THE ACTUAL HELL?
We have medical teams trying to access Burnsville (elevation 2,700ft) and Black Mountain. Authorities are threatening arrest. I’m gonna keep this short & simple; something is very wrong here.
— Kelly DNP Functional/Integrative Medicine (@kacdnp91) October 2, 2024
More:
When Jordan Seidhom woke up Saturday morning, he saw a Facebook post that tens of thousands of people were commenting on and sharing. A family was stranded on a mountain in Banner Elk, North Carolina.
They ran out of water a day earlier and just enough food to last less than two days.
Seidhom, the former head of the Chesterfield County Sheriff’s Office narcotics unit, knows a thing or two about finding people. He researched the mountain chain where the family was located and found a place to land on his mapping software.
He loaded bottled water and food into his helicopter and headed toward Banner Elk.
“I thought, I have a helicopter, maybe I can help,” Seidhom told Queen City News Chief Investigator Jody Barr.
What followed was a few heartwarming rescues of people Biden-Harris had left behind.
Then:
Seidhom landed in a parking lot at Boys Camp Road and Memorial Highway near the Lake Lure Flowering Bridge where he said he spotted a group of first responders gathered.
“Once we landed where emergency personnel were, I was met by a fire chief or maybe a captain, and he asked me who I was. I told him who I was, who I was with, just a local volunteer,” Seidhom said. The man was from an out-of-state fire department who’d traveled to N.C. to help in the rescue efforts, Seidhom said.
He believed the chief was from somewhere in Michigan.
“I told him my background experience, law enforcement, firefighting, and pilot and he immediately started helping with coordination. He gave me radio frequencies to coordinate with them on, set up a landing area for me to come back with the other victim, and just basically started the rescue efforts; the policies and procedures that you would take coordinating with someone from an outside source or outside agency. And in the middle of the whole conversation and them blocking the road off, I was greeted by the – at that time I didn’t know – but the Lake Lure fire chief, or assistant chief, maybe. And he shut down the whole operation.”
More: “If that’s what you want us to do, we’ll leave no issue. And I explained to him that I left my son on the side of the mountain, and I left another victim. I was going to go back and bring them, it was already set up for the landing spot and then I would get out of his area. He told me I wasn’t going to go back up the mountain to get them, I was going to leave them there.”
Tar, feathers.
OR MAYBE YOU WILL: FEMA Is Out of Money After Helene and You’ll Never Guess Where It Went.
LIGHTNING DEAL: FIGHTECH Shoulder Brace for Torn Rotator Cuff for Men and Women.#CommissionEarned
LIFE UNDER HARRIS-WALZ WOULD BE THE SAME AS Life in Kamala’s California.
It’s election season, and because California is a one-party state, we don’t see very many campaign ads for Kamala Harris. But ballot initiatives are another story. One hotly contested ballot initiative, Proposition 33, if approved by voters, will enable California’s cities and counties to impose rent control. How the rent control advocates make their case is typical. Greed and oppression against hapless, helpless, innocent victims. But the government is here to help!
Ads in favor of Prop. 33 are masterpieces in emotional imagery. One after another, a diverse collection of beleaguered tenants appear on the television screen, each of them repeating the phrase “The rent’s too high.” Another ad promoting a yes vote on Prop. 33 follows the same pattern, but this time, one after another, a collection of forlorn tenants asks, “Where will I live?” while superimposed on the screen is written, “Average Rent, $2,800.”
In both cases, viewers are advised to “vote for rent control.”
The naked dishonesty of these ads is lost on most Californians. They have been conditioned to believe that high home prices and high monthly rents are the result of price gouging by greedy landlords when in reality there is a housing shortage because the Democratic majority in the state legislature has passed countless laws that make it almost impossible to get permits to build homes. No wonder the median price for a home in California is $904,000.
Just wait until rent control creates severe shortages.