tal

The ~/.ssh/known_hosts file only contains public keys. I mean, maybe someone doesn't want to hand out the list of hosts that they talk to, but exposing it doesn't expose the private keys, which are what you really need to keep secret.

Those are in ~/.ssh/id_rsa or the like, depending upon key type.

looks dubious

The problem here is that if this is unreliable -- and I'm skeptical that Google can produce a system that will work across-the-board -- then you have a synthesized image that now has Google attesting to be non-synthetic.

Maybe they can make it clear that this is a best-effort system, and that they only will flag some of them.

There are a limited number of ways that I'm aware of to detect whether an image is edited.

• If the image has been previously compressed via lossy compression, there are ways to modify the image to make the difference in artifacts in different points of the image more visible, or -- I'm sure -- statistically look for such artifacts.

• If an image has been previously indexed by something like Google Images and Google has an index sufficient to permit Google to do fuzzy search for portions of the image, then they can identify an edited image because they can find the original.

• It's possible to try to identify light sources based on shading and specular in an image, and try to find points of the image that don't match. There are complexities to this; for example, a surface might simply be shaded in such a way that it looks like light is shining on it, like if you have a realistic poster on a wall. For generation rather than photomanipulation, better generative AI systems will also probably tend to make this go away as they improve; it's a flaw in the image.

But none of these is a surefire mechanism.

For AI-generated images, my guess is that there are some other routes.

• Some images are going to have metadata attached. That's trivial to strip, so not very good if someone is actually trying to fool people.

• Maybe some generative AIs will try doing digital watermarks. I'm not very bullish on this approach. It's a little harder to remove, but invariably, any kind of lossy compression is at odds with watermarks that aren't very visible. As lossy compression gets better, it either automatically tends to strip watermarks -- because lossy compression tries to remove data that doesn't noticeably alter an image, and watermarks rely on hiding data there -- or watermarks have to visibly alter the image. And that's before people actively developing tools to strip them. And you're never gonna get all the generative AIs out there adding digital watermarks.

• I don't know what the right terminology is, but my guess is that latent diffusion models try to approach a minimum error for some model during the iteration process. If you have a copy of the model used to generate the image, you can probably measure the error from what the model would predict -- basically, how much one iteration would change an image or part of it. I'd guess that that only works well if you have a copy of the model in question or a model similar to it.

I don't think that any of those are likely surefire mechanisms either.

On the subject of the repeated murder attempts against him, he added: “There’s something going on. I mean, perhaps it’s God wanting me to be President to save this country.”

On one hand, the Almighty appears to have thrown several assassins at Trump but had them fail. One might take that as an expression of divine endorsement for Trump's leadership. But, then, on the other hand, He hasn't sent any against Harris.

Definitely a tough theological knot, that one.

For example, Google Chrome has stopped the use of auto-play video.

Even setting aside ads, that was virtually always something that I did not want.

If websites like CNN want someone to watch video, put the video up with autoplay off. If someone wants to watch it, they can start it playing.

PawSense is a Windows package that tries to detect when a cat is walking across a keyboard and locks it.

https://priceonomics.com/the-software-that-detects-when-a-cat-is-messing/

I don't know of a Linux equivalent, though I'd swear I remember something similar that was targeted at the author's young 2-year-old daughter, was named after her, but which I cannot now find.

YouTube desperately needs to fix the recommendations for music.

I mean, I guess if someone has a YouTube account, there's nothing wrong with using YouTube as a music recommendations system, but it isn't really the first thing I'd think of. I mean, music isn't really what it was designed for.

And YouTube doesn't know what a user would listen to offline, so unless all their music-listening is from YouTube tracks...I'm not sure how representative the listening data would be of what a user would listen to.

I don't use them, because I don't really want to hand them a profile of me, but if I wanted to get music recommendations, I'd probably use something like Audioscrobbler, which was designed for building a profile on someone's music-listening habits and then handing them recommendations based on that.

This Popsie Funk channel is upfront, that the music is AI generated.

goes looking

Yeah, the description reads:

Popsie Funk is a fictitious creation. The tracks are A.I. generated from lyrics and musical compositions that I have created. The A.I. samples are then mixed and edited by me.

I am adding this disclaimer due to repeated questions about the genuine authenticity of Popsie Funk and his music.

I don't think that the artist in question is faking this.

All that being said, while this particular case isn't, I suppose one could imagine such a "trying to pretend to be human" artist existing. That is, if you think about all the websites out there with AI-generated questions and answers that do try to appear human-generated, you gotta figure that someone is thinking about doing the same with musicians...and at mass scale, not manually doing one or two.

That doesn't sound like it's an incredibly difficult problem to solve from a technical standpoint, if the creator is the one being hit. Just need either a software package -- or, if the limitation here is content creator bandwidth, service -- that pushes a video to multiple streaming video providers.

Might be an issue for third-parties creating mirrors of YouTube content, though.

I just posted it myself as the first thing that came to mind with something small and cute and noise-making. Hadn't read other comments at that point.

List of URLs submitted to Reddit on this domain:

https://old.reddit.com/domain/reclaimthenet.org/

As best I can tell, it seems to be mostly material related to conspiracy or political promotion of Donald Trump.

I'm also not incredibly sanguine about some of the Reddit users regularly submitting material from the domain. For example, /u/ExtHD is submitting material from this domain and from alethonews.com, like "Georgia to apologize for starting 2008 war | The country will find the strength to apologize to the Ossetians for the “bloody conflict” and strive to restore trust and unity between the two brotherly nations". That looks kinda like Russian information campaign stuff to me.

The first Wayback Machine snapshot of the top-level webpage on this domain shows it promoting Laura Loomer's stuff (the woman who was recently in the news as being responsible for the "pet-eating Haitians" thing).

https://web.archive.org/web/20190320223919/https://reclaimthenet.org/

We've genetically engineered other colored foods before, like golden rice.

We've genetically-engineered many bioluminescent plants and animals.

kagis

We've genetically-engineered blue flowers:

https://www.science.org/content/article/scientists-genetically-engineer-world-s-first-blue-chrysanthemum

We all think we've seen blue flowers before. And in some cases, it's true. But according to the Royal Horticultural Society's color scale—the gold standard for flowers—most "blues" are really violet or purple. Florists and gardeners are forever on the lookout for new colors and varieties of plants, however, but making popular ornamental and cut flowers, like roses, vibrant blue has proved quite difficult. "We've all been trying to do this for a long time and it's never worked perfectly," says Thomas Colquhoun, a plant biotechnologist at the University of Florida in Gainesville who was not involved with the work.

True blue requires complex chemistry. Anthocyanins—pigment molecules in the petals, stem, and fruit—consist of rings that cause a flower to turn red, purple, or blue, depending on what sugars or other groups of atoms are attached. Conditions inside the plant cell also matter. So just transplanting an anthocyanin from a blue flower like a delphinium didn't really work.

Naonobu Noda, a plant biologist at the National Agriculture and Food Research Organization in Tsukuba, Japan, tackled this problem by first putting a gene from a bluish flower called the Canterbury bell into a chrysanthemum. The gene's protein modified the chrysanthemum's anthocyanin to make the bloom appear purple instead of reddish. To get closer to blue, Noda and his colleagues then added a second gene, this one from the blue-flowering butterfly pea. This gene's protein adds a sugar molecule to the anthocyanin. The scientists thought they would need to add a third gene, but the chrysanthemum flowers were blue with just the two genes, they report today in Science Advances.

"That allowed them to get the best blue they could obtain," says Neil Anderson, a horticultural scientist at the University of Minnesota in St. Paul who was not involved with the work.

Chemical analyses showed that the blue color came about in just two steps because the chrysanthemums already had a colorless component that interacted with the modified anthocyanin to create the blue color. "It was a stroke of luck," Colquhoun says. Until now, researchers had thought it would take many more genes to make a flower blue, Nakayama adds.

The next step for Noda and his colleagues is to make blue chrysanthemums that can't reproduce and spread into the environment, making it possible to commercialize the transgenic flower. But that approach could spell trouble in some parts of the world. "As long as GMO [genetically modified organism] continues to be a problem in Europe, blue [flowers] face a difficult economic future," predicts Ronald Koes, a plant molecular biologist at the University of Amsterdam who was not involved with the work. But others think this new blue flower will prevail. "It's certainly an advance for the retail florist," Anderson says. "It would have a lot of market value worldwide."

I imagine that it's quite possibly within the realm of what we could do.

For me, it’s corn on the cob.

Man, I dunno if I really want to explore this rabbit hole, but I'm sure that there's much-less-tolerable stuff out there. Say, live mice or something.