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A Nice Little Cryptography Primer

By itss | 28/06/2021
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Pun Intended.

Category: Technology
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  • Facial Recognition on Public Buses? Kansas City Says Yes
    by EditorDavid on 21/06/2026 at 7:34 am

    An anonymous reader shared this report from the Associated Press: Officials in Kansas City, Missouri, are preparing to equip cameras on some public buses with facial recognition software capable of identifying passengers who appear on a list of banned riders or missing persons. Supporters and opponents alike view the effort as a major litmus test for tapping the AI-powered software on a U.S. public transportation system, positioning Kansas City as the latest epicenter of a fierce debate over whether the safety benefits of artificial intelligence are worth the privacy costs. "The idea of running face recognition on a camera that is pointed on live spaces in public is a line that until recently has never really been crossed in the last 25 years," said Jay Stanley, senior policy analyst for the Project on Speech, Privacy and Technology at the American Civil Liberties Union. The state of Missouri declined to help fund the project as expected due to concerns with the facial recognition component. Still, the city is pushing ahead with local and federal money, said Tyler Means, chief mobility and strategy officer at the Kansas City Transportation Authority. "Privacy is always a tricky thing," Means said. "We've always had cameras on our buses. It's just new technology. I think in time it'll smooth over and people will realize, 'Well, it didn't really feel any different'...." Images captured by cameras aboard the buses would immediately be checked against any active alerts, generated when a missing person, banned rider or someone on a law enforcement watch list designated by the transportation authority is identified... After the buses return to the depot, the transportation authority would archive the regular video footage on a local server for up to five years. The company partnering with Kansas City to run the cameras "started using live facial recognition years ago to alert nursing homes when residents left the building," according to the article, and then "brought the technology to correctional institutions and schools." But this is its first attempt at bringing its cameras onto public transportation. The article also includes this quote from Will Owen, communications director for the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project. "City residents should not be guinea pigs for transit systems to test Silicon Valley's latest unproven, biased surveillance tech." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  • Polymarket Paid Dozens to Post Videos of Themselves 'Winning' With Fake Bets
    by EditorDavid on 21/06/2026 at 4:34 am

    In January a college student posted a video showing him winning $100,000 on Polymarket — one of 145 that appeared to show bets adding up to almost $410,000, reports the Wall Street Journal. "But none of those bets were real." Instead its creator was "one of dozens of mostly college-age creators Polymarket paid to film themselves making fake trades and sometimes scoring fake wins," the Journal reports, citing interviews with the creators an an analysis of more than 1,100 of their videos: Polymarket built near-perfect copies of its website, then instructed creators to make simulated trades on those dummy sites and hide that they were being paid by Polymarket. To get the videos to go viral, Polymarket has recruited a social-media army to copy and re-post creators' footage. Though the New York-based company has been banned from offering its primary crypto platform in the U.S. since 2022, the social-media creators are paid to specifically target U.S. users, who can still access the site with a virtual private network... Polymarket hired and worked closely with a marketing contractor to promote the site. In a message reviewed by the Journal, that contractor told its social-media army to repost content made by 10 Polymarket creators in particular... These creators didn't initially identify themselves as paid by Polymarket, although one offered a $20 bonus code in his social-media bio... The company instructed creators not to disclose they are paid, according to creators who have worked with the company. They said the pay often added up to $2,000 to $3,000 a month... A handful of videos the Journal reviewed also contained short glimpses of URLs indicating the sites were test environments for Polymarket engineers... Creators said they send the finished videos to Polymarket for review. If a video isn't engaging enough, or if it bears obvious signs of being faked, Polymarket will ask for the videos to be reshot, the creators said... Polymarket sends creators bullet-point guidance on what to say, according to creators who have worked with the company and a recruiting website... Polymarket's viral clipping campaign racked up more than 140 million views on TikTok, YouTube and Instagram, according to the analytics provider Tubular... Internal materials show that Polymarket and Virality promote videos showing how easy it is to conduct insider trades on the platform. Polymarket has paid clippers to promote at least 19 videos discussing opportunities to use inside information or other tactics to manipulate markets. America's advertising laws "require people who are paid to endorse a product to disclose their ties," the article notes, "although there is some gray area about what's permitted." (After the Journal's investigation, the creators started adding "@polymarket partner" to their bios, the article points out._ And when asked for a comment, Polymarket "said it plans to conduct a comprehensive audit of active promotional content." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  • Gamers Sue PlayStation: It's Not Clear They're Selling Licenses Rather Than Ownership of Games
    by EditorDavid on 21/06/2026 at 1:34 am

    The gaming news site Aftermath reports: Four gamers are suing Sony Interactive Entertainment for allegedly breaking a California law that requires digital storefronts selling games to make it clear people are buying licenses, not actually owning the games. Sony Interactive Entertainment's PlayStation store uses language like "Buy Now" and "Confirm Purchase," lawyers wrote in a complaint filed on Thursday... "In reality, consumers who 'purchase' digital games through PlayStation do not obtain ownership of those products," lawyers wrote. "Instead, PlayStation grants only a limited, revocable license to access the software, subject to multiple restrictions contained in a separate Software Product License Agreement".... [T]he PlayStation store does have a disclosure. Above the "Confirm Purchase" button, there's a note: "By selecting [Confirm Purchase], you agree to complete the purchase in accordance with the PlayStation Terms of Service before using this content. You further acknowledge that your purchase of this digital product amounts to a license subject to the Software Product License Agreement." These four gamers aren't satisfied with that; they said in the complaint that it's too small, and that "a reasonable customer completing a purchase would not necessarily notice this disclosure." "It's a proposed class action complaint, meaning the group of four gamers is asking a judge to grant them class action status." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  • How Millions of Digital Home Devices Are Secretly Powering Cyberattacks
    by EditorDavid on 20/06/2026 at 11:23 pm

    The Wall Street Journal reports on internet-connected devices — and how every year millions of them "can contain a secret digital backdoor that opens up access to your home internet, so that anyone... can surf the web as if they were you." (And this is especially true for "knockoffs that you buy online"...) In a video report this week they tested two digital picture frames from Amazon and three streaming devices from Walmart "because we heard that they often ship with backdoor software used in cyberattacks. Security experts believe manufacturers are being paid to add this malware, but many people also get tricked into downloading the software onto their phones or computers... Within minutes of turning the devices on, there was a surge of internet traffic... Visits to gambling, porn, cryptocurrency and loads of other sketchy web sites started pouring in from users around the world." (And remote visitors also tried to access Outlook and Gmail accounts...) Residential proxy companies even rent out access to "tens of millions of home networks around the world," according to the report. "But the problem is actually worse than that. Hackers figured out a way to seize control of these backdoors, and they started taking over these residential networks. Last month authorities arrested a 23-year-old Ottawa man, saying he'd taken control of more than a million devices to launch some of the largest cyberattacks anyone had ever seen.." After a couple months the Journal's reporter collected logs of all the traffic, and sent it to an investigator at Comcast, who said both were conducting DDoS attacks. But estimate for the number of infected devices are as low as tens of millions or as high 500 million-plus. "We've seen nation state attacks launched through these kind of endpoints, which means your device sitting in your house is part of a nation state attack against another nation state... We've seen ad fraud, we've seen ticket scalping, we've seen financial fraud." But more importantly, "We have seen some of the largest computer attacks — meaning computers attacking other computers at human request — ever recorded in our digital history in the last several months." At cybersecurity conferences, some are warning "there are much larger ones on the horizon if we don't get a hold of this problem." The company making the picture frame "couldn't be reached for comment," while Amazon said it's been out of stock since last year. Both Amazon and Walmart said they take action when they confirm malware on a third-party product. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  • OpenAI Announces Benchmarks for AI Life Sciences Research. Its Best Model Failed 63.9% of the Test
    by EditorDavid on 20/06/2026 at 9:34 pm

    This week OpenAI announced a 750-task test to to measure "whether AI systems can support realistic life science research tasks, not just answer biology questions." But while OpenAI's top-performing GPT-Rosalind model led the rankings, Slashdot reader BrianFagioli notes that "it achieved a pass rate of just 36.1 percent, failing nearly two-thirds of benchmark tasks." Nerds.xyz points out that means "the best-performing model failed nearly two-thirds of the benchmark's tasks." The benchmark also revealed a familiar weakness. AI systems generally perform better when everything is presented as text. Once they are forced to work with supporting documents, figures, or complex datasets, performance drops noticeably. GPT-Rosalind's pass rate fell from 45.1 percent on text-only tasks to 28.1 percent on tasks involving artifacts or URLs. To be fair, the benchmark is not intended to suggest AI is useless in research. Quite the opposite. OpenAI found that models are becoming increasingly capable of scientific communication, evidence synthesis, and translating research findings into practical explanations. Those are valuable skills, particularly for researchers drowning in information. But LifeSciBench serves as a useful reminder that today's AI systems are still far from autonomous scientists. They can help. They can assist. They can sometimes provide surprisingly useful insights. What they cannot reliably do, however, is replace the expertise, judgment, and skepticism that real scientific research requires. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  • Remembering When Alan Turing Developed a Portable Voice Encryption Device
    by EditorDavid on 20/06/2026 at 8:34 pm

    Long-time Slashdot reader smooth wombat writes: Alan Turing, one of the more famous people who worked at Bletchley Park to decipher the German Enigma coding machine, was also working on a separate project. His private papers, known as the Bayley papers for his assistant Donald Bayley who held onto the papers until his death in 2020, reveal Turning had produced a working model of a portable voice encryption device. He even demonstrated it by using a Winston Churchill speech recording. "Weighing just 39 kg, including its power pack," Jack Copeland wrote in an article for IEEE Spectrum, "Delilah would be at home in a truck, a trench, or a large backpack." More from Popular Mechanics: Turingâ(TM)s work at Bletchley Park actually informed the Delilah experimentation he was doing at Hanslope Park, and not just because he used Red Forms, the Army-issue sheets Hanslope staffers were meant to use to alert Bletchley staffers to enemy signals, as his personal scrap paper for Delilah experiments. He drew inspiration from one of the German cipher machines they had decoded at Bletchley; not the famed Enigma machine, but rather the SZ42. While the former relied on Morse Code, the latter utilized a 5-bit telegraph code, which Copeland notes âoewas a forerunner of ASCII and Unicode and is still used by some ham radio operators.â The SZ42 produced an obscuring key of telegraph characters, with an identical key produced to both the sender and receiver. If it could be done for text, Turing reasoned it could be done for sound as well... [T]he reason Delilah fell to the wayside of history isnâ(TM)t because it was a failure, but rather because it simply wasnâ(TM)t needed anymore. By the time Turing had built and demonstrated his device, the war was over. What good was a portable voice encryptor if you had no major enemies trying to intercept your calls, the government reasoned. So funding for the project stopped, and Turingâ(TM)s two-year experiment ended with a whimper. Turingâ(TM)s time as an electrical engineer at Hanslope Park became a footnote in his story, if even that. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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