A few years ago, I set out to reinvent photography. I didn’t have a good idea how to do this, I just knew I wanted to make something original, and combining photography with my electronics skills seemed like a good way to do that. It failed at reinventing photography, but I succeeded in writing a clickbait first sentence, and the process was lots of fun too. //

The idea was great, I would use a LED strip to display images in mid-air, like those persistence of vision displays. I could set the camera to record a long exposure, then move the strip and trace a pattern in the air. I had never seen anyone do this before, so the first thing I did was what everyone does when they have a groundbreaking idea: I searched the web to see if this already existed.

The second thing I did was what every self-respecting inventor does when they have a groundbreaking idea: I looked at the first two search results, saw that none of them resembled what I had in mind, said “Well, this conclusively proves that nothing like this has ever been done!” and started working on it.

I call it… Ledonardo!

When I was a teenager, I had a CD player in my room, and I used to listen to fairy tales to fall asleep. The narrator’s voice would relax me and I’d fall asleep quickly. Fast forward to yesterday, I was playing with Google Text-To-Speech for an unrelated project, and had gotten one of their code samples to generate some speech for me. I had also played around with OpenAI’s GPT-3, which I had found wonderfully surrealist, and it had stuck in my mind, so I thought I should combine the two and create a podcast of nonsensical stories that you could listen to to help you fall asleep more easily.

Having already played with Google’s speech synthesis, I thought it would be pretty quick and easy to create this, as all I’d have to do is generate some text with GPT-3 and have Google speak it. Half an hour later, I had an AI-generated logo, AI-generated soundscapy background music, an AI-generated fairytale, and an AI-narrated audio file. A day later, I have seven:

The Deep Dreams podcast.
https://deepdreams.stavros.io/

Images are just too big. A 3 MB bitmap compresses down to a 500 KB JPEG, which, don’t get me wrong, 16% of the original size is great, but why 500 KB? That’s still pretty large.

This is 2022, we shouldn’t have to put up with large images. Our websites might load 60 MB of stuff for a pageview, but that stuff shouldn’t be images, it should be Javascript, as Brendan Eich intended.

We shouldn’t have to put up with fat images, but, until now, we had no choice.

Now we do.

The solution

a computer compressing data, by Caspar David Friedrich, matte painting trending on artstation HQ

A week or so ago, Stable Diffusion was released, and the world went crazy, and for good reason. Stable Diffusion, if you haven’t heard, is a new AI that generates realistic images from a text prompt. You basically give it a description of the image you want, and it generates it.

Now, this alone would be revolutionary, but we got double the revolution this time: This thing can also take an image and tell you the prompt you can use to generate it.

Are you thinking what I’m thinking?

That’s right, why compress an image to 500 KB when you can compress it to 50 bytes, where the bytes are the prompt that can be used to generate the exact same image again?

You wouldn’t, of course not.

Instead, what you would do, is ask the image-describing AI to describe the image, take the resulting (very small) prompt, transmit it over the wire, where the recipient would then use it to generate the image again based on the prompt.

I call this technique STAV, or Stable Transcription and Artistic Validation. Yes, the acronym might not contain any of the words “image”, “compression”, “reconstruction”, or “diffusion”, but Philip Katzip isn’t going to be the only one giving his name to compression techniques. //

As you can see, there is basically no loss in quality, even though the images’s sizes are around a ten-thousandth the original’s. This is an absolutely astonishing result, and will definitely herald a new era of compression. There are even some cases where quality is better than the original, and it is astonishing for a compressor to achieve 100%+ quality.

There are some minor kinks that need to be worked out, such as the fact that each image takes around a day to generate on mobile, but this is more than acceptable in certain domains. Website visitors, for example, are well-accustomed to such loading times, and would barely notice any difference.

Time Stamp Authority

freeTSA.org provides a free Time Stamp Authority. Adding a trusted timestamp to code or to an electronic signature provides a digital seal of data integrity and a trusted date and time of when the transaction took place.

IdenTrust Timestamping Authority Server is a service that binds the digital certificate used to sign a digital file with the data being signed, creating a unique sequence of characters or encoded information known as hash, and also identifies when a certain event has occurred. The result is a trusted accurate digital date and time stamp seal embedded within the digital file that contains X.509 digital signatures. Any change in the timestamped file will break the timestamp seal alerting the user that the file is no longer in its original state. //

Users who wish to add timestamping to PDF files that are signed with IdenTrust personal or business digital certificates must add 'http://timestamp.identrust.com' as the Timestamping Server to their local Adobe® Acrobat or Adobe® Reader configuration. Our article How to Add IdenTrust Timestamping Authority Server to Adobe will guide you through this process.

Users who wish to add IdenTrust Timestamping Authority Server to Microsoft® MS-Office® digitally signed documents can do it following the instructions in our article Apply IdenTrust Timestamping Authority to Microsoft Office Digitally Signed Documents.

Clive Robinson • September 15, 2022 3:03 AM

@ Winter,

Re : Blockchain efficiency

“Blockchains are transparent, robust, and fast.”

No they are not.

To be transparent they need to be “public” and few people actually want every financial move they make being made naked and open to all.

Whilst they look like they are robust they are not as data structures, or systems. The only robustness they bring to the table over existing systems is by the public duplication. Which is problematical as who is going to pay for the infrastructure many times that of Googles current setup, just to implement one such? Remember you would need a minimum of four such systems[1] and all the high security communications to support it, which would make the NSA envious.

As for fast, the current systems due to the moronic “Proof of XXX” attached are so slow transactions are at best just a handful a second. Even without that “Proof of XXX” the number of global transactions at any one time numbers up in the tens of millions a second, something most do not realise.

But people do not appreciate the combined,

1. Gate Keeper Effect
2. Ripple across Effect.

This will create a significant time delay which has consequences in that high speed transactions can be done and compleated long before the blockchain gets updated, thus “High Frequency Fraud” will be a result. This will require “back-out” mechanisms that don’t exist because they destroy the blockchain security model.

Then of course any system with locked in time delay and capacity issues, is a “Sitting Duck” target for extortion by “Denial of Service”(DoS) attack.

To be honest I’m surprised there has been no real concerted effort to Ransom one of the crypto-coin blockchains by a DDoS…

As has been pointed out the idea of a global blockchain is a “Crypto-Anarchists” dream and every one elses very real nightmare.

Because like it or not, it will become not some kind of libertarian freedom, but a tool of near total oppression as it will have all the failings of hierarchical systems[2] that certain entities will lust after to control. We actually see this with blockchain gate keepers already.

[1] There is a problem with blockchains in that if someone gets more than 50% control they can “own it”. This means you need three at all times sharing effectively equitably. Add in the fact “at all times” need 100% availability, and no single system has 100% reliability means you need an absolut minimum of four, preferably more.

[2] Mankind has known many of the failings of single and hierarchical systems for as long as there has been any kind of social structure. War is just one obvious side effect, slavery or forced servitude yet another the list of hierarchical system failings is both long and grevious. For centuries at the very least people have sort out ways to robustly maintain the desirable effects of social cohesion, yet get rid of hierarchies, or atleast their many undesirable side effects, and so far the failure to do this is effectively 100%…

A consistent, unambiguously stated policy of a strong dollar will result in lower global energy, specifically oil.

This is a morally sound tradeoff, even if it comes at the expense of America’s domestic oil and gas industry. You can’t delink the cost of fossil fuels, specifically oil and natural gas, and the cost of global food production. Think fertilizer.

Sure, a weak dollar results in some cheaper American goods, making trade-deficit bugs happy. Still, it also results in more expensive global commodity prices resulting in higher inputs, including and especially in the agricultural sector. Think natural gas. That means higher food costs and, inevitably, when supply chains are disrupted, food shortages and global starvation. Not in Martha’s Vineyard; think Bangladesh, countries in Africa, and Latin America.

What’s better? a weak dollar, expensive oil, a few more jobs in the oil and gas sector, but more war revenues for Putin and Iran? Or a strong dollar, cheaper oil, fewer domestic jobs in the oil and gas sector, and lower global food prices resulting in less worldwide poverty and starvation?

A sound U.S. dollar policy is a moral and ethical policy for America and the rest of the industrialized and developing world and will result in more peace and prosperity. //

A strong dollar with low oil prices means lower overall energy and food costs, less poverty, especially in the developing world, and perhaps more importantly, less financial resources for tyrants and terrorists, resulting in fewer wars and rumors of wars, and fewer people freezing to death in the winter and sweltering to death in the summer…

Our federal government paid for Russian disinformation to frame the president of the United States for colluding with Russia.

Techno Fog @Techno_Fog
The FBI caught Steele primary subsource Igor Danchenko in a number of lies.

What did the FBI do in response?

It signed Danchenko up as a paid FBI confidential human source.

Durham's latest:
technofog.substack.com
Durham shocker: Danchenko was a paid FBI informant
3:20 PM · Sep 13, 2022

Durham dropped a pretty stunning revelation regarding Igor Danchenko, who is currently being prosecuted for lying to the FBI. Danchenko was the primary sub-source for the discredited Steele Dossier and was caught in several falsehoods regarding the document.

Now, we are learning that after those lies were known, the FBI didn’t stop using him as a source. On the contrary, they made him a paid confidential informant until the month before the 2020 presidential election. //

Techno Fog @Techno_Fog
·
The FBI caught Steele primary subsource Igor Danchenko in a number of lies.

What did the FBI do in response?

It signed Danchenko up as a paid FBI confidential human source.

Durham's latest

technofog.substack.com
Durham shocker: Danchenko was a paid FBI informant

Techno Fog @Techno_Fog

The purpose should be quite clear -

The FBI buries Danchenko from inquiry by making him a CHS.

In doing so, the FBI prevents discovery of its own misconduct.

Utterly corrupt and self-serving.
3:47 PM · Sep 13, 2022

What does it mean to lose a language? Deep knowledge, passed down over millennia—gone. Ways of thinking about the land, the sea, the sky, and the flora and fauna that inhabit them. Rituals and recipes. Myths and memories, erased. And for those who spoke the language, it means losing a part of themselves.

It happens every three months. A language—an irreplaceable key to understanding the world—fades away. By the end of the century, as much as 90% of the world’s 6,500 languages will be gone forever.

Languages are prisms through which we look at the world. A shared understanding that binds a people together. A diversity of languages encourages a diversity of thought, of perspectives, of sense-making. Every language tells us a little bit about who we are. When a language dies, a sliver of our shared culture vanishes, and humanity is poorer for the loss.

A left-leaning New York think tank sounded a familiar warning about Arizona’s “voter suppression bills” being “dangerously close to becoming law.”

The Brennan Center for Justice added in a press release that Arizona was “taking center stage in the relent­less effort to rein in voter parti­cip­a­tion in the name of ‘elec­tion secur­ity.’” Pending bills, the think tank claimed, were “aimed at making voting by mail harder.”

That was in April 2021, before Arizona passed several reform measures that state legislators said they crafted to ensure secure and honest elections.

Little more than a year later, in August 2022, Arizona notched a record for high turnout in a primary election as 1.45 million voters participated, or 35.1% of those registered, surpassing the previous record in a 2000 primary by 7,000 ballots.

Voter turnout in Arizona for 2018, the last primary in a non-presidential election year, was 1.2 million voters, or 33.4%.

In 2021, Democrats and pundits attacked election reform laws enacted in 19 states as attempts at “voter suppression.” The five states that appeared to come under the most attack were Georgia, Texas, Arizona, Florida, and Iowa—all of which saw boosted voter turnout so far in 2022 compared to the 2018 primaries.

As a rule, non-presidential elections and primary elections attract lower turnout than presidential elections or general elections.

But voter turnout was significantly higher in the 2022 primaries in Georgia, Texas, and Arizona and nominally higher in Florida than in the comparable 2018 primaries.

So new election laws in these states did a lousy job of suppressing the vote, if that’s what Republican lawmakers designed them to do.

Louisa Lim’s book, ‘Indelible City: Dispossession and Defiance in Hong Kong,’ tells the heartbreaking tale of the Chinese takeover of what was one of the world’s freest cities. //

Lim’s book is timely because Beijing has been busy rewriting the history of Hong Kong, emphasizing China’s sovereignty claim of the city since time immemorial. Chinese authorities reportedly will introduce a new history book to Hong Kong schools that denies Hong Kong was ever a British colony. //

Lim’s book helps answer some questions many people, including myself, have, including: Why and how did the British government give up Hong Kong so easily?

Great Britain deserved credit for bringing the rule of law, independent judiciary, and laissez-faire capitalism to Hong Kong. These political and economic systems, combined with the Chinese people’s resilience and industriousness, transformed the once-sleepy fishing village into an international financial center and one of the busiest trading ports within a few decades. However, the British made three big mistakes that sealed Hong Kong’s fate today.

First, the British government failed to institute a democratic political system in Hong Kong. //

The second big mistake was that the British government was naive about the nature of the CCP, which was shocking to me because Hong Kong’s fate was sealed when Margret Thatcher was the prime minister of the U.K., and she was known for standing up to communism. Yet Thatcher let her colleagues and herself be played by cunning CCP officials during their negotiations. //

The third big mistake the British government made was to exclude Hong Kongers from its negotiation with Beijing. Thatcher told the British Parliament that the final agreement was “acceptable to the Hong Kong people.” But the Hong Kong people did not get a say in the matter.

Ethnic Chinese who served as advisers to the Hong Kong governor’s office were shut out of the negotiation despite repeated requests. They warned the British government that without an ethnic Chinese on the British negotiating team, the team “might be missing the nuances of spoken Mandarin.” They also feared that the British negotiating team “simply failed to understand the down-and-dirty nature of haggling with the Chinese.” All of their concerns turned out to be spot on. //

The British government didn’t even organize a public referendum or democratic process to let Hong Kongers vote on the agreement. Lim wrote that in retrospect, she could see how accurate the advice Hong Kong advisers gave was and how they “had pinpointed the problems at every step of the way.” Had the British government involved Hong Kongers from the very beginning, Hong Kong’s demise could have been prevented.

As Taiwan becomes the flash point between the United States and China, it’s foreseeable that the two nations may engage in a negotiation about Taiwan’s future someday. Lim’s book offers some timely and valuable lessons for future U.S. negotiators. Let’s hope they don’t repeat the British government’s mistakes regarding Hong Kong.

https://twitter.com/Charles_Lister/status/1567902180274831362

On Sept 12, 2001 -- 24hrs after 9/11 -- Queen Elizabeth ordered the U.S. national anthem be played at the Changing of the Guard outside Buckingham Palace.

Nothing like that had occurred in 600 years.

On the 21st Anniversay of the 9/11 attack, my memory goes back to this video. It’s not the images, it’s the sound.

“… the sound of the PASS (Personal Alert Safety System) alarms worn by firemen, which continued chirping after the buildings collapsed, each one representing a life lost. I never have been able to erase that sound from my memory.”

Facebook’s stonewalling has been revealing on its own, providing variations on the same theme: It has amassed so much data on so many billions of people and organized it so confusingly that full transparency is impossible on a technical level. In the March 2022 hearing, Zarashaw and Steven Elia, a software engineering manager, described Facebook as a data-processing apparatus so complex that it defies understanding from within. The hearing amounted to two high-ranking engineers at one of the most powerful and resource-flush engineering outfits in history describing their product as an unknowable machine.

The special master at times seemed in disbelief, as when he questioned the engineers over whether any documentation existed for a particular Facebook subsystem. “Someone must have a diagram that says this is where this data is stored,” he said, according to the transcript. Zarashaw responded: “We have a somewhat strange engineering culture compared to most where we don’t generate a lot of artifacts during the engineering process. Effectively the code is its own design document often.” He quickly added, “For what it’s worth, this is terrifying to me when I first joined as well.”

[…]

Facebook’s inability to comprehend its own functioning took the hearing up to the edge of the metaphysical. At one point, the court-appointed special master noted that the “Download Your Information” file provided to the suit’s plaintiffs must not have included everything the company had stored on those individuals because it appears to have no idea what it truly stores on anyone. Can it be that Facebook’s designated tool for comprehensively downloading your information might not actually download all your information? This, again, is outside the boundaries of knowledge.

“The solution to this is unfortunately exactly the work that was done to create the DYI file itself,” noted Zarashaw. “And the thing I struggle with here is in order to find gaps in what may not be in DYI file, you would by definition need to do even more work than was done to generate the DYI files in the first place.”

The systemic fogginess of Facebook’s data storage made answering even the most basic question futile. At another point, the special master asked how one could find out which systems actually contain user data that was created through machine inference.

“I don’t know,” answered Zarashaw. “It’s a rather difficult conundrum.”

The safest exchange points are easily accessible and in a well-lit, public place where transactions are visible to others nearby. Try to arrange a meeting time that is during daylight hours, and consider bringing a friend along — especially when dealing with high-value items like laptops and smart phones.

Safeexchangepoint.com also advises that police or merchants that host their own exchange locations generally won’t get involved in the details of your transaction unless specified otherwise, and that many police departments (but not all) are willing to check the serial number of an item for sale to make sure it’s not known to be stolen property. //

• Beware of common scams, like checks for an amount higher than the amount of the deal; “cashier’s checks” that are forged and presented when the bank is closed.
• If you are given a cashier’s check, money order or other equivalent, call the bank — at the number listed online, not a number the buyer gives you — to verify the validity of the check.

SafeTradeSpots are designated locations at law enforcement offices where buyers and sellers can meet in public under surveillance to complete in-person transactions. There’s no charge for the service.

Every month, tens of millions of Americans use online marketplaces to buy and sell secondhand in their own neighborhoods.

With clear benefits for consumers, local businesses and the environment, this kind of ecommerce is among the most popular and fastest growing sectors online, facilitating tens of billions of dollars in local transactions annually.

We started SafeExchangePoint.com to support communities across the country that want to offer their own local, convenient and secure exchange points where buyers and sellers can complete transactions, and to help consumers find the nearest SafeExchangePoint.

SafeTrade is a program to help users of online classifieds trade safely.

The program launched in 2015 in response to the thousands of transactions initiated on Craigslist and other classified sites that have gone awry. At this writing, 105 killings have been linked to Craigslist.

​There’s nothing wrong with Craigslist --- it’s a wonderful site and a wonderful service --- but safety for users should be paramount. SafeTrade is designed to help everyone stay safe.

SafeTrade is open to all police departments and law enforcement organizations to offer. There’s no charge, no trademark, no fee. We encourage all police department and law enforcement agencies to join SafeTrade. (We’ll even supply the logo by email to any department that wants to use it, and we’re also supplying banners to a few departments as a “starter.”)