Facebook and Instagram have a problem. Well, they have many, many problems, but one of the ones they feel like addressing is “celeb-bait ads and impersonation.” According to a new post from parent company Meta, the way they’re going to try solving this is through the use of facial recognition technology. Again. Woo. In the lengthy post, Meta explains that the biggest impact of these new tools will be an expanded effort to stop scam accounts from impersonating celebrities. If you’ve used Facebook in the last year or so, you’ve probably encountered friend suggestions for attractive celebrities, which are obvious fakes that can be identified by their paparazzi photos and deliberate misspellings of their names. Now when Meta spots these impersonations, which are typically shilling spam or attempting to phish info out of unwary users, it’ll employ facial recognition to compare them to their relevant celebrity’s (real) Facebook or Instagram account. It’ll be expanded to advertising, too, though the system will be automated (like almost everything on social media). Fine. That seems like a worthwhile application of this problematic tech. But what about if someone manages to hack your legitimate Facebook or Instagram account? Or you forget your password and lose access to your email account? Currently, you need to plead your case to Meta’s support team by uploading some form of official ID. But the company is now testing a system where you can upload a video selfie instead, with facial recognition comparing you to your stored photos. The demonstration shows the user tilting their head at various angles to give the tool access to their entire face for scanning. Meta says that these videos will be “encrypted and stored securely,” never posted publicly, and immediately deleted along with facial recognition tech once the process is completed. This isn’t Facebook’s first brush with facial recognition tech. It previously used a more basic system to automatically tag users in photos and videos, but shut down the opt-in tool in 2021 after privacy concerns were raised. This new implementation of the system is far less broad and more pointedly targeted at safety. That said, I wouldn’t blame users for being skeptical of pretty much anything Meta and Facebook do at this point. After trying for years to disengage with Facebook’s systems, I reluctantly returned earlier this year to try and engage with some local communities… only to be immediately flooded by a mountain of AI-generated garbage. A Real Cozy Cabin with nothing but Real Genuine Human Comments on the photo. Facebook A never-ending deluge of AI-generated “cozy cabins,” Dodge Power Wagons, and pets and people just on the other side of the uncanny valley assaulted my news feed on a daily basis. I tried in vain to report these accounts… but with millions and millions of likes and shares, the majority of which I’m guessing were less than human, they just kept coming. So forgive me if I’m less than confident in Meta’s ability to stem this tide of social media impersonation, let alone its actual intention to protect users. Maybe once the company shows as much interest in keeping AI bullshit off my app screen I’ll have a little more faith in its dedication to authenticity. Since “deepfakes” are also easier to implement now, I have serious doubts about any automated system’s capability to reliably distinguish between real people and scammers on a video. Read...

Swann has launched SwannShield, an AI-powered home security voice assistant, enhancing protection and user experience in smart home technology. Read...

Gartner has listed the top 10 strategic technology trends for 2025, emphasising AI, governance and sustainability to guide organisations` futures. Read...

Western Digital has launched the world`s highest capacity HDDs, with the UltraSMR reaching 32TB and the ePMR CMR at 26TB, advancing data storage technology. Read...

As AI investment grows, the government is encourging its use across both private and public sectors - but the risks and costs of the technology remain under-investigated. Read...

In the ongoing war of words between Intel and Qualcomm in the low-power PC computing space, Qualcomm has fired a mammoth shot: The company is claiming that its second-generation Snapdragon Oryon CPU core is faster than Intel’s latest Core Ultra chip, Lunar Lake. To be more specific, Qualcomm believes that its second-generation Oryon core, in a smartphone, is faster than a Lunar Lake PC processor. Cristiano Amon, the chief executive of Qualcomm, said that the new Oryon core is 62 percent faster than the Core Ultra 7 Series 2 chip, if both chips are running at the same power. If the chips were to be run at the same power, the Core Ultra would require 190 percent of the power of Qualcomm’s chip. It’s an aggressive claim. And it’s slightly disingenuous, since no Core Ultra PC chip would be run at the same power of a smartphone. Viewed from Qualcomm’s perspective, however, that’s because no X86 PC processor could actually run at the power of a smartphone. Although Qualcomm didn’t actually say what that power level was, a graphic indicates it: somewhere under 10 watts. The key difference in the new Snapdragon 8 Elite is the addition of new, faster “prime” cores that Qualcomm added to the array of performance cores that it has used before. Qualcomm’s existing Snapdragon X Elite uses three clusters of four CPU cores, all running at 3.80GHz. The new second-generation Oryon CPU uses two prime cores, each running at 4.32GHz, with the remaining performance cores running at 3.53GHz. Qualcomm also revamped the GPU and NPU inside the chip, increasing the performance there, too. Qualcomm seemed to take Intel’s claims of Lunar Lake performance rather personally, with Amon promising a “battle of the benchmarks” at the Snapdragon Technology Summit, which kicked off today. In the constant back-and-forth between chipmakers, neither company will have the true last word. But Qualcomm’s statement was a true “mic drop” moment, and we’ll have to see how Intel responds. Read...

Chinese technology giant ByteDance denied reports that the incident caused more than $10m of damage. Read...

Wellington`s Effect appoints Pete Lister as CEO, effective 1st November, as the agency eyes expansion in digital solutions and technology capabilities. Read...

Hosting means influential people visiting, enabling New Zealand to showcase its industries, not least its cutting-edge design and technology, the former PM says. Read...

The R&D tax offset has served as a life raft for some of Australia’s most prominent technology start-ups, though in some cases it wasn’t enough. Read...