Security

This Person Does Not Exist

Posted on by Stian

This person does not exist – a random gallery of computer-generated faces, created with machine-learning algorithms called GANs. The technology to create these is very impressive, considering how realistic a lot of these look — and at the same kind of scary.

Computer-generated face

Computer-generated face

Of course scammers and other internet lowlifes have been using stolen or stock-image faces for a long time to add authenticity to fake social media profiles, this basically means that now they can just create random faces that will be very convincing, at least in most cases.

There are, at least for now, various ways to recognize fake AI-generated images by subtle hints, but the algorithms can only get better at this over time. Maybe recognizing these faces will be a necessary skill to have in times to come?

Related: Which face is real?

Windows Security

Posted on by Stian

I recently had to do a complete reinstall after my Windows 2000 installation started to seriously misbehave, and subsequently lost two partitions and some files in the process (grrr…). Luckily I managed to save most of my files from one of the partitions, which Windows thought was un-formatted and had no data.

The interesting part of the experience, however, is that this was the first time I’d done a reinstall with a computer connected to the Internet, so while during the install I unplugged the network connection, but afterwards I needed to connect to the Internet to download a service pack and do a windows update. This is where the problems started…

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