Month: July 2024

Enlarge (credit: Bloomberg / Contributor | Bloomberg)

After years of controversies over plans to scan iCloud to find more child sexual abuse materials (CSAM), Apple abandoned those plans last year. Now, child safety experts have accused the tech giant of not only failing to flag CSAM exchanged and stored on its services—including iCloud, iMessage, and FaceTime—but also allegedly failing to report all the CSAM that is flagged.

The United Kingdom’s National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC) shared UK police data with The Guardian showing that Apple is "vastly undercounting how often" CSAM is found globally on its services.

According to the NSPCC, police investigated more CSAM cases in just the UK alone in 2023 than Apple reported globally for the entire year. Between April 2022 and March 2023 in England and Wales, the NSPCC found, "Apple was implicated in 337 recorded offenses of child abuse images." But in 2023, Apple only reported 267 instances of CSAM to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC), supposedly representing all the CSAM on its platforms worldwide, The Guardian reported.

Enlarge / Researchers write, "In this image, the person on the left (Scarlett Johansson) is real, while the person on the right is AI-generated. Their eyeballs are depicted underneath their faces. The reflections in the eyeballs are consistent for the real person, but incorrect (from a physics point of view) for the fake person." (credit: Adejumoke Owolabi)

In 2024, it's almost trivial to create realistic AI-generated images of people, which has led to fears about how these deceptive images might be detected. Researchers at the University of Hull recently unveiled a novel method for detecting AI-generated deepfake images by analyzing reflections in human eyes. The technique, presented at the Royal Astronomical Society's National Astronomy Meeting last week, adapts tools used by astronomers to study galaxies for scrutinizing the consistency of light reflections in eyeballs.

Adejumoke Owolabi, an MSc student at the University of Hull, headed the research under the guidance of Dr. Kevin Pimbblet, professor of astrophysics.

Their detection technique is based on a simple principle: A pair of eyes being illuminated by the same set of light sources will typically have a similarly shaped set of light reflections in each eyeball. Many AI-generated images created to date don't take eyeball reflections into account, so the simulated light reflections are often inconsistent between each eye.

Enlarge / It's all too easy to go nuts with the Porsche option list and spend a fortune, but what if you didn't do that? (credit: Michael Teo Van Runkle)

Porsche's high-performance variants of the 911 might make for great headlines, proving the incredible potential of the world's most iconic rear-engined sports car to serve as a track toy and off-road rally racer simultaneously. But while motorsport heritage always factors into any Porsche conversation, the 911 is anything but the top rung of the company's sales ladder. Instead, the Cayenne and then Macan SUVs have led the pack in volume since 2002, bolstering the company's financial position and allowing the smaller-scale 911s and 718s to continue production.

For model year 2024, the facelifted third-gen Cayenne now comes in seven trim levels, including the technologically advanced and startlingly quick Turbo E-Hybrid, which offers 35 miles of all-electric range and a 3.5-second sprint to 60 mph. And yet a base V6 Cayenne offers a far more attainable entree into what it's like to own something other than a fully loaded, paint-to-sample uber-Porsche that can easily cost well over $200,000.

Revisiting the Cayenne SUV

A V6-powered Cayenne starts at $79,200, or almost $20,000 more than the smaller gasoline-powered Macan crossover. But the larger platform allows for a more refined vision of Porsche luxury on the interior, with more headroom, legroom, and cargo capacity. Despite the additional size, however, the latest iteration of the Cayenne never sacrifices the spirit that originally put the Sport in Sport Utility Vehicle. And even a small-displacement turbo V6 still delivers the highlights of Porsche performance, engineering, and reliability.