The Talk Show

‘Fake Faces’, With Special Guest Glenn Fleishman

Thursday, 23 January 2020

Special guest Glenn Fleishman returns to the show. Topics include iPhone encryption, the privacy implications of widely-available reverse image search for faces, deep-learning-powered algorithmically-generated faces, and Jeopardy’s “Greatest of All Time” tournament.

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Links:

This is Jeopardy:

• Jeopardy’s Greatest of All Time Tournament.
• Glenn’s analysis of matches 1–3 for Motherboard.
• Glenn’s archive of articles regarding Jeopardy.
• Prisoner of Trebekistan, by Bob Harris.
• Ken Jennings’s excellent Twitter account.

iPhone encryption:

• Jack Nicas’s New York Times column on how iPhone encryption works.
• My link to Nicas’s column, with a few additional thoughts.

Algorithmically-generated faces:

• The Washington Post: “Dating Apps Need Women. Advertisers Need Diversity. AI Companies Offer a Solution: Fake People”.
• Glenn on deep fake faces, last year for Fast Company .
• Facebook removes profiles with fake pics.

Facial recognition search:

• Kashmir Hill’s stunning report for The Times on Clearview AI, a Peter-Thiel-backed company that supplies law enforcement with facial recognition search, built using a library of billions of photos uploaded to the web.
• Nelson Minar on Yandex’s reverse image search for faces, which is startlingly accurate, and available to anyone.
• Screenshot of Yandex search results for my own face.

Miscellaneous:

• Tiny Type Museum.
• Election Ride Home podcast.
• The intense concentration required by grandmaster-level chess burns thousands of calories per day.
• YubiKey 5Ci — 2FA dongle with Lightning and USB-C jacks ($70 though).
• Loyola Maramount’s 1990 high-scoring men’s basketball team.
• Have I Been Pwned? — Fantastic resource where you can search to see if you have an account that was compromised in a data breach. Spoiler: you probably do.
• Kashmir Hill, writing for Gizmodo last year: “I Cut the ‘Big Five’ Tech Giants From My Life. It Was Hell”.
• The New York Times: “One Nation, Tracked”.

This episode of The Talk Show was edited by Caleb Sexton.