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AI Fairness Exploits

Here's the video of the winners of the Twitter bug bounty/CTF for algorithmic fairness. It's a judo trick to get AI failures recognized in the same way as insecure code.

https://youtu.be/KLwdzLiJywI

Background
https://hackerone.com/twitter-algorithmic-bias?type=team
https://www.theverge.com/2021/8/10/22617972/twitter-photo-cropping-algorithm-ai-bias-bug-bounty-resu...
https://github.com/twitter-research/image-crop-analysis

 

Cheap Fakes

Unintended consequences of Google Image Search.

THE VCE exam body has been left red faced after a doctored artwork depicting a huge robot helping socialist revolutionaries during the Russian Revolution was accidentally included in this year’s year 12 history exam taken by 5700 students.

https://www.theage.com.au/education/history-transformed-in-vce-exam-20121114-29ce7.html

You heard about Young Karl Marx, but have you heard of VI Lenin Evangelion ?

 

 

Modeling Reliability as a Complex System

I'm curious if anyone has mapped the reliability crisis with a System Dynamics Lens. Some of the proposed actions hit some of the archetypes on the nose....

For example a one-size fits all release shepherding process takes resources away from efforts that to address the underlying reliability problem. (Fixes that Fail)

Reliability metrics operate on a delay so you get oscillation of investment and failure (shifting the burden)

If anyone would like to workshop a systems diagram for reliability I'd be interested in workout out the feedback loops.

I highly recommend the book https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3828902-thinking-in-systems and the image below come from this pdf of https://thesystemsthinker.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/Systems-Archetypes-I-TRSA01_pk.pdf.

 

Alt Text in Action

Would be nice if all of our products supported Alt text as well as Mastodon does...

And if sharing with Louis Gray I'd say "Image of a rack mount server with long fsck times"

Rack Mount Server with long fsck times

 

EBT

Googlers, don't be smug, doesn't look like Google Express supports Food Stamps either..

[And at least Amazon offers discounted Prime membership to people with EBT cards.]

That said if you don't have the learned experience of being poor you might want to check out today's talk "Growing Up Poor In America" - Lisa 'Tiny' Garcia at 11am PT

Livestream at http://go/tiny-kim

[original image sourced from https://imgur.com/MUuZ9sr]

 

Dead Integrations

Today I confidently said to my father in law that I could make it easy for him to insert photos into gmail. Sadly Google let me down here.

Root cause bug is here:

https://b.corp.google.com/u/0/issues/26608412

Basically no one has updated the gmail compose/onepick integration to read from photos.google.com data. Instead it only supports G+ photos and albums, which are not being created any more.

So I thought, let's turn on Drive integration and use Drive OnePick. Nope. It sucks. You don't get an inline image in the message, nor can you use the photo options you normally get.

Inbox does have something that works, but I'm not going to train my 80 year old father-in-law to use another email client right after I got him moved over from NetZero(!)...

 

Not this again...

I guess they had to do something with the Chrome Bookmarks code base once they rolled it back.

See http://go/stars for the latest pitch deck and future plans.

So what does this mean for Spaces, which is also using search results?

What does it mean for collections?

Why can't we work together on this stuff instead of fragmenting? It's just so stupid.

http://techcrunch.com/2015/12/01/google-turns-image-search-into-pinterest-with-new-collections-featu...

 

Collections

Some feedback on Collections after actually using them for realzies:

- The aspect ratio of the cover image is really hard to deal with.  You can't crop regular images easily and you can't letterbox easily.
- I'd like to make a collection as 'Draft' so I can get it looking nice before I send it out to the world.
- I'd love to see a 'People mentioned this collection' in the sidebar. [and other aggregates, like places, hashtags, maybe a word cloud?]
- I wish I could back-date things.   Or at least allow for manual ordering.
- What about Pinned/Hero Post for a Collection?
- Will public collections have non-obfuscated URLs?
- Do we filter these oddball urls for naughty words?

 

Someday ...

Someday ...

Originally shared by Singularity Utopia

It is possible to do with a G+ badge? I want the badge large for big screens so I set the width to 450 but it doesn't resize to fit like all my other elements, here in the image you can see the badge when zoomed-in is off the screen. Can you allow (make happen, implement) a 100% width instead of 450?

Here it is live: http://singularity-2045.org/

 

 

A tale of automation woe.  Read from the bottom..

A tale of automation woe.  Read from the bottom..

A Windows 7 deployment image was accidentaly sent to all Windows machines, including laptops, desktops, and even servers. This image started with a repartition / reformat set of tasks.

As soon as the accident was discovered, the SCCM server was powered off – however, by that time, the SCCM server itself had been repartitioned and reformatted.

 

Google+  has some common sense content rules in the User Content and Conduct Policy [1]  You'll notice there is no...

Google+  has some common sense content rules in the User Content and Conduct Policy [1]  You'll notice there is no section on censorship based on viewpoint.

The issue described by Eric Raymond below is much more mundane.  It's actually a problem in the way Google+ previews web snippets.  

A couple of weeks ago we introduced the new Article embed type.  You'll notice these posts by their distinctive large-photos with a ragged-edge.  This new code caused the problem.

The markup on theblaze.com uses the http://schema.org/NewsArticle markup.  That, combined with some other factors causes the preview processing to fail.  This issue was reported to us on April 1st and a fix will be released to production early next week.

I opened an issue on our developer site to track this issue since it does affect a handful of other sites that use the NewsArticle markup.  Feel free to Star it to receive updates: 

https://code.google.com/p/google-plus-platform/issues/detail?id=805

[1] https://www.google.com/intl/en-US/+/policy/content.html

Originally shared by Eric Raymond

G+ may be engaging in non-viewpoint-neutral censorship of news  articles relating to firearms. 

This link:

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2014/04/04/gun-control-advocates-who-say-more-guns-equal-more-crime-...

results in post blocking when it's either pasted in the link box or pasted in text with the preview image not removed. Others have reported that all firearms-related articles from The Blaze, but not non-firearms-related articles, are blocked.

Something more specific than blocking of firearms-related images is going on, as the Geeks with Guns G+ community would have noticed that a lot sooner than now.

Google has some explaining to do.

 

I was talking to Brett Slatkin about authorship and he mentioned the Google Consumer surveys offers an A/B image...

I was talking to Brett Slatkin about authorship and he mentioned the Google Consumer surveys offers an A/B image survey that would be perfect for Authorship profile photo optimization.

You also get geographic/demographic breakdowns so I suspect that it's a good deal more informative than the OK Cupid bestface system.

 

 

 

 

Upgraded to Fedora 17 "Beefy Miracle" in-place on the same image I've had since Redhat 6.2.

Upgraded to Fedora 17 "Beefy Miracle" in-place on the same image I've had since Redhat 6.2.  It was a little more challenging than some upgrades due to moving everything into /usr, but overall it's working well.

And the origin of the name is pretty interesting, check it out:

 

Hey look, it's the Fedora Project! On Google+

Hey look, it's the Fedora Project! On Google+

Check out Fedora 16 if you're into Linux distros. I just finished upgrading the home server last night and it's running smooth. (even if systemctl reminds me way too much of solaris SMF)

Fun fact: I've been upgrading the same system image since Red Hat 6.0. No reinstalls.. and since I never had a CD/dvd all upgrades were via rpm/yum.

 

 

Back from Vacation

Thanks to all the folks who looked after things while I was out.