wilwheaton:

mostlysignssomeportents:

Late last year, a redditor called Deepfakes gained notoriety for the
extremely convincing face-swap porn videos he was making, in which the
faces of mainstream Hollywood actors and rockstars were convincingly
overlaid on the bodies of performers in pornography.

Deepfakes created his own subreddit dedicated to the practice and one of the habitues there created Fakeapp, an app that makes it significantly easier to create your own deepfakes.

Now, /r/deepfakes is filling up with convincing pornographic faceswaps
of celebrities, and when they escape the confines of the subreddit, they
get posted to tabloid sites as “genuine” sex-tapes.

The tool, meanwhile, is undergoing rapid development, making strides in
usability and polish of its output, heralding a day, very soon, when we
will see a lot of these fakes and struggle immensely to
distinguish them from reality. They needn’t be pornographic, of course
– you could faceswap Gandhi onto the aggressor in a beat-down, or Mike
Pence onto Pride leather parade-float dancer.

https://boingboing.net/2018/01/25/deepfakes-fakeapp.html

Well this certainly won’t have terrible unintended consequences.

mostlysignssomeportents:

If you’re lucky enough to be friends with a cop, they may give you one of their get out of jail cards, which you can flash to other cops along with a request for favorable treatment.

But the favoritism that cops afford to one another’s friends are nothing
compared to the favoritism they give each other. Thanks to the
sweetheart deals cut by police “unions,” cops who are accused of crimes
get all kinds of benefits, ranging from the right to choose who may
interrogate them to a guarantee that they can see all the evidence
against them before answering questions, to the right to know the names
of anyone who gave evidence against them before question.

Cops get to call a time-out on any questioning, pausing the investigations against them for 5 days in Virginia and 30 days
in Louisiana. They get to purge their records of any accusations of
wrongdoing, and they can’t be threatened or enticed with plea bargain
deals by investigators.

No perp gets these privileges: if you demanded that cops treat
garden-variety suspects this way, they’d crucify you with claims that
this would allow criminals to get away clean and reoffend…. Perhaps
that’s why, when cops are dirty enough to finally, finally face justice,
they always turn out to be repeat offenders?

https://boingboing.net/2018/01/25/i-am-the-law.html

wilwheaton:

wetwareproblem:

grison-in-labs:

feminismandmedia:

aka14kgold:

butts-bouncing-on-the-beltway:

redmagus77:

kaylapocalypse:

thatadult:

The Stanford prison experiment tapes were so stupid when I watched them in AP psych and so stupid when I watch this film about them. Literally they could’ve all sat and played cards and got $15 a day to tell ghost stories all day and be best friends. But masculinity and whiteness and power created this violent irrationality that positioned young ass men to be met with brutality and trauma and disrespect even when it was obviously taken too far. and it makes no sense. If someone put me in a room with Black girls and said I would get paid $90 a day (that’s the equivalent apparently) to be a prison guard, do you know how fast I’d be sitting with them and learning about them and exchanging Instagrams and like.. sleeping.. like what the fuck was the point of any of that…

My psych teacher introduced us to this study and literally before she showed us was like “don’t ever confuse a study based on one type of person (white men/boys) to be an example of an Everyman situation. There is strong evidence that if this was recreated with diversity, or even just with girls, that the results would have been drastically different. This is an example of bias and sexism in the medical research community.”

“Other, more subtle factors also shaped the experiment. It’s often said that the study participants were ordinary guys—and they were, indeed, determined to be “normal” and healthy by a battery of tests. But they were also a self-selected group who responded to a newspaper advertisement seeking volunteers for “a psychological study of prison life.” In a 2007 study, the psychologists Thomas Carnahan and Sam McFarland asked whether that wording itself may have stacked the odds. They recreated the original ad, and then ran a separate ad omitting the phrase “prison life.” They found that the people who responded to the two ads scored differently on a set of psychological tests. Those who thought that they would be participating in a prison study had significantly higher levels of aggressiveness, authoritarianism, Machiavellianism, narcissism, and social dominance, and they scored lower on measures of empathy and altruism.”

http://www.newyorker.com/science/maria-konnikova/the-real-lesson-of-the-stanford-prison-experiment

The thing about this study is that whether or not it’s generalizable to the public is debatable at best.

But it’s certainly generalizable to the population of people who tend to be drawn to prison system and law enforcement jobs because that’s exactly the demographics that tend to show up in those positions.

“But it’s certainly generalizable to the population of people who tend to be drawn to prison system and law enforcement jobs because that’s exactly the demographics that tend to show up in those positions.”

@half-crazedauthor

It is worth noting that, in fact, the BBC replicated this experiment in 2001 with very different results. Instead of recruiting volunteers for a psychological study of prison life, they advertised the experiment: 

“It asked ‘Do you really know yourself’ and asked for men to take part in a social science experiment to be shown on TV. It warned that the research would be a challenge and involve ‘hardship, hunger, solitude, anger’.

In the case of the BBC Prison Experiment, the mock prison did not devolve into the torturous, abusive hellishness of the Stanford Prison Experiment–even though the experimenters very deliberately attempted to create conditions that would destroy cohesion among the prisoners and encourage authoritarian behavior from the guards. Prisoners were told that they might be able to be promoted to guardhood in an effort to keep them divided, shaved upon entry to the prison, and the guards were encouraged to create the rules of the prison and enforce them in any way they saw fit. 

It’s important to note that one of the very first things the experimenters noted was that the guards were, at the very outset, uneasy about the status differences between themselves and the prisoners and conscious of their power. 

Because food–both quantity and quality–were very salient and powerful status treatment differences in the prison, there was almost immediately a showdown over food. (Prisoners were fed much, much smaller and worse-tasting food than the guards, and indeed prisoners were made to serve the guards their meals and watch them eat in part so everyone would be aware of these status issues.) 

The guards almost immediately felt guilty and attempted to share their sausages with the prisoners by giving them the guards’ leftovers… and the prisoners immediately go “not until we consult with the other prisoners,” and then collectively decide to refuse absolutely to take small rewards from guards in lieu of the right to good food. 

Guards tried repeatedly throughout the study to get prisoners to see them as basically equal, bar the circumstances of their current positions; prisoners instead repeatedly pointed out the actual circumstances of their current situation placed them at very different power levels indeed and insisted that guards actually change the system in order to make the conditions fair and equal. In general, prisoners quickly and collectively exploited the guards’ shame at the unequal conditions in order to receive fair treatment. 

At this point, out of curiosity, the experimenters introduced a new prisoner into the system, one who had been trained as a trades unionist… 

….and this unionist prisoner quickly chose to approach a disaffected guard, empathize with his unhappiness, and turn the blame for the situation at the unequal and unfair conditions set in the prison. Those conditions, of course, were set not by the guards–they were set by the experimenters. The very first thing, then, that this unionist does is build bridges to unify all the people in the prison. 

Prisoners steal the guards’ keys; guards choose instead of “cracking down” or punishing the prisoners to ask politely for the prisoners to help them find the keys, and cheerfully accept them when provided. This gives prisoners leverage for a negotiation, which is then deftly picked up by the experienced negotiator (although not without some pushback from another charismatic and decisive prisoner). 

Here’s what the negotiator had to say:

Negotiations begin. pDM outlines the forum proposal. One of the Guards points out that the Prisoners are asking to be rewarded for stealing the keys. pDM responds by outlining a stark choice. Certainly the Guards can refuse to accept his plan, but the alternative is a return to conflict: “It’ll not be the keys tomorrow, it’ll be something else. It’s a game. All I’m saying is that there is a way to resolve that game”.

pDM is confident. He knows he speaks for the Prisoners. The Guards, even in their own mess, are despondent. They know that they can’t handle the Prisoners. And so they accept the new order. Even if they have given up much of their power, at least this system might work and offer them some respite:

gTM: I’m in high spirits after that.
gBG: It actually went alright. This geezer is alright. We can all deal
         with him.

At this point, experimenters withdrew the negotiator to see what would happen to the egalitarian vision he set out. As it turned out, the prisoners peacefully overthrew the rule of guards (by, effectively, mounting a sitdown protest in the guard’s sanctuary) and decided instead to organize an egalitarian commune for the remainder of the experiment. 

so OP’s really not that far off the mark! 

So literally the only thing the Stanford experiment proved is “all cops are bastards,” and the followup demonstrated that, in the absence of bastards, socialism works?

I know you saw this wall of text and scrolled right past it, but I’m sharing it because this is so interesting and raises issues that we don’t think about enough. A lot of you are the same age as my kids, and you’re going to be in charge of the world that I’m an old man in, and I really hope you’ll study and learn from things like this.

So what I’m saying is, I know it’s a long read, but go read it, anyway. You’ll gain emotional and intellectual experience points.

mostlysignssomeportents:

The bookshop by my office has a huge, blown-up quote from George Orwell’s 1936 essay “Bookshop
Memories” over the counter, which inspired me to go look up the original
essay. It’s a hilarious, ill-tempered, mean-spirited and vastly
entertaining rant about what’s wrong with the booky trade – sure to be
appreciated by recovering booksellers like me, and bookstore junkies
(like me):

A bookseller has to tell lies about books, and that gives him a distaste
for them; still worse is the fact that he is constantly dusting them
and hauling them to and fro. There was a time when I really did love
books – loved the sight and smell and feel of them, I mean, at least if
they were fifty or more years old. Nothing pleased me quite so much as
to buy a job lot of them for a shilling at a country auction. There is a
peculiar flavour about the battered unexpected books you pick up in
that kind of collection: minor eighteenth-century poets, out-of-date
gazeteers, odd volumes of forgotten novels, bound numbers of ladies’
magazines of the sixties. For casual reading – in your bath, for
instance, or late at night when you are too tired to go to bed, or in
the odd quarter of an hour before lunch – there is nothing to touch a
back number of the Girl’s Own Paper. But as soon as I went to work in
the bookshop I stopped buying books. Seen in the mass, five or ten
thousand at a time, books were boring and even slightly sickening.
Nowadays I do buy one occasionally, but only if it is a book that I want
to read and can’t borrow, and I never buy junk. The sweet smell of
decaying paper appeals to me no longer. It is too closely associated in
my mind with paranoiac customers and dead bluebottles.

https://boingboing.net/2008/01/25/orwells-illtempered.html

mostlysignssomeportents:

Municipal networks are cheaper and faster
than the ones that cable and telephone duopolists build after being
given exclusive franchises to serve cities, which is why the FCC had to
issue an order banning cities to stop building them – in the absence of
such an order, it seems likely that most of America would end up using
municipal internet connections (unlike today, when 100,000,000 Americans are served by a single ISP).

Thus it should come as no surprise that 750+ US communities have already
built their own municipal internet networks, often in the teeth of vicious, multimillion-dollar scare campaigns from ISPs, featuring such laughable lies as “this means state-funded pornography production.”

But what is surprising is the political composition of these towns and
cities: they are most frequently conservative-leaning, Republican-voting
places. This is presumably bad news for the Congressional Republicans
who are likely to have to publicly vote to support or oppose Congressional review of the Trump FCC’s Net Neutrality-killing order.

https://boingboing.net/2018/01/24/breaking-internet-loses-votes.html