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In the weeks after Russia invaded Ukraine and images of the devastation wrought there flooded the news, Hoan Ton-That, the chief executive of the facial recognition company Clearview AI, began thinking about how he could get involved.

He believed his companys technology could offer clarity in complex situations in the war.

I remember seeing videos of captured Russian soldiers and Russia claiming they were actors, Mr. Ton-That said. I thought if Ukrainians could use Clearview, they could get more information to verify their identities.

In early March, he reached out to people who might help him contact the Ukrainian government. One of Clearviews advisory board members, Lee Wolosky, a lawyer who has worked for the Biden administration, was meeting with Ukrainian officials and offered to deliver a message.

Mr. Ton-That drafted a letter explaining that his app can instantly identify someone just from a photo and that the police and federal agencies in the United States used it to solve crimes. That feature has brought Clearview scrutiny over concerns about privacy and questions about racism and other biases within artificial-intelligence systems.

The tool, which can identify a suspect caught on surveillance video, could be valuable to a country under attack, Mr. Ton-That wrote. He said the tool could identify people who might be spies, as well as deceased people, by comparing their faces against Clearviews database of 20 billion faces from the public web, including from Russian social sites such as VKontakte.

Mr. Ton-That decided to offer Clearviews services to Ukraine for free, as reported earlier by Reuters. Now, less than a month later, the New York-based Clearview has created more than 200 accounts for users at five Ukrainian government agencies, which have conducted more than 5,000 searches. Clearview has also translated its app into Ukrainian.

Its been an honor to help Ukraine, said Mr. Ton-That, who provided emails from officials from three agencies in Ukraine, confirming that they had used the tool. It has identified dead soldiers and prisoners of war, as well as travelers in the country, confirming the names on their official IDs. The fear of spies and saboteurs in the country has led to heightened paranoia.

According to one email, Ukraines national police obtained two photos of dead Russian soldiers, which have been viewed by The New York Times, on March 21. One dead man had identifying patches on his uniform, but the other did not, so the ministry ran his face through Clearviews app.

The app surfaced photos of a similar-looking man, a 33-year-old from Ulyanovsk who wore a paratrooper uniform and held a gun in his profile photos on Odnoklassniki, a Russian social media site. According to an official from the national police, attempts were made to contact the mans relatives in Russia to inform them of his death, but there was no response.

Identifying dead soldiers and notifying their families is part of a campaign, according to a Telegram post by the Ukrainian vice prime minister Mykhailo Fedorov, to break through to the Russian public the cost of the conflict and to dispel the myth of a special operation in which there are no conscripts and no one dies, he wrote.

Images from conflict zones, of slaughtered civilians and soldiers left behind on city streets turned battlefields, have become more widely and instantaneously available in the social media era. President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine has shown graphic images of attacks on his country to world leaders in making his case for more international aid. But beyond conveying a visceral sense of war, those kinds of images can now offer something else: a chance for facial recognition technology to play a significant role.

Critics warn, however, that the tech companies could be taking advantage of a crisis to expand with little privacy oversight, and that any mistakes made by the software or those using it could have dire consequences in a war zone.

Evan Greer, a deputy director for the digital rights group Fight for the Future, is opposed to any use of facial recognition technology, and said she believed that it should be banned worldwide because governments had used it to persecute minority groups and suppress dissent. Russia and China, among others, have deployed advanced facial recognition in cameras in cities.

War zones are often used as testing grounds not just for weapons but surveillance tools that are later deployed on civilian populations or used for law enforcement or crowd control purposes, Ms. Greer said. Companies like Clearview are eager to exploit the humanitarian crisis in Ukraine to normalize the use of their harmful and invasive software.

Clearview is facing several lawsuits in the United States, and its use of peoples photos without their consent has been declared illegal in Canada, Britain, France, Australia and Italy. It faces fines in Britain and Italy.

April 12, 2022, 9:47 a.m. ET

Ms. Greer added: We already know that authoritarian states like Russia use facial recognition surveillance to crack down on protests and dissent. Expanding the use of facial recognition doesnt hurt authoritarians like Putin it helps them.

Facial recognition has advanced in power and accuracy in recent years, and is becoming more accessible to the public.

While Clearview AI says it makes its database available only to law enforcement, other facial recognition services that search the web for matches, including PimEyes and FindClone, are available to anyone willing to pay for them. PimEyes will surface public photos on the internet, while FindClone searches photos scraped from the Russian social media site VKontakte.

Facial recognition vendors are choosing sides in the conflict. Giorgi Gobronidze, a professor in Tbilisi, Georgia, who bought PimEyes in December, said he had barred Russia from using the site after the invasion started, citing concerns it would be used to identify Ukrainians.

No Russian customers are allowed to use the service now, Mr. Gobronidze said. We dont want our service to be used for war crimes.

Groups like Bellingcat, the Dutch investigative site, have used facial recognition sites for reports on the conflict and on Russias military operations.

Russia prepares renewed offensive. Ukraine is bracing for a Russian assault along its eastern front, where Ukrainian officials have warned civilians still living in the region that time is running out to escape. But the road to safety is fraught with peril, with reports of Ukrainian civilians being killed as they try to flee.

More evidence of atrocities. Officials continued to document and expose atrocitiescommitted by Russian forces around Kyiv, in what a growing number of Western officials claim are war crimes. Times reporters and photographers went to Bucha to uncover new detailsof the execution-style killings of civilians.

On the diplomatic front. Karl Nehammer, the Austrian chancellor, visited President Vladimir V. Putin, becoming the first Western leader to meet with him in person since the start of the invasion. Mr. Nehammer said he came away from the meeting fearing that Mr. Putin intended to drastically intensify the brutality of the war.

Aric Toler, research director at Bellingcat, said his preferred face search engine was FindClone. He described a three-hour surveillance video that surfaced this week, said to be from a courier service in Belarus, showing men in military uniforms packing up materials, including TVs, car batteries and an electric scooter, for shipping.

Mr. Toler said FindClone allowed him to identify several of the men as Russian soldiers sending loot to their homes from Ukraine.

As Ukraine and Russia fight an information war over what motivated the invasion and how it is going, journalists like Mr. Toler sometimes play the role of arbiter for their audiences.

Mr. Federov, Ukraines deputy prime minister, tweeted a still from the same surveillance tape, of one of the soldiers at the courier service counter. Mr. Federov claimed the man had been identified as an officer of Russian special forces who had committed atrocities in Bucha and was sending all the stolen items to his family.

Mr. Federov added, We will find every killer.

The technology has potential beyond identifying casualties or tracking certain units. Peter Singer, a security scholar at New America, a think tank in Washington, said the increasing availability of data about people and their movements would make it easier to track down individuals responsible for war crimes. But it could also make it hard for civilians to lie low in tense environments.

Ukraine is the first major conflict that weve seen the use of facial recognition technology in such scale, but it is far from the last, Mr. Singer said. It will be increasingly hard for future warriors to keep their identity secret, just as for regular civilians walking down your own city streets.

In a world of more and more data being gathered, everyone leaves a trail of dots that can be connected, he added.

That trail is not just online. Drone footage, satellite images, and photos and videos captured by people in Ukraine are all playing a role in discerning what is happening there.

Mr. Toler of Bellingcat said the technology was not perfect. Its easy to misfire that goes without saying, he said. But people are more right than wrong with this. They have figured out how to corroborate identifications.

Faces can look similar, so secondary information, in the form of an identifying mark, a tattoo or clothing, is important to confirm a match. Whether that will happen in a tense, wartime situation is an open question.

Mr. Toler is not sure how much longer he will have access to his preferred facial recognition tool. Because FindClone is based in Russia, it has been subject to sanctions, he said.

I still have about 30 days left on my service, so Im desperately trying to add more juice to my account, Mr. Toler said. I have a friend in Kyrgyzstan. Im trying to use her bank card to re-up my account.

Read the original post:
How Facial Recognition Is Being Used in the Ukraine War - The New York Times

This comes days after another Chennai-based software-as-a-service company (SaaS) Kissflow gifted luxury BMW cars to its five senior executives, each worth about 1 crore, as a gift.

A Chennai-based IT firm on Monday gifted as many as 100 cars to its employees for their constant support and unparalleled contributions to the company's success and growth.

Ideas2IT, an It firm has gifted Maruti Suzuki cars to 100 employees.

"We are gifting 100 cars to 100 of our employees who have been a part of us for more than 10 years. We have a strength of 500 employees. Our concept is to return the wealth we have received, to the employees," said Hari Subramanian, Marketing Head, Ideas2IT.

Murali Vivekanandan, Founder and Chairman, Ideas2IT said that the employees have made a lot of efforts for improving the company and the company is not giving cars to them, they have earned it with their hard work.

"Seven-eight years ago we promised that when we get lefty goals we will share our wealth. Awarding these cars is just the first step. We plan to roll out more such initiatives in the near future," added Vivekanandan.

"It is always great to receive gifts from the organization; on every occasion, the company shares its happiness with gifts like gold coins, iPhones. Car is a very big thing for us," said Prasath, an employee, who received the gift from the company.

This comes days after another Chennai-based software-as-a-service company (SaaS) Kissflow gifted luxury BMW cars to its five senior executives, each worth about 1 crore, as a gift.

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Covid XE variant: Karnataka government to screen travelers from 8 countries

Following the discovery of India's first case of the new XE coronavirus in Mumbai, Karnataka Health Minister K Sudhakar stated that the state is considering imposing new measures for international visitors entering the state. He also advised people who had not yet received the second dose of the COVID-19 vaccine to do so as soon as possible. He went on to suggest that people get immunised and collaborate with the government.

Contractor who accused Karnataka minister Eshwarappa dies; suicide suspected

BENGALURU: a right-wing leader and contractor, Santosh K Patil, who accused Karnataka minister KS Eshwarappa of demanding a commission for road construction in Belagavi's Hidalgo village, was found dead in a lodge in Udupi district on Tuesday, police said. Patil on March 11 shot off a letter to union rural development and panchayat raj (RDPR) minister Giriraj Singh, accusing Eshwarappa and his associates of demanding money for road works to the tune of 4 crore.

e-Sanjeevani services to be extended to every district

PUNE The state is planning to extend the central ministry's e-Sanjeevani app, the first-of-its-kind telemedicine service facility started by the country, to every district. Currently, the service is attended to by the medical health officer at the five health circles but with more experts added to the facility, each district would have a dedicated health officer. The e-prescription generated at end of the session is used for obtaining medicines.

Minor girl gang-raped in Rajasthans Churu district

A 17-year-old girl was allegedly gang raped on Sunday night in Churu district of Rajasthan, police said. Deputy superintendent of police, Mamta Saraswat said the girl in her complaint has alleged that her neighbor, a college student, had proposed to her one-and-a-half years back but she rejected. Later, assuring to marry her, he raped her and also made a video of it. On Sunday night, the accused asked the girl to come to the fields.

Rickets cases rising, kids of affluent families getting afflicted

PUNE Hospitals in the city have been reporting a rise in the number of cases of rickets since last year and children from affluent families too are getting afflicted by the disease, the hospital authorities said. Rickets is a skeletal disorder in children caused by a lack of vitamin D, calcium or phosphorous, resulting in bone pain, weak and soft bones and various skeletal deformities.

See the rest here:
Chennai-based IT firm gifts cars to its 100 employees - Hindustan Times

Spring is here, which in the admissions process can only mean one thing a hyperfocus on yield for our incoming class while concurrently turning the page to look ahead to the future. Of course, in a post-COVID world (whatever that means), we are faced with a number of unknowns, the largest of which is how to get back to high-effort initiatives that were so critical pre-2020. Concurrently, we need to continue and expand upon the highly effective and measurable digital offerings weve spent so much time perfecting over the past two years.

As we look ahead, it will be important to not let digital efforts go the way of high school visits and college fairsthings that we do with no real understanding of their true impactand ultimately create a confusing, or worse, negative student experience. To that end, there are three low-hanging fruit ways to fix your digital engagement plan by breaking some rules.

The reality is that in 2022 there is very little digital content that needs to be consumed live. There are entire industries built around easy, step-by-step video tutorials and guides. In the context of college admissions, were also competing for screen time with social media apps and video-streaming sites used for entertainment.

Additionally, while meeting software like Zoom and Teams has made it easier for members of your campus community to be comfortable being on camera, there will always be challenges with internet connectivity compounded with varying degrees of comfort on the part of your presenters. The last thing we want to see is a great information session slightly derailed by bad internet and then completely off the mark because of a stressed-out professor who cant re-center themselves.

How do we break the rule? Simulate live experiences by pre-recording content and releasing it on a schedule (like The Mandalorian on Disney+). This creates anticipation for fresh content while also removing the challenges inherent in broadcasting live each time. Additionally, effective promotion of on-demand content can serve as a method of repurposing content without the added effort of continually recording new material which can be a burden to an already overstretched team.

The battle between authentic and amateur is not new. Even prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, the general rule of thumb for video content was that students prefer a raw and unfiltered view of campus over highly produced videos featuring faculty and the president. Of course, during the height of the pandemic we had no choice but to produce what students wanted to see: videos featuring students and staff from their living rooms and kitchens simply sharing their voice.

As we return to normal, the temptation is to revert to ignoring this type of feedback from the market and overproduce video content for on-demand consumption. This is why programs like The College Tour on Amazon Prime are so popular with colleges. Much like YouniversityTV nearly a decade ago, admissions and marketing teams clamor for shiny and pristine presentations with little to no regard for ROI. These types of investments now lead to blowback from the community at large.

How do we break the rule? Avoid the temptation to put too much effort and emphasis on a polished final product. If weve learned nothing from the latest Disney smash hit, Encanto, it doesnt need to be perfect it just needs to be. So just let it be. Raw and unfiltered content also moves from idea to eyeballs in a far shorter period of time. This allows for fast feedback for your team with the ability to iterate quickly and add to the story over time.

OK. This one isnt so much a rule as it is a problem with how most institutions treat recruitment data.

For the record, investing in a college tour video with Amazon in and of itself isnt a bad thing. The issue, however, is the inability to measure meaningful ROI with a video hosted on YouTube and embedded into a webpage. This limitation is a function of investing in disparate systems and platforms without a true plan for how they all fit together. Its the reason most institutions cant (or dont) effectively track beyond the first source of an enrollment: doing anything more is just too hard.

How do we break the rule/address this problem? The most impactful thing we can do is stop thinking about digital interactions and in-person interactions as separate and think of them as part of a continuous story. Using marketing automation and machine learning, we can connect the dots from visitors to our virtual tour, our .edu website and our institutionally branded videos and content. This connectivity enables us to use machine learning to drive dynamic content and automations without our CRM to truly tailor the recruitment process for our prospective students. Going about it this way also ensures we arent giving our student data to Google for free.

We have a unique opportunity as an industry to continue the rapid innovation that we have seen over the past two years. This will take a commitment to not going backward and having a laser focus on delivering students the right message at the right time via the right channels from the right sender. Thats a lot of rights to get right.

A leader in enrollment marketing strategy, Gil Rogers has published numerous studies on digital student engagement and presented at dozens of national conferences on enrollment strategy. He currently serves as executive vice president at PlatformQ Education.

Read the original here:
Fix Engagement by Breaking the Rules | Call to Action: Marketing and Communications in Higher Education - Inside Higher Ed

Do you want to create a deck plan and design for free? Here is a complete guide using which you can easily design beautiful and professional decks on your Windows 11/10 PC. In this post, we will be mentioning two different methods to make a deck design. So, without much ado, let us check out these methods in detail.

Here are the methods to design a deck on your Windows 11/10 PC:

To create a deck model on your PC, you can use free desktop software. There are some software that let you plan and design a deck. However, there are only a few software that come for free. If you want free software, you can try using DreamPlan to design a deck on Windows 11/10. It is free for non-commercial use only.

DreamPlan is a dedicated free home design software that lets you plan and create a home plan. It lets you design the interior as well as the exterior of your home. It allows you to make a floor plan, create staircase designs, design bathrooms, etc. Along with that, you can also make a deck plan and add it to the exterior of your house. It offers you all the tools and features to do that. You can access deck designing tools from the dedicated tab in it. Let us check out a sorted procedure to create a 3D deck design in this free software.

Here are the main steps to create a deck in DreamPlan:

Let us discuss the above steps in detail now.

Firstly, you need to download and install this free software, and then launch the software to start using it.

Now, go to the Deck tab present on its menubar and simply create boundaries for your deck as per your requirements. After that, you can start adding components to your deck including stairs, flooring, and railing.

You can stylize and customize the appearance of the components the way you want. It lets you edit several parameters including deck height, decking style, decking color, rotation, fascia thickness, fascia style, deck skirt, skirt style, and skirt color. Furthermore, you can also customize railing height, post size, post spacing, post style, post color, infill type (rails, baluster, bars, mesh), infill style, infill color, size, rail spacing, cap type, rail cap width, cap style, stair width, tread run, tread nose, rise, tread color, stringer color, rise color, foot size, foot spacing, footing style, and more.

It provides a measuring tool that helps you create a precise design. When done creating the deck design, you can save the snapshot of the deck design or print the deck on paper.

All in all, it is a great free deck design software using which you can build a dream home plan for free. You can download it from here.

Read: Sweet Home 3D: Free Interior Design Software for Windows PC.

Here are the online tools that you can use to design a deck for free:

deckdesigner.timbertech.com is a nice tool to create beautiful deck designs online. It provides you with multiple deck templates that you can use and modify to make your own deck design. However, if you want to create a completely new deck from the scratch, you can do that too.

It has a complete set of tools that allow you to create the desired deck design. These tools include Decking, Multi-Color Decking, Multi-Width Decking, Railing, Decor, Wall Paint, and Flooring that let you customize the look of the deck. Apart from that, you can easily toggle between 2D and 3D view modes to design a deck. The final design can be saved as a screenshot image or you can save the project on the website itself.

The good part of this online tool is that it offers all real-brand materials to use to create a deck. So, you have the option to buy all the materials that you have used in creating a deck. Now, lets check out how to use it.

Here are the steps to create a deck design online for free:

You can use it here.

Lowes.com is a free online deck design tool. It lets you create professional deck designs and plans from scratch. Some handy deck templates are also available in it that you can use to quickly modify and create your own deck design. It provides both 2D and 3D view modes to make the design. You can use its different tools including Decking, Deck Material, Railing, Wall paint, Flooring, Substructure, Infill, and more to make a proper deck. You can also customize the size, dimensions, and orientation of the deck according to your requirements.

Follow the below steps to create a deck design online:

Try it here.

decks.com, as the name suggests, is a dedicated online tool to create a deck design. You can design 2D and 3D decks using it. It offers several deck shapes, dummy houses, stairs, and shaping tools that help you create a deck design. To use it, you need to register a free account on its website and then sign in with your account to start using it.

You can try the below steps to easily create a deck design:

It is a nice tool to create a deck design. You can also find some helpful videos on this web service to know how exactly to use it and design a deck.

See: Best free Architecture software for Architects to run on Windows PC.

fiberondecking.com is another online tool to design a deck. Like other tools, it also offers various deck templates that you can use and edit as per your requirements. In addition to that, you can also create your own deck design which is completely new.

In it, you can find tools in different sections to design a complete deck. Frame, Railing, Stairs, Wall, Landscape, Furniture, Lights, and some more tools sections are available in it. It provides a canvas where you can add a deck and its components as well as adjust their sizes. You can also customize the look and feel of the entire deck.

It offers a handy feature that lets you change the landscape area where you want to create a deck. You can use Beach, Forest, Mountains, and other landscapes to create a deck.

You can use it here.

One more online tool that you can use to create a deck design online is moisturehield.com. It is another website that lets you build a deck design from scratch. You can find all the essential tools that let you add and customize deck, railing, stairs, and more. Using it, you can also accessorize the deck using items like chairs, spas, a bench, and more.

Yes, you can design your own deck. For that, you can use a free online tool or free software that lets you design a deck. We have mentioned some free online tools and free software that you can check out below.

To build a deck, you must make a note of the budget, materials, dimensions, and other design details that you need. Besides that, you can use the tools that we have mentioned in this post to create professional deck designs.

Now read:

Read more from the original source:
Design a Deck using these free Deck Designer software and online tools - TheWindowsClub

If youve ever tried streaming on Twitch or YouTube, youd probably be familiar with OBS Studio. It is a free and open-source software for video recording and live streaming, which offers a ton of useful features like real-time capture, scene composition, recording, encoding, and broadcasting via the Real Time Messaging Protocol (RTMP). It supports all streaming services that support RTMP, including YouTube, Twitch, Instagram, and Facebook. If youre thinking of giving live streaming a shot, you should definitely check it out. And now that OBS Studio is available on Steam, its easier than ever to do so.

Up until now, you could only download OBS Studio from its official website or GitHub page. But Windows and macOS users can now download it from Steam as well. Downloading from Steam has a couple of unique benefits, including support for automatic background updates, more efficient downloads on macOS, usage tracking, and easy opt-in for Beta/Release Candidate builds.

At the moment, OBS Studio for Linux is not available on Steam. But the team behind the streaming software plans to add Linux builds in the coming months. In addition, the team also plans to offer better Steam Deck support, which will help Steam Deck users stream games on the go.

Note that OBS Studio on Steam doesnt support cloud saves at the moment. If thats something you need, you would be better off downloading OBS Studio from the official website or the GitHub page. However, the team is working on adding support for better ways to export/import and backup OBS data regardless of the platform, so cloud save support could make its way to the Steam version with a future release. The OBS Studio team has also published a detailed FAQ for the Steam version, which you should check out before installing it on your device.

Download OBS Studio on Steam

Source: Steam, OBS Project

Original post:
Free and open source streaming software OBS Studio is now available on Steam - XDA Developers