275: ‘Fake Faces’ With Glenn Fleishman

The Talk Show With John Gruber

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.

Sponsored by:

• Clear: Get through security even faster. Get your first 2 months free with code talkshow.
• Squarespace: Make your next move. Use code talkshow for 10% off your first order.
• Hover: Find a domain name for your passion. Get 10% off your first purchase.

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.