Hello from the deepest point of the semester break, a time usually spent working on everything that is not directly study related and complaining about the weather. Except, today, I can’t complain about the weather.
ZDNet reports on the discovery of a chinese government database tracking the Uyghur minority in their country. The type of data that is/was being tracked is mind blowing.
The database that Gevers found wasn’t just some dead servers with old data. The researcher said that during the past 24 hours a stream of nearly 6.7 million GPS coordinates were recorded, meaning the database was actively tracking Uyghur Muslims as they moved around.
Google releases an update on facial-tracking for AR (via engadget.com).
The latest release of ARCore, version 1.7, can create a 468-point 3D mesh of a user’s face from just the front camera alone, good enough to apply slick filtering effects like the ones seen in this GIF. The key is making sure apps can track where to put everything, and avoid weird artifacting like you sometimes see with things like Snapchat filters.
Peter Limberg and Conor Barnes write about The Memetic Tribes of Culture War 2.0 (on medium.com):
Enter memetic tribes. We define a memetic tribe as a group of agents with a meme complex, or memeplex, that directly or indirectly seeks to impose its distinct map of reality — along with its moral imperatives — on others. These tribes are on active duty in the new culture war.
And finally, Sci-Fi architecture in videogames. Ewan Wilson writes about “The impossible architecture of videogames” on eurogamer.net:
Bang head against wall of text.
I’ll leave this here while I still can:
Click on the button to load the content from giphy.com.