Reddit has banned the r/deepfakes subreddit that's devoted to making AI-powered porn using celebrities' faces, classifying it as a form of "involuntary pornography." Reddit follows several other platforms that have already banned deepfakes pornography, including Pornhub, which said yesterday that deepfakes imagery counted as nonconsensual pornography. The Verge reports: In a post today, Reddit announced an update to its rules on posting sexual imagery of a person without their consent. The new rule extends a ban on posting photos or video of people who are nude or engaged in sexual acts without the subject's permission, saying that this includes "depictions that have been faked" -- including the sophisticated face-swapped videos that have become especially popular on Reddit over the past month. "Do not post images or video of another person for the specific purpose of faking explicit content or soliciting 'lookalike' pornography."

This doesn't affect all AI-based face swapping enthusiasts on Reddit. The subreddit for FakeApp, a program that allows anyone to swap faces in videos, is still online. So is r/SFWdeepfakes, which is devoted to non-pornographic use of the technology. At least one small, specific subreddit devoted to simulated porn for an individual actor also seems to have slipped under the radar. But along with the central deepfakes hub, the main subreddit for posting not-safe-for-work deepfakes has gotten shut down, and so has the community r/YouTubefakes. The subreddit r/CelebFakes, which focused on non-AI-powered photoshopped pornographic images, was initially left online, but removed shortly after the announcement. The site will rely on "first-party reports" to shut down future deepfakes material.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from NBC News: The Food and Drug Administration declared the popular herbal product kratom to be an opioid on Tuesday, opening a new front in its battle to get people to stop using it. New research shows kratom acts in the brain just as opioids do, FDA Commissioner Dr. Scott Gottlieb said in a statement. And he said the agency has documented 44 cases in which kratom at least helped kill people -- often otherwise healthy young people.

"Taken in total, the scientific evidence we've evaluated about kratom provides a clear picture of the biologic effect of this substance," Gottlieb wrote. "Kratom should not be used to treat medical conditions, nor should it be used as an alternative to prescription opioids. There is no evidence to indicate that kratom is safe or effective for any medical use." The FDA released detailed accounts of several of the deaths. The victims often had mixed kratom with other substances, including chemicals taken out of inhalers and found in over-the-counter cold and flu drugs.

Chinese internet players have flocked to a research conference on artificial intelligence here, fighting to attract students from their home country who received a top-notch education in the U.S. From a report: Chinese is the language of choice among 34 company and group booths occupying prime real estate near the entrance to the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence conference, opened Friday. Native speakers represent companies including virtual mall operator Alibaba Group Holding and Tencent Holdings, which runs the communication platform WeChat. They woo students, mainly of Chinese origin, with descriptions of comfortable jobs or invite them to attend parties. The intense competition reflects the great strides China has made in the field. This year, the AAAI received research submissions in record numbers -- at least 3,800. Entries from China increased 57% on the year to a level roughly even with those from the U.S. Moreover, Chinese researchers were involved with about 60% of the research posters on display -- a privilege given to selected papers. The research poster exhibition was sponsored by Chinese internet company Baidu.

hackingbear writes: Chinese ecommerce giant Alibaba has announced that its mobile wallet app Alipay is to be accepted in physical Apple Stores in the country. This would be the first time Apple has allowed retail store purchases to be made with a third-party mobile wallet app amid a push by the iPhone maker to revive growth in the world's No.2 economy. Apple has had to work hard to promote Apple Pay in China due to the popularity of existing, local mobile wallet apps like WeChat Pat and Alipay. The company had already bowed to the inevitable in allowing local apps to be used for online payments. Other American brands like McDonald's and Starbucks have already started accepting Alipay and WeChat Pay in China for sometimes.

Google could try to get serious about gaming with a rumored console and game-streaming service, according to the Information. From a report: The service, codenamed "Yeti," would stream modern games over the internet instead of processing them on locally, allowing them to run weaker hardware such as Google's Chromecast dongles. Several other companies, including Nvidia and Sony, already offer their own game-streaming services, but the problems are always the same: Publishers tend to support these services halfheartedly or not at all, and even with an excellent internet connection, the experience isn't as responsive or dependable as a powerful home console. It's unclear how Google might solve those problems, but the company is reportedly considering a holiday 2017 launch.

U.S. prosecutors say 36 people have been indicted in connection with an international cybercrime ring that bought and sold stolen credit card information, leading to losses of more than $530 million. From a report: The Justice Department says Wednesday that the so-called Infraud Organization dealt in the large-scale acquisition and sale of stolen identities, credit card information and malware. Deputy Assistant Attorney General David Rybicki says it was "truly the premier one-stop shop for cybercriminals worldwide." He says the organization used an online forum on the dark web to sell financial and personal information. Investigators believe the organization's nearly 11,000 members targeted more than 4.3 million credit cards and bank accounts.

While most CAPTCHA tests we come across on the Web are usually meant to keep robots out, one website is welcoming them in. From a report: The conceit of Humans Not Invited is essentially a reverse CAPTCHA. Visitors to the site are greeted with a vision test not unlike the ones you've done before, but instead it's filled with seemingly indistinguishable blue and gray blurry boxes. When I tried, prompted to "select all squares with selfie sticks." Most humans, like me, will fail to decipher the hidden selfie sticks and will be shown a message that says "YOU'RE A HUMAN. YOU'RE NOT INVITED." To the human eye these boxes appear indistinguishable, a specially programmed bot can spot out the correct image simply by identifying a handful of pixels, according to the project's creator, Damjanski, (his real name is Danjan Pita).

In their fight against Uber, London's taxi drivers claim a distinct advantage: They must forgo GPS and navigate the huge city entirely from memory. CNET: Put in place in 1865, the Knowledge exam requires cabbies to navigate between any two points in central London without following a map or GPS. It can take four years to learn the information and pass a series of stringent oral tests. It's a grueling process unmatched by any training taxi drivers have to face anywhere else, and it's the most arduous thing Pearson's [Editor's note: a driver; used as anecdote in the story] ever done. "My uncle was a cab driver and he encouraged me to give it a go," he said. "But I still didn't realize how hard it would be."

Despite the difficulty of mastering it, cabbies proudly defend the Knowledge as a critical part of their job, something technology can't replace. They say it sets them apart from ride-hailing services like Uber, whose drivers don't have to learn the Knowledge, and they believe it allows them to deliver a superior level of service. But ever since mapping apps arrived on phones and GPS-wielding Uber drivers exploded into London in 2012, the Knowledge has faced a volatile future. Should cabbies have to spend years of their life memorizing every inch of London when they can simply punch in a destination on a screen and be guided? Absolutely, say the drivers I spoke with.

An anonymous reader writes: The story of Azimuth Security, a tiny startup in Australia, provides a rare peek inside the secretive industry that helps government hackers get around encryption. Azimuth is part of an opaque, little known corner of the intelligence world made of hackers who develop and sell expensive exploits to break into popular technologies like iOS, Chrome, Android and Tor.

Twitter has officially suspended Bitfinex'ed -- a notorious internet sleuth who has long speculated that popular exchange desk Bitfinex has quietly been printing its dollar-pegged Tether digital tokens out of thin air, a move that could lead to the collapse of Bitcoin and perhaps even the entire market, The Next Web reports. From the report: In an email to TNW, Bitifinex'ed said that Twitter has yet to clarify the reasons for the suspension. "This account has been suspended," the message reads. It is worth noting that in addition to the claims made against Bitfinex and Tether, Bitfinex'ed has previously accused other well-known figures within the crypto-community of foul play. Indeed, earlier in January the anonymous investigator suggested Litecoin Charlie Lee might have engaged in insider trading during his time at Coinbase. Lee ultimately denied these claims. In the aftermath of this altercation, waves of Lee supporters took to Twitter to condemn the premises of the piece Bitfinex'ed authored.

An anonymous reader shares a report: The story of the frog's neuro-abacus is just one example of nature's vast, ancient and versatile number sense, a talent explored in detail in a recent themed issue of Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, edited by Brian Butterworth, a cognitive neuroscientist at University College London, C. Randy Gallistel of Rutgers University and Giorgio Vallortigara of the University of Trento. Scientists have found that animals across the evolutionary spectrum have a keen sense of quantity, able to distinguish not just bigger from smaller or more from less, but two from four, four from ten, forty from sixty. Orb-weaving spiders, for example, keep a tally of how many silk-wrapped prey items are stashed in the "larder" segment of their web. When scientists experimentally remove the cache, the spiders will spend time searching for the stolen goods in proportion to how many separate items had been taken, rather than how big the total prey mass might have been. Small fish benefit from living in schools, and the more numerous the group, the statistically better a fish's odds of escaping predation. As a result, many shoaling fish are excellent appraisers of relative head counts.

An anonymous reader shares a report: The operators of some tech support scam websites have found a new trick to block visitors on their shady sites and scare non-technical users into paying for unneeded software or servicing fees. The trick relies on using JavaScript code loaded on these malicious pages to initiate thousands of file download operations that quickly take up the user's memory resources, freezing Chrome on the scammer's site. The trick is meant to drive panicked users into calling one of the tech support phone numbers shown on the screen. According to Jerome Segura -- Malwarebytes leading expert in tech support scam operations, malvertising, and exploit kits -- this new trick utilizes the JavaScript Blob method and the window.navigator.msSaveOrOpenBlob function to achieve the "download bomb" that freezes Chrome.

An anonymous reader shares a report: The tumble in cryptocurrencies that erased nearly $500 billion of market value over the past month could get a lot worse, according to Goldman Sachs Group's global head of investment research. Most digital currencies are unlikely to survive in their current form, and investors should prepare for coins to lose all their value as they're replaced by a small set of future competitors, Goldman's Steve Strongin said in a report dated Feb. 5. While he didn't posit a timeframe for losses in existing coins, he said recent price swings indicated a bubble and that the tendency for different tokens to move in lockstep wasn't rational for a "few-winners-take-most" market. "The high correlation between the different cryptocurrencies worries me," Strongin said. "Because of the lack of intrinsic value, the currencies that don't survive will most likely trade to zero."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: In a hearing today before the Senate Banking Committee, Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Jay Clayton and Commodity Futures Trading Commission Chairman Christopher Giancarlo opened up about what the near-term U.S. regulatory fate of cryptocurrency might look like. In a week of plunging prices and bad news, the hearing struck a tone that coin watchers could reasonably interpret as surprisingly optimistic. Over the course of the open hearing, Clayton and Giancarlo traded testimony over what can be regulated, what should be regulated and how, while offering a broader outlook on the long-term future of virtual currency markets and blockchain tech.

The testimony drew a useful distinction among three pillars of the virtual currency ecosystem (for lack of a better unifying term): cryptocurrencies, "a replacement for dollars;" ICOs, "like a stock offering;" and distributed ledger technologies, or the technical framework generally known as blockchain. Throughout the hearing, on the SEC side, Clayton struck a relatively solemn tone focused on ICO fraud concerns, while the CFTC's Giancarlo came across as genuinely enthusiastic and curious about the emerging market. When asked about the intrinsic value of cryptocurrency, Clayton said: "There are a lot of smart people who think there's something to the value of cryptocurrency and the international exchange and I'm not seeing those benefits manifesting themselves in the market yet. I look at this from the perspective of Main Street investors and they should understand that."

On ICOs as a security: "I believe every ICO I've seen is a security... You can call it a coin but if it functions as a security, it is a security... Those who engage in semantic gymnastics or elaborate re-structuring exercises in an effort to avoid having a coin be a security are squarely in the crosshairs of our enforcement provision."