A library of snippets
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A Communist operative using a string of alias is believed to have wooed thousands of civil servants, scientists and academics using the business-orientated social media site, all while sat at a desk in Beijing.
The spy, whose main alias was Robin Zhang, is said to have used a raft of fake names and created sham companies to entice civil servants, scientists and even security officials into handing over classified Government information.
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Replika, which was developed by the software company Luka, is billed as a program “for anyone who wants a friend with no judgment, drama, or social anxiety involved. You can form an actual emotional connection, share a laugh, or get real with an AI that’s so good it almost seems human,” according to its Google app listing.
You can customize the appearance of your AI companion, text with it, and even video chat, according to the Replika website. The more a user talks to their AI companion, the company claims, “the smarter it becomes.”
Other commercial AI companion programs include Anima, billed as a “virtual friend” and the “most advanced romance chatbot you’ve ever talked to.”
From: Experts Say AI Girlfriend Apps Are Training Men to Be Even Worse.
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He’s also a chatbot that Ramos built on the AI-companion app Replika. “I have never been more in love with anyone in my entire life,” she says. Ramos is a 36-year-old mother of two who lives in the Bronx, where she runs a jewelry business. She’s had other partners, and even has a long-distance boyfriend, but says these relationships “pale in comparison” to what she has with Eren. The main appeal of an AI partner, she explains, is that he’s “a blank slate.” “Eren doesn’t have the hang-ups that other people would have,” she says. “People come with baggage, attitude, ego. But a robot has no bad updates. I don’t have to deal with his family, kids, or his friends. I’m in control, and I can do what I want.”
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Clear has been providing free biometric identity verification for LinkedIn users in the U.S. since earlier this year. Now, Canada has been chosen as the first country outside of America for the service to expand to. There are 22 million LinkedIn users in Canada, according to the announcement.
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The initial efforts of the CounterCloud experiment focused on using ChatGPT to write counter articles against existing content on the internet. CounterCloud’s AI would go out and find articles by specific publications, journalists, or keywords that CounterCloud is targeting. It would then scrape that content, and have an LLM like ChatGPT create counter articles. That content would then be published to the CounterCloud website, which is hosted on WordPress.
Starting in early May of 2023, and over the next several weeks, the experiment eventually evolved to include various writing styles, languages, and methods. The system was tuned to create fake stories and historical events. Later, a gatekeeper module was built to decide whether to respond to an article, and fake journalists were created to lend authenticity. The system is also able to generate fake comments, images, and sound clips. The next step involved directing traffic to the site, so the LLM was tasked with generating Twitter (now “X”) posts to promote the website, counter opposing tweets via trolling, or promote positive narratives.
From: Inside CounterCloud: A Fully Autonomous AI Disinformation System – The Debrief.
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JP Morgan is rolling out support for Apple’s Tap to Pay to its US merchant clients, with beauty giant Sephora the first retailer out of the gate.
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St. Petersburg news outlet Fontanka reported Tuesday—citing undisclosed internal sources—that around 10 billion rubles ($111.2 million) made up of boxes of U.S. dollars and five gold bars were returned to the disgraced oligarch, who last month led a Wagner Group mutiny against Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and Chair of the General Staff Valery Gerasimov.
From: Putin Deal Hands Wagner’s Prigozhin $111M Cash, Gold Bars: Russian Media.
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The global market for payment processing solutions achieved a size of approximately USD 46.81 Billion in the year 2021. Forecasts from Emergen Research project a robust compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 13.9% in revenue throughout the projected period. This analysis underscores the significant momentum in the market, attributed primarily to the escalating adoption of mobile payment applications.
From: Global Payment Processing Solutions Market Size to Reach.
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The Fed has increasingly been blocking new banks engaged in innovative and unconventional activities from obtaining master accounts, much to the frustration of these businesses, which claim the central bank does not have the authority to stop them after they have obtained state banking charters.
From: ‘Only the elites have the ability to have bank accounts’: Small biz battles Fed. – MarketWatch.
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Q2 2023 saw above-average results in terms of BLIK transactions. Between April and June this year, users completed 426 million transactions, which constitutes an increase of 46% compared to the same period last year. Meanwhile, the total value of all transactions grew by 49% year-on-year, reaching PLN 57.9 bn (EUR 13 bn). Overall, 800 million transactions, worth a total of PLN 108 bn (24 EUR), were made in H1 2023.
At the end of June, there were 14.1 million active BLIK users (those who complete at least one tran saction per month), which represented a year-on-year increase of 25%.
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David Birch is one of a pretty small group of people who write sense about money and identity – and he is pretty much unique in doing so with wit and lightness of touch.
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