Lead Hacker

Progress towards reliable deepfake labelling tech is sluggish, despite all the “help” from AI providers. | Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge, Getty Images As 2025 drew to a close, Instagram head Adam Mosseri ended the year by doom-posting about AI. "Authenticity is becoming infinitely reproducible," Mosseri lamented . "Everything that made creators matter - the ability to be real, to connect, to have a voice that couldn't be faked - is now accessible to anyone with the right tools." But people, Mosseri insisted, still wanted "content that feels real." His proposed solution was finding a way to label real media. "Camera manufacturers will cryptographically sign images at capture, creating a chain of custody," he said. The result would be a trustworthy system for determining what's not AI. The g … Read the full story at The Verge. source https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/882956/ai-deepfake-detection-labels-c2pa-inst...

Image: Kristen Radtke / The Verge Last November, the House Oversight Committee had just released 20,000 pages of documents from the estate of Jeffrey Epstein, and Luke Igel and some friends were clicking around, trying to follow the threads of conversation through garbled email threads and a PDF viewer that was, frankly, "gross." In the coming months, the Department of Justice would release its own batches of files, more than three million of them - again, all PDFs. This was a problem. While the Department of Justice had run optical character recognition over the text, it was not very good, Igel said, rendering the files more or less unsearchable. "There was no interface … Read the full story at The Verge. source https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/882891/ai-pdf-parsing-failure

I wish I could talk to my Plex server… | Image: Samsung. In addition to summoning Bixby or Gemini , Galaxy S26 users will be able to call on Perplexity by saying " hey, Plex ." The integration of Perplexity into Galaxy AI is just one element of the company's embrace of a "multi-agent ecosystem." Often, people will use different AI agents for different tasks, depending on where their strengths lie. So Samsung is opening up the ability to integrate different agents into the OS. Hey, Plex isn't just some transparent version of the app baked into a Galaxy phone to quickly get answers to questions. Perplexity will have access to Samsung Notes, Clock, Gallery, Reminder, and Calendar, as well as select thi … Read the full story at The Verge. source https://www.theverge.com/tech/882921/samsung-is-adding-perplexity-to-galaxy-ai

I recently had the pleasure of interviewing Laurie Spiegel for the site. As preparation for the interview, I spent a lot of time over the last couple of weeks revisiting Spiegel's records, most notably The Expanding Universe , her 1980 masterpiece that blends synth experimentalism with early examples of what would eventually be called ambient music , and algorithmic composition techniques. It's a marvel that sounds both nostalgic and cutting-edge at the same time. Tracks like "Patchwork" and "A Folk Study" dabble in the sort of bouncy arpeggios that beg comparisons to The Who's "Baba O'Riley," while "Old Wave" and "East River Dawn" conjure ea … Read the full story at The Verge. source https://www.theverge.com/entertainment/882915/laurie-spiegel-the-expanding-universe-review-masterpiece-ambient-music

Fun vibes. Okay-ish photos. | Photo: Antonio G. Di Benedetto / The Verge There's been a surge of interest over the last few years in inexpensive digital cameras. Younger folks are snapping up old point-and-shoots because they view the aesthetic as more authentic and more appealing than smartphone images. Companies are even rereleasing old tech at new prices . And there are cameras like the original Camp Snap : a $70 single-button point-and-shoot with no screen, designed as a modern take on a disposable film camera. It's cheap enough to send off with a kid to summer camp and accessible enough for just about anyone to enjoy its lo-fi aesthetic. I've been testing two charming examples of this formula: the $99 Camp S … Read the full story at The Verge. source https://www.theverge.com/gadgets/882641/camp-snap-pro-flashback-one35-v2-digicam-camera-comparison-review

Arturia launched a new version of its flagship effects suite, FX Collection, which includes two new plugins, EFX Ambient and Pitch Shifter-910. FX Collection 6 also marks the introduction of an Intro version with a selection of six effects covering the basics for $99. That pales in comparison to the 39 effects in the full FX Collection Pro, but that also costs $499. Pitch Shifter-910 is based on the iconic Eventide H910 Harmonizer from 1974, an early digital pitchshifter and delay with a very unique character. Arturia does an admirable job preserving its glitchy quirks. Pitch Shifter-910 is not a transparent effect that lets you create natu … Read the full story at The Verge. source https://www.theverge.com/tech/882852/arturia-fx-collection-6