Showing posts with label forgeries. Show all posts
Showing posts with label forgeries. Show all posts

Friday, September 9, 2022

Fake Things Bonanza


Trying to come up with a theme for the imagery in this post -- too many fake things to report, and we need some visual release in between. 

Why not some AI-generated art? It's in the news as of this week because of the first public release of an AI generator that allowed someone to win a local art contest without painting a damn thing.  

This is kind of a big deal because for reference, the text-generating tool GPT-3 was deemed too dangerous to release to the public for fear it would, I don't know, topple susceptible governments (maybe we could call them immunocompromised governments instead, to take the edge off). 

This newest generation of image generation software is equally as effective, and it's use has been limited to select users, usually researchers and engineers working for either governments (that we don't hear about) or for commercial enterprise (that we do hear about). But now it's open to everyone. 

The above image, well, I'll admit I'm not sure how the heck it was made. The artist (the human part at least) titles the work "Stress", but it's likely they used a much more extensive and nuanced text prompt to get the image, and they ran that prompt through a dataset of 5 billion captioned-images and this is what came out. It looks like a much more interesting heart, if not accurate, and perhaps illustrated by MARS1 for a cyberpunk medical school anatomy textbook. ,

Here's a quick timeline of how we got here:
And here's the actual post, about fake things in general, interspersed with AI-generated imagery:


Fake Publishers:
Man arrested in thefts of unpublished books
Jan 2022, Associated Press

Authorities say they’ve solved a publishing industry whodunit with the arrest of a man accused of numerous literary heists in recent years. An Italian citizen working in publishing in London is accused of impersonating others in the industry, using phishing schemes to amass a veritable library of unpublished works. Filippo Bernardini was arrested Wednesday after arriving at John F. Kennedy International Airport. He faces charges including wire fraud and aggravated identity theft. He’s expected to appear in federal court on Thursday. No information on an attorney for him was available. 


Fake Whiskey:
With a whiff, 'e-nose' can sense fine whiskey
Apr 2022, phys.org

The real story is that the fake whiskey game is so strong, we need an e-nose to fight it. 

And let's not forget the famous wine forger Rudy Kurniawan, he was a wine savant who reproduced rare and exorbitantly priced wines out of a mixture of cheaper wines. What's more mind-mashing -- that he can figure the exact recipe, or that it's even possible to take 5 good wines and mix them in just the right proportion that they taste just like a world-class winner.
[Rudy Kurniawan]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rudy_Kurniawan

via University of Technology Sydney: Wentian Zhang et al, The Use of Electronic Nose for the Classification of Blended and Single Malt Scotch Whisky, IEEE Sensors Journal (2022). DOI: 10.1109/JSEN.2022.3147185


Fake Headline:
Spanish police seize huge haul of illegal stuffed animals
Apr 2022, BBC News

Spanish police have seized what is thought to be one of the largest hauls of animal taxidermy in Europe, worth €29m (£24.2m).


Fake Science:
Computer scientists suggest research integrity could be at risk due to AI generated imagery
May 2022, phys.org

It's never the robots, always the humans who are the real problem:
A small team of researchers at Xiamen University has expressed alarm at the ease with which bad actors can now generate fake AI imagery for use in research projects. They have published an opinion piece outlining their concerns in the journal Patterns. (Using a generative adversarial network, obviously)

via Xiamen University: Liansheng Wang et al, Deepfakes: A new threat to image fabrication in scientific publications? Patterns (2022). DOI: 10.1016/j.patter.2022.100509


Real Problems with Fake Science:
Flawed research not retracted fast enough to prevent spread of misinformation, study finds
Jun 2022, phys.org

Makes sense - Retracted papers receive more attention than comparable nonretracted papers even before retraction. One possible reason is that retracted papers may contain sensational or novel findings, which could lead to increased attention, they say.

Using Retraction Watch and Altmetric data databases, the team compared the online footprints of 2,830 retracted papers to 13,599 nonretracted control papers that had similar publication venues, dates, numbers of authors and authors' citation counts. The researchers compared the amount of attention between the two groups of papers measured in mentions in social media and news media databases, and both six months after publication and again post-retraction.

Solutions - Through their hand-labeling process of critical and non-critical mentions, the researchers also found that discourse about retracted papers tended to be more critical overall on Twitter.

via University of Michigan: Hao Peng et al, Dynamics of cross-platform attention to retracted papers, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2022). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2119086119


Fake Families:
Used by corporate real estate purchases of residential housing stock, to trick homeowners into selling to a "family" and not a corporation? (This sounds entirely plausible, but I can't find any more info on this beyond an internet forum chat, and aside from the practice by a Dallas-based real estate firm called Centex back in 2006 where they put fake families in the house while they show it, to produce a more "natural vibe" to the place?)


Fake Candy:
Fake 'potentially dangerous' chocolate seized in Oxford Street American candy shop raids
Jun 2022, ITV News London

The council said the raid was part of its investigation into 30 American-style candy and souvenir shops on Oxford Street for business rates evasion amounting to £7.9 million.

The council said it believed that very few of the shops were serving sufficient customers to be commercially viable and were instead being used to avoid business rate bills and possibly commit other offences.

Westminster City Council recently wrote to 28 freeholders urging them to consider the impact of US sweet shops on Oxford Street and has so far seized around £574,000 worth of counterfeit and illegal goods from American candy and souvenir stores.

[Randon Redditor explanation] Covid - only essential businesses could be open, so all the drug fronts switched to become candy stores that were technically food stores that could be classified as essential and continue laundering money. They're american candy because they price things at like 15 pounds for a bag of twizzlers because of the novelty. They're all owned by people and entities from Afghanistan as well, which seems to insinuate they're fronts for heroin. But like the high street in the documentary was like 30% american candy stores with absolutely no one going in and buying anything from any of them. It's pretty wild.


Fake Data:
'Fake' data helps robots learn the ropes faster
Jul 2022, phys.org

How to be a human. We're getting there:
For the rope-looping simulation and experiment, Mitrano and Berenson expanded the data set by extrapolating the position of the rope to other locations in a virtual version of a physical space — so long as the rope would behave the same way as it had in the initial instance. Using only the initial training data, the simulated robot hooked the rope around the engine block 48% of the time. After training on the augmented data set, the robot succeeded 70% of the time.

via  University of Michigan: Data Augmentation for Manipulation, arXiv:2205.02886v3 [cs.RO] 
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2205.02886


Fake Lodgings:
Booking.com scam - Tourists descend on north London private home
Aug 2022, BBC News

A woman in north London says she feels victimised after dozens of tourists turned up at her home when her private address was placed on the Booking.com accommodation website.

Travellers from Hong Kong, Saudi Arabia and Los Angeles turned up at the home of Gillian, whose full name is not being given, throughout July.


What kind of fake even is this?
Viagra and Cialis are in certain honey products
Aug 2022, NJ Advanced Media

It's funny because you can bet most of this "honey" is rice syrup: 
Honey is one of the most faked foods in the world, and the US government isn't doing much to fix it

And would you look at that, the original announcement from the FDA calls them "honey-based products"
Tainted Honey-based Products with Hidden Active Drug Ingredients


Fake Accents:
Start-up denies using tech to turn call centre accents 'white'
Aug 2022, BBC News

A Silicon Valley start-up has developed technology that can change the accents of call centre workers in real time. The company, Sanas, has told the BBC that its technology could overcome accent-based prejudice and reduce racist abuse faced by staff.

A former call centre agent himself, Mr Narayana said in his experience agents would be abused or discriminated against because of how they sound - abuse the company believes its technology can prevent.

Sanas - Breaking Barriers One Conversation At A Time


Fake Healthcare:
Cutting down vitamin D tests could help lower carbon cost of health care
Aug 2022, phys.org

"Low-value health care", i.e., unnecessary vitamin D tests, because:
"There are high rates of vitamin D testing of healthy individuals who are not at risk of vitamin D deficiency—with previous research estimating that 76.5% of vitamin D tests did not meet any of the Medicare indications for testing. We need to reduce low-value care such as over-testing and overtreatment."

via University of Sydney: Matilde Breth-Petersen et al, Health, financial and environmental impacts of unnecessary vitamin D testing: a triple bottom line assessment adapted for healthcare, BMJ Open (2022). DOI: 10.1136/bmjopen-2021-056997


Fake News (About Spiders)
What fake news about spiders can teach us about the global spread of (mis)information
Aug 2022, phys.org

A similar exercise would allow comparing if the levels of misinformation and sensationalism are the same across a broad spectrum of taxa, testing the prediction if a negative framing by the traditional and social media translates to a lower chance of being prioritized for conservation, and vice versa."

The "Fake Index" perhaps? "The quality of spider information in the global press is rather poor—errors and sensationalism are rampant." 

I grew up thinking "eating spiders in your sleep" was an early viral meme created on purpose to measure the network dynamics of the young internet while watching the meme spread. But that's not true. The common answer to where this came from (that you will even find on Britannica unfortunately) is that it was in an article about our susceptibility to misinformation, given as a stupid example of an idea that is easily spread. But that's not true either. Turns out that was a meta-meme, created by Snopes back in 2001, as they pretended to provide the origin story. It's just a perennial urban legend. 

via National Research Council of Italy and University of Helsinki's Finnish Museum of Natural History: Stefano Mammola, The global spread of misinformation on spiders, Current Biology (2022). DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2022.07.026


Fake Influencers:
Real money, fake musicians - A million-dollar Instagram verification scheme
Aug 2022, ProPublica

Fake market always reinventing itself. It's easier to get yourself "verified" as a musician than as an influencer, so they make you a fake album, some fake likes, etc., and you're in business.


Fake Attempts At Correction:
Economists have a method for reducing fake news on social media
Aug 2022, phys.org

"For example, Twitter could limit the breadth of sharing on its site by limiting how many people see any given retweet in their Twitter feeds," he says.

But sharing is a metric for engagement, and engagement is the primary metric for their revenue.

Both Facebook and WhatsApp, two apps owned by parent company Meta that allow users to message each other, have used methods similar to the researchers' model to limit the spread of misinformation.

And that's why it "didn't work", i.e., they didn't really do it.

"If you limit sharing, you could also be limiting the spread of good information, so you might be throwing the baby out with the bathwater and that doesn't really help you," McAdams warns. "Our analysis explores how to strike that balance."

This is the crux of the matter.

via Duke University: Matthew O. Jackson et al, Learning through the grapevine and the impact of the breadth and depth of social networks, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2022). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2205549119

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Thursday, April 14, 2022

The Art Cop


I wanted to talk about Robert Volpe, the New York City Police Department's art theft sleuth, but the page I had saved is apparently no longer active. Luckily, the very helpful web browser Brave automatically asks me if I'd like to check the Wayback Machine for an archive, which I do, and which it has, and which I will re-paste right here just for furthering the sake of posterity. Although I should note that the main reference here is a New York Times article from 2006 titled Robert Volpe, Art Theft Expert, Dies at 63. You can read more in a book titled Art Cop from 1974 (see below).

Robert Volpe (December 13, 1942 – November 28, 2006), was a painter and New York City police officer and detective, specializing in art theft.

Born in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, Volpe studied art at the High School of Art and Design, Parsons School for Design and the Art Students League of New York. His art career began with paintings of tugboats during his teenage years, and later, in the 1970s, his abstract work sold for as much as $1500. After a stint in the army, he joined the New York City police force and initially worked undercover on organized crime cases, including narcotics work related to the French Connection. After making several art crime arrests, in 1971 he was appointed the sole member of the New York City Police Department's bureau for art crime, the only bureau of its kind in the nation.

His work was varied, including art theft, vandalism, and forgeries, and he took as many as 40–50 calls per day from around the world. In 1981, he recovered an 1858 candelabrum once owned by the king of Egypt only 11 days after being notified of the theft by British authorities. Over his desk hung a congratulatory photograph from the foreign minister of Italy for recovering two ivories worth $1.5 million stolen from a museum in Pesaro. After Volpe's retirement in 1983, art crimes began to be handled by the burglary division.

Here's an even older article from which I've copied a few portions:
Art People: City's art policeman. By Michael Brenson, New York Times, May 20, 1983. 

Mr. Volpe is the art squad of the New York City Police Department. For almost 11 years, he has worked this beat alone in a city he describes as the ''clearing house internationally for art.'' Not only is he the one-man art squad in New York, but he is also the only detective in the United States ''designated to investigate artrelated crimes,'' he said. Internationally, he added, there are about a dozen art detectives, including four-man units in Britain and Italy.

The 40-year-old, Brooklyn-born son of a banker, whose formative years with the Police Department were spent as an undercover agent for the narcotics squad, knows the New York art world as well as many artists and dealers know it. In his boots, dungarees and sweater, with his thick mustache, he is a familiar figure in galleries. ''I guess you could say some of my best friends are dealers,'' he said.

Mr. Volpe also keeps abreast of what goes on at the auction houses. He was at the Sotheby Parke Bernet galleries on April 18, the day before the theft of a diamond valued at $500,000 to $600,000 was discovered. He has been called in to work on the case with detectives of the 19th Precinct, who have jurisdiction over it. ''I know all the players in the game,'' he said. ... collectors, curators, dealers, framers, restorers and packers. 

...
Before Mr. Volpe began the job in 1972, a police art squad did not exist. ''I was brought in to make a survey and see if there was something in this area,'' he said. ''Instead of coming back with a report, I started coming back with arrests and recoveries. So, obviously, there was a need.''

In the last few years, he has been deluged. He said he received up to 50 telephone calls a day, ''anything from reports of theft, to requests from private dealers and from police departments here and around the world, to someone asking me what kind of acrylic brush to use.''

...
[One of his most memorable cases] "of little significance," he said. It involved a Brooklyn artist, now dead, whose sculpture tools, along with seven statues of rabbis he had made, were stolen. The artist was so distressed by the robbery, Mr. Volpe said, that he wound up in an intensive-care ward.

"I did something unprofessional," the detective recalled. "I promised him I'd get them back. I dropped everything I was doing and went out on the street. I talked to hookers and junkies. I found out that a couple of pieces were being sold at subway stops for $5 each. Eventually, the information started fitting together. I got all the pieces back. A week and a half later, he got out of the hospital, and I presented him the pieces and helped him find a new studio."

And another good story about him here:
Robert Volpe; World-Renowned 'Art Cop', By Adam Bernstein, Washington Post, December 1, 2006.

Once, he portrayed a gay Rhode Island art dealer named Damien Renar. When he arranged to meet the thieves, he was dressed in a white linen suit, and he relished the dramatic showdown, he said, when he could pull his police revolver from its holster and shout, "Freeze, you [expletive]!"

"Grade B movie stuff," he told the Times. "You find you have to behave that way. You don't come off with authority, you're done."

When he retired in 1985, he estimated that he had recovered tens of millions of dollars worth of Byzantine ivories, Oriental rugs, Greek marble heads, Tiffany glass, Matisses, Raphaels and other treasures. For a period, he noted a particularly high trade in faux antique French furniture.

"If all the old French furniture was real," he told the Christian Science Monitor, "there would never have been a French Revolution. Everybody in the country would have been too busy making furniture."

And ^THAT is a good lesson to remember when thinking about the world of fakes, frauds and forgeries. 


Post Script, On the Charm of an Art Thief:
Overall, he said, the recovery rate for stolen fine art was at best 10 percent. He lamented to Time magazine that judges rarely gave harsh sentences to art thieves.

"An art thief is entertaining, romantic," he said. "I've seen cases where the thief has pleaded guilty and gotten no sentence at all."

Notes:
Art Cop: Robert Volpe, Art Crime Detective, by Laurie Schneider Adams on Dodd, Mead & Co. in 1974. ISBN13: 9780396070207. [goodreads]

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Monday, July 12, 2021

Artificial Olfactory Camouflage, Deep Forensics and Other Fake News

Scientists used 'fake news' to stop predators from killing endangered birds—and the result was remarkable
Mar 2021, phys.org

There's visual fakes and auditory imposters, but rarely do we get to hear about artificial olfactory camouflage: 
Odors emanating from the shorebirds' feathers and eggs attract these scent-hunting mammals, which easily find the nests.

Five weeks before the shorebirds arrived for their breeding season in 2016, we mixed the odors with Vaseline and smeared the concoction on hundreds of rocks over two 1,000-hectare study sites. We did this every three days, for three months.

The predators were initially attracted to the odors. But within days, after realizing the scent would not lead to food, they lost interest and stopped visiting the site.

via: Grant L. Norbury et al. Misinformation tactics protect rare birds from problem predators, Science Advances (2021). DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.abe4164
Image credit: Hard to believe, but this is a picture of Jezero Crater on Mars, taken by the robot named Perseverance, 2021.

How to spot deepfakes? Look at light reflection in the eyes
Mar 2021, phys.org

From the researchers who brought you the blinkrate solution to deepfake video (the fakes give it away because they blink funny).

This one is similar, and it's because both eyes are supposed to have the same image being reflected. And it happens that way every time, no matter what, because our eyeballs are always symmetrical, something about bilateria or binocular vision.

Whereas deepfake generators are good at picking out the idiosyncrasies, the imperfections, it's the perfect part that are their weakness. And I guess this is one of the few things we have that are perfect. Another one? Blowing spit bubbles out of your mouth, it's the only geometrically perfect thing the human body can create.   

The "Deepfake-o-meter," by the way.

via University at Buffalo: Exposing GAN-generated Faces Using Inconsistent Corneal Specular Highlights. arXiv:2009.11924v2 [cs.CV] arxiv.org/abs/2009.11924

Lawyers used sheepskin as anti-fraud device for hundreds of years to stop fraudsters pulling the wool
Mar 2021, phys.org

Just like modern quantum cryptography:
Legal documents dating from the 13th to 20th century, and have discovered they were almost always written on sheepskin, rather than goatskin or calfskin vellum. This may have been because the structure of sheepskin made attempts to remove or modify text obvious. Attempts to scrape off the ink would result in these layers detaching—known as delamination—leaving a visible blemish highlighting any attempts to change any writing.

via University of Exeter:  Scratching the surface: the use of sheepskin parchment to deter textual erasure in early modern legal deeds, Doherty et al. Heritage Science 2021, DOI: 10.1186/s40494-021-00503-6
MyHeritage offers 'creepy' deepfake tool to reanimate dead
Mar 2021, BBC News

Dead people brought back to life, just like you've always wanted. 

A growing problem of 'deepfake geography' - How AI falsifies satellite images
Apr 2021, phys.org

Let's say you wanted to make it look like the rainforest wasn't on fire -- you can take out the smoke plumes. Or maybe you want to create a story about a fake explosion somewhere, you put in some smoke plumes. Advanced technology can help you make really believable forgeries. 
The study's goal was not to show that geospatial data can be falsified, Zhao said. Rather, the authors hope to learn how to detect fake images so that geographers can begin to develop the data literacy tools, similar to today's fact-checking services, for public benefit.

via University of Washington: Cartography and Geographic Information Science, DOI: 10.1080/15230406.2021.1910075
Post Script: 
Don't forget that fake maps have been a thing forever. The mapmakers themselves would put fake towns or streets in their maps to stop people from making copies. Even dictionary-makers employ this security measure with fake words. It's called a copyright trap, and if you copied the trap and didn't know it, the real mapmaker could identify your copy as their original.

And Paper Street was where Tyler Durden lived in Fight Club, but we don't talk about that.

Post Post Script:
Recognizing liars from the sound of their voice
Feb 2021, phys.org

AI can tell us all the things we already know but couldn't prove with science until now (Maybe like fractals?). We know when people are lying. Lying is a two way street; it requires a kind of social permission that we give to each other for some reason. 
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