A top university in northwest China has scrapped English tests as a prerequisite for graduation, rekindling a heated debate about the role of the world's lingua franca in the country's education system after years of rising nationalist sentiment under leader Xi Jinping.

A few sentences in a note from an obscure United Nations group has ignited a firestorm in the

By Akash Sriram (Reuters) -New York Times Co signaled on Tuesday that advertising spending was picking up faster than market

A first ever study of wartime “deepfake” videos has found the fake content undermined viewers’ trust in conflict footage to the point they became critical of all footage coming from warzones. The study, from researchers at University College Cork (UCC), is also the first of its kind to find evidence of online conspiracy theories which incorporate deepfakes. Deepfakes are artificially manipulated audio-visual material. Most deepfake videos involve the production of a fake “face” constructed by Artificial Intelligence, that is merged with an authentic video, in order to create a video of an event that never really took place. Although fake, they can look convincing and are often produced to imitate or mimic an individual. The study, titled A new type of weapon in the propaganda war, analysed close to 5,000 tweets on X (formerly Twitter) in the first seven months of 2022 to explore how people react to deepfake content online. The Russia-Ukraine war presented as the first real-life example of deepfakes being used in warfare. The researchers highlight examples of deepfake videos during this war including the use of video game footage as evidence of the urban myth fighter pilot “The Ghost of Kyiv”, and a deepfake of Russian president Vladimir Putin, showing the Russian president announcing peace with Ukraine. The study found deepfakes often undermined users’ trust in the footage they were receiving from the conflict to the point where they lost trust in any footage viewed. As well as the threat coming from the fake content itself, researchers found genuine media contact was being labelled as deepfakes. The study showed that the lack of social media literacy led to significant misunderstandings of what constitutes a deepfake, however, the study also demonstrated that efforts to raise awareness around deepfakes may undermine trust in legitimate videos. Therefore, the study asserts, news media and governmental agencies need to weigh the benefits of educational deepfakes and pre-bunking against the risks of undermining truth. John Twomey, UCC researcher, said much of the misinformation analysed in the study “surprisingly came from the labelling of real media as deepfakes”. “Novel findings about deepfake scepticism also emerged, including a connection between deepfakes fuelling conspiratorial beliefs and unhealthy scepticism,” he said. “The evidence in this study shows that efforts to raise awareness around deepfakes may undermine our trust in legitimate videos. “With the prevalence of deepfakes online, this will cause increasing challenges for news media companies who should be careful in how they label suspected deepfakes in case they cause suspicion around real media.” Mr Twomey added: “News coverage of deepfakes needs to focus on educating people on what deepfakes are, what their potential is, and both what their current capabilities are and how they will evolve in the coming years”. Dr Conor Linehan, from UCC’s School of Applied Psychology, said researchers “have long feared that deepfakes have the potential to undermine truth”. “Deepfake videos could undermine what we know to be true when fake videos are believed to be authentic and vice versa,” he said. This study is part of broader work by UCC’s School of Applied Psychology examining the psychological impact of deepfakes. Read More More than 500 potential cyber attacks logged every second, BT says AI being used to create child abuse imagery, watchdog warns ChatGPT and other chatbots ‘can be tricked into making code for cyber attacks’ Tinder adds Matchmaker feature to let friends recommend potential dates Google and Meta withdraw from upcoming Web Summit ‘Game-changing’ facial recognition technology catches prolific shoplifters

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E-commerce giant Amazon has said it uses artificial intelligence systems to prevent fake reviews on the platform that can intentionally mislead customers. While the company already uses machine learning models to detect risks such as links to other accounts, sign-in activity, review history, and other indications of unusual behavior that point to fake reviews, the tech giant said on Tuesday that is further investing in sophisticated fraud-detection tools. Using several such methods, the company said it “proactively blocked over 200 million suspected fake reviews” from its stores in 2022. “We will continue to build sophisticated tools that protect customers, our selling partners, and our store from bad actors that attempt to profit by proliferating fake reviews globally,” Amazon said. In the new statement, the e-commerce giant warned of the emergence of an illicit industry of “fake review brokers,” who approach consumers via social media channels, and messaging services, soliciting them to write fake reviews in exchange for money or other incentives. These brokers, according to Amazon, portray themselves as legitimate businesses with networks of hundreds of employees stationed worldwide. So far, it has taken legal action against over 90 such bad actors around the world who facilitated fake reviews and sued more than 10,000 Facebook group administrators who attempted to put fake reviews. It also reported over 23,000 abusive social media groups, with over 46 million members and followers, that facilitated fake reviews in 2022, the company added. These high-volume fake review brokers a “global problem” impacting multiple industries, according to Amazon, which called on the private sector, consumer groups, and governments to work together to stop fake review brokers. “Through cross-industry sharing – including information on bad actors’ tactics and techniques, who they are targeting, the services they provide, and how they operate – we can more effectively shut down these schemes, thereby protecting more consumers across different industries,” the company said. In countries that already have laws against soliciting fake reviews, it said regulators could do more to use their authority to take action against fake review brokers. “We also support greater funding for law enforcement to build further technical expertise to investigate and take down these brokers,” the multibillion-dollar conglomerate said. “Amazon will continue to protect our stores from fake reviews by investing in proactive tools to detect and stop fake reviews from impacting a customer’s buying decision,” it added. Read More Revealed: The delivery apps charging you double for your food shop Amazon staff spied on women private through Ring cameras, officials say ‘Last Beatles record’ was created using AI, says Paul McCartney Best Amazon deals and offers to buy now, from air fryers to Apple watches Jeff Bezos mocked for spending $4k on bottle of ‘engagement wine’ worth just $650 Elon Musk is once again world’s richest person

It’s well known that all humans alive today can be traced back to a common ancestor but a study may have found where that ancestor originates. Researchers at the University of Oxford’s Big Data Institute mapped the entirety of genetic relationships among humans to create the largest human family tree ever. By combining modern and ancient human genomes data from eight different databases, the researchers were able to create a massive family tree. This allowed them to see how a person’s genetic sequence relates to another using the points of the genome. Sign up for our free Indy100 weekly newsletter “Essentially, we are reconstructing the genomes of our ancestors and using them to form a vast network of relationships,” Lead author Dr Anthony Wilder Wohns said. “We can then estimate when and where these ancestors lived.” Where they lived? Sudan, Africa. Dr Wohns told Reuters, "The very earliest ancestors we identify trace back in time to a geographic location that is in modern Sudan. “These ancestors lived up to and over 1 million years ago—which is much older than current estimates for the age of Homo sapiens—250,000 to 300,000 years ago. So bits of our genome have been inherited from individuals who we wouldn’t recognize as modern humans," Dr Wohns said. Researchers used 3,609 individual genome sequences from 215 populations and samples that ranged from 1,000s to over 100,000 years. By using a new method to compile the data, algorithms were able to predict where common ancestors were in evolutionary trees to explain some patterns of genetic variation. The results were a network of almost 27 million ancestors. “The power of our approach is that it makes very few assumptions about the underlying data and can also include both modern and ancient DNA samples,” Dr Wohns says. Not only does the data help us understand human geology better but the new method could help in other research, like medicine. “The underlying method could have widespread applications in medical research, for instance identifying genetic predictors of disease risk," Dr Wohns added. Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.

Heather Rae El Moussa was slammed as she thanked the pregnancy kit brand for accurate test results in the video advertisement