Latest news with #Forensics
Malay Mail
6 days ago
- General
- Malay Mail
Body of 58-year-old man found in Sungai Pahang near Maran
KUANTAN, May 29 — A 58-year-old man was found drowned in Sungai Pahang at Kampung Paya Pasir, Maran yesterday afternoon. A Pahang Fire and Rescue Department spokesman said a fisherman found the victim's body floating at around 3 pm near the Kampung Paya Pasir sand pump. He said the department used an aluminium boat to retrieve the victim, whose floating body was caught among a pile of driftwood. The body was subsequently handed over to the police for further investigation. 'The operation faced difficulties in launching the boat due to the soft, sandy terrain of the area,' he added. A total of seven personnel from the Maran Fire and Rescue Station were involved in the operation. Meanwhile, Maran police chief Supt Wong Kim Wai said the victim's body had been sent to the Tengku Ampuan Afzan Hospital's Forensics Unitfor a post-mortem. — Bernama
Yahoo
15-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Aptima Awarded DARPA Contract to Bring Powerful Media Forensic Technologies to Market
Aptima to work with DARPA to commercialize defenses against synthetic and manipulated media Woburn, MA, May 15, 2025 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Aptima, Inc., a leader in optimizing human performance through innovative technologies, announced today it has been awarded a contract by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Commercial Strategy Office to lead a new commercialization effort focused on one of today's most urgent challenges: making reliable media forensic capabilities available to users to help mitigate online threats perpetuated via synthetic and manipulated media. With AI-generated images, audio, and video becoming more convincing and pervasive, society is struggling to keep pace. The emerging tools and standards required to help people understand the authenticity or origins of what they're reading, watching, and listening have yet to be adopted at internet scale — leaving individuals, institutions, and industries without a reliable foundation to determine if content is authentic. 'As falsified media technologies improve, they move faster than traditional forensic tools, leaving industries without reliable ways to spot and fight advanced media manipulations, like deepfakes,' said Shawn Weil, Chief Growth Officer at Aptima. 'DARPA is leading the way to fill this gap by going beyond improving detection capabilities, developing better ways to determine why and how content has been synthesized or manipulated – ultimately enabling trust and security in digital media across different sectors.' Through this effort, Aptima will leverage its role as the test and evaluation lead for DARPA's Semantic Forensics (SemaFor) program to explore commercial pathways that can help bridge the gap between cutting-edge analytics and commercially available products. 'This is a crucial step toward creating a more trustworthy digital ecosystem,' added Weil. 'We're thrilled to be working with DARPA to chart a path forward—one that connects innovation with real-world need.' About Aptima, Inc. Aptima, Inc. is a leader in optimizing human performance through innovative technologies that blend behavioral science, artificial intelligence, and advanced analytics. For 30 years, Aptima has delivered groundbreaking solutions in training, readiness, and human-machine teaming for industries including defense, healthcare, and education. Its intelligent systems enhance decision making, training, and operational efficiency by harnessing data-driven insights and adaptive tools. For more information, visit CONTACT: Media Contact: Joel Greenberg DCPR Joel@ 202-363-1065 | 202-669-3639 cellError in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
AFP
04-04-2025
- Politics
- AFP
Fabricated news article frames Duterte's arrest as obstacle to Russia-Ukraine ceasefire
"Friends don't abandon friends," reads part of the caption to screenshots of a purported news article shared on Facebook on March 17, 2025. The screenshots were shared on the verified page of a candidate for May's mid-term elections According to the supposed news report, titled "Putin Refuses Peace Talks Over Duterte's ICC Detention in Ukraine Negotiations", Russian President Vladimir Putin said he "will not sit at a table to discuss peace while a leader who stood with us is shackled by a court that serves Western interests". An image appearing to show Duterte and Putin shaking hands accompanies the purported article, which is followed by a Wikipedia entry for its supposed author. Image Screenshot of the false Facebook post, captured on March 27, 2025 The post circulated after Duterte was arrested and transferred to The Hague to face a crimes against humanity charge stemming from his "war on drugs" that claimed the lives of thousands of mostly poor men, often without proof they were linked to drugs (archived link). Duterte once called Putin "his hero" and made two official visits to Russia during his presidency (archived here and here) Putin also has a standing arrest warrant issued by the ICC in 2023 for crimes related to his country's war against Ukraine (archived link). Similar posts were shared elsewhere on Facebook, and were also translated into Tagalog. "Thank you President Putin for this. We owe you this one. That's why from the start I truly admire you because you have the same goal as Father Digong," read a comment on one of the posts, using a nickname for Duterte. Another comment read: "Thank you president Putin. The Filipino people salute you." 'Fabricated news article' The journalist whose byline appears at the bottom of the purported article "No, I did not write this article nor have I ever written anything similar," she said on March 26. "It appears that the entire thing is AI-generated." A review of the purported article also shows it contains several factual inaccuracies. For example, it claims Putin made his remarks during a press conference in Moscow with Belarussian President Alexander Lukashenko on Saturday, March 15. But Putin's joint press conference with Lukashenko, where a US-Ukraine plan for a 30-day ceasefire was discussed, in fact took place on Thursday, March 13 (archived here and here). Moreover, a check of the joint press conference's official transcript shows there was no mention of Duterte or the ICC proceedings (archived link). The image of Putin and Duterte shaking hands that accompanies the article also appears to be AI-generated and bears the watermark for X's Siwei Lyu, director of the University at Buffalo's Media Forensics Lab in the United States, told AFP there are also other elements in the image that suggest it was created by AI (archived link). "There are visible artifacts around the handshake and noticeable issues with Putin's eyes, which appear unnatural. The thumb also looks distorted, further suggesting signs of digital generation," he said on March 27. Image Screenshot of the image in the fabricated news article, with visual discrepancies highlighted by AFP Duterte's arrest on March 11 has spawned a flood of misinformation, some of which AFP has debunked here.
Yahoo
26-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Yasiin Bey likens music industry to 'Scrooge McDuck'
Yasiin Bey has likened the music industry to "Scrooge McDuck". The rapper formerly known as Mos Def did not hold back in a new interview with The Guardian, declaring the music industry had stripped him of his passion early on in his career. "I was so disillusioned," Yasiin, 51, explained. "You start out with idealism and passion, and then you encounter the kind of conduct and values George Orwell called 'inanities'. And they do this s**t to everybody, it's not even personal, it's systemic." He added he believed the current streaming model to be "gross" and "exploitative" of artists. "That s**t is gross, paying people part of a penny for their music," Yasiin said. "Those motherf**kers are cold-blooded, man, like Scrooge McDuck, lickin' his lips as he jumps into a pool of gold coins... The music industry of now makes the one I started out in seem charitable. It's completely exploitative." With his new project, Forensics, expected to be released in 2025, however, Yasiin expressed hope. "I'm just happy to be alive, to be able to create art and beauty, to the best of my ability," he told the outlet. "Like, to be a human being is a miracle. We're on this spaceship, planet Earth, sharing this experience, and it's crazy. Like, who needs peyote? We're already in outer space, baby."
The Guardian
21-02-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
‘The music industry is as cold blooded as Scrooge McDuck': the return of rapper Yasiin Bey
It's the penultimate night of Paris fashion week, and at Le Trianon, a storied 1,000-capacity music hall beneath Montmartre, Yasiin Bey – the artist formerly known as Mos Def – is holding court. 'Fashion week is exhausting, especially when you be swagging this hard,' grins the dandyish MC and sometimes streetwear designer. 'People see me and be like: 'What's the event?' Today. Life is the event.' Bey is showcasing his new project, Forensics, a partnership with DJ and producer the Alchemist (Eminem, Nas, Earl Sweatshirt). Over beats steeped in psychedelia and spiritual soul, Bey skips between the personal and political with profundity, as has long been his gift. This is Bey's deepest, most focused work in years, from Ondasz, a meditation on resistance that finds Bey reflecting: 'I don't know if Goliath made David afraid / But I do know David threw his stone anyway,' to Kidjani, a mesmerising, moving tribute to his late mother, Sheron Smith (the 'Umi' in his 1999 hit Umi Says). The material signals a rebirth for an MC and movie star who, for the last decade and a half, seemed content to disappear from the limelight. 'I'm a Hollywood runaway – don't tell 'em my whereabouts!' he grins a week later, in the snug of London's Chiltern Firehouse hotel. He wasn't always on the run from fame. As a child actor, Bey toiled in community theatre and off-off-off-Broadway productions, before scoring roles in TV movies and short-lived sitcoms. By 1995, he was Bill Cosby's teenage sidekick in The Cosby Mysteries. However, his true focus had shifted elsewhere – to the now-legendary freestyle rap sessions in New York's Washington Square Park. In 2017, future rap partner Talib Kweli told Desus & Mero that Bey was 'hood-famous', rapping against such underground stars as Supernatural, Mister Man (whose group Da Bush Babees Bey later guested with) and Agallah. Bey would 'come round and buy people sandwiches', Kweli continued, 'because he had a job. He was doing his acting thing and coming to the park and rhyming.' Although always on his way to or from another screen test, whenever Bey hit the park his commitment was unfailing, his skills inarguable. 'I was young, flowing with the energy of the times and the city,' he remembers. 'I saw a real shot at having this be a career. I knew I could do it. I didn't know how, but I knew I could.' His debut single, the sublime Universal Magnetic, arrived in 1997 on James Murdoch's Rawkus, the hottest imprint within New York's then insurgent underground hip-hop scene. The B-side, If You Can Huh! You Can Hear, found Bey ruminating, 'Time is the asset / How you gonna spend it?' He certainly invested his wisely during these years, dropping the first album by Black Star, his superduo with Kweli, in 1998, with his debut Mos Def full-length, Black on Both Sides, arriving the following year. It came at the perfect moment – the nadir of the gangsta era, with the street verité of the genre's early years now swapped for Puff Daddy's soapy capitalist fantasies, and Bey's socially conscious hip-hop was a welcome corrective. 'We had optimism and youthful naivety,' he says of these early days. 'Talib and I were continuing great traditions laid down by our elders – Gil Scott-Heron, Curtis Mayfield, Coltrane. I felt for sure we were doing something special. We weren't, like, 'We're rap stars!'' he chuckles, in his affable burr. 'We didn't need to be chart-toppers. We could afford groceries, we weren't about to get evicted. We knew radio programmers didn't wanna play our pro-Black shit while they were trying to sell skin cream. We knew we weren't going to be media darlings.' He stops for a beat. 'But then we kinda ended up being that, low-key.' Indeed, Black on Both Sides translated its critical acclaim into commercial success, hitting No 3 in Billboard's US Rap Albums chart and earning a gold disc, thanks to its breakout single, the winningly complex rap ballad, Ms Fat Booty, and the deftness with which Bey blended politics, warm humanism and sharp wit. He scored key roles in movies such as Brown Sugar, The Italian Job and The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, but it was the almost routine experience of rejection that had perhaps the greatest impact on his art. 'It was part of the game. Like, what, are you going to be brittle and fall apart? You just got to give your best, you can't get folded up, like, 'Mom, they don't like me!' You just gotta keep going. Confidence undimmed, he formed Black Jack Johnson, with luminaries from landmark Black rock and metal bands Bad Brains, Funkadelic and Living Colour. 'I was trying to take all Limp Bizkit's money!' he says. 'It was my funky vendetta against what I felt was appropriation.' He seemed unstoppable. 'But then they foiled my plan,' he scowls. 'The label said: 'We don't want a rock record, we want you doing that hippity-hop shit.'' His second album, 2004's The New Danger, juggled rap tracks alongside his Black Jack Johnson material, but by then Bey's momentum had ebbed away. A stronger third LP, 2006's True Magic, was half-heartedly released after more friction with the label; it didn't even have sleeve art. He quit MCA, released 2009's excellent The Ecstatic on indie label Downtown, and ditched the Mos Def moniker in 2012 in favour of Yasiin Bey, the name he'd been using privately since the late 90s. He showed little interest in playing the game he'd made his life's work for years. In 2016 – a turbulent year that saw him exiled from South Africa, where he'd been living on an expired tourist visa for several years – Bey announced his retirement 'from the recording industry … and Hollywood'. 'I was so disillusioned,' he says today, the pain still fresh. 'You start out with idealism and passion, and then you encounter the kind of conduct and values George Orwell called 'inanities'. And they do this shit to everybody, it's not even personal, it's systemic.' When the system itself changed, with the advent of streaming, he says artists got screwed even further. 'That shit is gross,' he says, 'paying people part of a penny for their music. Those motherfuckers are cold blooded, man like Scrooge McDuck, lickin' his lips as he jumps into a pool of gold coins. The music industry of now makes the one I started out in seem charitable. It's completely exploitative.' The retirement didn't hold. But Bey's reluctance to cooperate with the streaming behemoths meant his subsequent work was often hard for fans to find. 2019's Negus was an ambitious album/movie/installation you could only experience if you attended limited-engagement art events in Hong Kong or Marrakech. His long-awaited second album with Talib Kweli, 2022's No Fear of Time, was solely available via the podcast network Luminary (it got a belated physical release last December). For Forensics, Bey has devised a new scheme to evade the streaming paradigm. Merch on sale at shows and via Bandcamp – including lanyards and branded baseball caps – will contain digital 'Bump tags' which, when tapped against a user's smartphone, enable access to online Forensics content, including the group's forthcoming studio release. 'It's lo-fi, hi-tech high art,' Bey says, tugging at his black cap emblazoned with 'Forensics' in white type. 'Our swag is superior, Lord have mercy. Do I look like I'm on some X-Files shit in this? I can't wait to wear it to an airport. 'Let him through security, he must be investigating something!'' Bey's renaissance comes as the world is growing dark. At his fashion week event, he prefaced ROSITA Stone, a track about how the mighty mindlessly brutalise those about them, with what he described as 'a Turkish parable: 'When a clown enters a palace, that does not make him a king, but it may turn the palace into a circus.'' But today he speaks of hope, aware that giving into fear is no answer. 'We've got to resist the despair,' he says. 'It's such a brutal situation, we have no choice but to be beautiful.' He pauses, and sighs. 'I'm just happy to be alive, to be able to create art and beauty, to the best of my ability. Like, to be a human being is a miracle. We're on this spaceship, planet Earth, sharing this experience, and it's crazy. Like, who needs peyote? We're already in outer space, baby.' After too long on the outskirts of the universe, Yasiin Bey has picked up the mic once again. Forensics' streams and merch are available at Their debut studio album is due in the spring.
