Zoom and Enhance on 1896 Film

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Zoom and Enhance on 1896 Film
Number 3712
Broadcast Date FEBRUARY 5, 2020
Episode Length 31:33
Hosts Tom Merritt, Sarah Lane, Roger Chang
Guests Scott Johnson

Denis Shiryaev has upscaled the film classic “L’Arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat: a 50-second silent movie of a train pulling into a station. Using DAIN and Topaz Labs’ Gigapixel AI, he has transformed the original blurry footage into a 4K 60FPS clip.

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Quick Hits

Check Point Software discovered a vulnerability in Philips Hue light bulbs that would upload a malicious over-the-air update to affect color and brightness of the bulb. If the owner reset and re-added the bulb to its network, the exploit could then trigger a buffer overflow to take control of the Hub. Check Point notes the vulnerability takes advantage of the ZigBee communications protocol and therefore may be replicable in other products that use ZigBee. Philips has issued a patch.
LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner announced he's stepping down after 11 years and will become executive chairman in June. His replacement will be Ryan Roslansky, a senior vice president of product at the company and the first person Weiner hired. Tomer Cohen, another VP of product, will move into Roslansky’s role.
A WhatsApp flaw, discovered by researcher Gal Weizman at PerimeterX, showed how an attacker could use cross-site scripting attacks to read the files on the MacOS or Windows versions of the app by using a specially crafted text message, and then get contents of files on the computer. WhatsApp's desktop app was implemented using the Electron software framework, which allows developers to create cross-platform applications based on Web and browser technologies but relies on developers to deploy secure Electron apps.
Google announced that based on research from 45,000 worldwide consumers, ad-blocking changes in Chrome set to be applied later this year will include blocking long, non-skippable pre-roll ads or groups of ads longer than 31 seconds appearing before a video that can't be skipped within the first 5 seconds. Mid-roll ads of any length are included as well. Image or text ads that appear on top of a playing video and are in the middle 1/3 of the video player window or cover more than 20 percent of the video content are also included. Chrome enforcement begins August 5, 2020, and will see the browser “stop showing all ads on sites in any country that repeatedly show these disruptive ads.”

Top Stories

Disney announced its Disney+ streaming service has reached 26.5 million paid subscribers. Analysts had expected 20 million or more. 50% signed up directly and 20% through Verizon. Disney+ is expanding to Western Europe in March and will launch in India March 29 through streaming service Hotstar. ESPN+ subscribers reached 6.6 million and Hulu reached 30.7 million. Disney also announced its intention to expand Hulu internationally in 2021.
Spotify reported 271 million worldwide subscribers, up 31% over a year ago. Paying users rose 29%. Podcast listening grew 200% and 16% of Spotify's monthly active users listen to podcasts. Revenue rose 24% with a loss per share of €1.14 both of which missed expectations. Spotify blamed the loss on payroll taxes related to stock compensation as its stock price rose. The company announced it will acquire Bill Simmons' sports podcast company Ringer. Spotify faces increasing competition in the music streaming market, including India's Gaana which has 152 million monthly active users.
Starting March 5, Twitter may label faked images, video, and other media that have been “significantly and deceptively altered or fabricated” as "manipulated media" and link to a Twitter Moment section that gives more context. If manipulated media is presented as truth and is “likely to impact public safety or cause serious harm,” it may be removed. When making a decision, Twitter will look at accompanying text and account information. Users can appeal decisions. Along with faked images and video, Twitter will consider modified subtitles or VoiceOver as manipulation as well.
ZDNet's Mary Jo Foley reports Microsoft announced internally a reorganization in its Experiences and Devices unit. The Windows experience (client) team will combine with the hardware team under hardware chief Panos Panay starting February 25. Windows Experience head Joe Belfiore will continue to lead the Essential Products Inclusive Community or EPIC team that includes mobile apps, but starting this autumn after a sabbatical, will co-lead the Office Experience Group with Ales Holecek. This does not move Windows Core OS, which is under the Azure Engineering organization. However, the moves further formalize Microsoft's process of designing Surface, Windows Experience and Office together.
Russian security researcher Vladislav Yamak published details of a vulnerability in firmware for chips form Huawei-owned HiSilicon. The chips are often used by other manufacturers in security cameras, Network Video Recorders and DVRS. Yarmak said the exploit combines four security bugs previously reported in March 2013, March 2017, July 2017, and September 2017. The vulnerability would let an attacker access Telnet and login to gain root access. Yarmak did not report the vulnerability to HiSilicon claiming he does not trust the company to fix the issues since they have left these previously known vulnerabilities unpatched. Yarmak has made proof-of-concept code available on GitHub for users to test whether their devices are vulnerable. You can either stop using the devices or restrict network access to these devices to trusted users," especially on device ports 23/tcp, 9530/tcp, 9527/tcp -- the ports that can be exploited in attacks.

Discussion

One of the stalwart pieces of film history is "L'Arrivée d'un train en gare de La Ciotat: a 50-second silent movie of a train pulling into a station. It's the one you'll often see shown along with apocryphal scenes of people ducking as they mistake the train for real. The historic film was made by the Lumière Brothers in 1896 using a Cinématographe camera on 35mm film. Denis Shiryaev has used the DAIN and Topaz Labs' Gigapixel AI enhancement programs to transform the film into a 4K 60fps clip. DAIN creates extra frames to smooth out motion. Gigapixel AI's algorithm is trained to recognize details and complete an image using bilinear and bicubic interpolation. Bilinear interpolation fills in pixels by creating a gradient between the two nearest which is sharp but less accurate. Bicubis samples from the 16 nearest pixels which improves color but can be blurry. Using both helps correct for each other. There's also a 1080p version colorized by the DeOldify neural network.

Mailbag

Writing software can be difficult at the best of times, but writing a time-sensitive, highly concurrent, mission-critical piece of software that is used every four years sounds like a nightmare. Given these demands, I was shocked to hear that the IowaReporterApp wasn't being run at the same time as traditional caucus counting methods. When you have to prove trustworthiness, running both systems in parallel seems like the only way to go. Simulations aren't enough. At least in my opinion.
Sent by Chris Allen

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"The Iowa App Flap" 		Zoom and Enhance on 1896 Film
 Followed by:
"People Don't Talk About Nuro Enough"
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