Inventing Video Evidence

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Your Tech Moment™

5 min readJun 10, 2019

Salesforce Marries Tableau / Text-to-DeepFake / Office Spamsters / Ecuador Extradition / Turn Off W10 Updates? / Dirty Deeds Playbook drops this week

Ingrid Lunden: Salesforce is buying data visualization company Tableau for $15.7B in all-stock deal

On the heels of Google buying analytics startup Looker last week for $2.6 billion, Salesforce today announced a huge piece of news in a bid to step up its own work in data visualization and (more generally) tools to help enterprises make sense of the sea of data that they use and amass: Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7 billion in an all-stock deal.
The latter is publicly traded and this deal will involve shares of Tableau Class A and Class B common stock getting exchanged for 1.103 shares of Salesforce common stock, the company said, and so the $15.7 billion figure is the enterprise value of the transaction, based on the average price of Salesforce’s shares as of June 7, 2019.
This is a huge jump on Tableau’s last market cap: it was valued at $10.79 billion at close of trading Friday, according to figures on Google Finance. (Also: trading has halted on its stock in light of this news.)
The two boards have already approved the deal, Salesforce notes. The two companies’ management teams will be hosting a conference call at 8am Eastern and I’ll listen in to that as well to get more details.
This is a huge deal for Salesforce as it continues to diversify beyond CRM software and into deeper layers of analytics.

James Vincent: AI deepfakes are now as simple as typing whatever you want your subject to say

In the latest example of deepfake technology, researchers have shown off new software that uses machine learning to let users edit the text transcript of a video to add, delete, or change the words coming right out of somebody’s mouth.
The work was done by scientists from Stanford University, the Max Planck Institute for Informatics, Princeton University, and Adobe Research, and shows that our ability to edit what people say in videos and create realistic fakes is becoming easier every day.
Type in new speech and the software edits the video
You can see a number of examples of the system’s output…including an edited version of a famous quotation from Apocalypse Now, with the line “I love the smell of napalm in the morning” changed to “I love the smell of french toast in the morning.”
This work is just at the research stage right now and isn’t available as consumer software, but it probably won’t be long until similar services go public. Adobe, for example, has already shared details on prototype software named VoCo, which lets users edit recordings of speech as easily as a picture, and which was used in this research.

See the examples and how multiple techniques are used to achieve these new deepfakes over at The Verge.

It seems we get new warnings every week to “not believe our own eyes” as technology is abused to create “fake news” and “my truth.” Are we being prepared for something so awful or catastrophic that we’re being groomed to question video evidence? How are courts responding to photographic proof, audio recordings, and logs in a world where technology can push the boundaries of belief? I’d love to know what you think. Comment below or engage with me on Twitter.

David Bisson: Microsoft Warns of Malspam Campaign Abusing Office Vulnerability to Distribute Backdoor

Microsoft is warning users to be on the lookout for a malspam campaign that’s abusing an Office vulnerability in order to distribute a backdoor.
On 7 June, Microsoft Security Intelligence took to Twitter to raise awareness of the operation. The campaign, which remains active as of this writing, begins when users receive a malspam email in one of several different European languages. Each of these emails attempt to trick users into opening an attached RTF document.
This file moves the infection chain forward by exploiting CVE-2017–11882. Fixed by Microsoft in November 2017…[affecting] all versions of Microsoft Office, Microsoft Windows and architecture types dating back to 2000.

Read about this problem at Tripwire.

Georgina Torbet: Ecuadorian President blocks extradition of alleged Facebook fraudster

A New York man who fled to Ecuador after allegedly trying to defraud Mark Zuckerberg will not be extradited to the US, Reuters reports.
Paul Ceglia, a wood pellet salesman from Wellsville, is accused of creating a fake contract in 2010 saying Zuckerberg had agreed to give him half of Facebook while he was a student at Harvard. Ceglia was subsequently charged with mail and wire fraud in 2012.
However, months before the start of his trial in 2015, he removed his ankle tracker and disappeared with his family. He spent three and a half years as a fugitive before being arrested in Ecuador in 2018.
It looked like Ceglia would be brought back to the US to face trial when an Ecuadorian court approved his extradition in November 2018. But now the President of Ecuador, Lenin Moreno, has blocked the extradition order.
“In an exercise of national sovereignty, attending to the principle of reciprocity in public international law and for humanitarian reasons … I delegate to you Minister to deny the extradition,” Moreno wrote…in the letter to his interior minister, Reuters reports.
For now, Ceglia will remain in jail in Ecuador, where he has requested asylum.
Ecuador has been known to refuse extradition requests to the US, despite the extradition treaty in place between the two nations. WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange was granted asylum and spent seven years hiding in the Ecuadorian embassy after facing charges of sexual assault and rape.
Assange’s asylum has since been revoked and he is currently imprisoned in the UK. He now faces charges of federal conspiracy for helping a whistleblower break into classified US government computers.

Find this story today over at Engadget.

Woody Leonhard: Save yourself a headache: Make sure Windows automatic update is off

Much has changed in the past month. We’ve seen an emergency cry for all Windows XP, Vista, Win7, Server 2003, 2008 and 2008 R2 systems to get patched in order to fend off widely anticipated BlueKeep attacks. We’ve also seen Microsoft officially release Windows 10 version 1903, with unsuspecting “seekers” now the prime targets.
If you want to avoid the mayhem that seems to accompany every month’s dump of partially-tested patches, it would behoove you to turn off Windows automatic update and wait to see what squishy stuff gets stuck in others’ shoes.
You’ll have to install the June 2019 patches at some point. But for now, discretion’s demonstrably the better part of valor.

Details about why Woody makes this recommendation are over at ComputerWorld.

Look for my new book “The Dirty Deeds Playbook” out this week in paperback and on Amazon’s Kindle program. It’s a satirical look at how to sew chaos in American elections for 2020 and beyond. ISBN: 9781072931430

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