Here's what's happening at the Japanese pop culture expo By Missael Soto • Published June 30, 2023 • Updated on June 30, 2023 at 6:43 pm Arvin Soun, dressed as an anime character, walks down the steps while posing for photos during the Anime Expo Thursday, July 5, 2018, in Los Angeles. More than 100,000 fans are expected at the expo to celebrate Japanese pop culture. (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong) Thousands of anime fans flock to downtown LA this weekend for the largest convention of its kind in North America. The Anime Expo invites fans of all backgrounds to celebrate Japanese pop culture with a four-day event. The expo begins on Saturday with an opening ceremony that will introduce this year's special guests' like anime creators, artists and voice actors. Here's a preview of what you can expect at the Anime Expo: Fashion Show: Discover some of Japan's latest fashion trends with a fashion show. The showcase intends to present the guests with up and coming Japanese brands that are available for purchase at the event. AMV Competition: The Anime Music Video Competition is an event where fans submit creative music videos which are premiered in front of an audience. The winner is decided by the crowd depending on who they believe had the best music video. Gaming: Test your gaming skills with over 60 free-to-play gaming stations. Play against friends, strangers or even by yourself in a single-player game. Karaoke: Have fun and sing your heart out at the karaoke room with songs from anime's and Japanese pop. There will also be karaoke contests and karaoke quiz shows. Meet and Greets: Meet some of the biggest names in anime. Creators and artists from Japan will be present to sign autographs. Full schedule and times can be found on the [Anime Expo Website](https://www.anime-expo.org/ax/ax-signatures/). Attendees of the expo are invited to show up in cosplay of their favorite Japanese pop culture icon. Tickets to the expo are all sold out including day passes for any of the event's four-days. The expo concludes on Tuesday July 4 with a closing ceremony to send everyone off. [Source](https://www.nbclosangeles.com/entertainment/the-scene-entertainment/la-anime-expo-2023/3180503/)

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Image for article titled Four Ways Criminals Could Use AI to Target More Victims Warnings about artificial intelligence (AI) are ubiquitous right now. They have included fearful messages about AI’s potential to cause the extinction of humans, invoking images of the Terminator movies. The UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has even set up a summit to discuss AI safety. However, we have been using AI tools for a long time – from the algorithms used to recommend relevant products on shopping websites, to cars with technology that recognises traffic signs and provides lane positioning. AI is a tool to increase efficiency, process and sort large volumes of data, and offload decision making. Nevertheless, these tools are open to everyone, including criminals. And we’re already seeing the early stage adoption of AI by criminals. Deepfake technology has been used to generate revenge pornography, for example. Technology enhances the efficiency of criminal activity. It allows lawbreakers to target a greater number of people and helps them be more plausible. Observing how criminals have adapted to, and adopted, technological advances in the past, can provide some clues as to how they might use AI. 1. A better phishing hook AI tools like ChatGPT and Google’s Bard provide writing support, allowing inexperienced writers to craft effective marketing messages, for example. However, this technology could also help criminals sound more believable when contacting potential victims. Think about all those spam phishing emails and texts that are badly written and easily detected. Being plausible is key to being able to elicit information from a victim. Phishing is a numbers game: an estimated 3.4 billion spam emails are sent every day. My own calculations show that if criminals were able to improve their messages so that as little as 0.000005% of them now convinced someone to reveal information, it would result in 6.2 million more phishing victims each year. 2. Automated interactions One of the early uses for AI tools was to automate interactions between customers and services over text, chat messages and the phone. This enabled a faster response to customers and optimised business efficiency. Your first contact with an organisation is likely to be with an AI system, before you get to speak to a human. Criminals can use the same tools to create automated interactions with large numbers of potential victims, at a scale not possible if it were just carried out by humans. They can impersonate legitimate services like banks over the phone and on email, in an attempt to elicit information that would allow them to steal your money. 3. Deepfakes AI is really good at generating mathematical models that can be “trained” on large amounts of real-world data, making those models better at a given task. Deepfake technology in video and audio is an example of this. A deepfake act called Metaphysic, recently demonstrated the technology’s potential when they unveiled a video of Simon Cowell singing opera on the television show America’s Got Talent. This technology is beyond the reach of most criminals, but the ability to use AI to mimic the way a person would respond to texts, write emails, leave voice notes or make phone calls is freely available using AI. So is the data to train it, which can be gathered from videos on social media, for example. The deepfake act Metaphysic perform on America’s Got Talent. Social media has always been a rich seam for criminals mining information on potential targets. There is now the potential for AI to be used to create a deepfake version of you. This deepfake can be exploited to interact with friends and family, convincing them to hand criminals information on you. Gaining a better insight into your life makes it easier to guess passwords or pins. 4. Brute forcing Another technique used by criminals called “brute forcing” could also benefit from AI. This is where many combinations of characters and symbols are tried in turn to see if they match your passwords. That’s why long, complex passwords are safer; they are harder to guess by this method. Brute forcing is resource intensive, but it’s easier if you know something about the person. For example, this allows lists of potential passwords to be ordered according to priority – increasing the efficiency of the process. For instance, they could start off with combinations that relate to the names of family members or pets. Algorithms trained on your data could be used to help build these prioritised lists more accurately and target many people at once – so fewer resources are needed. Specific AI tools could be developed that harvest your online data, then analyse it all to build a profile of you. If, for example, you frequently posted on social media about Taylor Swift, manually going through your posts for password clues would be hard work. Automated tools do this quickly and efficiently. All of this information would go into making the profile, making it easier to guess passwords and pins. Healthy scepticism We should not be frightened of AI, as it could bring real benefits to society. But as with any new technology, society needs to adapt to and understand it. Although we take smart phones for granted now, society had to adjust to having them in our lives. They have largely been beneficial, but uncertainties remain, such as a good amount of screen time for children. As individuals, we should be proactive in our attempts to understand AI, not complacent. We should develop our own approaches to it, maintaining a healthy sense of scepticism. We will need to consider how we verify the validity of what we are reading, hearing or seeing. These simple acts will help society reap the benefits of AI while ensuring we can protect ourselves from potential harms. Want to know more about AI, chatbots, and the future of machine learning? Check out our full coverage of artificial intelligence, or browse our guides to The Best Free AI Art Generators and Everything We Know About OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Daniel Prince, Professor of Cyber Security, Lancaster University This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article. [source](https://gizmodo.com/ai-four-ways-criminals-use-ai-target-more-victims-1850585866)

Twitter's lawsuit over censorship in India has been dismissed Twitter had accused the government of acting 'arbitrarily and disproportionately' with takedown orders. FILE - A sign at Twitter headquarters is shown in San Francisco on Nov. 18, 2022. The Los Angeles District Attorney has left Twitter due to barrage of “vicious” homophobic attacks that were not removed by the social media platform even after they were reported, the office confirmed on Thursday, June 8, 2023. (AP Photo/Jeff Chiu, File) Steve Dent Last year, Twitter sued India over orders to block content within the country, saying the government had applied its 2021 IT laws "arbitrarily and disproportionately." Now, India's Karnataka High Court has dismissed the plea, with a judge saying Twitter had failed to explain why it delayed complying with the new laws in the first place, TechCrunch has reported. The court also imposed a 5 million rupee ($61,000 fine) on the Elon Musk-owned firm. "Your client (Twitter) was given notices and your client did not comply. Punishment for non-compliance is seven years imprisonment and unlimited fine. That also did not deter your client," the judge told Twitter's legal representation. "So you have not given any reason why you delayed compliance, more than a year of delay… then all of sudden you comply and approach the Court. You are not a farmer but a billon dollar company." Twitter’s relationship with India was fraught for much of 2021. In February, the government threatened to jail Twitter employees unless the company removed content related to protests by farmers held that year. Shortly after that, India ordered Twitter to pull tweets criticizing the country’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic. More recently, the government ordered Twitter to block tweets from Freedom House, a nonprofit organization that claimed India was an example of a country where freedom of the press is on the decline. Those incidents put Twitter in a compromising situation. It either had to comply with government orders to block content (and face censorship criticism inside and outside the country), or ignore them and risk losing its legal immunity. In August, it complied with the orders and took down content as ordered. The court order follows recent comments from Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, saying that India threatened to raid employees homes if it didn't comply with orders to remove posts and accounts. In a tweet, India's deputy minister for information technique called that "an outright lie" saying Twitter was "in non-compliance with the law." Twitter filed the suit around the same time that Elon Musk started trying to wiggle out of buying Twitter. Since then, Twitter has often complied with government takedown requests — most recently in Turkey, where it limited access to some tweets ahead of a tightly contested election won by incumbent president Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Twitter's lawsuit over censorship in India has been dismissed [Source](https://www.engadget.com/twitters-lawsuit-over-censorship-in-india-has-been-dismissed-114031691.html?src=rss)