AI Art Examples

AI Art Examples — independent reviews, comparisons, pricing and step-by-step guides on Aizhi.

  • Split screen (computing)

    Split screen (computing)

    Split screen is a display technique in computer graphics that consists of dividing graphics and/or text into non-overlapping adjacent parts, typically as two or four rectangular areas. This allows for the simultaneous presentation of (usually) related graphical and textual information on a computer display. TV sports adopted this presentation methodology in the 1960s for instant replay. Non-dynamic split screens differ from windowing systems in that the latter allowed overlapping and freely movable parts of the screen (the "windows") to present both related and unrelated application data to the user. In contrast, split-screen views are strictly limited to fixed positions. The split screen technique can also be used to run two instances of an application, potentially allowing another user to interact with the second instance. == In operating systems == Split screen modes are used by mobile operating systems to enable computer multitasking similar to the window interface present in desktop operating systems. Android supports split screen view of two apps natively on all devices, while certain devices, such as Samsung Galaxy Z TriFold, support three sumultaneous views. Split screen functionality is not supported on iOS, but a similar feature called Split View is present in iPadOS, first introduced in 2015 with the first generation of iPad Pro. == In video games == The split screen feature is commonly used in non-networked, also known as couch co-op, video games with multiplayer options. In its most easily understood form, a split screen for a multiplayer video game is an audiovisual output device (usually a standard television for video game consoles) where the display has been divided into 2-4 equally sized areas (depending on number of players) so that the players can explore different areas simultaneously without being close to each other. This has historically been remarkably popular on consoles, which until the 2000s did not have access to the Internet or any other network and is less common today with modern support for networked console-to-console multiplayer. In competitive split-screen games, it is customarily considered cheating to look at another player's screen section to gain an advantage. === History === Split screen gaming dates back to at least the 1970s, with games such Drag Race (1977) from Kee Games in the arcades being presented in this format. It has always been a common feature of two or more player home console and computer games too, with notable titles being Kikstart II for 8-bit systems, a number of 16-bit racing games (such as Lotus Esprit Turbo Challenge and Road Rash II), and action/strategy games (such as Toejam & Earl and Lemmings), all employing a vertical or horizontal screen split for two player games. Xenophobe is notable as a three-way split screen arcade title, although on home platforms it was reduced to one or two screens. The addition of four controller ports on home consoles also ushered in more four-way split screen games, with Mario Kart 64 and Goldeneye 007 on the Nintendo 64 being two well known examples. In arcades, machines tended to move towards having a whole screen for each player, or multiple connected machines, for multiplayer. On home machines, especially in the first and third person shooter genres, multiplayer is now more common over a network or the internet rather than locally with split screen. Starting from the late 2000s, the presence of split screen multiplayer has largely been declining due to the increasing prevalence of online multiplayer, though TechRadar reported a resurgence of split screen due to support from independent studios and increased interest from the players.

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  • Completeness (cryptography)

    Completeness (cryptography)

    In cryptography, a boolean function is said to be complete if the value of each output bit depends on all input bits. This is a desirable property to have in an encryption cipher, so that if one bit of the input (plaintext) is changed, every bit of the output (ciphertext) has an average of 50% probability of changing. The easiest way to show why this is good is the following: consider that if we changed our 8-byte plaintext's last byte, it would only have any effect on the 8th byte of the ciphertext. This would mean that if the attacker guessed 256 different plaintext-ciphertext pairs, he would always know the last byte of every 8byte sequence we send (effectively 12.5% of all our data). Finding out 256 plaintext-ciphertext pairs is not hard at all in the internet world, given that standard protocols are used, and standard protocols have standard headers and commands (e.g. "get", "put", "mail from:", etc.) which the attacker can safely guess. On the other hand, if our cipher has this property (and is generally secure in other ways, too), the attacker would need to collect 264 (~1020) plaintext-ciphertext pairs to crack the cipher in this way.

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  • Data validation and reconciliation

    Data validation and reconciliation

    Industrial process data validation and reconciliation, or more briefly, process data reconciliation (PDR), is a technology that uses process information and mathematical methods in order to automatically ensure data validation and reconciliation by correcting measurements in industrial processes. The use of PDR allows for extracting accurate and reliable information about the state of industry processes from raw measurement data and produces a single consistent set of data representing the most likely process operation. == Models, data and measurement errors == Industrial processes, for example chemical or thermodynamic processes in chemical plants, refineries, oil or gas production sites, or power plants, are often represented by two fundamental means: Models that express the general structure of the processes, Data that reflects the state of the processes at a given point in time. Models can have different levels of detail, for example one can incorporate simple mass or compound conservation balances, or more advanced thermodynamic models including energy conservation laws. Mathematically the model can be expressed by a nonlinear system of equations F ( y ) = 0 {\displaystyle F(y)=0\,} in the variables y = ( y 1 , … , y n ) {\displaystyle y=(y_{1},\ldots ,y_{n})} , which incorporates all the above-mentioned system constraints (for example the mass or heat balances around a unit). A variable could be the temperature or the pressure at a certain place in the plant. === Error types === Data originates typically from measurements taken at different places throughout the industrial site, for example temperature, pressure, volumetric flow rate measurements etc. To understand the basic principles of PDR, it is important to first recognize that plant measurements are never 100% correct, i.e. raw measurement y {\displaystyle y\,} is not a solution of the nonlinear system F ( y ) = 0 {\displaystyle F(y)=0\,\!} . When using measurements without correction to generate plant balances, it is common to have incoherencies. Measurement errors can be categorized into two basic types: random errors due to intrinsic sensor accuracy and systematic errors (or gross errors) due to sensor calibration or faulty data transmission. Random errors means that the measurement y {\displaystyle y\,\!} is a random variable with mean y ∗ {\displaystyle y^{}\,\!} , where y ∗ {\displaystyle y^{}\,\!} is the true value that is typically not known. A systematic error on the other hand is characterized by a measurement y {\displaystyle y\,\!} which is a random variable with mean y ¯ {\displaystyle {\bar {y}}\,\!} , which is not equal to the true value y ∗ {\displaystyle y^{}\,} . For ease in deriving and implementing an optimal estimation solution, and based on arguments that errors are the sum of many factors (so that the Central limit theorem has some effect), data reconciliation assumes these errors are normally distributed. Other sources of errors when calculating plant balances include process faults such as leaks, unmodeled heat losses, incorrect physical properties or other physical parameters used in equations, and incorrect structure such as unmodeled bypass lines. Other errors include unmodeled plant dynamics such as holdup changes, and other instabilities in plant operations that violate steady state (algebraic) models. Additional dynamic errors arise when measurements and samples are not taken at the same time, especially lab analyses. The normal practice of using time averages for the data input partly reduces the dynamic problems. However, that does not completely resolve timing inconsistencies for infrequently-sampled data like lab analyses. This use of average values, like a moving average, acts as a low-pass filter, so high frequency noise is mostly eliminated. The result is that, in practice, data reconciliation is mainly making adjustments to correct systematic errors like biases. === Necessity of removing measurement errors === ISA-95 is the international standard for the integration of enterprise and control systems It asserts that: Data reconciliation is a serious issue for enterprise-control integration. The data have to be valid to be useful for the enterprise system. The data must often be determined from physical measurements that have associated error factors. This must usually be converted into exact values for the enterprise system. This conversion may require manual, or intelligent reconciliation of the converted values [...]. Systems must be set up to ensure that accurate data are sent to production and from production. Inadvertent operator or clerical errors may result in too much production, too little production, the wrong production, incorrect inventory, or missing inventory. == History == PDR has become more and more important due to industrial processes that are becoming more and more complex. PDR started in the early 1960s with applications aiming at closing material balances in production processes where raw measurements were available for all variables. At the same time the problem of gross error identification and elimination has been presented. In the late 1960s and 1970s unmeasured variables were taken into account in the data reconciliation process., PDR also became more mature by considering general nonlinear equation systems coming from thermodynamic models., , Quasi steady state dynamics for filtering and simultaneous parameter estimation over time were introduced in 1977 by Stanley and Mah. Dynamic PDR was formulated as a nonlinear optimization problem by Liebman et al. in 1992. == Data reconciliation == Data reconciliation is a technique that targets at correcting measurement errors that are due to measurement noise, i.e. random errors. From a statistical point of view the main assumption is that no systematic errors exist in the set of measurements, since they may bias the reconciliation results and reduce the robustness of the reconciliation. Given n {\displaystyle n} measurements y i {\displaystyle y_{i}} , data reconciliation can mathematically be expressed as an optimization problem of the following form: min x , y ∗ ∑ i = 1 n ( y i ∗ − y i σ i ) 2 subject to F ( x , y ∗ ) = 0 y min ≤ y ∗ ≤ y max x min ≤ x ≤ x max , {\displaystyle {\begin{aligned}\min _{x,y^{}}&\sum _{i=1}^{n}\left({\frac {y_{i}^{}-y_{i}}{\sigma _{i}}}\right)^{2}\\{\text{subject to }}&F(x,y^{})=0\\&y_{\min }\leq y^{}\leq y_{\max }\\&x_{\min }\leq x\leq x_{\max },\end{aligned}}\,\!} where y i ∗ {\displaystyle y_{i}^{}\,\!} is the reconciled value of the i {\displaystyle i} -th measurement ( i = 1 , … , n {\displaystyle i=1,\ldots ,n\,\!} ), y i {\displaystyle y_{i}\,\!} is the measured value of the i {\displaystyle i} -th measurement ( i = 1 , … , n {\displaystyle i=1,\ldots ,n\,\!} ), x j {\displaystyle x_{j}\,\!} is the j {\displaystyle j} -th unmeasured variable ( j = 1 , … , m {\displaystyle j=1,\ldots ,m\,\!} ), and σ i {\displaystyle \sigma _{i}\,\!} is the standard deviation of the i {\displaystyle i} -th measurement ( i = 1 , … , n {\displaystyle i=1,\ldots ,n\,\!} ), F ( x , y ∗ ) = 0 {\displaystyle F(x,y^{})=0\,\!} are the p {\displaystyle p\,\!} process equality constraints and x min , x max , y min , y max {\displaystyle x_{\min },x_{\max },y_{\min },y_{\max }\,\!} are the bounds on the measured and unmeasured variables. The term ( y i ∗ − y i σ i ) 2 {\displaystyle \left({\frac {y_{i}^{}-y_{i}}{\sigma _{i}}}\right)^{2}\,\!} is called the penalty of measurement i. The objective function is the sum of the penalties, which will be denoted in the following by f ( y ∗ ) = ∑ i = 1 n ( y i ∗ − y i σ i ) 2 {\displaystyle f(y^{})=\sum _{i=1}^{n}\left({\frac {y_{i}^{}-y_{i}}{\sigma _{i}}}\right)^{2}} . In other words, one wants to minimize the overall correction (measured in the least squares term) that is needed in order to satisfy the system constraints. Additionally, each least squares term is weighted by the standard deviation of the corresponding measurement. The standard deviation is related to the accuracy of the measurement. For example, at a 95% confidence level, the standard deviation is about half the accuracy. === Redundancy === Data reconciliation relies strongly on the concept of redundancy to correct the measurements as little as possible in order to satisfy the process constraints. Here, redundancy is defined differently from redundancy in information theory. Instead, redundancy arises from combining sensor data with the model (algebraic constraints), sometimes more specifically called "spatial redundancy", "analytical redundancy", or "topological redundancy". Redundancy can be due to sensor redundancy, where sensors are duplicated in order to have more than one measurement of the same quantity. Redundancy also arises when a single variable can be estimated in several independent ways from separate sets of measurements at a given time or time averaging period, using the algebraic constraints. Redundancy is linked to the concept

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  • Locally recoverable code

    Locally recoverable code

    Locally recoverable codes are a family of error correction codes that were introduced first by D. S. Papailiopoulos and A. G. Dimakis and have been widely studied in information theory due to their applications related to distributive and cloud storage systems. An [ n , k , d , r ] q {\displaystyle [n,k,d,r]_{q}} LRC is an [ n , k , d ] q {\displaystyle [n,k,d]_{q}} linear code such that there is a function f i {\displaystyle f_{i}} that takes as input i {\displaystyle i} and a set of r {\displaystyle r} other coordinates of a codeword c = ( c 1 , … , c n ) ∈ C {\displaystyle c=(c_{1},\ldots ,c_{n})\in C} different from c i {\displaystyle c_{i}} , and outputs c i {\displaystyle c_{i}} . == Overview == Erasure-correcting codes, or simply erasure codes, for distributed and cloud storage systems, are becoming more and more popular as a result of the present spike in demand for cloud computing and storage services. This has inspired researchers in the fields of information and coding theory to investigate new facets of codes that are specifically suited for use with storage systems. It is well-known that LRC is a code that needs only a limited set of other symbols to be accessed in order to restore every symbol in a codeword. This idea is very important for distributed and cloud storage systems since the most common error case is when one storage node fails (erasure). The main objective is to recover as much data as possible from the fewest additional storage nodes in order to restore the node. Hence, Locally Recoverable Codes are crucial for such systems. The following definition of the LRC follows from the description above: an [ n , k , r ] {\displaystyle [n,k,r]} -Locally Recoverable Code (LRC) of length n {\displaystyle n} is a code that produces an n {\displaystyle n} -symbol codeword from k {\displaystyle k} information symbols, and for any symbol of the codeword, there exist at most r {\displaystyle r} other symbols such that the value of the symbol can be recovered from them. The locality parameter satisfies 1 ≤ r ≤ k {\displaystyle 1\leq r\leq k} because the entire codeword can be found by accessing k {\displaystyle k} symbols other than the erased symbol. Furthermore, Locally Recoverable Codes, having the minimum distance d {\displaystyle d} , can recover d − 1 {\displaystyle d-1} erasures. == Definition == Let C {\displaystyle C} be a [ n , k , d ] q {\displaystyle [n,k,d]_{q}} linear code. For i ∈ { 1 , … , n } {\displaystyle i\in \{1,\ldots ,n\}} , let us denote by r i {\displaystyle r_{i}} the minimum number of other coordinates we have to look at to recover an erasure in coordinate i {\displaystyle i} . The number r i {\displaystyle r_{i}} is said to be the locality of the i {\displaystyle i} -th coordinate of the code. The locality of the code is defined as An [ n , k , d , r ] q {\displaystyle [n,k,d,r]_{q}} locally recoverable code (LRC) is an [ n , k , d ] q {\displaystyle [n,k,d]_{q}} linear code C ∈ F q n {\displaystyle C\in \mathbb {F} _{q}^{n}} with locality r {\displaystyle r} . Let C {\displaystyle C} be an [ n , k , d ] q {\displaystyle [n,k,d]_{q}} -locally recoverable code. Then an erased component can be recovered linearly, i.e. for every i ∈ { 1 , … , n } {\displaystyle i\in \{1,\ldots ,n\}} , the space of linear equations of the code contains elements of the form x i = f ( x i 1 , … , x i r ) {\displaystyle x_{i}=f(x_{i_{1}},\ldots ,x_{i_{r}})} , where i j ≠ i {\displaystyle i_{j}\neq i} . == Optimal locally recoverable codes == Theorem Let n = ( r + 1 ) s {\displaystyle n=(r+1)s} and let C {\displaystyle C} be an [ n , k , d ] q {\displaystyle [n,k,d]_{q}} -locally recoverable code having s {\displaystyle s} disjoint locality sets of size r + 1 {\displaystyle r+1} . Then An [ n , k , d , r ] q {\displaystyle [n,k,d,r]_{q}} -LRC C {\displaystyle C} is said to be optimal if the minimum distance of C {\displaystyle C} satisfies == Tamo–Barg codes == Let f ∈ F q [ x ] {\displaystyle f\in \mathbb {F} _{q}[x]} be a polynomial and let ℓ {\displaystyle \ell } be a positive integer. Then f {\displaystyle f} is said to be ( r {\displaystyle r} , ℓ {\displaystyle \ell } )-good if • f {\displaystyle f} has degree r + 1 {\displaystyle r+1} , • there exist distinct subsets A 1 , … , A ℓ {\displaystyle A_{1},\ldots ,A_{\ell }} of F q {\displaystyle \mathbb {F} _{q}} such that – for any i ∈ { 1 , … , ℓ } {\displaystyle i\in \{1,\ldots ,\ell \}} , f ( A i ) = { t i } {\displaystyle f(A_{i})=\{t_{i}\}} for some t i ∈ F q {\displaystyle t_{i}\in \mathbb {F} _{q}} , i.e., f {\displaystyle f} is constant on A i {\displaystyle A_{i}} , – # A i = r + 1 {\displaystyle \#A_{i}=r+1} , – A i ∩ A j = ∅ {\displaystyle A_{i}\cap A_{j}=\varnothing } for any i ≠ j {\displaystyle i\neq j} . We say that { A 1 , … , A ℓ {\displaystyle A_{1},\ldots ,A_{\ell }} } is a splitting covering for f {\displaystyle f} . === Tamo–Barg construction === The Tamo–Barg construction utilizes good polynomials. • Suppose that a ( r , ℓ ) {\displaystyle (r,\ell )} -good polynomial f ( x ) {\displaystyle f(x)} over F q {\displaystyle \mathbb {F} _{q}} is given with splitting covering i ∈ { 1 , … , ℓ } {\displaystyle i\in \{1,\ldots ,\ell \}} . • Let s ≤ ℓ − 1 {\displaystyle s\leq \ell -1} be a positive integer. • Consider the following F q {\displaystyle \mathbb {F} _{q}} -vector space of polynomials V = { ∑ i = 0 s g i ( x ) f ( x ) i : deg ⁡ ( g i ( x ) ) ≤ deg ⁡ ( f ( x ) ) − 2 } . {\displaystyle V=\left\{\sum _{i=0}^{s}g_{i}(x)f(x)^{i}:\deg(g_{i}(x))\leq \deg(f(x))-2\right\}.} • Let T = ⋃ i = 1 ℓ A i {\textstyle T=\bigcup _{i=1}^{\ell }A_{i}} . • The code { ev T ⁡ ( g ) : g ∈ V } {\displaystyle \{\operatorname {ev} _{T}(g):g\in V\}} is an ( ( r + 1 ) ℓ , ( s + 1 ) r , d , r ) {\displaystyle ((r+1)\ell ,(s+1)r,d,r)} -optimal locally coverable code, where ev T {\displaystyle \operatorname {ev} _{T}} denotes evaluation of g {\displaystyle g} at all points in the set T {\displaystyle T} . === Parameters of Tamo–Barg codes === • Length. The length is the number of evaluation points. Because the sets A i {\displaystyle A_{i}} are disjoint for i ∈ { 1 , … , ℓ } {\displaystyle i\in \{1,\ldots ,\ell \}} , the length of the code is | T | = ( r + 1 ) ℓ {\displaystyle |T|=(r+1)\ell } . • Dimension. The dimension of the code is ( s + 1 ) r {\displaystyle (s+1)r} , for s {\displaystyle s} ≤ ℓ − 1 {\displaystyle \ell -1} , as each g i {\displaystyle g_{i}} has degree at most deg ⁡ ( f ( x ) ) − 2 {\displaystyle \deg(f(x))-2} , covering a vector space of dimension deg ⁡ ( f ( x ) ) − 1 = r {\displaystyle \deg(f(x))-1=r} , and by the construction of V {\displaystyle V} , there are s + 1 {\displaystyle s+1} distinct g i {\displaystyle g_{i}} . • Distance. The distance is given by the fact that V ⊆ F q [ x ] ≤ k {\displaystyle V\subseteq \mathbb {F} _{q}[x]_{\leq k}} , where k = r + 1 − 2 + s ( r + 1 ) {\displaystyle k=r+1-2+s(r+1)} , and the obtained code is the Reed-Solomon code of degree at most k {\displaystyle k} , so the minimum distance equals ( r + 1 ) ℓ − ( ( r + 1 ) − 2 + s ( r + 1 ) ) {\displaystyle (r+1)\ell -((r+1)-2+s(r+1))} . • Locality. After the erasure of the single component, the evaluation at a i ∈ A i {\displaystyle a_{i}\in A_{i}} , where | A i | = r + 1 {\displaystyle |A_{i}|=r+1} , is unknown, but the evaluations for all other a ∈ A i {\displaystyle a\in A_{i}} are known, so at most r {\displaystyle r} evaluations are needed to uniquely determine the erased component, which gives us the locality of r {\displaystyle r} . To see this, g {\displaystyle g} restricted to A j {\displaystyle A_{j}} can be described by a polynomial h {\displaystyle h} of degree at most deg ⁡ ( f ( x ) ) − 2 = r + 1 − 2 = r − 1 {\displaystyle \deg(f(x))-2=r+1-2=r-1} thanks to the form of the elements in V {\displaystyle V} (i.e., thanks to the fact that f {\displaystyle f} is constant on A j {\displaystyle A_{j}} , and the g i {\displaystyle g_{i}} 's have degree at most deg ⁡ ( f ( x ) ) − 2 {\displaystyle \deg(f(x))-2} ). On the other hand | A j ∖ { a j } | = r {\displaystyle |A_{j}\backslash \{a_{j}\}|=r} , and r {\displaystyle r} evaluations uniquely determine a polynomial of degree r − 1 {\displaystyle r-1} . Therefore h {\displaystyle h} can be constructed and evaluated at a j {\displaystyle a_{j}} to recover g ( a j ) {\displaystyle g(a_{j})} . === Example of Tamo–Barg construction === We will use x 5 ∈ F 41 [ x ] {\displaystyle x^{5}\in \mathbb {F} _{41}[x]} to construct [ 15 , 8 , 6 , 4 ] {\displaystyle [15,8,6,4]} -LRC. Notice that the degree of this polynomial is 5, and it is constant on A i {\displaystyle A_{i}} for i ∈ { 1 , … , 8 } {\displaystyle i\in \{1,\ldots ,8\}} , where A 1 = { 1 , 10 , 16 , 18 , 37 } {\displaystyle A_{1}=\{1,10,16,18,37\}} , A 2 = 2 A 1 {\displaystyle A_{2}=2A_{1}} , A 3 = 3 A 1 {\displaystyle A_{3}=3A_{1}} , A 4 = 4 A 1 {\displaystyle A_{4}=4A_{1}} , A 5 = 5 A 1 {\displaystyle A_{5}=5A_{1}} , A 6 = 6 A 1 {\displaystyle A_{6}=6A_{1}}

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  • Randomized Hough transform

    Randomized Hough transform

    Hough transforms are techniques for object detection, a critical step in many implementations of computer vision, or data mining from images. Specifically, the Randomized Hough transform is a probabilistic variant to the classical Hough transform, and is commonly used to detect curves (straight line, circle, ellipse, etc.) The basic idea of Hough transform (HT) is to implement a voting procedure for all potential curves in the image, and at the termination of the algorithm, curves that do exist in the image will have relatively high voting scores. Randomized Hough transform (RHT) is different from HT in that it tries to avoid conducting the computationally expensive voting process for every nonzero pixel in the image by taking advantage of the geometric properties of analytical curves, and thus improve the time efficiency and reduce the storage requirement of the original algorithm. == Motivation == Although Hough transform (HT) has been widely used in curve detection, it has two major drawbacks: First, for each nonzero pixel in the image, the parameters for the existing curve and redundant ones are both accumulated during the voting procedure. Second, the accumulator array (or Hough space) is predefined in a heuristic way. The more accuracy needed, the higher parameter resolution should be defined. These two needs usually result in a large storage requirement and low speed for real applications. Therefore, RHT was brought up to tackle this problem. == Implementation == In comparison with HT, RHT takes advantage of the fact that some analytical curves can be fully determined by a certain number of points on the curve. For example, a straight line can be determined by two points, and an ellipse (or a circle) can be determined by three points. The case of ellipse detection can be used to illustrate the basic idea of RHT. The whole process generally consists of three steps: Fit ellipses with randomly selected points. Update the accumulator array and corresponding scores. Output the ellipses with scores higher than some predefined threshold. === Ellipse fitting === One general equation for defining ellipses is: a ( x − p ) 2 + 2 b ( x − p ) ( y − q ) + c ( y − q ) 2 = 1 {\displaystyle a(x-p)^{2}+2b(x-p)(y-q)+c(y-q)^{2}=1} with restriction: a c − b 2 > 0 {\displaystyle ac-b^{2}>0} However, an ellipse can be fully determined if one knows three points on it and the tangents in these points. RHT starts by randomly selecting three points on the ellipse. Let them be X 1 {\displaystyle X_{1}} , X 2 {\displaystyle X_{2}} and X 3 {\displaystyle X_{3}} . The first step is to find the tangents of these three points. They can be found by fitting a straight line using least squares technique for a small window of neighboring pixels. The next step is to find the intersection points of the tangent lines. This can be easily done by solving the line equations found in the previous step. Then let the intersection points be T 12 {\displaystyle T_{12}} and T 23 {\displaystyle T_{23}} , the midpoints of line segments X 1 X 2 {\displaystyle X_{1}X_{2}} and X 2 X 3 {\displaystyle X_{2}X_{3}} be M 12 {\displaystyle M_{12}} and M 23 {\displaystyle M_{23}} . Then the center of the ellipse will lie in the intersection of T 12 M 12 {\displaystyle T_{12}M_{12}} and T 23 M 23 {\displaystyle T_{23}M_{23}} . Again, the coordinates of the intersected point can be determined by solving line equations and the detailed process is skipped here for conciseness. Let the coordinates of ellipse center found in previous step be ( x 0 , y 0 ) {\displaystyle (x_{0},y_{0})} . Then the center can be translated to the origin with x ′ = x − x 0 {\displaystyle x'=x-x_{0}} and y ′ = y − y 0 {\displaystyle y'=y-y_{0}} so that the ellipse equation can be simplified to: a x ′ 2 + 2 b x ′ y ′ + c y ′ 2 = 1 {\displaystyle ax'^{2}+2bx'y'+cy'^{2}=1} Now we can solve for the rest of ellipse parameters: a {\displaystyle a} , b {\displaystyle b} and c {\displaystyle c} by substituting the coordinates of X 1 {\displaystyle X_{1}} , X 2 {\displaystyle X_{2}} and X 3 {\displaystyle X_{3}} into the equation above. === Accumulating === With the ellipse parameters determined from previous stage, the accumulator array can be updated correspondingly. Different from classical Hough transform, RHT does not keep "grid of buckets" as the accumulator array. Rather, it first calculates the similarities between the newly detected ellipse and the ones already stored in accumulator array. Different metrics can be used to calculate the similarity. As long as the similarity exceeds some predefined threshold, replace the one in the accumulator with the average of both ellipses and add 1 to its score. Otherwise, initialize this ellipse to an empty position in the accumulator and assign a score of 1. === Termination === Once the score of one candidate ellipse exceeds the threshold, it is determined as existing in the image (in other words, this ellipse is detected), and should be removed from the image and accumulator array so that the algorithm can detect other potential ellipses faster. The algorithm terminates when the number of iterations reaches a maximum limit or all the ellipses have been detected. Pseudo code for RHT: while (we find ellipses AND not reached the maximum epoch) { for (a fixed number of iterations) { Find a potential ellipse. if (the ellipse is similar to an ellipse in the accumulator) then Replace the one in the accumulator with the average of two ellipses and add 1 to the score; else Insert the ellipse into an empty position in the accumulator with a score of 1; } Select the ellipse with the best score and save it in a best ellipse table; Eliminate the pixels of the best ellipse from the image; Empty the accumulator; }

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  • Sysomos

    Sysomos

    Sysomos Inc. is a Toronto-based social media analytics company owned by Outside Insight market leaders Meltwater. The company developed text analytics and machine learning technologies for user generated content, and served 80% of the top agencies and Fortune 500. == History == Sysomos was founded by Nilesh Bansal and Nick Koudas. The company is a spinoff of the University of Toronto research project BlogScope. The BlogScope project, which started in 2005, resulted in creation of the underlying content aggregation and analysis engine commercialized by Sysomos. The company raised venture capital in 2008 and was acquired by Marketwire in 2010. The company's original flagship product, Media Analysis Platform (MAP), mines and analyzes content from social media or user-generated content to create a picture of media coverage. Sysomos launched its flagship offering MAP in Sept 2007, followed by addition of Heartbeat to its product suite in 2009. In addition to the two main products, the company released FourWhere, a free location-based social search service that mashes up Foursquare in March 2010. The company also offers Sysomos Heartbeat which provides social media monitoring and engagement capabilities to communication professionals, brand managers and customer support groups. In 2013, Heartbeat was extended to add publishing components to deliver a complete end-to-end social media marketing platform. On July 6, 2010, it was announced that Marketwire, a press release distribution company, had acquired Sysomos. After the acquisition, Sysomos founders Nick Koudas and Nilesh Bansal, left Sysomos to start Aislelabs. In February 2015, Sysomos split from Marketwired, as an independent company, and appointed Adnan Ahmed as the new CEO. In March 2015, newly independent Sysomos launched a redesign for its Heartbeat product and a new API for its MAP product. In the same year, the company acquired Expion. In September 2016, Peter Heffring was announced as the new CEO. In April 2017, Sysomos showcased a new unified platform offering new insights. In April 2018, media monitoring firm Meltwater announced it had acquired Sysomos. The CEO of Sysomos, Peter Heffring, said the company will continue to operate as an independent unit of Meltwater. Heffring will run the social analytics division of Meltwater. == Reports == Inside Twitter series of reports is the most extensive third-party survey on Twitter's growth and demographics. Another extensive survey regarding the top 5% of most active Twitter users found that over 25% of all tweets are machine created. The report also confirms Twitter's international growth. Inside Facebook Pages report found that only four percent of pages have more than 10,000 fans, 0.76% of pages have more than 100,000 fans, and 0.05% of pages (or 297 in total) have more than a million fans. Inside YouTube reports focus more on video hosting services and YouTube.

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  • White-box cryptography

    White-box cryptography

    In cryptography, the white-box model refers to an extreme attack scenario, in which an adversary has full unrestricted access to a cryptographic implementation, most commonly of a block cipher such as the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES). A variety of security goals may be posed (see the section below), the most fundamental being "unbreakability", requiring that any (bounded) attacker should not be able to extract the secret key hardcoded in the implementation, while at the same time the implementation must be fully functional. In contrast, the black-box model only provides an oracle access to the analyzed cryptographic primitive (in the form of encryption and/or decryption queries). There is also a model in-between, the so-called gray-box model, which corresponds to additional information leakage from the implementation, more commonly referred to as side-channel leakage. White-box cryptography is a practice and study of techniques for designing and attacking white-box implementations. It has many applications, including digital rights management (DRM), pay television, protection of cryptographic keys in the presence of malware, mobile payments and cryptocurrency wallets. Examples of DRM systems employing white-box implementations include CSS and Widevine. White-box cryptography is closely related to the more general notions of obfuscation, in particular, to Black-box obfuscation, proven to be impossible, and to Indistinguishability obfuscation, constructed recently under well-founded assumptions but so far being infeasible to implement in practice. As of January 2023, there are no publicly known unbroken white-box designs of standard symmetric encryption schemes. On the other hand, there exist many unbroken white-box implementations of dedicated block ciphers designed specifically to achieve incompressibility (see § Security goals). == Security goals == Depending on the application, different security goals may be required from a white-box implementation. Specifically, for symmetric-key algorithms the following are distinguished: Unbreakability is the most fundamental goal requiring that a bounded attacker should not be able to recover the secret key embedded in the white-box implementation. Without this requirement, all other security goals are unreachable since a successful attacker can simply use a reference implementation of the encryption scheme together with the extracted key. One-wayness requires that a white-box implementation of an encryption scheme can not be used by a bounded attacker to decrypt ciphertexts. This requirement essentially turns a symmetric encryption scheme into a public-key encryption scheme, where the white-box implementation plays the role of the public key associated to the embedded secret key. This idea was proposed already in the famous work of Diffie and Hellman in 1976 as a potential public-key encryption candidate. Code lifting security is an informal requirement on the context, in which the white-box program is being executed. It demands that an attacker can not extract a functional copy of the program. This goal is particularly relevant in the DRM setting. Code obfuscation techniques are often used to achieve this goal. A commonly used technique is to compose the white-box implementation with so-called external encodings. These are lightweight secret encodings that modify the function computed by the white-box part of an application. It is required that their effect is canceled in other parts of the application in an obscure way, using code obfuscation techniques. Alternatively, the canceling counterparts can be applied on a remote server. Incompressibility requires that an attacker can not significantly compress a given white-box implementation. This can be seen as a way to achieve code lifting security (see above), since exfiltrating a large program from a constrained device (for example, an embedded or a mobile device) can be time-consuming and may be easy to detect by a firewall. Examples of incompressible designs include SPACE cipher, SPNbox, WhiteKey and WhiteBlock. These ciphers use large lookup tables that can be pseudorandomly generated from a secret master key. Although this makes the recovery of the master key hard, the lookup tables themselves play the role of an equivalent secret key. Thus, unbreakability is achieved only partially. Traceability (Traitor tracing) requires that each distributed white-box implementation contains a digital watermark allowing identification of the guilty user in case the white-box program is being leaked and distributed publicly. == History == The white-box model with initial attempts of white-box DES and AES implementations were first proposed by Chow, Eisen, Johnson and van Oorshot in 2003. The designs were based on representing the cipher as a network of lookup tables and obfuscating the tables by composing them with small (4- or 8-bit) random encodings. Such protection satisfied a property that each single obfuscated table individually does not contain any information about the secret key. Therefore, a potential attacker has to combine several tables in their analysis. The first two schemes were broken in 2004 by Billet, Gilbert, and Ech-Chatbi using structural cryptanalysis. The attack was subsequently called "the BGE attack". The numerous consequent design attempts (2005-2022) were quickly broken by practical dedicated attacks. In 2016, Bos, Hubain, Michiels and Teuwen showed that an adaptation of standard side-channel power analysis attacks can be used to efficiently and fully automatically break most existing white-box designs. This result created a new research direction about generic attacks (correlation-based, algebraic, fault injection) and protections against them. == Competitions == Four editions of the WhibOx contest were held in 2017, 2019, 2021 and 2024 respectively. These competitions invited white-box designers both from academia and industry to submit their implementation in the form of (possibly obfuscated) C code. At the same time, everyone could attempt to attack these programs and recover the embedded secret key. Each of these competitions lasted for about 4-5 months. WhibOx 2017 / CHES 2017 Capture the Flag Challenge targeted the standard AES block cipher. Among 94 submitted implementations, all were broken during the competition, with the strongest one staying unbroken for 28 days. WhibOx 2019 / CHES 2019 Capture the Flag Challenge again targeted the AES block cipher. Among 27 submitted implementations, 3 programs stayed unbroken throughout the competition, but were broken after 51 days since the publication. WhibOx 2021 / CHES 2021 Capture the Flag Challenge changed the target to ECDSA, a digital signature scheme based on elliptic curves. Among 97 submitted implementations, all were broken within at most 2 days. WhibOx 2024 / CHES 2024 Capture the Flag Challenge again targeted ECDSA. Among 47 submitted implementations, all were broken during the competition, with the strongest one staying unbroken for almost 5 days.

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  • Pivot to video

    Pivot to video

    "Pivot to video" is a phrase referring to the trend, starting in 2015, of media publishing companies cutting staff resources for written content (generally published on their own web sites) in favor of short-form video content (often published on third-party platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, Snapchat, and TikTok). These moves were generally presented by publishers as a response to changes in social media traffic or to changes in the media consumption habits of younger audiences. However, many media commentators have argued that this shift was primarily motivated by advertising revenue, and that only advertisers, not consumers, prefer video over text. The pivot's contribution to job loss in the media industry has given the phrase "pivot to video" an association with decline, especially in a business context. Commentators have also noted a lack of transparency and accuracy in the viewership metrics reported by platforms such as Facebook, pointing out that abrupt shifts in platforms' proprietary algorithms can have devastating effects on publishers' viewership, traffic, and revenue. Following a scandal in which Facebook revealed it had artificially inflated numbers to its advertisers about how long viewers watched ads, many journalists and industry analysts concluded that the shift to video was based on such misleading or inaccurate metrics, which created a false impression that there was customer demand for additional video content. == History == Streaming media technology has been available since the early 1990s, though it was relatively low-fidelity and not widely available until the mid-2000s. In 2007, traditional media publishers including the New York Times, Washington Post and Time Inc. created new divisions to develop web videos, and Facebook launched its video platform. Twitter purchased micro-video service Vine in October 2012, began adding native video streaming in late 2014, and acquired video-streaming service Periscope in January 2015. An August 2014 profile on BuzzFeed noted the publisher's large investment into video production, and observed that "the future of BuzzFeed may not even be on BuzzFeed.com. One of the company’s nascent ideas, BuzzFeed Distributed, will be a team of 20 people producing content that lives entirely on other popular platforms, like Tumblr, Instagram or Snapchat." On 7 January 2015, Facebook issued a statement about "the shift to video," reporting that "since June 2014, Facebook has averaged more than 1 billion video views every day." Media critic John Herrman argued that "What the shift to Facebook video means is that Facebook is more interested in hosting the things media companies make than just spreading them, that it views links to outside pages as a problem to be solved, and that it sees Facebook-hosted video as an example of the solution." In February 2015, the digital video-journalism publisher NowThis announced that it would operate without a home page, producing content to be published directly on social media platforms. In April 2016, Mashable fired much of its editorial staff, attempting to pivot away from hard news coverage while "growing Mashable across every platform" and doubling down on branded content and video. By December 2017, following a sale to Ziff Davis, Mashable retreated from this focus on video; Bernard Gershon, president of GershonMedia, said that the announcement of many such "pivots" were actually aimed primarily at investors. By 2017, "advertiser interest in video [was] insatiable... Any CFO is going to say 'How can we get more video?'" according to an executive of the publishers' trade association Digital Content Next. Publishers such as Vanity Fair, the Washington Post, and Sports Illustrated began adapting their own articles into cheap video content, either dictated by a newsreader or animated as a slideshow with captions, which could be shared on social platforms or even played alongside the articles themselves. June 2017 saw numerous high-profile pivots to video. Vocativ laid off at least 20 staff, including its entire newsroom, explaining that "as the industry evolves, we are undertaking a strategic shift to focus exclusively on video content that will be distributed via social media and other platforms." Fox Sports eliminated its entire writing staff to focus on creating "premium video across all platforms." And MTV News announced a restructuring that would cut its writing team. Less than two years earlier, MTV News had hired Grantland co-founder Dan Fierman to lead a significant investment in "longform" political and cultural reporting, but Fierman left in April 2017, and in June MTV announced it was "shifting resources into short-form video content more in line with young people's media consumption habits." In July, Vice Media laid off at least 60 employees, including the editor-in-chief of Vice Sports, while expanding video production. August 2017 saw Mic cut ten writers and directed the remainder of the newsroom to generate videos for social platforms. CEO Chris Altchek said "When you think about how many hours people spend watching video versus reading, the audience has already spoken." The move was ultimately unsuccessful, and Mic laid off the majority of its staff a year later before being sold to Bustle Media Group for a fraction of its former value. In September 2017, the for-profit wiki-hosting company Fandom began adding commercially produced videos to its otherwise user-generated wiki subdomains, explicitly citing the need to "keep up with user and advertiser expectations" by "diversifying our content," claiming without substantiation that "consumer patterns are changing," necessitating the addition of "complementary video" to accommodate that supposed need. Objection to the content in these videos and its sharp contrast against the content of the wiki sites to which they were applied led to vocal user backlash, leading Fandom CCO Dorth Raphaely to offer the following non-committal response: "I agree that with these videos in particular we did not deliver the right type of content experience." Movie Pilot CEO Tobi Bauckhage explained his company's fall 2017 layoffs as part of moving "from a text-based publishing model to video... a reaction to the fact that Facebook has changed their algorithms in favor of video instead of referral traffic over the last 12 months and we were losing money in the publishing bit of our business." As part of the company's change in direction, the majority of its staff was laid off and its parent company was sold to Webedia. In November 2017, magazine publisher Condé Nast cut jobs, reduced the frequency of several magazines, and shut down the print edition of Teen Vogue, then invested significant new resources in video production, with a senior executive saying "In the next 24 months, I hope that video is half our business... It’s critical. It’s the macro trend of content consumption." In February 2018, Vox Media cut approximately 50 employees, primarily those assigned to "social video," as Vox CEO Jim Bankoff admitted that those efforts were not "viable audience or revenue growth drivers." In August 2020, Facebook Inc. (now Meta Platforms) pivoted Instagram to video in an effort to replicate the success of TikTok and appeal to a younger audience, introducing "reels" as a form of video and promoting them aggressively. Reels accounted more than half the 20 most-viewed posts on Facebook; however, most of these reels were anonymous aggregations of content from TikTok. Elon Musk declared in early 2024 that X (formerly Twitter) was now a "video-first platform", which has been described by critics as a "pivot to video". == As euphemism == In 2017, Journalist Brian Feldman said that "'Pivoting to video' has become a business strategy for digital publishers common enough in recent months to be a kind of cliché — a slick way to describe something else: layoffs." In response, writers use the phrase as gallows humor shorthand for death or cancellation, as in "how do i tell my bf i want our relationship to pivot to video" (SkyNews' Mollie Goodfellow) or "Horse broke its leg, so we had to take it out back and help it 'pivot to video'" (blogger Anil Dash). == Facebook metrics controversy == In September 2016, Facebook admitted that it had reported artificially inflated numbers to its advertisers about how long viewers watched ads leading to an overestimation of 60-80%. Plaintiffs in a later court case allege the discrepancy was as high as 150-900%. Facebook apologized in an official statement and in multiple staff appearances at New York Advertising Week. Two months later, Facebook disclosed additional discrepancies in audience metrics. In October 2018, a California federal court unsealed the text of a class action lawsuit filed by advertisers against Facebook, alleging that Facebook had known since 2015 that its viewership numbers were highly inflated, that internal records showed it "was far from an hon

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  • Foveated imaging

    Foveated imaging

    Foveated imaging is a digital image processing technique in which the image resolution, or amount of detail, varies across the image according to one or more "fixation points". A fixation point indicates the highest resolution region of the image and corresponds to the center of the eye's retina, the fovea. The location of a fixation point may be specified in many ways. For example, when viewing an image on a computer monitor, one may specify a fixation using a pointing device, like a computer mouse. Eye trackers which precisely measure the eye's position and movement are also commonly used to determine fixation points in perception experiments. When the display is manipulated with the use of an eye tracker, this is known as a gaze contingent display. Fixations may also be determined automatically using computer algorithms. Some common applications of foveated imaging include imaging sensor hardware and image compression. For descriptions of these and other applications, see the list below. Miniaturized foveated imaging systems can be realized by high-resolution 3D printing of multi-lens objectives directly on a CMOS (Complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor) chip. Foveated imaging is also commonly referred to as space variant imaging or gaze contingent imaging. == Applications == === Compression === Contrast sensitivity falls off dramatically as one moves from the center of the retina to the periphery. In lossy image compression, one may take advantage of this fact in order to compactly encode images. If one knows the viewer's approximate point of gaze, one may reduce the amount of information contained in the image as the distance from the point of gaze increases. Because the fall-off in the eye's resolution is dramatic, the potential reduction in display information can be substantial. Also, foveation encoding may be applied to the image before other types of image compression are applied and therefore can result in a multiplicative reduction. === Foveated sensors === Foveated sensors are multiresolution hardware devices that allow image data to be collected with higher resolution concentrated at a fixation point. An advantage to using foveated sensor hardware is that the image collection and encoding can occur much faster than in a system that post-processes a high resolution image in software. === Simulation === Foveated imaging has been used to simulate visual fields with arbitrary spatial resolution. For example, one may present video containing a blurred region representing a scotoma. By using an eye-tracker and holding the blurred region fixed relative to the viewer's gaze, the viewer will have a visual experience similar to that of a person with an actual scotoma. === Video gaming === Foveated rendering is a rendering optimization technique which uses an eye tracker integrated with a virtual reality headset to reduce the rendering workload by greatly reducing the image quality in the peripheral vision (outside of the zone gazed by the fovea).. However, other than the near-eye displays (e.g., virtual reality headset), foveated rendering is also suitable for large high-resolution display walls, desktop monitor, and even for smart phones. Over the time different foveated rendering techniques are proposed, for instance, adaptive resolution, geometric simplification, shading simplification and chromatic degradation, spatio-temporal deterioration . If we consider the variable sample distribution of physically-based rendering under the shader (e.g., hit/miss etc.), then this degradation strategies are applied on overall foveated rendering. At the CES 2016, SensoMotoric Instruments (SMI) demoed a new 250 Hz eye tracking system and a working foveated rendering solution. It resulted from a partnership with camera sensor manufacturer Omnivision who provided the camera hardware for the new system. The Apple Vision Pro mixed reality headset features dynamic foveated rendering provided by its visionOS operating system. === Quality assessment === Foveated imaging may be useful in providing a subjective image quality measure. Traditional image quality measures, such as peak signal-to-noise ratio, are typically performed on fixed resolution images and do not take into account some aspects of the human visual system, like the change in spatial resolution across the retina. A foveated quality index may therefore more accurately determine image quality as perceived by humans. === Image database retrieval === In databases that contain very high resolution images, such as a satellite image database, it may be desirable to interactively retrieve images in order to reduce retrieval time. Foveated imaging allows one to scan low resolution images and retrieve only high resolution portions as they are needed. This is sometimes called progressive transmission. == Example images ==

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  • Influencer

    Influencer

    An influencer is an individual who has the capacity to shape the attitudes, behavior, or decisions of others through authority, knowledge, position, or the nature of the relationship with the audience. The term is used in various fields such as media, business, politics, religion, and communication, referring to influencers such as social media influencers, podcasters, public speakers, religious influencers, writers, and newsletter writers etc who have dedicated followings in various areas. One writer defines influencers as "a range of third parties who exercise influence over the organization and its potential customers." Another writer defines an influencer as a "third party who significantly shapes the customer's purchasing decision but may never be accountable for it." According to another writer, influencers are "well-connected, create an impact, have active minds, and are trendsetters". Just because a person has many followers does not necessarily mean they have much influence over those people. In contemporary usage, the term frequently refers to a social media influencer, (also known as an online influencer or simply influencer) a person who builds a grassroots online presence through engaging content such as photos, videos, and updates. This is done by using direct audience interaction to establish authenticity, expertise, and appeal, and by standing apart from traditional celebrities by growing their platform through social media rather than pre-existing fame. The modern referent of the term is commonly a paid role in which a business entity pays for the social media influence-for-hire activity to promote its products and services, known as influencer marketing. A 1% increase in spending on influencer marketing can lead to a 0.5% increase in audience engagement. As such, an influencer effectively acts as a modern salesperson or a marketer. Types of influencers include fashion influencer, travel influencer, and virtual influencer, and they involve content creators and streamers. Some influencers are associated primarily with specific social media apps such as TikTok, Instagram, or Pinterest; many influencers are also considered internet celebrities. As of 2023, Instagram is the social media platform businesses spend the most advertising money towards marketing with influencers. However, influencers can have an impact on any social media network. == History == === Origins === The word influencer in its general sense of a person or thing that exerts influence, is attested in historical sources at least since the 17th century. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) gives 1664 as the earliest example of usage and cites a sentence from Henry More's A Modest Enquiry into the Mystery of Iniquity: "The head and influencer of the whole Church". The origins of online influencing can be traced back to the emergence of digital blogs and platforms in the early 2000s. Nevertheless, recent studies demonstrate that Instagram, an application with more than one billion users, harbors the majority of the influencer demographic. These individuals are sometimes referred to as "Instagrammers" or "Instafamous". A crucial aspect of influencing is their association with sponsors. The 2015 debut of Vamp, a company that links influencers with sponsorships, transformed the landscape of influencing. There is much debate about whether social media influencers can be considered celebrities, as their path to fame is often less traditional and arguably easier. Melody Nouri addressed the differences between the two types in her article "The Power of Influence: Traditional Celebrities vs Social Media Influencer". Nouri asserts that social media platforms have a greater negative impact on young, impressionable audiences in comparison with traditional media such as magazines, billboards, advertisements, and tabloids featuring celebrities. Online, it is thought to be simpler to manipulate an image and lifestyle in such a way that viewers are more susceptible to believing it. One theory considers the former American First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt (1884–1962) to be the "original media influencer." While she achieved celebrity in her role as First Lady, she built a global personal brand as a wise, informative, trustworthy American woman. Her voice was her own, unrestricted by political advisors and powerful men, and with it, Roosevelt exerted unprecedented social and cultural influence in radio, print, public speaking, film, and television until she died. In one notable example, it may have been Roosevelt's television support of John F. Kennedy which nudged his "hairline victory" during the 1960 Presidential campaign. In another example, David Ogilvy paid Roosevelt more than a quarter of a million dollars in today's currency to make a TV commercial for Good Luck margarine (1959), in which Roosevelt also managed to mention world hunger. As a content creator, she wrote My Day, a popular daily newspaper column that ran nationwide for twenty-six years. Like a social media post, My Day covered all aspects of her life, and in it Roosevelt often recommended movies, books, and products that she admired. Roosevelt also had a hand in designing all three of her public affairs television shows. Unlike contemporary influencers, she was less motivated by a pay-to-play situation than by a desire to educate and inspire; but she did use her influence to benefit the entertainment industry careers of her children, and she welcomed the revenue that her influence bought, most of which was donated to charity. === 2000s === The early 2000s showed corporate endeavors to leverage the internet for influence, with some companies participating in forums for promotions or providing bloggers with complimentary products in return for favorable reviews. A few of these practices were viewed as unethical for taking advantage of the labor of young individuals without providing remuneration. In 2004, The Blogstar Network was established by Ted Murphy of MindComet. Bloggers were encouraged to join an email list and receive remunerated offers from corporations in exchange for creating specific posts. For instance, bloggers were compensated for writing reviews of fast-food meals on their blogs. Blogstar is widely regarded as the first influencer marketing network. Murphy succeeded Blogstar with PayPerPost, which was introduced in 2006. This platform compensated significant posters on prominent forums and social media platforms for every post made about a corporate product. Payment rates were determined by the influencer's status. Though very popular, PayPerPost, received a great deal of criticism as these influencers were not required to disclose their involvement with PayPerPost as traditional journalism would have. With the success of PayPerPost, the public became aware that there was a drive for corporate interests to influence what some people were posting to these sites. The platform also incentivized other firms to establish comparable programs. Despite concerns, marketing networks with influencers continued to grow throughout the 2000s and into the 2010s. The influencer marketing industry was worth as much as $8 billion in 2019, according to estimates from Business Insider Intelligence, which are based on Mediakix data. Evan Asano, the Former CEO and founder of the agency Mediakix, previously spoke with Business Insider and said he believed influencer marketing on Instagram would continue to grow despite likes being hidden. === 2010s === By the 2010s, the term "influencer" described digital content creators with a large following, distinctive brand persona, and a patterned relationship with commercial sponsors. By this period, influencer marketing had become a widely researched field globally, with systematic reviews drawing on hundreds of studies that documented the growing role of authenticity, audience engagement, and parasocial relationships in shaping how consumers responded to influencer content across different markets. During this period, influencer culture also developed through distinct channels outside Western markets. In South Korea, the global spread of Korean pop culture, also called K-Pop, through platforms such as YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter gave rise to what scholars have called 'Hallyu 2.0' or the 'New Korean Wave', where fans throughout Southeast Asia, North America, Latin America, and Europe shared, subtitled, and redistributed Korean music and film content on a large scale. This helped Korean entertainers to build substantial followings internationally. Consumers often mistakenly view celebrities as reliable, leading to trust and confidence in the products being promoted. A 2001 study from Rutgers University discovered that individuals were using "internet forums as influential sources of consumer information." The study proposes that consumers preferred internet forums and social media when making purchasing decisions over conventional advertising and print sources. An in

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  • Social bot

    Social bot

    A social bot, refers to fully or partially automated social media accounts designed to perform most regular users’ actions, such as liking, posting content, and chatting with other users. Although their levels of autonomy vary, and often include a human-in-the-loop, social bots can use artificial intelligence to perform social media actions and can use large language models to mimic human dialogue. Social bots can operate alone or in groups that coordinate messaging as part of a network of coordinated inauthentic behavior. Social bots are often used to perform ad fraud by artificially boosting viewership and engagement metrics and to spread disinformation on social media. == Uses == Social bots are used for a large number of purposes on a variety of social media platforms, including Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube. One common use of social bots is to inflate a social media user's apparent popularity, usually by artificially manipulating their engagement metrics with large volumes of fake likes, reposts, or replies. Social bots can similarly be used to artificially inflate a user's follower count with fake followers, creating a false perception of a larger and more influential online following than is the case. The use of social bots to create the impression of a large social media influence allows individuals, brands, and organizations to attract a higher number of human followers and boost their online presence. Fake engagement can be bought and sold in the black market of social media engagement. Corporations typically use automated customer service agents on social media to affordably manage high levels of support requests. Social bots are used to send automated responses to users’ questions, sometimes prompting the user to private message the support account with additional information. The increased use of automated support bots and virtual assistants has led to some companies laying off customer-service staff. Social bots are also often used to influence public opinion. Autonomous bot accounts can flood social media with large numbers of posts expressing support for certain products, companies, or political campaigns, creating the impression of organic grassroots support. This can create a false perception of the number of people who support a certain position, which may also have effects on the direction of stock prices or on elections. Messages with similar content can also influence fads or trends. Many social bots are also used to amplify phishing attacks. These malicious bots are used to trick a social media user into giving up their passwords or other personal data. This is usually accomplished by posting links claiming to direct users to news articles that would in actuality direct to malicious websites containing malware. Scammers often use URL shortening services such as TinyURL and bit.ly to disguise a link's domain address, increasing the likelihood of a user clicking the malicious link. The presence of fake social media followers and high levels of engagement help convince the victim that the scammer is in fact a trusted user. Social bots can be a tool for computational propaganda. Bots can also be used for algorithmic curation, algorithmic radicalization, and/or influence-for-hire, a term that refers to the selling of an account on social media platforms. == History == Bots have coexisted with computer technology since the earliest days of computing. Social bots have their roots in the 1950s with Alan Turing, whose work focused on machine intelligence with the development of the Turing Test. The following decades saw further progress made towards the goal of creating programs capable of mimicking human behavior, notably with Joseph Weizenbaum’s creation of ELIZA. Considered to be one of the first Chatbots, ELIZA could simulate natural conversations with human users through pattern matching. Its most famous script was DOCTOR, a simulation of a Rogerian psychotherapist that was programmed to chat with patients and respond to questions. With the growth of social media platforms in the early 2000s, these bots could be used to interact with much larger user groups in an inconspicuous manner. Early instances of autonomous agents on social media could be found on sites like MySpace, with social bots being used by marketing firms to inflate activity on a user’s page in an effort to make them appear more popular. Social bots have been observed on a large variety of social media websites, with Twitter being one of the most widely observed examples. The creation of Twitter bots is generally against the site’s terms of service when used to post spam or to automatically like and follow other users, but some degree of automation using Twitter’s API may be permitted if used for “entertainment, informational, or novelty purposes.” Other platforms such as Reddit and Discord also allow for the use of social bots as long as they are not used to violate policies regarding harmful content and abusive behavior. Social media platforms have developed their own automated tools to filter out messages that come from bots, although they cannot detect all bot messages. == Legal regulation == Due to the difficulty of recognizing social bots and separating them from "eligible" automation via social media APIs, it is unclear how legal regulation can be enforced. Social bots are expected to play a role in shaping public opinion by autonomously acting as influencers. Some social bots have been used to rapidly spread misinformation, manipulate stock markets, influence opinion on companies and brands, promote political campaigns, and engage in malicious phishing campaigns. In the United States, some states have started to implement legislation in an attempt to regulate the use of social bots. In 2019, California passed the Bolstering Online Transparency Act (the B.O.T. Act) to make it unlawful to use automated software to appear indistinguishable from humans for the purpose of influencing a social media user's purchasing and voting decisions. Other states such as Utah and Colorado have passed similar bills to restrict the use of social bots. The Artificial Intelligence Act (AI Act) in the European Union is the first comprehensive law governing the use of Artificial Intelligence. The law requires transparency in AI to prevent users from being tricked into believing they are communicating with another human. AI-generated content on social media must be clearly marked as such, preventing social bots from using AI in a manner that mimics human behavior. == Detection == The first generation of bots could sometimes be distinguished from real users by their often superhuman capacities to post messages. Later developments have succeeded in imprinting more "human" activity and behavioral patterns in the agent. With enough bots, it might be even possible to achieve artificial social proof. To unambiguously detect social bots as what they are, a variety of criteria must be applied together using pattern detection techniques, some of which are: cartoon figures as user pictures sometimes also random real user pictures are captured (identity fraud) reposting rate temporal patterns sentiment expression followers-to-friends ratio length of user names variability in (re)posted messages engagement rate (like/followers rate) analysis of the time series of social media posts Social bots are always becoming increasingly difficult to detect and understand. The bots' human-like behavior, ever-changing behavior of the bots, and the sheer volume of bots covering every platform may have been a factor in the challenges of removing them. Social media sites, like Twitter, are among the most affected, with CNBC reporting up to 48 million of the 319 million users (roughly 15%) were bots in 2017. Botometer (formerly BotOrNot) is a public Web service that checks the activity of a Twitter account and gives it a score based on how likely the account is to be a bot. The system leverages over a thousand features. An active method for detecting early spam bots was to set up honeypot accounts that post nonsensical content, which may get reposted (retweeted) by the bots. However, bots evolve quickly, and detection methods have to be updated constantly, because otherwise they may get useless after a few years. One method is the use of Benford's Law for predicting the frequency distribution of significant leading digits to detect malicious bots online. This study was first introduced at the University of Pretoria in 2020. Another method is artificial-intelligence-driven detection. Some of the sub-categories of this type of detection would be active learning loop flow, feature engineering, unsupervised learning, supervised learning, and correlation discovery. Some operations of bots work together in a synchronized way. For example, ISIS used Twitter to amplify its Islamic content by numerous orchestrated accounts which further pushed an item to the Hot List news, thus further a

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  • Social network hosting service

    Social network hosting service

    A social network hosting service is a web hosting service that specifically hosts the user creation of web-based social networking services, alongside related applications. Such services are also known as vertical social networks due to the creation of SNSes which cater to specific user interests and niches; like larger, interest-agnostic SNSes, such niche networking services may also possess the ability to create increasingly niche groups of users. == List of social network hosting services == Federated Media Publishing's BigTent BroadVision Clearvale Ning Wall.fm

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  • Xara Designer Pro+

    Xara Designer Pro+

    Xara Designer Pro+ is an image editing program incorporating photo editing and vector illustration tools created by British software company Xara. Xara Xtreme LX was an early open source version for Linux. The Windows version was previously sold under the names Xara Studio, Xara X and Xara Xtreme, and traces its origin in the late 1980s to a title called ArtWorks for the Acorn Archimedes line of computers using RISC OS. There is a pro version called Xara Designer Pro (formerly Xara Xtreme Pro). The current commercial version of Xara Photo & Graphic Designer runs only on Windows, although Xara documents can be edited in a web browser on any platform using the Xara Cloud service. Versions up to 4.x can be run on Linux using Wine. == History == ArtWorks, the predecessor of Xara Photo and Graphic Designer, was developed on Acorn Archimedes and Risc PC 32-bit RISC computers running RISC OS by Computer Concepts during the late 1980s. The first version, developed for Microsoft Windows was initially called Xara Studio. It was licensed to Corel Corporation before wide-scale public availability, and from 1995 to 2000 was released as CorelXARA. Corel ceded the licensing rights back to Xara in 2000. The first Xara X version released in 2000 by its original owner. The next version, Xara X¹, was released in 2004. Xara Xtreme was released in 2005. In November 2006, Xara Xtreme PRO (an enhanced version of Xara Xtreme) was released. Xara Xtreme 3.2 and Xtreme Pro 3.2 were released in May 2007. 3.2 Pro included Xara3D, and both versions had more robust typography. In April 2008, Xara Xtreme 4.0 was released. Xara Xtreme and Xara Xtreme Pro 5.1 were released in June 2009. Features included more text-area enhancements, content-aware scaling of bitmap images, improved file import and export, master-page (repeated) objects, an object gallery (replacing the layer gallery), website-creation tools, and multi-stage graduated transparency. In June 2010, Xara Photo & Graphic Designer 6 and Xara Designer Pro 6 were released. Xtreme was renamed Photo & Graphic Designer, and Xtreme Pro was renamed Designer Pro. In May 2011, Xara Photo & Graphic Designer 7 and Xara Designer Pro 7 were released. Features included "magic" photo erase, user interface improvements to docking galleries and snapping alignment, and (in Pro) new webpage and website-design features. In May 2012, Xara Photo & Graphic Designer 2013 and Xara Designer Pro X (v8) were released. Xara Photo & Graphic Designer 9 was released in May 2013. In July of that year, Xara Designer Pro X9 was released. Xara Photo & Graphic Designer 10 was released on 16 July 2014, and Xara Designer Pro X10 on 23 July. Xara Photo & Graphic Designer 11 was released on 29 June 2015, and Xara Designer Pro X11 was released the following month. In 2016, the delivery model was changed to an update service which can be renewed annually. Users are entitled to any updates released while the update service is active. The first update-service updates were in May 2016 for Xara Photo & Graphic Designer, and July 2016 for Xara Designer Pro X. == Features == Xara Photo & Graphic Designer is known for its usability and fast renderer. It provides a fully anti-aliased display, advanced gradient fill, and transparency tools. Among vector editors, Xara Photo & Graphic Designer is considered to be fairly easy to learn, with similarities to CorelDRAW and Inkscape in terms of interface. Alongside the vector illustration tools, Xara Photo & Graphic Designer also includes an integrated photo tool offering manual and automatic photo enhance, cropping, adjustment of brightness levels, red-eye fix, 'magic' erase, photo healing, color and background erase, panoramas and content aware resizing. Designer Pro includes a wider range of tools for other design tasks including the creation of web pages and websites, and text and page layout tools for DTP with the aim of providing a single solution for all graphic and web design tasks.

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  • Social employee

    Social employee

    A social employee is a worker operating within a social business model. Following an organization's social computing guidelines, social employees use social media tools both for internal workflow and collaboration purposes and for external engagement with customers, prospects and stakeholders through a combination of social media marketing, content marketing, social marketing, and social selling. Social employee programs are considered to be as much about culture and engagement as they are about business processes and best practices. In addition to increased leads and sales, social employee best practices are said to improve business outcomes important to social media marketing, such as increased connections and web traffic, improved brand identification and "chatter", and better customer advocacy. == Overview == The term "social employee" was first introduced to describe those exhibiting the emerging characteristics of workers operating under a social business model. The term is often used interchangeably with similar designations like "employee advocate" or "social employee advocate". Crucial to the perceived value of the social employee is the concept of the digital footprint. While organizations are able to generate large bases of followers through social media, research shows that brand marketing and engagement efforts through these networks are not as effective as those of individual employees. In fact, some research indicates that employee experts are more trusted than any other member of an organization. Because of this, social employee programs are designed to train, empower, and support employee engagement efforts in the hopes of authentically engaging larger communities, increasing the frequency of shares, reviews, and other forms of "earned media" and expanding the brand's presence on the web. == The personal or employee brand == A foundational concept of the social employee is the idea of the personal or employee brand. This concept first gained popular attention in a 1997 FastCompany article by business leader Tom Peters titled "The Brand Called You". In the article, Peters argued that the premium placed on branding impacted workers' lives to such an extent that creating and cultivating a distinct personal brand had become a professional necessity. According to Peters, doing so built trust, loyalty, visibility, influence, and employability. With increased adoption of social media tools by both businesses and consumers in the early 21st century, many business leaders became increasingly concerned with social engagement, both internally among employees and externally with customers and other stakeholders. While many in the business community acknowledged the potential social tools had for improved collaboration, productivity, and brand messaging, the concern that employees would misrepresent their brand, disclose proprietary information, or otherwise damage their company's reputation or ability to conduct business persisted. As a result, many began to advocate for employee branding as a solution to this problem. This helped give new meaning to the concept of brand ambassadorship, positioning everyday employees in public, and potentially high-profile, engagement roles. == Characteristics == === Engaged === Because social employee advocacy is dependent on the perceived authenticity of the employee, engagement is highly valued in social organizations. Further, data show the measurable impact of employee engagement on organizational productivity and profitability: Happy employees were found to be 12 percent more productive. In one study, engaged employees were found to be 38 percent more likely to produce at above-average rates. In another, organizations with engaged employees had a 19 percent higher than average shareholder return, while organizations with disengaged employees experienced shareholder return that was 44 percent below average. Engaged companies were found to outperform disengaged companies by up to 202 percent. Companies with strong focus on culture were found to have an average 13.9 percent turnover rate, while those with a low focus experience were found to have a 48.4 percent turnover rate. === Flexible job environment and work–life balance === The number of professionals working mobile or remote has risen considerably since 2010. While estimates vary, one study found that number of organizations with mobile or remote employees is expected to rise from 24 percent in 2012 to 89 percent by 2020. Other research has estimated that by 2020, 105.4 million professionals will work remotely in America, about 72.3 percent of the total workforce. This change has been linked to a rise in social technologies, including biometrics, wearables, near-field communications, and augmented reality. Social employees have also put a greater emphasis on work–life balance, with many believing that advances in technology can directly support efforts in this area. Purported benefits of this shift include a more flexible workforce, reduced business costs, and greater organizational leverage in attracting and retaining top talent. === Buys into the brand's story === In 2009, thought leader Simon Sinek presented a speech called "How Great Leaders Inspire Action" at a TEDxPugetSound event. Sinek's central argument in this speech was, "People don't buy what you do. They buy why you do it." This concept—that the story behind a business or product offering is a more compelling sales tool than the product itself—is frequently cited in social media marketing as a way to build authentic connections with stakeholders. However, others have argued that for employees to share a brand's story authentically, they must be engaged in that story themselves, and as a result, many companies have made storytelling part of their culture programs. === Collaborative === An implicit tenet in social business is that social technologies aren't a barrier to productivity, but rather a path to increased connectivity. The shift in enterprise software systems like IBM Connections to incorporate social communication models, such as mentions, wikis, and newsfeeds, reflects the changing communication dynamics within business. With an increase in diversity and sophistication in collaborative software platforms, social organizations have sought to find new creative ways to utilize these tools and secure employee buy-in around them. Crowdsourcing has also become popular in social businesses. Examples include AT&T's program The Innovation Pipeline (TIP), begun in 2009, which has generated over 28,000 ideas that have led to over 75 projects with funding exceeding $44 million. IBM has also put considerable resources into such processes, producing its social computing guidelines through employee crowdsourcing, as well as its Connections platform through the Technology Adoption Program (TAP), a more formalized crowdsourcing initiative. Another popular form of internal collaboration is the hack day, or hackathon. Organizations such as Netflix, Facebook, and IBM use hack days to pull employees out of their day-to-day work environments and encourage them to collaborate in nontraditional ways in an attempt to drive disruptive innovation. Social employees are often encouraged to seek external collaboration opportunities with customers and prospects. For example, Procter & Gamble introduced the Live Well Collaborative to connect with external stakeholders and develop products and services for the 50+ demographic. === Social listener === A social listener is someone who engages in social listening, or social media monitoring, for professional means. Social employees can use social media monitoring for a variety of reasons, including professional development, industry news and trends, and gauging market sentiment. Some have argued that social listening is one of the most important components of social business, as it enables organizations to collect rich market data, make more informed strategic decisions, and respond to customer needs more authentically. === Customer-centric === Advocates of customer-centricity in social business argue that social media has changed the dynamic from one-way brand messaging to shared interactions between brand and customer. Brand and customer engagement is seen as a means of creating more lasting connections with customers and prospects and empowering them to become brand promoters. Customer-centric interactions are seen to have distinct value to brands, as research shows that prospects are far more likely to trust brand-related messaging from a friend or family member than they are from a brand. As a means of building social employees, some social advocates have also called for a broader definition of customer to include the employees themselves. In the book The Pursuit of Social Business Excellence, authors Vala Afshar and Brad Martin made the following argument: A social business operates with the guiding principle that each employee's responsi

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  • Smart-ID

    Smart-ID

    Smart-ID is an electronic authentication tool developed by SK ID Solutions, an Estonian company. Users can log in to various electronic services and sign documents with an electronic signature. Smart-ID meets the European Union's eIDAS Regulation and the European Central Bank's standards for a secure authentication solution. Smart-ID is a Qualified Signature Creator Device (QSCD) that can issue a Qualified Electronic Signature (QES). The Smart-ID app is compatible with both iOS and Android devices and does not require a SIM card. By 2021, the Smart-ID application was launched in the Huawei AppGallery. As of May 2023, Smart-ID has 3,298,969 active users across the Baltic States (Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia). Every month, the Smart-ID processes 79 million transactions. In March 2023, Smart-ID users made an exceptional 85 million transactions. == History == In November 2016, SK ID Solutions debuted the Smart-ID tool for the first time at its annual conference. In February 2017, eKool, Starman, and Tallinn Kaubamaja Grupp were the first to implement Smart-ID authentication in their e-services. In March 2017, Smart-ID was added as an authentication option to SEB bank and Swedbank's online banking in all three Baltic States. Dokobit, previously known as DigiDoc, began offering its clients the ability to use e-services using Smart-ID in April 2017. More than 100 service providers had implemented Smart-ID as an authentication solution for their services by November 2019. At its annual conference on November 8, 2018, SK ID Solutions revealed that Smart-ID had been certified as compatible with the QSCD[8] level, the highest level of qualified electronic signature in the European Union, following a rigorous certification process. As a result, the Smart-QES-level ID's electronic signature, the digital counterpart of a handwritten signature, is now available to all users who have registered with the tool. This signature is accepted by all European Union member states. On August 26, 2019, Estonian Information Systems Supervisory Authority experts reviewed Smart-ID (ISSA). Based on the methods provided in the eIDAS Regulation, the expert committee concluded that Smart-ID offers a high level of electronic identification assurance. SK ID Solutions and RIA struck an agreement in September 2019 that allows Smart-ID to authenticate Estonian state e-services via RIA's central authentication service, which is used by over 60 public authorities. Smart-ID accounts created three years ago have expired in January 2020. Therefore, renewing them and performing mandatory updates was necessary. In February 2020, SK ID Solutions announced that Smart-ID could be used to give digital signatures in the national digital signature software DigiDoc4, which up until this moment was only possible with ID cards via Mobile-ID. Users must have at least version 4.2.4.71 or later of the DigiDoc4 software installed on their computers to use this feature. Since February 2020, Smart-ID accounts can now be created with biometric information from an ID card or passport, but only by users who have previously used a Smart-ID account. Since October 2022, 13–17 years old minors in Lithuania are able to create a Smart-ID account using biometric information too. A parent or legal guardian must approve the registration. SK ID Solutions collaborated on the new solution with iProov from the United Kingdom and InnoValor from the Netherlands. TÜV Informationstechnik GmbH, a German certification company, assessed it. Since May 2023, Smart-ID can be used to submit company's annual reports in Estonia and digitally sign anything in the e-business register using your PIN2. == Overview == The Smart-ID app is available for download on Google Play and Apple's App Store. Android 4.4 and iOS 11 are the oldest supported operating system versions for Smart-ID. Smart-ID works on the premise of two-factor authentication, combining an intelligent device (something the user owns) with PINs (something the user knows). A new user must first authenticate themselves with an ID card or a mobile phone number and then confirm a PIN1 and PIN2 code, either manually or automatically produced. The first PIN is used to authenticate a person's identity when accessing e-banking or e-services, while the second PIN is used to support electronic signatures and authenticate transactions (e.g., transfers). The PIN1 code must be four digits long, while the PIN2 code must be five digits long. To log in to an e-service, the user must use Smart-ID as the authentication method and enter their unique Smart-ID user ID. A notification will open on the user's smart device where the software is installed and display a verification code. If the code matches the code presented to the user by the e-service, then the user can confirm the match by entering their PIN1 code. The user must verify the action with their PIN2 code when giving digital signatures. A Smart-ID account is valid for three years. The report can be updated, changed, and deleted at any given time, free of charge. Smart-ID is available in five languages: Estonian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Russian, and English. An international survey conducted in 2021 revealed that Smart-ID is the most reliable authentication solution in Baltic countries. In January 2023, the number of times Smart-ID was used to access State Authentication Service (TARA) in Estonia has surpassed those of Mobile-ID and ID-cards for the first time since July 2022. == Security == Smart-ID is based on Cybernetica's SplitKey authentication and digital signature platform technology, for which the company has filed a patent application. Public key cryptography, digital signature methods, and critical public infrastructures are all used in the technology. The user's PIN is not saved on the device and is only needed to decrypt the private key in the Smart-ID app. When the user inputs the PIN, the private key is cracked, and the answer is transmitted to the Smart-ID server, where a portion of the key given by the app is joined with the server's encrypted key. The app will block the user from accessing it for three hours if they input the incorrect PIN three times in a row. If this happens once again, the app will lock for 24 hours. If this happens a third time, the account will be permanently disabled. PINs cannot be changed or recovered once an account has been created. The user must create a new account if the account is permanently blocked. Smart-ID uses the Apple and Google messaging networks to notify the app when new data is saved on its servers. == Phishing == In February 2019, unknown criminals attempted to create Smart-ID accounts with stolen IDs obtained via phishing customers' text messages and website addresses, according to a monthly report by the Estonian Information System Manager in April 2019. The Latvian Information Technology Security Incident Assessment Body Cert was also notified of these intrusions on March 1. Fraudsters sent emails to potential victims pretending to be bank representatives. The mails linked users to a phishing page after redirecting them to a phony bank login page. Victims were asked to log in using their identification information and PIN1 code. The fraudsters then began the process of generating a new Smart-ID account. As a result, the victim had to input a PIN2 number, which permitted the fraudster to finish setting up a new tab with the victim's personal information. Fraudsters in Estonia were able to log in to multiple e-services utilizing Smart-ID using a Smart-ID account and the victim's data. On behalf of the victims, fraudsters also employed online banking services. Later, the Estonian Information System Manager identified several victims, some of whom had also experienced financial losses. The Estonian Information System Manager requested a full report on the event from SK ID Solutions. The organization opted not to criticize the corporation after receiving the information, although it did propose that the procedure of creating Smart-ID accounts be reviewed. According to the Estonian Banking Association, Estonian banks have not discontinued using Smart-ID and do not think it is required. Smart-ID was exposed to a thorough review process in September 2019 to determine this authentication instrument's level of security. Reviewers discovered no flaws, and SK ID Solutions and the Estonian Information System Manager signed a contract. Estonia later introduced Smart-ID and other authentication mechanisms to the central public services portal.

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