It's All Over
For our final guest presentation of Internet for Educators, we were Zoomed in with Dr. Alec Couros , who certainly had a lot to show and tell us. For one, Dr. Couros has a problem: people keep using his picture to scam other people. Specifically, they use it for online romance scams, even using elaborate Photoshopping to fake passports and other identification papers as "proof" of who they are. Why Dr. Couros' face in particular has proven so useful for these purposes is unknown, but it must feel odd to be involved in the constant stream of criminal behaviour flowing through the Internet, however tangentially and without consent. Dr. Couros' presentation was, in fact, something of a parade of horrors. He showed off technology that can almost seamlessly co-opt somebody's appearance and create very convincing fakes, such as a sort of digital "mask" that can have face mapped to it, creating a digital doppelgänger of the target. This is taken to extrem...