Hacking and art mixed on Friday in a freshly launched dating Web site that lets visitors seek mates by sifting through profile pictures mined from Facebook.
Lovely-faces.com boasted Facebook pictures of about 250,000 people searchable in categories that included nationality, gender, funny, smug and “climber.”
The creators of the online “dating agency” were identified at the Web site as artists Paolo Cirio and Alessandro Ludovic.
“Our mission was to give all these virtual identities a new shared place to expose themselves freely, breaking Facebook’s constraints and boring social rules,” the Web site authors said in an online statement datelined in Berlin.
The artists explained that a million “stolen” Facebook profile pictures were analyzed using facial recognition software that filtered images by expressions.
“Immersing ourselves in the resulting database was a hallucinatory experience as we dove into hundreds of thousands of profile pictures and found ourselves in toxicated by the endless smiles, gazes and often leering expressions,” the artists said.
“So we established a new Web site (lovely-faces.com) giving them justice and granting them the possibility of soon being face to face with anybody who is attracted by their facial expression and related data,” they said.
Facebook frowned on lovely-faces, saying that “scraping” or mining information violates the terms of service at the world’s leading online social network. Facebook was investigating and vowed to take “appropriate” action.
Vietnam has lodged an official protest with China following the sinking of a Vietnamese fishing boat that it said had been rammed by a Chinese maritime surveillance vessel near islands in the South China Sea. The Vietnamese fishing vessel, with eight fishermen onboard, was fishing near the Paracel Islands (Xisha Islands, 西沙群島) on Thursday when it was rammed and sunk by the Chinese vessel, the Vietnamese Ministry of Foreign Affairs said in a statement posted on a government Web site yesterday. All of the fishermen were picked up by the Chinese vessel alive and were transferred to two other Vietnamese fishing vessels
The dramatic quietening of towns and cities during lockdown in Britain has changed the way the Earth moves beneath our feet, scientists said. Seismologists at the British Geological Survey (BGS) have found that their sensors are twitching less now that human activity has been curtailed, leading to a drop in the anthropogenic din that vibrates through the planet. The fall in the human hum that rings around the world means that, in theory at least, the scientists should be able to detect smaller earthquakes in the UK, and more distant tremors in Europe and in countries further afield than their equipment usually
China is facing a wave of COVID-19 infections from Russia, with more than half of the country’s total imported cases in the past two days coming through its northeastern land border. Heilongjiang, China’s northernmost province, which borders Russia, has reported 60 imported cases this month, according to the Health Commission of Heilongjiang Province. All but one entered the Chinese border by car or coach from the nearby Russian city of Vladivostok, after they flew from Moscow, where more than half of Russia’s 6,300 cases have been reported. The Russian cases account for one-third of all the confirmed infections China has detected in
‘GOOD NEWS’: The nation’s top health official said that the number of emergency phone calls had decreased, although it was too soon to say that it indicated a trend France on Friday reported 588 deaths from COVID-19 in hospital, its biggest 24-hour toll since the pandemic began. The new deaths brought to 5,091 the total number of people who have died in hospital of COVID-19 in France, top health official Jerome Salomon told reporters. There is no daily toll for those who have died of COVID-19 in retirement homes in France. Salomon said that a total of 1,416 people had died in such establishments from COVID-19 during the epidemic, which would raise the total French toll to at least 6,507. France has been in lockdown since March 17 in a bid to slow
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