All posts tagged: blur

I had a front row seat at the Blur v Oasis frenzy – here’s what a new play gets bang on and bafflingly wrong | Theatre

I had a front row seat at the Blur v Oasis frenzy – here’s what a new play gets bang on and bafflingly wrong | Theatre

“At this point, it’s Israel/Palestine. Rangers/Celtic. No one remembers how it got started. All they know is, ‘I like this team and I don’t like that team.’ The whole country’s gone fucking mad. It’s what happens in a civil war – everyone starts thinking with the blood.” In a new play simply titled The Battle, those words are spoken by a fictionalised Damon Albarn, as he leads his band Blur into a contest with Oasis for a summer No 1 and the de facto kingship of Britpop. But then he recoils as he wonders what on earth he has got involved in. Musical considerations inevitably take second place to sales figures, as the brief, superficial friendship between the two groups curdles into a poisonous loathing, mostly on the Oasis side. And, ironically, the band that has a thoroughly uncomplicated relationship with fame and success – the one fronted by the dependably mad-for-it Gallagher brothers – ends up losing out to a quartet whose victory instantly fills them with angst and emptiness. The Battle – two …

How to blur your home on Google Street View – and why you should do it ASAP

How to blur your home on Google Street View – and why you should do it ASAP

ZDNET With Street View, you can see panoramic, street-level images of practically any place in the world. Captured by Google’s fleet of specialized vehicles with high-resolution cameras, these images provide a virtual tour of neighborhoods, landmarks, and businesses. While Street View is incredibly useful and sometimes nostalgic, it does raise privacy concerns. Also: Google’s new Pixel 10a may be the affordable iPhone alternative I’ve been waiting for Google tries to blur identifiable faces and license plates in Street View to prevent misuse, but your house will still appear clearly. If this visibility feels unsettling — whether due to geospatial data privacy concerns, the desire to prevent criminal targeting, or maybe you just want to shield your property from unwelcome attention — Google allows you to blur your home upon request. Here’s how. How to blur your house on Google Maps Street View Google provides a quick process for requesting that your house, vehicle, or other object, or even your face, be blurred on Street View. Keep in mind that once blurred, the image cannot be reverted, so …

AI-altered photos and videos of Minneapolis shootings blur reality

AI-altered photos and videos of Minneapolis shootings blur reality

From Facebook and TikTok to Instagram and X, AI-manipulated images and videos depicting Alex Pretti’s final moments have proliferated across the internet since his fatal shooting by federal officers in Minneapolis last weekend. The rapid spread of media altered by artificial intelligence, much of which shows Pretti collapsing in the seconds after he was shot, has clouded key details of the shooting on social networks. Unlike other AI-generated deepfakes that portray entirely unrealistic scenes and are easily identified as fake, many of the AI-altered depictions of Pretti’s shooting appear to have been based on verified images, mirroring reality enough to confuse and mislead many online. And even as awareness of the capabilities of advanced artificial intelligence spreads, some online are extending their skepticism of authentic media, falsely claiming that legitimate photos and videos of Pretti have been altered by AI. One image that appears to have been manipulated with AI, showing the ICU nurse falling forward as a federal officer points a gun at his back, has been viewed over 9 million times on X …