PhotoDNA has also enabled content providers to remove millions of illegal photographs from the internet; helped convict child sexual predators; and, in some cases, helped law enforcement rescue potential victims before they were physically harmed.

In the meantime, though, the volume of child sexual exploitation material being shared in videos instead of still images has ballooned. The number of suspected videos reported to the CyberTipline managed by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) in the United States increased tenfold from 312,000 in 2015 to 3.5 million in 2017. As required by federal law, Microsoft reports all instances of known child sexual abuse material to NCMEC.

Microsoft has long been committed to protecting its customers from illegal content on its products and services, and applying technology the company already created to combating this growth in illegal videos was a logical next step.

“Child exploitation video content is a crime scene. After exploring the development of new technology and testing other tools, we determined that the existing, widely used PhotoDNA technology could also be used to effectively address video,” says Courtney Gregoire, Assistant General Counsel with Microsoft’s Digital Crimes Unit. “We don’t want this illegal content shared on our products and services. And we want to put the PhotoDNA tool in as many hands as possible to help stop the re-victimization of children that occurs every time a video appears again online.”

A recent survey of survivors of child sexual abuse from the Canadian Centre for Child Protection found that the online sharing of images and videos documenting crimes committed against them intensified feelings of shame, humiliation, vulnerability and powerlessness. As one survivor was quoted in the report: “The abuse stops and at some point also the fear for abuse; the fear for the material never ends.”

The original PhotoDNA helps put a stop to this online recirculation by creating a “hash” or digital signature of an image: converting it into a black-and-white format, dividing it into squares and quantifying that shading. It does not employ facial recognition technology, nor can it identify a person or object in the image. It compares an image’s hash against a database of images that watchdog organizations and companies have already identified as illegal. IWF, which has been compiling a reference database of PhotoDNA signatures, now has 300,000 hashes of known child sexual exploitation materials.

PhotoDNA for Video breaks down a video into key frames and essentially creates hashes for those screenshots. In the same way that PhotoDNA can match an image that has been altered to avoid detection, PhotoDNA for Video can find child sexual exploitation content that’s been edited or spliced into a video that might otherwise appear harmless.

“When people embed illegal videos in other videos or try to hide them in other ways, PhotoDNA for Video can still find it. It only takes a hash from a single frame to create a match,” says Katrina Lyon-Smith, senior technical program manager who has implemented the use of PhotoDNA for Video on Microsoft’s own services.

Today’s Deal: Save 66% on Endless Space® 2 and 50% on additional content!*

Look for the deals each day on the front page of Steam. Or follow us on twitter or Facebook for instant notifications wherever you are!

*Offer ends September 13th at 10AM Pacific Time

Save up to 80% in the Made with GameMaker sale during this week’s Midweek Madness*!

GameMaker Studio 2 is the latest and greatest incarnation of GameMaker! It has everything you need to take your idea from concept to finished game. With no barriers to entry and powerful functionality, GameMaker Studio 2 is the ultimate 2D development environment!

Over 40 games made with GameMaker are on discount during this sale as well as GameMaker Studio 2 at its lowest price ever on Steam! Whether you want to play these amazing games or start making games, check out the deals today!

*Offer ends Friday 10am Pacific Time

Starting at 2:00 p.m. PDT today, members of the Xbox One Preview Beta and a subset of Preview Delta will begin receiving the latest Xbox One system update (1810.180828-1920). Learn more about the new features in development for 1810 here, and read on for a list of fixes and known issues in this 1810 system update.

NOTE : Today a subset of Delta Users are receiving the 1810 build.  We are doing the subset of users as we are targeting the upgrade process and will move the remaining set of Delta users in over the next few weeks as we flight new builds to test the upgrade process.

Fixes:

My Games & Apps

• Memberships –  We have resolved the issue in the Membership sections for Games for Gold not showing the correct titles.
• UI Fixes to the collection filter in My Games and Apps – now the drop down is anchored rather than centered.

Oneguide

• Fixes to Oneguide in which some users were seeing an error with the app failing to launch and stating it needs to be re-installed with an error.

Settings – Display

• Fixes to the 4k TV details status page to fix issues with Text being Cut-off.

Known Issues:

Audio

• We are aware that some users are experiencing issues where mics do not work. Please ensure that your controller is running the latest Firmware (Settings – Kinect & Devices – Devices & Accessories) and be sure to file feedback using the “Report a problem” tool when you experience this issue.

Avatars

• We are aware that, in some instances, Avatar limbs (feet & hands) are pointing in unexpected directions and facial hair is appearing where it should not. Please file feedback should you experience this.
• It can take up to 10 seconds to view an Avatar on the profile screen after creating a new Avatar.

My Games & Apps

• EA Access App – We are aware that the EA Access app will crash when navigating in the app and become unresponsive.
• Shudder App – We are aware that the Shudder app may become unresponsive.
• We are aware of the following Media apps crashing and have identified a fix that will be flighted shortly. There is no workaround at present.  The apps we are monitoring are:
  
  • Demand 5
  • Orange
  • CTV Go on Box One
  • SEGO
  • TMN GO
  • Foxtel Play
  • Halo Channel
  • TSN on Xbox One

Microsoft Edge

• Microsoft Edge crashes for some users at random times.
• The cursor may disappear when exiting and re-entering the app.
  
  • Workaround: Press Y when re-entering the app to make the cursor re-appear

OneGuide

• Sometimes users may encounter stuttering when launching straight into Oneguide after the console is turned on from Instant on. Please file feedback when you see this.
• Here is a workaround to resolve temporarily:
  
  • If you have a Kinect sensor connected to the console, try disabling it by going to Settings>Kinect & devices>Kinect and toggling the Kinect sensor off. Then re-launch OneGuide.

Power

• We are tracking an issue in which the console is fully powering off when it is placed into Instant On mode.

Profile Color

• Sometimes users may encounter the incorrect Profile color when powering on the console.

Settings – Network Statistics

• We are aware that the Detailed Network Statistics feature is not showing any data.  This does not impact the consoles networking performance at all it is a UI bug.

Virtual Keyboard

• We are aware that some characters appear incorrectly when using the Virtual Keyboard in conjunction with a chatpad. Workaround: Disconnect the chatpad.

Curve Digital has announced that Velocity 2X will now be releasing on 20th September on Switch.

A direct successor to the 2012 PlayStation hit Velocity, Velocity 2 marks the first time a game in the series has arrived on a Nintendo console. The game follows the story of Lt. Kai Tana, a brave pilot who has found herself stranded a long way from home after getting sucked through a black hole. Discovered and experimented on by an evil alien race called the Vokh, Kai Tana has recently escaped with her ‘Quarp Jet’ and must outrun her captors.

The game has already released on other platforms, scoring highly among critics on systems such as PS4, PS Vita, and Xbox One. Its blend of “pulse-pounding 2D action platforming and fast-paced vertical-scrolling shmup action” has won over the hearts of players, too, gaining ‘very positive’ user reviews on Steam.

FuturLab Managing Director, James Marsden, has said the following:

“This is the ultimate version of Velocity 2X. On Nintendo Switch, players will get the complete, no-compromise home console/PC version with all the graphical bells and whistles, whether playing at home on their TV at 1080p and 60fps, or on the Switch screen at 720p and 60fps.”

The game will be available on Switch on 20th September, with pricing still to be confirmed. If you happen to be attending EGX in Birmingham, UK later this month, you’ll be able to go hands-on with the game to see what all the fuss is about.

Have you been waiting for this one to arrive on Switch? Feel free to share your excitement with us down below.

Super Smash Bros. Ultimate is shaping up to be just that; the ultimate Super Smash Bros. game. But no matter how many characters are included as playable fighters, a colossal majority of those people beg for Sakurai to include on social media just won’t make it in.

So to take a slightly different stance, rather than talk about who will, could, or might be a fighter, we decided to take a look at who flat-out just won’t. You know, for fun. Watch the video if you want to share in the previously mentioned fun.

© 2018 Valve Corporation. All rights reserved. All trademarks are property of their respective owners in the US and other countries.

Do you enjoy running Fedora, containers, and have a Raspberry Pi? What about using all three together to play with LEDs? This article introduces Fedora IoT and shows you how to install a preview image on a Raspberry Pi. You’ll also learn how to interact with GPIO in order to light up an LED.

What is Fedora IoT?

Fedora IoT is one of the current Fedora Project objectives, with a plan to become a full Fedora Edition. The result will be a system that runs on ARM (aarch64 only at the moment) devices such as the Raspberry Pi, as well as on the x86_64 architecture.

Fedora IoT is based on OSTree, like Fedora Silverblue and the former Atomic Host.

Download and install Fedora IoT

The official Fedora IoT images are coming with the Fedora 29 release. However, in the meantime you can download a Fedora 28-based image for this experiment.

You have two options to install the system: either flash the SD card using a dd command, or use a fedora-arm-installer tool. The Fedora Wiki offers more information about setting up a physical device for IoT. Also, remember that you might need to resize the third partition.

Once you insert the SD card into the device, you’ll need to complete the installation by creating a user. This step requires either a serial connection, or a HDMI display with a keyboard to interact with the device.

When the system is installed and ready, the next step is to configure a network connection. Log in to the system with the user you have just created choose one of the following options:

• If you need to configure your network manually, run a command similar to the following. Remember to use the right addresses for your network:
  

  $ nmcli connection add con-name cable ipv4.addresses \ 192.168.0.10/24 ipv4.gateway 192.168.0.1 \ connection.autoconnect true ipv4.dns "8.8.8.8,1.1.1.1" \ type ethernet ifname eth0 ipv4.method manual

• If there’s a DHCP service on your network, run a command like this:
  

  $ nmcli con add type ethernet con-name cable ifname eth0

The GPIO interface in Fedora

Many tutorials about GPIO on Linux focus on a legacy GPIO sysfis interface. This interface is deprecated, and the upstream Linux kernel community plan to remove it completely, due to security and other issues.

The Fedora kernel is already compiled without this legacy interface, so there’s no /sys/class/gpio on the system. This tutorial uses a new character device /dev/gpiochipN provided by the upstream kernel. This is the current way of interacting with GPIO.

To interact with this new device, you need to use a library and a set of command line interface tools. The common command line tools such as echo or cat won’t work with this device.

You can install the CLI tools by installing the libgpiod-utils package. A corresponding Python library is provided by the python3-libgpiod package.

Creating a container with Podman

Podman is a container runtime with a command line interface similar to Docker. The big advantage of Podman is it doesn’t run any daemon in the background. That’s especially useful for devices with limited resources. Podman also allows you to start containerized services with systemd unit files. Plus, it has many additional features.

We’ll create a container in these two steps:

1. Create a layered image containing the required packages.
2. Create a new container starting from our image.

First, create a file Dockerfile with the content below. This tells podman to build an image based on the latest Fedora image available in the registry. Then it updates the system inside and installs some packages:

FROM fedora:latest RUN  dnf -y update RUN  dnf -y install libgpiod-utils python3-libgpiod

You have created a build recipe of a container image based on the latest Fedora with updates, plus packages to interact with GPIO.

Now, run the following command to build your base image:

$ sudo podman build --tag fedora:gpiobase -f ./Dockerfile

You have just created your custom image with all the bits in place. You can play with this base container images as many times as you want without installing the packages every time you run it.

Working with Podman

To verify the image is present, run the following command:

$ sudo podman images REPOSITORY                 TAG        IMAGE ID       CREATED          SIZE localhost/fedora           gpiobase   67a2b2b93b4b   10 minutes ago  488MB docker.io/library/fedora   latest     c18042d7fac6   2 days ago     300MB

Now, start the container and do some actual experiments. Containers are normally isolated and don’t have an access to the host system, including the GPIO interface. Therefore, you need to mount it inside while starting the container. To do this, use the –device option in the following command:

$ sudo podman run -it --name gpioexperiment --device=/dev/gpiochip0 localhost/fedora:gpiobase /bin/bash

You are now inside the running container. Before you move on, here are some more container commands. For now, exit the container by typing exit or pressing Ctrl+D.

To list the the existing containers, including those not currently running, such as the one you just created, run:

$ sudo podman container ls -a CONTAINER ID   IMAGE             COMMAND     CREATED          STATUS                              PORTS   NAMES 64e661d5d4e8   localhost/fedora:gpiobase   /bin/bash 37 seconds ago Exited (0) Less than a second ago           gpioexperiment

To create a new container, run this command:

$ sudo podman run -it --name newexperiment --device=/dev/gpiochip0 localhost/fedora:gpiobase /bin/bash

Delete it with the following command:

$ sudo podman rm newexperiment

Turn on an LED

Now you can use the container you already created. If you exited from the container, start it again with this command:

$ sudo podman start -ia gpioexperiment

As already discussed, you can use the CLI tools provided by the libgpiod-utils package in Fedora. To list the available GPIO chips, run:

$ gpiodetect gpiochip0 [pinctrl-bcm2835] (54 lines)

To get the list of the lines exposed by a specific chip, run:

$ gpioinfo gpiochip0

Notice there’s no correlation between the number of physical pins and the number of lines printed by the previous command. What’s important is the BCM number, as shown on pinout.xyz. It is not advised to play with the lines that don’t have a corresponding BCM number.

Now, connect an LED to the physical pin 40, that is BCM 21. Remember: the shorter leg of the LED (the negative leg, called the cathode) must be connected to a GND pin of the Raspberry Pi with a 330 ohm resistor, and the long leg (the anode) to the physical pin 40.

To turn the LED on, run the following command. It will stay on until you press Ctrl+C:

$ gpioset --mode=wait gpiochip0 21=1

To light it up for a certain period of time, add the -b (run in the background) and -s NUM (how many seconds) parameters, as shown below. For example, to light the LED for 5 seconds, run:

$ gpioset -b -s 5 --mode=time gpiochip0 21=1

Another useful command is gpioget. It gets the status of a pin (high or low), and can be useful to detect buttons and switches.

Conclusion

You can also play with LEDs using Python — there are some examples here. And you can also use the i2c devices inside the container as well. In addition, Podman is not strictly related to this Fedora edition. You can install it on any existing Fedora Edition, or try it on the two new OSTree-based systems in Fedora: Fedora Silverblue and Fedora CoreOS.