💬 QUOTED: “Are we ready for a world where our data is exposed at a glance?”

If you’ve seen Minority Report, Black Mirror, Eagle Eye, or *insert any other tech-based sci-fi thriller here* and the answer is no, brace yourself. Two Harvard students recently paired the Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses with facial recognition software to rapidly identify strangers and compile their personal information from the internet.

In a video posted to X, the students, AnhPhu Nguyen and Caine Ardayfio, explain how they built I-XRAY:

• The program utilizes the camera integrated into the glasses to capture images of random people.
• These images are then run through a publicly available facial recognition search site like PimEyes, after which AI trawls the web to compile the person’s addresses, names of their parents, photos, and more.

Using this info, Nguyen and Ardayfio were purportedly able to approach unsuspecting people in public and make them think they had met before.

The dystopian future is already here: Per the students, the aim of this project is to highlight the privacy concerns associated with new consumer technologies. Anyone with a camera and the tech know-how can pull off the same thing as Nguyen and Ardayfio, Meta told 404 Media (the students won’t be releasing the program’s code for this very reason).

🍿🤡 STAT OF THE DAY: Joker: Folie à Deux, the big-budget sequel to Joker (2019) starring Joaquin Phoenix and Lady Gaga, debuted for moviegoers everywhere this weekend – but it appears critics are having the last laugh. Joker 2 earned $40 million in domestic ticket sales, well below its expected haul of $50 million–$60 million. It also became the first Hollywood comic book movie in history to earn a “D” CinemaScore from audiences. Compared to the first Joker, the jukebox-musical sequel earned less than half as much in its domestic weekend debut ($40M vs. $96M), despite costing over 3x as much to make ($190M vs $55M).

🤔 DID YOU KNOW? A zeptosecond – aka one trillionth of a billionth of a second – is the smallest unit of time ever measured. Ex: It takes a photon ~247 zeptoseconds to travel across a hydrogen molecule.

📰 WORTH A READ: The video game that inspired a generation of historians → (The Guardian)