mel_llaguno

Given the recent article by CNN [https://www.cnn.com/2021/05/04/tech/pimeyes-facial-recognition/index.html] I had a look at their privacy policy and found this interesting tidbit:

Data of unidentified entities are stored for 2 years.

This seems "alarming" as searches can be used to find images that they _haven't_ yet indexed.

https://pimeyes.com/en/privacy-policy

I was working on a web frontend for fawkes (https://pypi.org/project/fawkes/) based on the research outlined here (https://github.com/Shawn-Shan/fawkes) which claims to be able to use image level perturbations to protect against AI image recognition systems. From the paper, the following claim is made:

"Our cloaking technique is not designed to fool a tracker who uses similarity matching. However, we believe our cloaking technique should still be effective against Amazon Rekognition, since cloaks create a feature space separation between original and cloaked images that should result in low similarity scores between them."

I was in the process of verifying this when I found that _no such guarantee_ can be made using fawkes. I documented my experiment here: https://github.com/Shawn-Shan/fawkes/issues/125.

Using Azure Face and AWS Rekognition, perturbed images regardless of the settings resulted in high degrees of similarity. In addition, I did a separate test using a perturbed image and another image with the same subject which _still resulted in a high degree of similarity_.

While the README claims "Python scripts that can test the protection effectiveness will be ready shortly.", no such scripts have been provided.

According to the fawkes website, their application has been downloaded over 300k times. If the protection they claim to provide is ineffective, then there are _a lot of people_ exposed out there with a misguided sense of being protected. This situation is further complicated by the apparent legitimacy of this tool due to its presentation at Usenix 2020 and its inclusion in pypi.

My question is this - has anyone actually validated the efficacy of this algorithm and have reproducible results to share? Or is fawkes yet another example of AI snake oil?

I've noticed a trend in technical material being authored on Medium behind a registration wall. Are people really generating enough revenue to warrant publishing tech articles on Medium to offset the greater good of making the material broadly available?

Gist offers public visibility and commenting without the requisite barrier to entry.

Thoughts?

I'm looking to deploy a SaaS solution from Canada which will have customers in the US as well. If I'm based solely in Canada and have _no_ permanent establishment in the US (including ensuring that my cloud instances were _not_ deployed on any US zones and avoiding employees/contractors from the US), would I be exempt from any US corporate tax?

I've been trying to find a clear answer and as with all things related to taxes, it's been utter confusion. Ran this question by the Canadian BDC/EDC with no avail. Practical experience would be appreciated.

If there is no need to execute a "Delaware straddle" and there are beneficial tax implications for not doing so, then all the better.

TIA

I've seen a lot of startups using Rails, but are there any out there that apply for YC funding that are using something more enterprise focused for their application? If you've considered using the GAE and choose something else, what was the deciding factor?