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"Documents claiming that Mariam Nawaz Sharif was only a trustee of the companies that bought the London flats, are dated February 2006, and appear to be typed in Microsoft Calibri. But the font was only made commercially available in 2007, leading to suspicions that the documents are forged."

"he foresees fake text being used "for the production of [literal] 'fake news', or to potentially impersonate people who had produced a lot of text online, or simply to generate troll-grade propaganda for social n"

"Doctored images have become a fact of life for political campaigns. When they're disproved, believers 'just don't care.'"

"A picture may say a thousand words, but what if the photograph has been fabricated? There are ways to spot a fake - you just have to look closely enough."

"In the first six weeks of 2020, more than 1.6bn of the 2.4bn presidential campaign ads shown to US Facebook users were from the Bloomberg campaign. Since launching his campaign in mid-November, the former mayor of New York City has spent nearly $45m on Facebook ads - more than all his opponents combined."

"The disinformation campaign promotes unfounded conspiracy theories that the US is behind the new coronavirus outbreak, in an apparent bid to damage America's image around the world."

"There's a certain irony that, in fields outside of computer science, plagiarism is a sign that you didn't understand the question. Within computer science, the opposite is true. Not only have you found an acceptable solution, you've understood it enough to use it within the parameters of your own project."

"The Chinese government is planning on implementing a system that connects citizens' financial, social, political, and legal credit ratings into one big social trustability score. The idea would be that if someone breaks trust in one area, they'd be adversely affected everywhere."

"Google has pledged to continue developing advanced programs using machine learning to combat the rise of extremist content, after it found that it was both faster and more accurate than humans in scrubbing illicit content from YouTube."

"Researchers from MIT and Google recently showed off a machine learning algorithm capable of automatically retouching photos just like a professional photographer. Snap a photo and the neural network identifies exactly how to make it look better-increase contrast a smidge, tone down brightness, whatever-and apply the changes in less than 20 milliseconds."

"The first thing that came into my mind when I first heard about Deep Fakes, is what would happen if we could create DeepFakes in realtime and not just for existing videos or photos? Suppose we can go online with someone else's face, would this be funny or would this push the ethical boundaries even further? I decided to see how much effort it would be to try it out."

"When you take a photo, your smartphone or digital camera stores "metadata" within the image file. This automatically and parasitically burrows itself into every photo you take. It is data about data, providing identifying information such as when and where an image was captured, and what type of camera was used."

"He never got the chance to find out. A week later, he opened up his digital "wallet," where the artwork would supposedly be available, and was faced with an ominous banner reading, "This page has gone off grid. We've got a 404 error and explored deep and wide, but we can't find the page you're looking for."  The artwork, which he expected to be on the page, had disappeared entirely. "There was no history of my ever purchasing it, or ever owning it," he said. "Now there's nothing. My money's gone.""

"It's fast getting to the point where it feels unreasonable to solely blame the famous and the industries that promote them. These days, people are going to plastic surgeons wanting to resemble their own modified avatars from selfies, rather than celebrities. If you like, the fiction of Hollywood perfection has been democratised. Indeed, it's interesting how, even as "improved" celebrities are mocked, or, as with Pike, call it out themselves, the modification of our own images continues unhindered, save for the occasional "#nofilter" humblebrag. It's gone beyond old-school catfishing (pretending to be someone else) to the point where people are essentially deep-faking themselves. And it's all just a bit of fun. Until it isn't. The desire to look better is all too human but are we inexorably moving towards the moment when we lose our grip on what we actually look like?"

"But it wasn't just one day of high engagement. A new study from Cybersecurity For Democracy found that far-right accounts known for spreading misinformation are not only thriving on Facebook, they're actually more successful than other kinds of accounts at getting likes, shares and other forms of user engagement. It wasn't a small edge, either. "It's almost twice as much engagement per follower among the sources that have a reputation for spreading misinformation," Edelson said. "So, clearly, that portion of the news ecosystem is behaving very differently.""

"Unilever said it would eliminate "all digital alterations to body shape, size, proportion and skin colour" from its advertising. The Photoshop ban will cover Unilever adverts as well as influencers paid by the company to promote products."

"A series of senior European MPs have been approached in recent days by individuals who appear to be using deepfake filters to imitate Russian opposition figures during video calls. Those tricked include Rihards Kols, who chairs the foreign affairs committee of Latvia's parliament, as well as MPs from Estonia and Lithuania. Tom Tugendhat, the chair of the UK foreign affairs select committee, has also said he was targeted."

Sounds a bit extreme just to make sure no one can log on to your laptop or smartphone, but a team of researchers from Stanford and Northwestern universities as well as SRI International is nonetheless experimenting at the computer-, cognitive- and neuroscience intersection to combat identity theft and shore up cyber security-by taking advantage of the human brain's innate abilities to learn and recognize patterns.

"The online newspaper Nu.nl had been Facebook's only factchecking partner in the Netherlands since Leiden University dropped out of the programme last year. The website had sole responsibility for marking Facebook and Instagram news content for Dutch users as being false or misleading, in order to help power the social network's tools that suppress distribution of misinformation."