Kurt Knutsson reports World ID's iris scanning tech launches in six U.S. cities to verify identity, fight AI bots. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, known for creating ChatGPT, has launched World, a project that uses an eye scan to prove you are a real person online. The idea is to help people stand out from bots and AI by creating a digital ID with a quick scan from a device called the Orb. While Altman says this technology keeps humans central as AI advances, it also raises serious concerns about privacy and the security of sensitive biometric data, with critics and regulators questioning how this information will be used and protected. Join the FREE "CyberGuy Report": Get my expert tech tips, critical security alerts and exclusive deals, plus instant access to my free "Ultimate Scam Survival Guide" when you sign up! World ID relies on a device called the Orb, a spherical scanner that captures a person's iris pattern to generate a unique IrisCode.

AI-enabled tools have become sophisticated enough to allow a small number of individuals to run disinformation campaigns of an unprecedented scale. Privacy-preserving identity attestations can drastically reduce instances of impersonation and make disinformation easy to identify and potentially hinder. By understanding how identity attestations are positioned across the spectrum of decentralization, we can gain a better understanding of the costs and benefits of various attestations. In this paper, we discuss attestation types, including governmental, biometric, federated, and web of trust-based, and include examples such as e-Estonia, China's social credit system, Worldcoin, OAuth, X (formerly Twitter), Gitcoin Passport, and EAS. We believe that the most resilient systems create an identity that evolves and is connected to a network of similarly evolving identities that verify one another. In this type of system, each entity contributes its respective credibility to the attestation process, creating a larger, more comprehensive set of attestations. We believe these systems could be the best approach to authenticating identity and protecting against some of the threats to democracy that AI can pose in the hands of malicious actors. However, governments will likely attempt to mitigate these risks by implementing centralized identity authentication systems; these centralized systems could themselves pose risks to the democratic processes they are built to defend. We therefore recommend that policymakers support the development of standards-setting organizations for identity, provide legal clarity for builders of decentralized tooling, and fund research critical to effective identity authentication systems.

Over the past few months, shiny metallic orbs have materialized cities around the world, from New York to Berlin to Tokyo. Its detractors slam them as invasive, dystopian and exploitative. Welcome to the rollout of Worldcoin, an AI-meets-crypto project from OpenAI founder Sam Altman that has stirred endless controversy. The startup uses orbs to scan people's eyes in exchange for a digital ID and possibly some cryptocurrency, depending on what country they live in. Altman and his co-founder Alex Blania hope that Worldcoin will provide a new solution to online identity in a digital landscape rife with scams, bots and even AI imposters.

Joe Burton, CEO of digital identity authentication company Telesign, spoke with TechRepublic about how the "fuzzy" realm between statistical analysis and artificial intelligence can fuel global, fast and accurate identity management. Telesign may have been instrumental in the development of two-factor authentication, but it has a marginal share of a market dominated by companies like Persona, OpenID, Okta, Duo Security and LastPass. Burton said the company is looking forward, with big plans to use new technologies and services powered by AI to set itself apart from competitors. A key approach since 2019 has been evolving its Communications Platform-as-a-Service leadership, dispensing with passwords and focusing on mobile numbers for identity verification, data modeling and customized communications. SEE: 1Password's Steve Won: Passwords will soon be past tense.

While blockchain can ensure decentralization as one of the top web 3.0 features, you must also identify how the semantic web defines web3 functionalities. The semantic web basically ensures that machines in the web3 ecosystem cannot only understand data but also interpret the underlying context. Decentralisation remained one of the elusive concepts in the domain of technology for many years. The use of decentralization could put a system at risk of new vulnerabilities alongside increasing the need for resources. However, blockchain and the notion of web 3.0 have proved the possibility of introducing decentralization in an efficient, secure, and resourceful manner.

Were you unable to attend Transform 2022? Check out all of the summit sessions in our on-demand library now! Securing digital identities is a problem for many organizations. In fact, according to the Identity Defined Security Alliance (IDSA), 79% of organizations have experienced an identity-related breach. Part of the challenge of identity management is the identities that organizations need to manage aren't just human, but machine-based.

IDnow, a leading European identity proofing platform provider, is pleased to announce its participation in the International Air Transport Association's (IATA) Accelerate@IATA 2022 accelerator program. IDnow is working with IATA and its members, providing expertise and regulatory know-how in the field of identity proofing and digital identity. Together, IATA and IDnow are working on the shared goal of making flying more seamless and low-touch for passengers, while lowering fraud risks for airlines. IATA is the trade association for the world's airlines, representing some 290 airlines or 83% of total air traffic. As a leading industry association, IATA is shaping industry standards and the future of aviation.

Hardware maker Nvidia is ramping up its efforts to make a stand in the Metaverse. On Tuesday, the company revealed a new set of developer tools focused on metaverse environments, including new AI capabilities, simulations, and other creative assets. Creators utilizing the Omniverse Kit, along with apps such as Nucleus, Audio2Face and Machinima, will be able to access the new upgrades. Nvidia says one primary function of the tools will be to help enhance building "accurate digital twins and realistic avatars." Quality of metaverse interaction is a hot topic in the industry, as developers and users ponder the quality of experiences over the quantity.

We revisit the classic signal-to-symbol barrier in light of the remarkable ability of deep neural networks to generate realistic synthetic data. DeepFakes and spoofing highlight the feebleness of the link between physical reality and its abstract representation, whether learned by a digital computer or a biological agent. Starting from a widely applicable definition of abstract concept, we show that standard feed-forward architectures cannot capture but trivial concepts, regardless of the number of weights and the amount of training data, despite being extremely effective classifiers. On the other hand, architectures that incorporate recursion can represent a significantly larger class of concepts, but may still be unable to learn them from a finite dataset. We qualitatively describe the class of concepts that can be "understood" by modern architectures trained with variants of stochastic gradient descent, using a (free energy) Lagrangian to measure information complexity. Even if a concept has been understood, however, a network has no means of communicating its understanding to an external agent, except through continuous interaction and validation. We then characterize physical objects as abstract concepts and use the previous analysis to show that physical objects can be encoded by finite architectures. However, to understand physical concepts, sensors must provide persistently exciting observations, for which the ability to control the data acquisition process is essential (active perception). The importance of control depends on the modality, benefiting visual more than acoustic or chemical perception. Finally, we conclude that binding physical entities to digital identities is possible in finite time with finite resources, solving in principle the signal-to-symbol barrier problem, but we highlight the need for continuous validation.

We are excited to bring Transform 2022 back in-person July 19 and virtually July 20 - 28. Join AI and data leaders for insightful talks and exciting networking opportunities. Identity and access management (IAM) provider ForgeRock recently held its annual IDLive conference in Austin, Texas. One of the most compelling sessions involved ForgeRock CTO Eve Maler, who discussed the future of IAM and how it's now being heavily infused with artificial intelligence (AI) to make it more effective. The future that Maler described is very much aligned with the company's mission to "help people safely and simply access the connected world" and its vision of "never having to log in again." While IAM has historically been a part of the IT plumbing to manage employee access within companies, it has emerged as a technology with a significant impact on all users -- employees, consumers, citizens and others -- in the new post-pandemic digital world that is evolving into Web3.