GoKawiil
Tech News
Malaysian national Ye Lin, 30, sent a colleague a Google Gemini-generated photo of a saltwater crocodile purportedly in Singapore's Pandan Reservoir. The image spread until it reached national water agency officials, prompting a days-long search that shut down the 435-acre reservoir and halted canoe and rowing club activities before authorities determined the photo was fake.
Ye Lin allegedly used Google's Gemini to create a fake image of a saltwater crocodile in Pandan Reservoir and sent it to a colleague in August. The image prompted a crocodile sighting report to national water agency PUB, which suspended aquatic activities for two days while searching for the nonexistent animal before confirming the photo was fake and alerting police. Lin faces charges of transmitting false information and obstruction of justice after reportedly deleting the image and the Gemini app from his phone.
A technical breakdown explains how Windows XP picked a user's initial account picture: it used the RtlRandomEx function seeded with GetTickCount(), scanning the default pictures folder once rather than twice. This single-pass method is a special case of reservoir sampling, selecting one item fairly as the folder is enumerated.
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Visitors to British Columbia's Williston Reservoir filmed a tree-covered floating mass roughly the size of two football fields drifting on the water. The island was later reported to have disappeared from view, leaving its exact fate unclear.