Remarkable nonsense

Remarkable nonsense about ‘the Holocaust’

Russian Holocaust ice-skating routine slammed as ‘unbelievably tasteless’

Dated:

(CNN)A Holocaust-themed ice skating routine on a Russian reality television show, involving the wife of a high-level aide to President Vladimir Putin, has sparked outrage around the world. The act was based on the award-winning 1997 Italian film, “Life is Beautiful,” which tells the story of a Jewish father who tries to hide his son from the horrors of the Holocaust through humor and games. In the routine, set to Israeli singer Noa’s “Beautiful That Way” from the film’s soundtrack, former Olympic ice skater Tatiana Navka and her dance partner Andrei Burkovsky dance in the striped pajamas and yellow six-pointed stars which Jewish victims of Nazi concentration camps were forced to wear. Navka married President Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov in a large ceremony in August 2015.

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Microsoft builds new AI bot to ignore Hitler

Dated:
  • Microsoft is trying to avoid another PR disaster with its new AI bot.

The company’s latest program can describe what it “sees” in photos.

“CaptionBot,” as it’s called, does a pretty decent job at describing simple everyday scenes, such as a person sitting on a couch, a cat lounging around, or a busy restaurant. But it seems to be programmed to ignore pictures of Nazi symbolism or its leader.

CNNMoney gave CaptionBot several photos of Adolf Hitler and variations of the swastika to analyze, and it often came back with “I really can’t describe the picture” and a confused emoji. It did, however, identify other Nazi leaders like Joseph Mengele and Joseph Goebbels.

Microsoft (MSFT) released CaptionBot a few weeks after its disastrous social experiment with Tay, an automated chat program designed to talk like a teen.

Shortly after putting Tay to work on Twitter, it began to tweet incredibly racist comments like “Hitler was right I hate the jews.”

The company blamed the bot’s behavior on a “coordinated effort” by online trolls to teach and trick the program into saying hateful things, and it took Tay offline after less than a day.

Related: Microsoft ‘deeply sorry’ for chat bot’s racist tweets

In addition to ignoring pictures of Hitler, CaptionBot also seemed to refuse to identify people like Osama bin Laden. But the program had no problems identifying Mao Zedong, Pol Pot, or Saddam Hussein.

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Source: money.cnn.com/2016/04/14/technology/microsoft-hitler/index.html

Bar of soap ‘made from the fat of Jewish Holocaust victims’ is removed from eBay after Dutch owner put it up for sale

Dated:
  • The listing sought €199 for the bar of soap reportedly made from ‘fat’
  • It was claimed victims of the Westerbork concentration camp in Holland
  • The Nazis are believed to have experimented with the soap during the war
  • SS leader Heinrich Himmler is reported to have stopped the experiments

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