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I've spent years of study perfecting a spell to turn Hermione into a porn star, and some spotty muggle has beaten me to it.

In recent weeks there has been an explosion in what has become known as deepfakes: pornographic videos manipulated so that the original actress' face is replaced with somebody else's.

As these tools have become more powerful and easier to use, it has enabled the transfer of sexual fantasies from people's imaginations to the internet. It flies past not only the boundaries of human decency, but also our sense of believing what we see and hear.

There are some celebrities in particular that seem to have attracted the most attention from deepfakers.

It seems, anecdotally, to be driven by the shock factor: the extent to which a real explicit video involving this subject would create a scandal.

Fakes depicting actress Emma Watson are among the most popular on deepfake communities, alongside those involving Natalie Portman.

As the practice draws more ire, some of the sites facilitating the sharing of such content are considering their options - and taking tentative action.

Gfycat, an image hosting site, has removed posts it identified as being deepfakes - a task likely to become much more difficult in the not-too-distant future.

Reddit, the community website that has emerged as a central hub for sharing, is yet to take any direct action - but the BBC understands it is looking closely at what it could do.

...Read the full article from bbc.com

Firefox is working to protect users from censorship and government control of the Internet. Firefox 59 will recognize new peer to peer internet protocols such as Dat Project, IPFS, and Secure Scuttlebutt, allowing companies to develop extensions which will deliver the Internet in a way governments will find difficult to control, monitor and censor.

Mozilla believes such freedom is a key ingredient of a healthy Internet, and has sponsored other projects which would offer peer to peer wireless internet which cuts out Internet Service Providers.

While a peer to peer system would never be as fast and easy as a client-server system as we have at present, it does provide a baseline level of service which government and ISPs could not go below, or risk increasing number of users defecting, which means the mere existence of these systems helps everyone else, even if they never become widespread.

Mozilla writes:

Mozilla has always been a proponent of decentralization , recognizing that it is a key ingredient of a healthy Internet. Starting with Firefox 59, several protocols that support decentralized architectures are approved for use by extensions. The newly approved protocols are:

• Dat Project
• IPFS
• Secure Scuttlebutt

Firefox itself does not implement these protocols, but having them on the approved list means the browser recognizes them as valid protocols and extensions are free to provide implementations.