On June 24th, the mayor of Berlin thought she was on a video call with the mayor of Kyiv, Vitali Klitschko. The call, however, was fake. The head of the Deutsche Welle’s fact-checking team Joscha Weber tells Gareth what happened, how the mayors of Vienna and Madrid were deceived by similar fake calls, and how a Russian comedy duo claims to be behind it all. The video call was initially thought to be a deepfake, but a later analysis by German media suggests that it may have been a shallowfake instead. What do these two terms mean, and what is the difference between them? We have deepfake experts Hany Farid and Hao Li in the studio to answer this question, explain how deepfakes are created, and discuss the wider issues that they pose.

India’s great VPN exit
In late April, the Indian government decided to enact new cybersecurity rules that include forcing virtual private network (VPN) providers to keep users’ data such as names, contact numbers, and IP addresses for a period of five years. VPN companies in India have sharply criticised the ruling, and some have already exited and pulled their servers out of the country. India has now given VPN providers another three months to comply with the new rules. Expert contributor Bill Thompson tells Gareth what VPNs are, why these new rules conflict with their premise, and what this could mean for privacy and the tech sector in India.

Can AI solve prostate cancer?
In a recent machine learning competition, developers used a new prostate biopsy dataset to train artificial intelligence algorithms to diagnose and grade tumours. Gareth speaks to Ph.D. student Nita Mulliqi about the difficulties of using AI in prostate cancer grading and how a dataset from diverse clinical settings is needed to create effective algorithms. We also hear from a consultant for the WHO, Rohit Malpani, about the limitations of applying machine learning applications in healthcare in low- and middle-income countries.

Studio manager: Michael Millham
Producer: Florian Bohr

(Image: Vitali Klitschko. Credit: Getty Images)