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Asus unveils 5-in-1 Android/Windows Transformer Book V tabfonetop

Posted date: 1:19 PM / comment : 1 , , ,

Asus Transformer Book V: A Windows, Android, laptop, tablet, and smartphone five-in-one!
If you thought that Microsoft’s tablet-that-turns-into-a-laptop was cool, the Asus Transformer Book V — unveiled at Computex 2014 in Taiwan — will blow your mind. Like previous 2-in-1 Transformer Books, there’s a Windows tablet that clicks into a laptop base — but now there’s also a slot on the back of the tablet for an Android smartphone! All told, this hideous three-in-one device has five modes of operation: a Windows laptop, a Windows tablet, an Android smartphone, an Android tablet, and an Android laptop. There’s no word on pricing or release date.
Okay, let’s break this beast down. First, the main brain of the operation is the tablet: a 12.5-inch device running Windows 8.1, with an Intel Core CPU under the hood, 4GB of RAM, a 28 watt-hour battery, and up to 128GB of flash storage. Reports seem to differ on the resolution of the screen (some say 1920×1080, some say 1366×768). In the laptop keyboard/base station, there’s a 1TB hard drive — and that’s about it (not quite as fancy as last year’s Transformer Book Trio, which had a full PC in the base). On the back of the tablet there’s a slot that will take a 5-inch, ZenFone-like smartphone. The smartphone will apparently be the first device in the world with Intel’s 64-bit Moorefield (Atom) SoC.
Asus Transformer Book V
Asus Transformer Book V. You can see the Android home screen running in a window in the background. [Image credit: Engadget]
The various parts of the Asus Transformer Book V (pronounced “five”) interact in the following ways. The tablet can be used as a Windows tablet, or as a Windows laptop. The smartphone can obviously be used as a normal Android smartphone. When you slot the smartphone into the tablet, you then gain the ability to run Android apps on your Windows desktop — or you can let Android take over the display entirely, turning the device into an Android tablet (or laptop, if you’re docked). The tablet gains LTE connectivity when the smartphone is plugged in. There will be some interchange of data between the two devices, but the exact implementation isn’t clear.
In terms of real-world usefulness, color us fairly skeptical. If the tablet part features an Intel Core processor, expect the entire Transformer Book V package to be very expensive — probably in the $1500 to $2000 range. While we don’t have the tablet’s exact weight, it will probably be in the region of 700-800 grams — which will be rather heavy, once you plug in the 140-gram smartphone. While there’s something to be said for a very cheap, “dumb” tablet that merely extends the size of your smartphone’s screen, I think putting a smartphone slot in the back of a full-featured 2-in-1 tablet/laptop is probably taking things a bit too far.
The various modes of the Asus Transformer Book V
The various modes of the Asus Transformer Book V
Having said that, if you’re in the market for a new smartphone, and potentially a new tablet as well, there’s no real reason why you shouldn’t at least try the Asus Transformer Book V. When you actually have all three parts laying around, and assuming the interchange of data between Android and Windows isn’t too clunky, some fairly useful scenarios might actually emerge.
I think the whole setup would be cheaper and more interesting if there was only one processor, though, in the smartphone. Then you could walk around with the smartphone, and turn it into a tablet or laptop if you want to consume some media or do something productive. That would be pretty close to my vision of the future, where the smartphone isthe PC of the future.

THIS BRAIN IMPLANT MAY HELP PEOPLE WALK AGAIN

Posted date: 5:06 PM / comment : 0 ,

Photo via Phys.org
Brain implants sound strange, like something out of sci-fi, but they’re closer than you think. Researchers at the A*Star Institute of Microelectronics in Singapore have developed a neural probe array small enough that it can sit inside someone’s brain on a long-term basis without damaging delicate tissue. The probe array is so compact that it can float along with a person’s brain inside their head. Their specialty: helping amputees and people with spinal cord injuries control artificial limbs.

The neural array forms a link between the brain and artificial limbs, allowing someone with an injury to walk or move again. As the technology advances, who knows what else they could allow us to do.
Despite the benefits, neural implants come with risks. The most common way of inserting probes into people’s brains is by drilling holes into the skull to serve as a pathway for electrodes. If things go wrong, patients can develop infections, or even bleed in the brain. 

“A high-profile array may touch the skull and damage the tissue when relative micromotions occur between brain and the probes,“ researcher Ming-Yuan Cheng told Phys.org. 

To solve this issue, Cheng and his team made the probe array as thin as possible, employing “innovative microassembly” techniques to limit the height of the array to within 750 micrometers, or about 75 percent of a single millimeter. The probe array is implanted in the brain’s subarachnoid space, 1-2.5 millimeter a cavity in the brain between the arachnoid mater and the pia mater of the meninges. 

These are layers of the membranes that surround and protect the brain and spinal cord. Basically, the implants sit right in the middle of our brain’s protective membranes.

Biocompatibility tests conducted with the neural probes have shown that it did not cause cell membranes to rupture nor suppressed cell growth, both of which would be bad. The team will make design tweaks to make the probes fully implantable. 

Chinese Chemists Invent Water-Jet Printer

Posted date: 10:38 PM / comment : 0 , , ,

Goodbye, Ink: Chinese Chemists Invent Water-Jet Printer

Printer ink makers and ink refilling stations may soon have an unexpected competition from a printer which uses H20 and not ink. The technology was developed by a team of chemists from China.
What makes the technology work is the paper that was treated with an invisible dye that colours upon exposure to water and later disappears. It uses a dye compound called oxazolidine that gives a clear, blue print in less than one second upon application of water.
Within a day, the used paper fades back to white which makes it reusable.
At temperature lesser than 35 degrees Celsius, the print would fade away in 22 hours, while at higher temperature, it would fade faster. The technology is ideal for documents that are printed to be read once and then discarded.
Sean Xiao-An Zhang, the chemistry professor at China's Jilin University, who supervised the work on the water-jet printer, estimated that about 40 per cent of office prints are eventually thrown to the garbage bin after one reading.
Mr Zhang estimates that based on 50 times rewriting, the cost would be only 1 per cent of inkjet prints. Reusing the paper only 12 times would bring down the cost of one-seventeenth of the cost of inkjet print.
The technology does not require changing a printer but only replacing the ink in the cartridge with H20, using a syringe.
The team published the result of their experiment in the Nature Communications journal.

Celebrating 25 Years of Not Getting Lost Thanks to GPS

Posted date: 1:25 PM / comment : 0 , , ,

If there was ever a justification needed for space technology, it’s that it keeps people like me from constantly being lost. These days, my smart phone is much better than me at getting around thanks to a fleet of satellites that tells it where it is at all times.
Though not a particularly romantic anniversary, today marks 25 years since the first satellite in the U.S. Global Positioning System launched from Cape Canaveral, beginning the set up for one of the wonders of the modern world. In the two and a half decades since then, GPS has become inextricably embedded into just about everything we own, finding use in cartography, smart phone apps, geotagging and geocaching, disaster relief, and hundreds of other applications, while simultaneously raising privacy concerns.
GPS relies on at least 24 satellites flying 20,000 kilometers overhead in one of six different orbital paths, tracing out what looks like a toy model of an atom. With their solar panels extended, each of these 1-ton satellites is about the same size as a giraffe. At any given moment, each satellite beams out a signal identifying itself and giving its time and location.
Your GPS-enabled phone or car captures that signal and compares the time it was received to the time it was transmitted. A quick calculation involving the speed of light allows the device to figure out the distance to that satellite. If you have your distance to two or three satellites, you can triangulate your position on the Earth. When all the GPS satellites are working, a user always has at least four in view, allowing them to determine things like altitude, speed, and direction.
In order to properly triangulate, GPS requires extremely accurate timekeeping, which is why each satellite carries an atomic clock. The satellites are also some of the most important technology using lessons learned from Einstein, who taught us that clocks outside a gravitational well will run faster than those inside of it because of the warping of space-time. An opposite effect comes from the fact that GPS satellites move at 14,000 kilometers per hour (0.001 percent the speed of light), meaning that they experience a slight time dilation making their clocks run slow relative to one at rest on the ground. The two effects taken together mean that the clock on a GPS satellite runs about 38 microseconds faster each day than ones here on Earth. GPS requires accuracy of 20 to 30 nanoseconds (one microsecond is 1,000 nanoseconds), so both effects are part of the calculation determining how far away each satellite is at any given time.
The idea behind GPS comes from the very beginnings of the Space Race. In 1957, the Soviet’s newly launched Sputnik satellite emitted a characteristic radio beep that could be tuned in to as the object passed overhead. While the rest of the U.S. was freaking out, two scientists at the Applied Physics Laboratory realized they could use those transmissions to pinpoint where the satellite was. As Sputnik approached, its radio signals would get compressed a little, shortening their wavelength, and as it receded, the wavelengths would lengthen. This is known as the Doppler effect and can easily be heard as an ambulance speeds toward you, the pitch of its siren getting higher.
The APL scientists used UNIVAC, one of the first commercial computers in the U.S., to figure out Sputnik’s orbit. A year later, they were asked to do the opposite problem: Find out where someone was on Earth based on the location of an overhead satellite. This was soon taken up by the Department of Defense’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (later named DARPA, the agency responsible for developing the internet), which launched satellites starting in 1964 as part of the TRANSIT program, the first satellite navigation program. The U.S. Navy was the main user of the TRANSIT satellites, using them to provide location information for their missile submarines.
Developing, launching, and maintaining the satellites necessary for a full GPS system was horrendously expensive (eventually costing roughly $8 billion in today’s dollars). If it hadn’t been for the Cold War and the fact that the U.S. needed to launch nuclear missiles from anywhere and everywhere, GPS might never have happened. The paranoid U.S. military wanted to make sure they would be able to respond to a Soviet nuclear attack even if some of its nuclear arsenal was destroyed. It wasn’t enough to have aircraft bombers and land-based intercontinental ballistic missile launchers. Submarine-launched ballistic missiles were needed to provide a counterattack from the sea. (The Soviets, of course, had similarly spread-out countermeasures.)
But submarines needed to accurately know their position before launching a missile in order to hit their target. The Navy had TRANSIT for this. Working in parallel throughout the 1960s, the Air Force developed a similar concept called MOSAIC for their bombers and the Army launched satellites under the SECOR program that could determine the location of a unit somewhere on the globe.
By 1973, the branches of the U.S. military realized they could combine their ideas and come up with something superior to all three. In September of that year, the top brass met at the Pentagon and came up with what would eventually become known as the Navigation System Using Timing and Ranging program, called Navstar-GPS, which was later shortened to just GPS. Between 1978 and 1985, the military launched 11 satellites (10 of which worked) to test the new GPS system.
An unlaunched GPS unit, which looks like probably the most satellitey satellite ever. Image: Scott Ehardt
After Korean Air Lines flight 007 was shot down in 1983 for wandering into prohibited U.S.S.R. airspace, President Reagan promised that GPS would be opened up for civilian use on passenger aircraft once it was completed. The first GPS satellite in the modern fleet launched on Feb. 14, 1989. The Air Force had planned to use the space shuttle for this launch in 1986 but was delayed by the Challenger disaster and eventually used a Delta II rocket. The full GPS fleet was completed in 1994 and now at least 32 satellites are in orbit to provide redundancy. During the same time, the Russians developed and launched GLONASS, which works on principles similar to GPS, and is currently the only alternative location-finding system in the world.
At its beginning, the U.S. military feared that GPS technology would be used by enemies, and purposely degraded civilian information so that it could only provide accurate location information to within 100 meters. In 2000, President Clinton had this feature turned off and now civilian devices are usually accurate to within 5 to 10 meters. The European Union and China are currently building their own global navigation systems, known as Galileo and Beidou, respectively, that will serve as further alternatives to GPS in the coming decade. It seems likely that folks in the future will never have to worry about being lost again.

Google working on 10 gigabit Internet speeds

Posted date: 10:00 AM / comment : 0 ,

Project to develop 'next generation' of the Internet is part of Google's broader obsession with speed, CFO says

File:GoogleFiberNetworkBox.jpg
Google Fiber Network Box
Google is working on technology that will provide data transfer speeds over the Internet that are many times faster than its current Google Fiber service in Kansas City, an executive at the online search giant said on Wednesday.
Google Fiber offers data transfer speeds of 1 gigabit per second currently. But the company is already working on speeds of 10 gigabits per second, Chief Financial Officer Patrick Pichette said during the Goldman Sachs Technology and Internet conference.
Pichette called this the next generation of the Internet and said it was part of Google's broader, long-term obsession with speed.
Faster speeds will increase the use of software as a service because users will be able to trust that critical applications that are data intensive will run smoothly over the Internet, he explained.
"That's where the world is going. It's going to happen," Pichette said. It may happen over a decade, but "why wouldn't we make it available in three years? That's what we're working on. There's no need to wait," he added.
Google is not the only one working on this. Last year, researchers in the U.K. announced that they achieved data transmission speeds of 10 gigabits per second using "li-fi" a wireless Internet connectivity technology that uses light.
Pichette has experience in this area. From early 2001 until July 2008, he was an executive at Bell Canada, which offers a fast, fiber optic Internet service to homes in that country.
Google Fiber is currently available in Kansas City, but Google has said it is bringing the service to Austin, Texas and Pichette told analysts last year that the project is not a hobby for the company.
On Wednesday he was asked whether Google Fiber will be coming to more cities. "Stay tuned," Pichette answered.

Funny Looking Tower Generates 600% More Electrical Energy Than Traditional Wind Turbines

Posted date: 10:56 AM / comment : 0 ,

The Sheerwind wind turbine promises to produce 6 times the electrical power than traditional wind turbines.
This funny looking wind tower acts like a funnel, directing the wind from any angle, down through a tube to a ground based turbine generator. The funneling of the wind through a narrow passage effectively creates a “jet effect” increasing the velocity of the wind, while lowering the pressure. This is called the Venturi Effect. This speeds up the wind turbine mounted inside the narrowest portion and generates electricity.
As such it can capture and generate electricity at a much lower wind speed than current wind power technologies.
The idea is so simple, so elegant, and promises to produce so much more energy at lower cost and more efficiently, that it might just be the answer to many problems with current wind turbine technology. Aside from the lower capital investment to get started, and increased efficiency and power generation, it also might be a solution to the ever growing problem of birds (and bats) being killed by traditional wind farms. (Yes, that is a problem)
This technology is not really new in the science of fluid dynamics, however this is a new way to generate electricity, and if successful, promises to grow the wind energy in a more eco-friendly way than ever thought possible.
Imagine a smaller HOME version on your off grid cabin. Now THAT is cool off grid tech!
Sheerwind INVELOX Wind Turbine
Conventional wind turbines use massive turbine generator systems mounted on top of a tower. INVELOX, by contrast, funnels wind energy to ground-based generators. Instead of snatching bits of energy from the wind as it passes through the blades of a rotor, wind is captured with a funnel and directed through a tapering passageway that naturally accelerates its flow. This stream of kinetic energy then drives a generator that is installed safely and economically at ground level. – See more at: http://sheerwind.com/technology/how-does-it-work
Sheerwind INVELOX Wind Turbine
Venturi effect
Figure-1-Raw-field-data-and-speed-ratios-for-24-data-sets1
via: Sheerwind

US military's 'Iron Man' armor will be ready for testing by June, says admiral

Posted date: 2:30 PM / comment : 0 , , ,

US military's Iron Man armor
The first prototypes for the US military's Iron Man armor will be ready for testing by this summer, said the head of US Special Operations Command today. At a special conference in Washington DC today, Defense Tech reports, Navy Adm. William McRaven stated that three unpowered prototypes of the Tactical Assault Light Operator Suit, or TALOS, are currently being assembled, with an expected delivery by June. The suit will undergo an evaluation period and hopefully be field-ready by August 2018.
During the conference, McRaven emphasized the suit's potential to save lives. "That suit," he said, "if done correctly, will yield a revolutionary improvement in survivability and capability for special operators." The TALOS was commissioned last October, and may one day be armed with its own on-board computer, health monitors, and MIT-developed liquid armor that can harden in a matter of milliseconds. The hope is to allow the wearer to walk through a stream of bullets — not unlike the Marvel superhero.
Presently, 56 corporations, 16 government agencies, 13 universities, and 10 national laboratories are working together to develop the armor. McRaven wants to up involvement to include mechanics and craftsmen on the project, and may seek the authority to approach the Pentagon to distribute prize money for interested experts.

Why South Korea is really an internet dinosaur

Posted date: 2:26 PM / comment : 0 , ,

South Korea is really an internet dinosaur

SOUTH KOREA likes to think of itself as a world leader when it comes to the internet. It boasts the world’s swiftest average broadband speeds (of around 22 megabits per second). Last month the government announced that it will upgrade the country's wireless network to 5G by 2020, making downloads about 1,000 times speedier than they are now. Rates of internet penetration are among the highest in the world. There is a thriving startup community (Cyworld, rolled out five years before Mark Zuckerberg launched Facebook, was the most popular social network in South Korea for a decade) and the country leads the world in video games as spectator sports. Yet in other ways the futuristic country is stuck in the dark ages. Last year Freedom House, an American NGO, ranked South Korea’s internet as only “partly free”. Reporters without Borders has placed it on a list of countries “under surveillance”, alongside Egypt, Thailand and Russia, in its report on “Enemies of the Internet”. Is forward-looking South Korea actually rather backward?
Every week portions of the Korean web are taken down by government censors. Last year about 23,000 Korean webpages were deleted, and another 63,000 blocked, at the request of the Korea Communications Standards Commission (KCSC), a nominally independent (but mainly government-appointed) public body. In 2009 the KCSC had made just 4,500 requests for deletion. Its filtering chiefly targets pornography, prostitution and gambling, all of which are illegal in South Korea. But more wholesome pursuits are also restricted: online gaming is banned between midnight and 6am for under-16s (users must input their government-issued ID numbers to prove their age). Sites from North Korea, including its state newspaper, news agency and Twitter feed, are blocked, as are those of North Korea's sympathisers. A law dating back to the Korean war forbids South Korean maps from being taken out of the country. Because North and South are technically still at war, the law has been expanded to include electronic mapping data—which means that Google, for instance, cannot process South Korean mapping data on its servers and therefore cannot offer driving directions inside the country. In 2010 the UN determined that the KCSC “essentially operates as a censorship body”.
Some Koreans are resisting. In 2011 Park Kyung-sin, a dissenting commissioner, posted a picture of Gustave Courbet’s “L’Origine du monde” on his blog, in protest at the KCSC’s order to block a picture of a man’s genitals—like that found in a science textbook—that he had previously posted on the same blog. He was convicted and fined, though the charges were later lifted. In 2012 a 15-year-old Korean cyber-game champion was locked out of a game of "Starcraft II" while playing after midnight in a competition that was taking place during the day in France. (By the time he reconnected, by entering the details of a parent’s ID card, he had lost the match.) The watchdog has no sense of humour: in 2012 a photographer received a suspended ten-month prison term for retweeting a series of North Korean propaganda posts, likening his inheritance of his father's studio to the North’s leadership transition. Park Dae-sung, a blogger who posted prophecies on the collapse of Lehman Brothers and the crash of the won in 2008 under the pen name of Minerva, spent 104 days in prison for “spreading false rumours”.
Critics spy political interference. In 2004 internet users were required to input their names and ID numbers on political comments in the run-up to an election. In 2009 those posting any comments on websites with over 100,000 daily visitors were required to do the same. That law has since been rescinded. But although the government is beginning to ease some restrictions, it is stepping up its monitoring of social media. The KCSC set up a special sub-committee on social media in 2011, and the following year asked for 4,500 comments on Twitter, Facebook and the like to be removed—13 times more than in 2010. Last year the number of comments deleted increased again, to 6,400. Some officials seem to enjoy posting rogue comments as well as deleting genuine ones. A group of intelligence agents are now under investigation for allegedly posting thousands of messages under false identities in support of Park Geun-hye, now South Korea’s president, in the run-up to the 2012 election. (There is no evidence that Ms Park had ordered this.) In December she said that the government needed to “correct the wild rumours spreading through social network services”, referring to public outcry at the privatisation of railways and health care. South Koreans may enjoy unusually speedy internet connections, but they are not allowed to use them freely.

How the EFF is securing your Android web surfing experience

Posted date: 12:16 PM / comment : 0 , ,

Android users worried about the security of their mobile Internet browsing in light of all the advanced spying practices recently revealed by Edward Snowden’s leaked documents, should know the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is ready to help by providing its HTTPS Everywhere extension to the Firefox app for Android devices.
The EFF on Monday announced that its extension can be installed on Android devices that run Mozilla’s Android app in order to enjoy an encrypted mobile browsing experience. “With HTTPS Everywhere installed, Firefox for Android encrypts thousands of connections from your browser that would otherwise be insecure,” the EFF wrote on its blog. “This gives Firefox a huge security advantage over every other mobile browser available today.”
The extension, previously available on the desktop version of Firefox, switches “insecure HTTP connections to secure HTTPS connections whenever possible using thousands of URL rewrite rules,” thus securing the “confidentiality and integrity” of the data sent over HTTPS including emails, instant messages, syncing, web browsing and app downloads. Once installed the Firefox extension can easily be toggled on and off on Android devices (installing instructions are available here).
Unfortunately, the EFF’s extension only works on Firefox for Android, with the Foundation taking a direct hit at Apple when announcing it. “[…] a quick note to iPhone users: we’re sorry we can’t help you to secure your mobile browsing experience,” the EFF said. “Apple’s policy of locking out Mozilla means you can’t have a more secure browser in your pocket.”
HTTPS Everywhere toggle for switching the extension on and off on Firefox Browser for Android | Image credit: EFF
HTTPS Everywhere
According to the Foundation, who fights for the digital rights of Internet users, HTTPS Everywhere encrypts “hundreds of billions of page views and over a trillion individual requests per year,” but reveals that the encryption is only possible if the visited site supports HTTPS.

How The Copyright Industry Made Your Computer Less Safe

Posted date: 12:14 PM / comment : 0 , ,

Copyright Industry
I've already written one piece about Cory Doctorow's incredible column at the Guardian concerningdigital rights management and anti-circumvention, in which I focused on how the combination of DRM and anti-circumvention laws allows companies to make up their own copyright laws in a way that removes the rights of the public. Those rights are fairly important, and the reason we have them encoded within our copyright laws is to make sure that copyright isn't abused to stifle speech. But, anti-circumvention laws combined with DRM allow the industry to route around that entirely. 

But there's a second important point in Doctorow's piece that is equally worth highlighting, and it's that the combination of DRM and anti-circumvention laws make all of our computers less safe. For this to make sense, you need to understand that DRM is really a form of security software.
The entertainment industry calls DRM "security" software, because it makes them secure from their customers. Security is not a matter of abstract absolutes, it requires a context. You can't be "secure," generally -- you can only be secure from some risk. For example, having food makes you secure from hunger, but puts you at risk from obesity-related illness.

DRM is designed on the presumption that users don't want it, and if they could turn it off, they would. You only need DRM to stop users from doing things they're trying to do and want to do. If the thing the DRM restricts is something no one wants to do anyway, you don't need the DRM. You don't need a lock on a door that no one ever wants to open.

DRM assumes that the computer's owner is its adversary.
But, to understand security, you have to recognize that it's an ever-evolving situation. Doctorow quotes Bruce Schneier in pointing out that security is a process, not a product. Another way of thinking about it is that you're only secure until you're not -- and that point is going to come eventually. As Doctorow notes, every security system relies on people probing it and finding and reporting new vulnerabilities. That allows the process of security to keep moving forward. As vulnerabilities are found and understood, new defenses can be built and the security gets better. But anti-circumvention laws make that almost impossible with DRM, meaning that the process of making security better stops -- while the process of breaking it doesn't.
Here is where DRM and your security work at cross-purposes. The DMCA's injunction against publishing weaknesses in DRM means that its vulnerabilities remain unpatched for longer than in comparable systems that are not covered by the DMCA. That means that any system with DRM will on average be more dangerous for its users than one without DRM.
And that leads to very real vulnerabilities. The most famous, of course, is the case of the Sony rootkit. As Doctorow notes, multiple security companies were aware of the nefarious nature of that rootkit, which not only hid itself on your computer and was difficult to delete, but also opened up a massive vulnerability for malware to piggyback on -- something malware writers took advantage of. And yet, the security companies did nothing, because explaining how to remove the rootkit would violate the DMCA. 

Given the post-Snowden world we live in today, people are suddenly taking computer security and privacy more seriously than they have in the past -- and that, as Doctorow notes, represents another opportunity to start rethinking the ridiculousness of anti-circumvention laws combined with DRM. Unfortunately, politicians who are way behind on this stuff still don't get it. Recent trade agreements like the TPP and ACTA continue to push anti-circumvention clauses, and require them around the globe, thereby weakening computer security. 

This isn't just an issue for the "usual copyright people." This is about actually making sure the computers we use are as secure and safe as they can be. Yet, in a world with anti-circumvention provisions, that's just not possible. It's time to fix that.

Creepy new Google Glass app can identify whoever you’re looking at

Posted date: 1:09 PM / comment : 0 , , ,

Creepy new Google Glass app can identify whoever you’re looking at

Google has reached out to remind us that it’s against their developer policies (section C.1.e) to approve Glassware that has any sort of facial recognition technology, and as such they will not be distributing the app through official channels. It could still be possible for the developer to distribute the app themselves and have users sideload it, but there is little chance such an app would get wide distribution.
We’ve seen our fair share of creepy apps, but this one probably takes the cake. It’s called NameTag, and in Robocop-like fashion, the app can scan a person’s face and compare it to a records database consisting of millions of people.
If NameTag successfully finds that person, it spits back tons of information about them, including their full name, their relationship status, what school they went to, their current occupation, their interests, and more. It’ll even tell you if that person has a criminal record.
nametag
It does all of this by searching various online social networking profiles for that person and pulling details from the profiles they may have filled out. It also pulls information from public records database, such as online court records in your city and state.
Upon gathering these details, they upload them to FacialNetwork.com‘s database without your permission. Don’t want your information made available? NameTag gives you the ability to opt-out, though we’d contend that something like this should be strictly opt-in.
Legal and moral issues aside, NameTag says that their goal isn’t to invade user privacy:
It’s about connecting people that want to be connected. We will even allow users to have one profile that is seen during business hours and another that is seen in social situations. NameTag can make the big, anonymous world we live in as friendly as a small town.
Except it should be up to that person whether or not they want to make their details known to strangers who happen to be wearing Google Glass and using this app. I know I’m not necessarily interested in talking to and meeting every single person I come across while I’m out and about. If they need to know more about me for whatever reason, they can come up to me, introduce themselves, and ask like normal human beings are supposed to.
NameTag’s angle is to enhance people’s social lives, but one might think up a few other cases where it might be useful. Perhaps you want to know if someone is registered as a sex offender before engaging them or allowing your children to be near them. That would be a noble use-case scenario, though some would contend that people should have a reasonable level of privacy no matter what they may have done in their life.
To be fair to NameTag, using public records and social networking profiles to craft reports about an individual are nothing new. Spokeo allows you to do this with as little as a name or email address, and gives you even more intimate information than NameTag claims to. That said, it’s not often that these types of services maintain their own database and use images to initiate a search for someone instead of their name or other details you might have access to.
We’re excited for the future of Google Glass, but apps like these will continue to come around and make us take a step back every now and then as we ponder how far is too far. Sure, our phones have cameras and would be capable of doing this with the right app (in fact, NameTag is planning on making iOS and Android apps of their own).
Still, it’s a lot more obvious when it’s being done with a smartphone, and there’s something about a camera that sits on your face that may or may not be taking your photo at any given time that makes something like NameTag a bit more uneasy to swallow. How do you feel?

Windows XP Resists Death Sentence

Posted date: 6:05 PM / comment : 0 ,

The proportion of people using Windows XP actually rose in January. It may be little more than a statistical quirk, but the underlying story is what happens when Microsoft pulls the plug on support in barely two months.
windows_xp
Windows Xp
The figures come from NetMarketShare and are based on computers used to visit sites hosted by its statistics client. It found Windows 7 on 47.49 percent of machines, XP on 29.23 percent, Windows 8 on 6.63 percent, Windows 8.1 on 3.95 percent and poor old Vista on 3.3 percent, just ahead of Mac OS X.
To be fair, the XP rise is just 0.25 percentage points on the previous month, so it’s not exactly a sign of revival. However, it does mean that of Windows users, very nearly one in three are still using the system, which debuted in 2001.
After several false starts, and rewriting its standard support timetables, Microsoft is officially scheduled to end support — including security patches — for XP in April. Having repeatedly warned that this time the deadline is for real, it runs a risk of being seen as crying wolf if it backs down.
If it doesn’t however, we’re looking at several hundred million computers being unprotected as and when nefarious folk spot a new flaw in the system, which sounds like the mother of all botnets in the making.
The Windows 8 figures will also be worrying for Microsoft. Fifteen months after its release, only a little over one in ten desktop computers are running the new system. Computerworld notes that Windows 7 was at around 25 percent at the same stage after its release. Part of the difference is the number of people buying tablets rather than new PCs, but it’s still a sign that the public remains sceptical about the system’s merits.
It’s also notable that far more people are running Windows 8 rather than the updated 8.1 version. It’s likely a sign of how many people are prepared to buy a new computer and never apply any updates — which is of course one of the reasons XP refuses to die quietly.

The camera which captures 360 degree images up in air

Posted date: 8:54 PM / comment : 0 , ,

The Panono camera ball takes 360 degree photographs when it is thrown in the air.
The sphere is covered by 36 cameras which, once airborne, simultaneously capture individual images - these are then pieced together in the cloud to produce a 108 megapixel image which can be explored in any direction.
Panono Camera
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