Face recognition techniques usually come with a certain amount of controversy. A new application, however, is unlikely to trigger any privacy concerns because all of the subjects are long dead.

Before photography took over, oil painting and portraiture was used to record what important people looked like. As a result for every artistically important painting there are a lot of “instant snaps” that fill museums and art gallery vaults. What would make these paintings much more valuable is knowing who all of the people in the portraits are.

The solution might be to apply face recognition software. This is the project for which three University of California, Riverside researchers have just received funding.

{ I Programmer | Continue reading | UCR }

art { Piero della Francesca, The Legend of the True Cross (detail), 1452-1466 }

Google’s harvesting of e-mails, passwords and other sensitive personal information from unsuspecting households in the United States and around the world was neither a mistake nor the work of a rogue engineer, as the company long maintained, but a program that supervisors knew about, according to new details from the full text of a regulatory report.

The report, prepared by the Federal Communications Commission after a 17-month investigation of Google’s Street View project, was released, heavily redacted, two weeks ago. Although it found that Google had not violated any laws, the agency said Google had obstructed the inquiry and fined the company $25,000.

On Saturday, Google released a version of the report with only employees’ names redacted.

The full version draws a portrait of a company where an engineer can easily embark on a project to gather personal e-mails and Web searches of potentially hundreds of millions of people as part of his or her unscheduled work time, and where privacy concerns are shrugged off.

The so-called payload data was secretly collected between 2007 and 2010 as part of Street View, a project to photograph streetscapes over much of the civilized world. When the program was being designed, the report says, it included the following “to do” item: “Discuss privacy considerations with Product Counsel.”

“That never occurred,” the report says.

Google says the data collection was legal. But when regulators asked to see what had been collected, Google refused, the report says, saying it might break privacy and wiretapping laws if it shared the material. (…)

Ever since information about the secret data collection first began to emerge two years ago, Google has portrayed it as the mistakes of an unauthorized engineer operating on his own and stressed that the data was never used in any Google product.

The report, quoting the engineer’s original proposal, gives a somewhat different impression. The data, the engineer wrote, would “be analyzed offline for use in other initiatives.” Google says this was never done. (…)

The Street View program used special cars outfitted with cameras. Google first said it was just photographing streets and did not disclose that it was collecting Internet communications called payload data, transmitted over Wi-Fi networks, until May 2010, when it was confronted by German regulators.

Eventually, it was forced to reveal that the information it had collected could include the full text of e-mails, sites visited and other data.

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

The buy, driven entirely by Zuckerberg, was made because Facebook’s CEO was petrified of Instagram becoming a Twitter-owned property.

Zuckerberg, we’re told, lives in perpetual anxiety, preoccupied by the fear of Facebook losing its place, terrified that youngsters will get their social networking fix from other services. That fear served as the catalyst behind his decision to buy Instagram and keep it out of the hands of a cross-town competitor.

This type of paranoia is relatively normal at Silicon Valley’s largest technology companies.

{ VentureBeat | Continue reading }

Not only is it accurate enough to compensate for the tiny aberrations in the optics, but it’s so accurate that we don’t know how accurate it is because we don’t yet have instruments accurate enough to measure the level of its accuracy.

The point is it’s pretty accurate.

{ Gizmodo | Continue reading }

{ How Apple Sidesteps Billions in Global Taxes | NY Times }

{ Back in late 2009, an Apple patent application surfaced showing that the company had explored ad-supported operating systems, with the user receiving free or discounted goods or services in exchange for viewing the advertisements. | MacRumors | Continue reading }

A team led by psychology professor Ian Spence at the University of Toronto reveals that playing an action videogame, even for a relatively short time, causes differences in brain activity and improvements in visual attention. (…) This is the first time research has attributed these differences directly to playing video games.

{ University of Toronto | Continue reading }

Historically, the book, almost alone, has resisted that great colonizing form of our age, the ad. That, in turn, meant you could be assured of one thing when you opened its covers: that you were alone in the book’s world and time. No longer. Sooner or later, the one thing the coming successor generations of e-book are guaranteed to do is smash the traditional reading experience, that sense — when you step inside those covers — of having plunged into another universe. You can’t really remain in another universe long with your email pinging in the background. So the book, enveloped in our busy world and the barrage of images, information, and so much else that comes our way incessantly, is bound to morph into something different, as is the experience of reading it.

{ Tom Dispatch | Continue reading }

artwork { Chad Person }

{ Mac Flashback Attack Started With Compromised WordPress Blogs }

related { We’ve heard much about the possibility of a quantum internet which uses single photons to encode and send information protected by the emerging technology of quantum cryptography }

They have designed an imager chip that could turn mobile phones into devices that can see through walls, wood, plastics, paper and other objects.

{ The University of Texas at Dallas | Continue reading }

Anonymous, together with a group known as the Peoples Liberation Front, Tuesday announced the immediate availability of a new website for hacktivists to dump their stolen (”doxed”) data.

Dubbed AnonPaste, the website has been created as an alternative to Pastebin and other websites that allow people to anonymously upload large amounts of text, the two groups said in a joint press release. Shared content can be set to expire after 10 minutes, an hour, a day, a month, a year, or never. In addition, the site promises to remain advertising-free and unmoderated, maintain no connection logs, and store only encrypted data.

{ InformationWeek | Continue reading }

Electronic dissemination of written news already substitutes for the delivery of some print newspapers. With the advent of electronic readers (“e-readers”) and tablet computers, the shift from print to electronic dissemination appears set to accelerate.Paper manufacturing, printing, and newspaper distribution release substantial amounts of greenhouse gas (GHG). The frequency and volume of newspapers makes them particularly energy intensive. We estimate that, in the United States, one newspaper subscription releases 94.7 kg of carbon dioxide annually, for production, printing, and delivery. (…)

In contrast, the production and operation of a single e-reader or tablet computer generates far fewer GHG emissions, assuming that emissions pro- duced during the manufacture of these devices are spread out over a three-year product life span. (…)

We calculated potential reductions by disseminating written news with e-readers rather than newspapers in a “what-if” scenario (that is, what if each current newspaper subscription were replaced today with an e-reader or tablet computer). Adopting e-readers could reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from publishing and distributing newspapers by 74 percent.

{ RAND | PDF }

photo { Adam Bartos }

A new company backed by two Google Inc. billionaires, film director James Cameron and other space exploration proponents is aiming high in the hunt for natural resources—with mining asteroids the possible target. (…)

The possibility of extracting raw materials such as iron and nickel from asteroids has been discussed for decades, but the cost, scientific expertise and technical prowess of fulfilling such as feat have remained an obstacle. NASA experts have projected it could cost tens of billions of dollars and take well over a decade to land astronauts on an asteroid. (…)

Earlier this month, a study by NASA scientists concluded that, for a cost of $2.6 billion, humans could use robotic spacecraft to capture a 500-ton asteroid seven meters in diameter and bring it into orbit around the moon so that it could be explored and mined. The spacecraft, using a 40-kilowatt solar-electric propulsion system, would have a flight time of between six and 10 years, and humans could accomplish this task by around 2025.

{ WSJ | Continue reading | Asteroid Retrieval Feasibility Study | PDF }

The study compared the software-generated ratings given to more than 22,000 short essays, written by students in junior high schools and high school sophomores, to the ratings given to the same essays by trained human readers.
The differences were minute.

{ Inside Higher Ed | Continue reading }

Nobody seems to love Facebook any more. People seem mostly tolerate it, because it’s convenient. And that’s why Facebook remains vulnerable.

Consumer-oriented social networking sites are like television networks: People will switch when there’s something better on another channel.

With its awkward design, 1990s-style layouts, weird privacy policies, and intrusive advertising, Facebook is vulnerable to the next best thing. Frankly, I think it’s just one online conversion program away from losing its customer base and becoming the next MySpace.

That’s not true of LinkedIn, though.  LinkedIn is all about business and people’s resumes.  Because its scope is limited to fundamentally dull information, LinkedIn is simply not vulnerable to something “cooler.”

{ Inc | Continue reading }

One research group inside Facebook, known as the Data Team, is tasked with the challenge of mathematically sifting through that data to look for patterns that explain the how and why of human social interactions. The people who do that, mostly PhDs with research experience in computer and social sciences, look for insights that will help Facebook tune its products, but have also begun to publish their findings in the scientific community.

{ Technology Review | Continue reading }

artwork { Jean-Michel Basquiat, Untitled (Mary Boone), 1984-1985 }

Federal authorities have arrested eight men accused of distributing more than $1 million worth of LSD, ecstasy, and other narcotics with an online storefront that used the TOR anonymity service to mask their Internet addresses.

“The Farmer’s Market,” as the online store was called, was like an Amazon for consumers of controlled substances, according to a 66-page indictment unsealed on Monday. It offered online forums, Web-based order forms, customer service, and at least four methods of payment, including PayPal and Western Union. From January 2007 to October 2009, it processed some 5,256 orders valued at $1.04 million. The site catered to about 3,000 customers in 35 countries, including the United States.

To elude law enforcement officers, the operators used software provided by the TOR Project that makes it virtually impossible to track the activities of users’ IP addresses.

{ Ars Technica | Continue reading }

photos { Claes Källarsson | 1 | 2 }

It’s famously tough getting through the Google interview process. But now we can reveal just how strenuous are the mental acrobatics demanded from prospective employees. Job-seekers can expect to face open-ended riddles, seemingly impossible mathematical challenges and mind-boggling estimation puzzles. (…)

1. You are shrunk to the height of a 2p coin and thrown into a blender. Your mass is reduced so that your density is the same as usual. The blades start moving in 60 seconds. What do you do? (…)

3. Design an evacuation plan for San Francisco. (…)

5. Imagine a country where all the parents want to have a boy. Every family keeps having children until they have a boy; then they stop. What is the proportion of boys to girls in this country? (…)

6. Use a programming language to describe a chicken. (…)

7. What is the most beautiful equation you have ever seen? (…) Most would agree this is a lame answer:
E = MC2
It’s like a politician saying his favorite movie is Titanic.
You want Einstein? A better reply is:
G = 8πT (…)

8. You want to make sure that Bob has your phone number. You can’t ask him directly. Instead you have to write a message to him on a card and hand it to Eve, who will act as a go-between. Eve will give the card to Bob and he will hand his message to Eve, who will hand it to you. You don’t want Eve to learn your phone number. What do you ask Bob? (…)

11. How much would you charge to wash all the windows in Seattle? (…)

14. Can you swim faster through water or syrup?

{ Wired | Continue reading }

images, clockwise from top left { 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 }

quote { thanks Tim }

The extraordinary success of Instagram is a tale about the culture of the Bay Area tech scene, driven by a tightly woven web of entrepreneurs and investors who nurture one another’s projects with money, advice and introductions to the right people. By and large, it is a network of young men, many who attended Stanford and had the attention of the world’s biggest venture capitalists before they even left campus.

Among this set, risk-taking is regarded as a badge of honor. Ideas are disposable: if one doesn’t work, you quickly move on to another. Timing matters. You make your own luck.

“There is some serendipity for entrepreneurs, but the people who are the rainmakers are the ones who entrepreneurs need to meet in order to make those connections that lead to success,” said Ted Zoller, a senior fellow at the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation who studies economic development around entrepreneurship. “The social ties that you make are directly correlated to success.”

For Mr. Systrom [co-founder of Instagram], the connections forged at Stanford were crucial.

Mr. D’Angelo, a 2006 graduate of the California Institute of Technology, helped him find engineers, set up databases and flesh out features. Soon after Instagram came out of the box, he put his money into it. So did Jack Dorsey, 35, a founder of Twitter; Mr. Systrom had been an intern at the company that became Twitter.

A colleague at Google, where Mr. Systrom worked straight out of college, introduced him to Marc Andreessen, a venture capitalist who had already invested millions in Facebook. In the spring of 2010, even before Instagram was born, Mr. Andreessen wrote him a check for $250,000.

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

“Whatever you post online, expect it to be used by companies to sell advertising,” says Rick Dakin.

{ 5 Ways Google Earns Money Off You | SmartMoney | full story }

images { 1. Marija Mandic | 2. Dan Christofferson }

Reliable and unbiased random numbers are needed for a range of applications spanning from numerical modeling to cryptographic communications. While there are algorithms that can generate pseudo random numbers, they can never be perfectly random nor indeterministic.

Researchers at the ANU are generating true random numbers from a physical quantum source. We do this by splitting a beam of light into two beams and then measuring the power in each beam.  Because light is quantised, the light intensity in each beam fluctuates about the mean.  Those fluctuations, due ultimately to the quantum vacuum, can be converted into a source of random numbers. Every number is randomly generated in real time and cannot be predicted beforehand.

{ Australian National University | Continue reading }

photo { Hiroshi Sugimoto, Orange Drive-in, 1993 }