YouTube user tdous:
I was playing the demo for the new(ish) game, Sherlock Holmes Nemesis, when I noticed that you never see or hear Dr. Watson move. He’s creepy.
This is some of the best programming I’ve seen in my life.
Microsoft readies NUads: They watch you watching them
Declan McCullagh, CNET:
“The innovation that we’re seeing is absolutely incredible,” [Lyn] Watts said. Kinect, he said, can allow advertisers to “go after that holy grail” — the living room.
Kinect’s unique capabilities to record and compile detailed biometric data raise some novel privacy issues. Kinect’s microphone array can record audio within earshot and transmit it to advertisers. It performs face recognition and can transmit video.
“How many people are in the living room? Are they taking any action based on the advertising they just saw?” Watts said. “Can we watch the customers’ reaction, and if we can, do we have the capability of showing a different ad, or the same ad, depending on what the reaction was?”
No no no no no no no no no no no no no please under no circumstances should you ever do anything like this
Cloud-Powered Facial Recognition Is Terrifying
Jared Keller for The Atlantic:
… a new application developed by Carnegie Mellon University’s Heinz College that’s designed to take a photograph of a total stranger and, using the facial recognition software PittPatt, track down their real identity in a matter of minutes. Facial recognition isn’t that new — the rudimentary technology has been around since the late 1960s — but this system is faster, more efficient, and more thorough than any other system ever used. Why? Because it’s powered by the cloud.
…
With Carnegie Mellon’s cloud-centric new mobile app, the process of matching a casual snapshot with a person’s online identity takes less than a minute. Tools like PittPatt and other cloud-based facial recognition services rely on finding publicly available pictures of you online, whether it’s a profile image for social networks like Facebook and Google Plus or from something more official from a company website or a college athletic portrait. In their most recent round of facial recognition studies, researchers at Carnegie Mellon were able to not only match unidentified profile photos from a dating website (where the vast majority of users operate pseudonymously) with positively identified Facebook photos, but also match pedestrians on a North American college campus with their online identities.
Yeah, this is creepy, but it also shows just how open we’ve become in sharing things on the internet.
Citizen 142124128 on the universal numbering program.
MSNBC.com and the Associated Press reporting on something you would probably be better off not ever knowing:
Rebel fighters who ransacked [Moammar] Gadhafi’s Bab al-Aziziya compound have been turning up some bizarre loot, including the Libyan leader’s eccentric fashion accessories and his daughter’s golden mermaid couch. The latest discovery is a photo album filled with page after page of pictures of Rice, the former secretary of state who visited Tripoli in 2008.
State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland on Thursday said she hasn’t seen pictures of the album. “I think I don’t need to see the photos, but bizarre and creepy are good adjectives to describe much of Gadhafi’s behavior,” Nuland said. “It doesn’t surprise me. It’s deeply bizarre and deeply creepy, though, if it is as you described.”
…
“I support my darling black African woman,” [Gadhafi said in 2007]. “I admire and am very proud of the way she leans back and gives orders to the Arab leaders. … Leezza, Leezza, Leezza. … I love her very much. I admire her, and I’m proud of her, because she’s a black woman of African origin.”