Category: Computers, Internet & Technology

Face Time

According to this article by Farhad Manjoo at Slate Magazine, Google has software that can identify your face most of the time if there are as few as 17 photos of you online. If there are 50, they can identify almost every time.

And all the other software giants have this same capability. They’re just waiting for the tipping point on public acceptance.

Manjoo believes that time is almost here: the technology has gotten so good, cameras are ubiquitous, and Facebook has diminished our sense of privacy.

The police officer that stops you won’t need your driver’s license anymore. He or she will just take your photo and the computer will tell them everything there is to know about you.

Oh, and if you ever look up at the sky, be sure to smile. You’re on candid camera.

Electronic art

This is the third New Yorker cover that David Hockney has drawn on an Apple handheld device. He used to use his iPhone, but he finds the iPad “especially good for luminous subjects or for things like the difference between ceramic and wood or a glass tea cup next to a ceramic mug. Anyway, it’s my sketchbook at the moment.” Hockney has been immersed in iPad projects, and is preparing a 2012 exhibit at the Royal Academy featuring about seventy iPad drawings “that show the winter slowly turning into spring,” he wrote in an e-mail. “They jump off the wall like paintings.”

Check out the slideshow of Hockney’s amazing work — He Draw on iPad : The New Yorker.

Saving for Later

If someone asked me to name essential apps for the their iPhone, iPod or iPad, one of these two would be in my reply.

Instapaper

Read It Later

If you like to read longer items on the internet, or if you like to save items to read later, and especially if you like to read web articles on your phone or iPad, one of these two applications is vital for you. They work in browsers like Internet Explorer, Safari or Firefox; on Apple iOS devices; and on Android devices.

You don’t need both. Their functions are nearly identical. Both are free to sign up and to read in a browser, but charge for their mobile apps. Instapaper is $4.99 and the same app works on iPad, iPhone and iPod. Read It Later is $2.99 and it too works on all three devices. Read It Later has a free app with less functionality.

Instapaper seems the more popular of the two. Read It Later has a prettier presentation, at least on the iPad.

Apple

Apple replaced my 11-month-old iPhone 4 yesterday because the home button occasionally sticks. They also replaced the 11-month-old bumper case which was coming apart (which they’d originally given me for free).

Now, in a perfect world, neither of these problems would have come about. But in the real world, getting no-cost replacements is pretty welcome.

Are you afraid of your cell phone now?

“After the World Health Organization warning, [Salon] asked 11 experts [they] admire from the science world for advice.” Take a look at all 11, but here are a couple that stood out:

PZ Myers, Ph. D, associate professor of biology at the University of Minnesota and author of the science blog, Pharyngula:

No. We’re just swimming in electromagnetic fields all the time, so it seems silly to worry about one tiny, low-power transmitter when I live in a house with a microwave oven, a half-dozen computers, a big screen TV, and whatever other hi-tech gadget has tickled my fancy that week. It’s true, though, that thanks to the inverse square law, other sources probably have smaller effects on me — the phone is the transmitter that I hold right next to my head on a regular basis. Could it be the source of unique problem? Maybe.

K.C. Cole, a long-time science writer for the Los Angeles Times, is a professor at USC Annenberg’s School of Journalism:

Yes, of course I use precautions. I generally refuse to talk to anyone I care about if they call me from a cell phone while driving. We KNOW that inattentional blindness is a real phenomenon, that it causes (not probably) as many deaths as drunken driving. Do I worry about cell phones giving me cancer? Please. Of all the environmental toxins we’re exposed to every day that cause cancer (and other illnesses), cell phones don”t even make the list.

Nothing you do on the web is private line of the day

Especially if you belong to social networks.

For example, Facebook or Twitter know when one of their members reads an article about filing for bankruptcy on MSNBC.com or goes to a blog about depression called Fighting the Darkness, even if the user doesn’t click the ‘Like’ or ‘Tweet’ buttons on those sites.

For this to work, a person only needs to have logged into Facebook or Twitter once in the past month. The sites will continue to collect browsing data, even if the person closes their browser or turns off their computers, until that person explicitly logs out of their Facebook or Twitter accounts, the study found.

From a report at ‘WSJ.com.

Stay Out of My Dropbox

As a recent but wholly enamored user of DropBox — that is, I was enamored until the security B.S. became known — I found this interesting. What is private and what is “who cares” anyway?

It’s from Susan Orlean who writes the Free Range blog. You need to read the whole thing (it’s only three paragraphs), but I liked this line:

“In fact, most of what I store there is so boring I can hardly read it myself, so it’s hard to picture it titillating a Dropbox programmer. (Note to the programmer now reading my files: can you remind me when my son’s next soccer game is? I think I uploaded the schedule last week. Thank you.)”

Yes, the Virginia Sweeties sports schedule matrix is in my DropBox — how else could I find it on my two Macs, iPad and iPhone. But my financial files are no longer.

Most provocative line of the day

“As a kind of masochistic experiment, the other day I tweeted ‘#TwitterMakesYouStupid. Discuss.’ It produced a few flashes of wit (‘Give a little credit to our public schools!’); a couple of earnestly obvious points (‘Depends who you follow’); some understandable speculation that my account had been hacked by a troll; a message from my wife (‘I don’t know if Twitter makes you stupid, but it’s making you late for dinner. Come home!’); and an awful lot of nyah-nyah-nyah (‘Um, wrong.’ ‘Nuh-uh!!’). Almost everyone who had anything profound to say in response to my little provocation chose to say it outside Twitter.”

The Twitter Trap – Bill Keller, executive editor, The New York Times from a piece on how “we are outsourcing our brains to the cloud.”

Read. Discuss (if you still can).

Least surprising line of the day

“The Bishop of Buckingham — who reads his Bible on an iPad — explained to me the similarities between Apple and a religion. And when a team of neuroscientists with an MRI scanner took a look inside the brain of an Apple fanatic it seemed the bishop was on to something. The results suggested that Apple was actually stimulating the same parts of the brain as religious imagery does in people of faith.”

TUAW reporting on a BBC 3 program, “Secrets of the Superbrands.”

‘Privacy, what’s that?’ line of the day

“Apple has made it possible for almost anybody – a jealous spouse, a private detective – with access to your phone or computer to get detailed information about where you’ve been.”

Pete Warden who, with Alasdair Allan, has discovered that Apple’s 3G devices keep a record of your locations (precise latitude and longitude) indefinitely. The data is on the iPhone or iPad (3G version) and in the iTunes created backup files on your computer.

And indeed it is!

Warden has an app you can download (Macs only) and see for yourself. You run the app on the computer where you have been backing up your iPhone or iPad.

Interesting line of the day

“[Technology] Brigands have used these technologies to topple the recorded music industry, sink the porn biz, kill the ticket scalper who used to loiter around the stadium, upend the map trade, rattle the publishing industry, move prostitutes off the street, demolish the print classifieds, unbundle the newspaper, unbundle the CD, and jailbreak your iPhone, and they’re coming to take over higher education, drive the DVD into extinction, and throttle your landline telephone.”

Jack Shafer – Slate Magazine

He calls them brigands for their assault on the established order of things.

So, should I wait in line or order online?

On paper, Apple didn’t do much. It just made the iPad one-third thinner, 15 percent lighter and twice as fast. There are no new features except two cameras and a gyroscope. I mean, yawn, right?

And then you start playing with it.

My friends, I’m telling you: just that much improvement in thinness, weight and speed transforms the experience. We’re not talking about a laptop or a TV, where you don’t notice its thickness while in use. This is a tablet. You are almost always holding it. Thin and light are unbelievably important for comfort and the overall delight. So are rounded edges, which the first iPad didn’t have.

David Pogue