Showing 1 - 10 of 11
Turning smart glasses into surveillance tools
Life, James Hein, Published on 23/10/2024
» I'm sure most readers are familiar with the Apple Vision Pro, and may have also been witness to someone wearing one out in the real world, because I have. Since then, there has been a new version of the Meta Ray-Bans that look like a pair of nerd glasses from the 1970s. The latter have turned into something from the TV series Person Of Interest by a couple of Harvard undergrads. The pair, AnhPhu Nguyen and Caine Ardayfio, are known for their punch-activated flamethrower. This time they built a system that allows the Ray-Bans to scan faces of people in view, pass this to an AI system that scans the internet for identification, and builds a dossier that is passed back to the glasses. It's called I-XRAY and challenges the concept of privacy because, if available, it will even provide details like address and social security number.
YouTube hypocrisy deserves flagging
Life, James Hein, Published on 27/09/2023
» YouTube is behaving badly again. A prominent presenter I occasionally watch, who has millions of subscribers, has been demonetised, for some possible actions 20 years ago. This is not a commentary on potential innocence or guilt, but on YouTube's processes. There are people whose lives are supported by revenue from their presentations on YouTube. This ranges from small fries all the way up to the big fish like the one here. When an individual is demonetised they can lose the ability to support themselves. In this case allegations were made by the media, not the police or authorities, and at the time of writing there have been zero charges made. YouTube is essentially saying, bring us all your viewers so we can hit them with ads and we can make lots of money, but you will be getting nothing for your work.
The cloud calls, banks don't hear
Life, James Hein, Published on 07/07/2021
» Is the industry rushing too quickly into the clouds? Cloud computing has been expanding steadily over the past few years and is starting to dominate as the primary platform for many organisations. Providers love it because it allows them to charge a service-based fee instead of a once-off payment for a product. There are rumours that Microsoft through Windows 11 will push to have a similar approach for their next version.
The fight for a freer web continues
Life, James Hein, Published on 17/03/2021
» The social media platform Telegram has over 500 million users with over 55 million active every day. Unlike other platforms such as Twitter, YouTube, Facebook and others, you are free to express your opinion there without being cancelled, shadow banned or throttled in searches.
Digital world backslides into autocratisation
Life, James Hein, Published on 03/03/2021
» - I love new technology and I often pick up the latest gadgets from sites like Kickstarter. Researchers at the University of Colorado Boulder are one step closer to using humans as batteries.
More data, more problems
Life, James Hein, Published on 01/01/2020
» It's time to make some predictions for 2020. A number were made by others a while back, most of which did not eventuate, like a Japanese base on the Moon, flying cars and a Beijing to London rail link. I'll try for a bit more realism.
None more black
Life, James Hein, Published on 25/09/2019
» Accidental discoveries have been responsible for many useful items like rubber and penicillin. A couple of science types at MIT in the US wanted to see if they could grow carbon nanotubes on aluminium to increase its conductance properties. Instead they found they had made the blackest substance yet known to man. It absorbs 99.96% of the light from any angle making it 10 times blacker than the current options. Potential uses include telescopes, optical blinders and art. Carbon nanotubes, is there anything they can't do, eventually?
AI-aided hope on the horizon
Life, James Hein, Published on 13/02/2019
» Despite some of my criticisms in the past there are some excellent examples of emerging artificial intelligence technologies. I've mentioned some of these from the medical world in earlier articles but a new one caught my eye this week, figuring out in which hotel a picture was taken. No, not to help people remember where holiday snaps were taken but to track down human trafficking where pics of women are taken to sell them for sex. The three groups behind this identification technology are from George Washington University, Temple University and Adobe, all in the US. Like many AI systems a large amount of source data is used and to help with this more than a million images have been collected from 50,000 hotels worldwide. Using all the room elements in backgrounds a neural network is being trained to identify a hotel chain and then a location.
Privacy an artefact of times past
Life, James Hein, Published on 18/07/2018
» If you have learned nothing else from my many years of writing, it should be that unless extraordinary steps are taken, personal data privacy doesn't exist, except perhaps in the deluded minds of government officials. The only thing privacy laws do these days is stop you from returning someone's lost phone. In just one day in the news, I read reports about Huawei infiltrating Facebook, another Spectre CPU problem, political data harvesting in the UK, insecure military servers in the UK, Chinese hackers interested in Cambodia (and the rest of the world) along with other items about lost or hacked data. Yahoo and Google collect far more than the whole of the US spy agencies combined, though at least the latter doesn't deliberately spread it around or sell it to marketers.
Translating ear buds and builder robots
Life, James Hein, Published on 09/05/2018
» Let's face it, technology is cool. Google is claiming that they will have translating ear buds you can use when you travel that will allow you to understand almost any language, instantly. Yes, it does sound like something out of a sci-fi book and I think they should name them Babel fish, but that name was already "stolen" from The Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy series in 2012 that later became Bing Translator. The good news is that first versions of these may be ready for tourists in the very near future.