Become a fan of Slashdot on Facebook

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×
Privacy

In Istanbul, Cameras To Recognize 15,000 Faces/sec. 221

Posted by kdawson from the for-your-own-good dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Istanbul's popular (and crowded) Istiklal shopping, cafe, and restaurant street is being outfitted with 64 wirelessly controlled, tamper-proof face-recognition cameras attached to a computer system capable of scanning 15,000 faces per second in a moving crowd for a positive match. The link from Samanyolu, badly translated by Google, states that 3 cameras are in place so far and that if trials are successful, this will mark the first time such a system, previously used by Scotland Yard and normally reserved for indoor security use, will be put to use in a public outdoor setting. It also notes that each camera controlled by the system is capable of 'locking onto' the faces of known criminals and pickpockets detected in the crowd and 'tracking' their movements for up to 300 meters before the next, closer placed camera takes over." Hit the link for more of this reader's background on the growing electronic encroachment on privacy in this city, which will be the European Capital of Culture in 2010, causing him to ask, "Is the historic city of Istanbul turning into the new London?"
Earth

Microbes 100M Years Old Found In Termite Guts 145

Posted by kdawson from the mutualism-in-action dept.
viyh writes with coverage on MSNBC of the discovery of ancient microbes fossilized in the gut of a termite. "One hundred million years ago a termite was wounded and its abdomen split open. The resin of a pine tree slowly enveloped its body and the contents of its gut. In what is now the Hukawng Valley in Myanmar, the resin fossilized and was buried until it was chipped out of an amber mine. The resin had seeped into the termite's wound and preserved even the microscopic organisms in its gut. These microbes are the forebears of the microbes that live in the guts of today's termites and help them digest wood. ... The amber preserved the microbes with exquisite detail, including internal features like the nuclei. ... Termites are related to cockroaches and split from them in evolutionary time at about the same time the termite in the amber was trapped."
Medicine

BPA Leaches From Polycarbonate Bottles Into Humans 251

Posted by kdawson from the glass-makes-a-comeback dept.
Linus the Turbonerd sends in the bulletin that BPA, a toxic chemical used in the production of polycarbonate, the plastic composing hard, clear water bottles, has been found to leach out of such containers, directly into the water that their users consume. "In addition to polycarbonate bottles, which are refillable and a popular container among students, campers and others and are also used as baby bottles, BPA is also found in dentistry composites and sealants and in the lining of aluminum food and beverage cans. ... 'We found that drinking cold liquids from polycarbonate bottles for just one week increased urinary BPA levels by more than two-thirds. If you heat those bottles, as is the case with baby bottles, we would expect the levels to be considerably higher. This would be of concern since infants may be particularly susceptible to BPA's endocrine-disrupting potential,' said Karin B. Michels, associate professor of epidemiology at HSPH and Harvard Medical School and senior author of the study."
Education

Students, the Other Unprotected Lab Animals 236

Posted by kdawson from the protection-available-but-not-to-you dept.
theodp writes "Slate reports on the horrible — and preventable — death of a young UCLA biochemist in a t-butyl lithium incident, which led a Chemical Health and Safety columnist to the disheartening conclusion that most academic laboratories are unsafe venues for work or study. It's estimated that accidents and injuries occur hundreds of times more frequently in academic labs than in industrial ones. Why? For one thing, Slate says, occupational safety and health laws that protect workers in hazardous jobs apply only to employees, not to undergrads, grad students, or research fellows who receive stipends from outside funders."
PC Games (Games)

Using 1 Gaming Computer For 2 People? 424

Posted by timothy from the quite-a-replacement-ratio dept.
True Vox writes "My fiance and I have recently taken interest in City of Heroes (she's currently got a character on my account). She's got a cute little netbook, but nothing nearly powerful enough for a 5-year-old MMORPG, let alone if we take interest in Champions Online! I am reticent to buy a new gaming computer simply for what amounts to a passing phase. Has anyone had any experience using one computer to control two monitors with two sets of input devices (e.g. two keyboards and two mice, or one keyboard, one mouse, and a 360 gamepad, perhaps)? I have seen one solution that might work, but not much information from users that I can find. In short, does anyone have any experience with setups like this?"
The Media

Wikipedia Moving From GFDL To Creative Commons License 90

Posted by timothy from the please-discuss-in-the-talk-section dept.
FilterMapReduce writes "The Wikimedia Foundation has resolved to migrate the copyright licensing of all of its wiki projects, including Wikipedia, from the GNU Free Documentation License to the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License. The migration is scheduled to be completed on June 15. After the migration, reprints of material from the wikis will no longer require a full copy of the GFDL to be attached, and the attribution rules will require only a link to the wiki page. Also, material submitted after the migration cannot be forked with GFDL "invariant sections," which are impossible to incorporate back into a wiki in most cases. The GFDL version update that made the migration possible and the community vote that informed the decision were previously covered on Slashdot."
Biotech

Hacking Our Five Senses and Building New Ones 290

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the where-is-my-x-ray-vision dept.
ryanguill writes "Wired has an article about expanding your five (maybe six) senses to allow you to sense other things such as direction. It also talks about hijacking other senses to compensate for missing senses, such as using electrodes in your mouth to compensate for lack of eyesight. Another example is a subject wearing a belt with 13 vibrating pads. The pad pointing north would vibrate giving you a sense of direction no matter your orientation: '"It was slightly strange at first," Wächter says, "though on the bike, it was great." He started to become more aware of the peregrinations he had to make while trying to reach a destination. "I finally understood just how much roads actually wind," he says. He learned to deal with the stares he got in the library, his belt humming like a distant chain saw. Deep into the experiment, Wächter says, "I suddenly realized that my perception had shifted. I had some kind of internal map of the city in my head. I could always find my way home. Eventually, I felt I couldn't get lost, even in a completely new place."'"

Comment A Better "Web of Trust" (Score 1) 171

by a302b (#26308399) Attached to: Do the SSL Watchmen Watch Themselves?
What about simply creating a better web of trust? For example, if you only trust governments, then you only accept certificates issued by them. If I trust Verisign but not Godaddy, then I only accept Verisign and the other sites I trust.

This is how a web of trust should work. People trust certain sites to issue certificates. As certain sites gain trust, more people want to get certificates from them, etc. I might trust my friend Bob, but there is no reason you should. If a bank or e-commerce site wants to do business, then they need to make sure that they get certificate(s) from sources that the majority of their clients also trust. Simple as that.

This way, governments can issue certificates with the stature you mention. At the same time, it is not monopolized by them, and people who don't trust the government are also free to use certificates by private companies.

Comment what is the point? (Score 5, Insightful) 630

by a302b (#26274809) Attached to: Sex Offenders Must Hand Over Online Passwords
What is the point of this? If the sex-offenders have already been caught and tried, then what does this prove? If they have already been sentenced, then any incriminating evidence is merely extra. If they haven't been tried, then can't they plead the "5th"? Finally, if this is to deter them from doing heinous acts in the future, then what is to stop them from opening another account?

To me, this smacks of government types trying to set a legal precedent for taking over peoples passwords, online identities, etc. Because it is the evil sex offenders, the public won't care. Then later the government can say: "But there is a precedent for taking passwords; its been done for a long time." Then the public shrugs and figures that if it has been going on for a while, then it can't be all that bad. And another personal liberty is thus erased.

Comment use of force (Score 1) 414

by a302b (#26228747) Attached to: Universal Broadband Plan Calls For $44 Billion
Its called the "We've Got A Bigger Army" philosophy. Look up President Jackson and the Trail of Tears for more info on the Executive branch trumping the Supreme Court. Then look at the current administration, and see how many of these attitudes continue in the office to today. I'm not trying to politicize or anything, but merely demonstrate that power (in any situation) tends to create its own rules, whether legitimized or not.
Social Networks

Submission + - Australia uses Facebook to track debtors (yahoo.com)

Submitted by a302b
a302b writes: A Canberra lawyer has been permitted to serve legal documents via Facebook for a couple that defaulted on some loans. He claims he needed to do this because he was unable to track them down to a physical address. At what point does our online presence become "real"? And what opportunities are available for fraud, if social networking sites are considered legal representations of ourselves, even when they can be anonymously created under any name?
Programming

Time to Get Good At Functional Programming? 620

Posted by Soulskill from the dysfunctional-programming-on-the-way-out dept.
prone2tech writes "From an article at Dr. Dobb's: Chipmakers have essentially said that the job of enforcing Moore's Law is now a software problem. They will concentrate on putting more and more cores on a die, and it's up to the software industry to recraft software to take advantage of the parallel-processing capabilities of the new chips. As is argued in this article, this means becoming proficient in parallel functional programming. The bad news? Getting good at functional programming is hard, harder than moving from iterative Pascal or Basic or C coding to object-oriented development. It's an exaggeration but a useful one: When you move to FP, all your algorithms break.'"
The Internet

New .tel TLD Now In Use 175

Posted by timothy from the pay-at-the-tel-booth dept.
rockwood reports that the .tel top level domain has been deployed, "in a first attempt at pushing the recently approved .tel... The top-level domain .tel was approved by ICANN as a sponsored TLD launching on Wednesday, December 3, 2008 to trademark owners of national effect and on February 3, 2009 to anyone who wishes to apply. Its main purpose is as a single management and publishing point for 'internet communication' services, providing a global contacts directory service by housing all types of contact information directly in the DNS."

Slashdot Top Deals

A rock store eventually closed down; they were taking too much for granite.

Close