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Programming

Racist Facial Recognition Software Screenshot-sm 49

Posted by samzenpus from the ebony-and-irony dept.
An anonymous reader writes "A black man found that his HP facial-tracking recognition software wouldn't work. Then he discovered it worked fine for a white co-worker. From the article: 'HP's Tony Welch thanked Desi and Wanda, the video's creators, and promised that he and the team at HP were looking into why the camera was behaving the way it was. "The technology we use is built on standard algorithms that measure the difference in intensity of contrast between the eyes and the upper cheek and nose," he said. "We believe that the camera might have difficulty 'seeing' contrast in conditions where there is insufficient foreground lighting."'"

Comment Exactly (Score 1) 888

by GameGod0 (#30394774) Attached to: Best Way To Clear Your Name Online?
The only way to control your name on the internet is to use assert control over it by using it actively. Make yourself known on the internet in a way you want to be known, so that this oddball reference to you gets buried into obscurity.
Media

MythTV 0.22 Released 329

Posted by timothy from the excess-of-caution dept.
uyguremre writes "After a little over a year and a half in the making, the developers of MythTV announced that MythTV 0.22 is now available. There have been a lot of large changes since 0.21, including a port from Qt v3 to Qt v4 and a major UI rewrite to convert to MythTV's new MythUI user interface libary. As always, this release adds support for some new hardware, in this case VDPAU video acceleration, DVB-S2, and the Hauppauge HD-PVR. The MythUI toolkit allows themes much greater control over the user interface and today we're announcing a competition to design new themes for MythTV. With the new release comes a theming competition too. For a more complete list of changes and new features, read the Release Notes on the wiki."

Comment Re:Easy (Score 1) 1091

by mcgrew (#29173105) Attached to: How To Prove Someone Is Female?

I think it's time to retire that old worn out joke, since according to this New Scientest article, we get laid more often than normal guys.

Is smart sexy? Our knee-jerk reaction - reinforced by cultural stereotypes of Star Trek-convention attending geeks and a seeming obsession with ditzy, pretty starlets - would argue otherwise. Nerds are, well, nerds.

Increasing scientific evidence shows that brains count for a lot in mate choice. And now - for the first time - researchers have directly linked a male's cognitive performance to his luck with the ladies.

"Males that are better problem-solvers are mating with more females," says Jason Keagy, a behavioural ecologist at the University of Maryland in College Park, who studies not the mating rituals of the political elite in nearby Washington DC, but those of a bird native to the forests of eastern Australia.

I submitted this to slashdot last week, but unfortunately it was rejected. The article has a pretty funny picture of a skinny nerd with glasses (Not unlike what I used to look like before I ditched the specs and grew a goatee) and two hotties.

Comment Re:Big news... (Score 1) 461

by GameGod0 (#29169975) Attached to: Linux Port For id's Tech 5 Graphics Engine Unlikely

I guess we have different definitions of small. If half the Linux users would all send me a buck, I think you might consider that to be a bit of cash.

Unfortunately, it's not your definition of small that matters here - it's Bethesda, id, and EA's definition.

To put this in perspective, remember that there's 30 million Xbox 360 owners out there. If 1 in 20 Xbox owners buy Rage, that'll be ~60,000 copies sold. Show me an existing Linux game that's sold more than 30,000 copies, and you might have an argument. Linux is also a giant pain in the ass to support, and that's undoubtedly factored into their cost/benefit analysis too.
GUI

Preview the Office 2007 Ribbon-Like UI Floated For OpenOffice.Org 617

Posted by timothy from the trial-balloon-target-practice dept.
recoiledsnake writes "OpenOffice.org has prototyped a new UI that radically changes the current OO.o interface into something very similar to the new ribbon style menus that Office 2007 introduced and which have been extensively used throughout Windows 7. The blog shows a screenshot of the prototype in Impress (the equivalent of PowerPoint), but this UI is proposed to be used across all OO.o applications. Some commenters on the Sun blog are not happy about OO.o blindly aping Office 2007, and feel that the ribbon UI may be out of place in non-Windows operating systems."

RadioShack To Rebrand As "The Shack"? 629

Posted by CmdrTaco from the a-little-old-place-where-we-can-get-together dept.
Harry writes "Rumor has it that RadioShack is planning to re-brand itself as The Shack later this year, after eighty-eight years under the old name (most of them with a space in between 'Radio' and 'Shack'). I hope it's not true, because I don't think the move would do a thing to make the retailer a better, more successful business." Where will we go to buy soldering irons and those RCA to headphone jack adapters now?
The Media

Inside the AP's Plan To Security-Wrap Its News Content 138

Posted by timothy from the one-of-the-greatest-diagrams-ever dept.
suraj.sun writes with an excerpt from this story at Ars Technica that the "Associated Press, reeling from the newspaper apocalypse, has a new plan to 'wrap' and 'protect' its content though a 'digital permissions framework.' The Associated Press last week rolled out its brave new plan to 'apply protective format to news.' The AP's news registry will 'tag and track all AP content online to assure compliance with terms of use,' and it will provide a 'platform for protect, point, and pay.' That's a lot of 'p'-prefaced jargon, but it boils down to a sort of DRM for news — 'enforcement,' in AP-speak."
Security

New DoS Vulnerability In All Versions of BIND 9 197

Posted by kdawson from the binding-with-briars-my-joys-and-desires dept.
Icemaann writes "ISC is reporting that a new, remotely exploitable vulnerability has been found in all versions of BIND 9. A specially crafted dynamic update packet will make BIND die with an assertion error. There is an exploit in the wild and there are no access control workarounds. Red Hat claims that the exploit does not affect BIND servers that do not allow dynamic updates, but the ISC post refutes that. This is a high-priority vulnerability and DNS operators will want to upgrade BIND to the latest patch level."
Image

Use Your Cell Phone To Diagnose Blood Diseases Screenshot-sm 63

Posted by samzenpus from the can-you-diagnose-me-now dept.
A group of research engineers at Berkeley have developed a mobile phone microscope that can photograph microbes in your blood, and analyze them for disease. The group hopes the device will be useful to doctors in developing countries to diagnose blood diseases in the field. The device uses a phone attachment with an LED, and magnified images are fed into the cell phone camera. Software installed on the phone analyzes bacterial counts, or the images can be sent to labs for quick analysis. UC Berkeley bioengineer Dan Fletcher led the CellScope research team. He said, "The same regions of the world that lack access to adequate health facilities are, paradoxically, well-served by mobile phone networks. We can take advantage of these mobile networks to bring low-cost, easy-to-use lab equipment out to more remote settings . . . We had to disabuse ourselves of the notion that we needed to spend many thousands on a mercury arc lamp and high-sensitivity camera to get a meaningful image. We found that a high-powered LED — which retails for just a few dollars — coupled with a typical camera phone could produce a clinical quality image sufficient for our goal of detecting in a field setting some of the most common diseases in the developing world."
Privacy

The NSA Wiretapping Story Nobody Wanted 144

Posted by Soulskill from the since-privacy-is-such-a-minor-issue dept.
CWmike writes "They sometimes call national security the third rail of politics. Touch it and, politically, you're dead. The cliché doesn't seem far off the mark after reading Mark Klein's new book, Wiring up the Big Brother Machine ... and Fighting It. It's an account of his experiences as the whistleblower who exposed a secret room at a Folsom Street facility in San Francisco that was apparently used to monitor the Internet communications of ordinary Americans. Amazingly, however, nobody wanted to hear his story. In his book he talks about meetings with reporters and privacy groups that went nowhere until a fateful January 20, 2006 meeting with Kevin Bankston of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Bankston was preparing a lawsuit that he hoped would put a stop to the wiretap program, and Klein was just the kind of witness the EFF was looking for. He spoke with Robert McMillan for an interview."

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