Stop posting this "user's" aka Dice's stories on Slashdot! His entire history of posts all link to the user's own i-programmer.info site in order to generate traffic and ad impressions. Enough is enough already!

Tog has a better take on the iWatch: http://asktog.com/atc/apple-iwatch/

Arrest warrant has been dropped: http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5j67FZIpdD8zrIyYcrXZQ4cqFj_mgD9HNV8UG0

Is eldavojohn some kind of Slashdot shill? He has 4 articles on the main page just in the last 2 days while there are numerous other more interesting stories that could be posted.

Slashdot has covered previous stories related to this from 2005 and 2006:
http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/11/14/0132216
http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/04/09/2319209

Use pHash instead, my open source perceptual hashing library that can detect similar audio, video, images and text files. It does not use Shazam's patented algorithm, which isn't all that great anyhow.

This is known as a perceptual hash. We have a perceptual audio hash in pHash, my open source software project that will tell you how similar two media files are to each other. It also features an indexing system to find the best matches from a sample audio clip, a la Shazam. These algorithms are not new by any means, although this patent goes a bit further than simply matching audio samples.

To take advantage of the change in your Firefox search bar on Linux, edit the ~/.mozilla/firefox/xxxxxx.default/search.json file and change all URL references to Google to "https" where xxxxxx is the random string created by Firefox. I assume it's similar for other operating systems.

While this is a step i nthe right direction, I believe only the results of your search are encrypted, not the search string itself. Perhaps Google should make the search a POST and not a GET. That should solve the problem of your search string appearing in the URL.

Or you can simply use my wonderful open source library called pHash.

Their SHA1 hashing method will not be sufficient to detect most copyright infringements. Even one bit change in a file will result in a completely different SHA1 hash. I am the creator of pHash, which is well suited for this type of similarity search. The hashes do not need to be identical in order to detect duplicate or similar files, and similar files will have hashes that are "close" to one another. This is really what they should be using.

1) Ask them, are you a girl?
2) Have you always been a girl?
3) If not, can you keep a secret?

Works for me ;)

I'd want to see the source code for this thing. I am sceptical due to the whole roadside breathalyzer court case that is still ongoing.

It has nothing to do with the blue color but rather the chalk crystals are too sharp for the ants to cross without it puncturing their exoskeleton.

This seems like a good time to pump my own open source project: pHash. pHash is a perceptual hashing library that computes hashes for audio, video and image files, with text and PDF hashing coming soon. We use an algorithm similar to YouTube's audio fingerprinting method but we do not only take into account the first 30 seconds. Although, it's impossible to tell from this basic test whether their algorithm truly only looks at the first 30 seconds, or if the algorithm considers them to be different audio files. If the song is only 1 minute in duration, and 30 seconds is blank, is that really the same audio file as the full 1 minute version? At some point the audio files are not really the same anymore, although the perceptual hashes should be somewhat close to each other. Please give pHash a try. We could use some feedback from the OSS community and would appreciate it greatly.