pnattress - Slashdot User

Comment Re:Privacy is simple (Score 3, Informative) 205

by pnattress on Sunday August 23, 2009 @01:45PM (#29164751) Attached to: Facebook App Exposes Abject Insecurity

It's perfectly possible to set privacy settings on Facebook for applications as well as friends. You can control the information other friend's applications can see. (Settings -> Privacy -> Applications). It's not heavily advertised, because if everyone hid all their info it would devalue their API somewhat, but it's definitely there.

Optical Character Recognition Still Struggling With Handwriting 150

Posted by Soulskill on Sunday October 05, 2008 @12:37PM from the i-can't-read-my-handwriting-either dept.

Ian Lamont recently asked Google if they planned to extend their transcription of books and other printed media to include public records, many of which were handwritten before word processors became ubiquitous. Google wouldn't talk about any potential plans, but Lamont found out a bit more about the limits of optical character recognition in the process: "Even though some CAPTCHA schemes have been cracked in the past year, a far more difficult challenge lies in using software to recognize handwritten text. Optical character recognition has been used for years to convert printed documents into text data, but the enormous variation in handwriting styles has thwarted large-scale OCR imports of handwritten public documents and historical records. Ancestry.com took a surprising approach to digitizing and converting all publicly released US census records from 1790 to 1930: It contracted the job to Chinese firms whose staff manually transcribed the names and other information. The Chinese staff are specially trained to read the cursive and other handwriting styles from digitized paper records and microfilm. The task is ongoing with other handwritten records, at a cost of approximately $10 million per year, the company's CEO says."

Comment Re:Yes (Score 1) 1067

by pnattress on Wednesday May 23, 2007 @11:28AM (#19237731) Attached to: Is Linux Out of Touch With the Average User?

When my wife installed our new scanner on her computer, she didn't plug in a scanner, put a CD in and click next, next... She just plugged it in, and *poof* it just worked. All necessary software and drivers were already installed by default. Let me know when Windows can do that, k?

Windows does do this. I lost the CD for my HP Scanner/Printer combo after I reinstalled Windows one time. So I just plugged the printer in; Windows recognised both printer and scanner components and even let me scan documents using its built in "scanning wizard" gizmo. Same story with virtually every other USB component I own, and I might add that Fedora Core 6 cannot write to my FAT32 formatted USB pen drive (although it pretends it can), so I suppose YMMV.

Submission + - IE7 and FF 2.0 share vulnerability

Submitted by hcmtnbiker on Sunday February 25, 2007 @01:35PM

hcmtnbiker writes: Internet Explorer 7 and Firefox 2.0 share a logic flaw. The issue is actually more severe, as the two versions of the Microsoft and Mozilla browsers are not the only ones affected. The vulnerability impacts Internet Explorer 5.01, Internet Explorer 6 and Internet Explorer 7, and Firefox 1.5.0.9. "In all modern browsers, form fields (used to upload user-specified files to a remote server) enjoy some added protection meant to prevent scripts from arbitrarily choosing local files to be sent, and automatically submitting the form without user knowledge. For example, ".value" parameter cannot be set or changed, and any changes to .type reset the contents of the field," said Michal Zalewski, the person that discovered the IE7 flaw. There are Proof of concepts for both IE7 and firefox

Submission + - Chimps making weapons to hunt and kill for food

Submitted by

Pojut

on Thursday February 22, 2007 @06:06PM

Pojut writes: "The Washington Post has an article involving chimps and weapons. Apparently, there have been direct observations of Chimps in the west African Savannah modifying sticks to create spears. They then use these spears to kill small mammals and eat them. It is the first time that an animal other than a human has been directly observed in crafting a weapon for the purpose of hunting or killing. URL: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/artic le/2007/02/22/AR2007022201007.html"

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