No doubt about it, Neven Vision is on a media roll lately.
Wired featured their facial recognition software for cellcams in its December 2004 issue, and now TheFeature interviews namesake Dr. Harmut Neven about his plans for “Hyperlinking the World”, visual Google style.
If Dr. Neven and his company have their way, we’ll all soon be sending cellcam pics to Neven Vision powered visual search servers. Example: Snap a photo of a painting and MMS it to his server. The server responds with information about the painting, maybe an audio-visual narration. TheFeature delves into some of the difficulties with constructing and searching a world size visual database, while the Wired piece focuses more on the biometric and security applications of the technology.
Whatever comes of this, I can’t help but think that the issue of whether or not we non-celebrities own our “public image” is about to be forced. I’m a big cellcam fan, but I don’t know if I’ll appreciate it when any cop or TSA employee (or city worker, or man on the street?) can snap my picture and within a few seconds know everything public there is to know about me. Privacy is about to take on an entirely different meaning.
Am I paranoid? Or concerned for good reason? Let me know what you think by leaving a comment.
As Wired News notes in “A Century of Einstein”, special relativity and other discoveries from Albert Einstein‘s immortal 1905 papers celebrate their one hundredth anniversary this year.
I’ve been intrigued by relativity for as long as I can remember, but the thing that really hooked me on Einstein was seeing one of the first printings of his original special relativity paper in German in the University of Oklahoma’s History of Science Collections in the early 1990s. (It was situated near a 17th century printing of Principia Mathematica, not the sort of thing a geeky engineering type such as myself soon forgets!) The power of Einstein’s work from 1905 to effect us in our daily lives one hundred years later still amazes and inspires me.
If you aren’t already a fan, buy a copy of Einstein’s “Relativity : The Special and the General Theory” or click here to access the free Project Gutenberg text. If you’re interested at all in how things work, you’ll probably enjoy it.
Thanks for everything, Professor!
My recent iPod Shuffle post received a tip o’ the hat from broadband blogger and Business 2.0 senior writer Om Malik. Thanks, Om!
I particularly enjoyed the comment from barky81 that “People who want shuffles want apples”, especially since I’ve never owned a Mac or Apple gear of any kind.
It’s always nice to see people do their homework. 🙂
It’s a bit late to the game given that Nokia 6230 has been reviewed various places since the first half of 2004, but PC Magazine’s posted their own short review.
The review is in their typical US- and PC-centric fashion. Worth a read however if you’re looking for a cellpod or a first rate EDGE modem at a discount price.
According to LinuxDevices.com, Motorola will launch 8-10 Linux based handsets in 2005. This would constitute roughly one quarter of Moto’s new handsets in 2005.
That’s cool. Not so cool, however, is this dorky quote from Jim Ready, the CEO of MontaVista (makers of Moto’s Linux distro):
[Motorola’s] ability to pop out three phones based on the same OS is making people in the industry say ‘Oh sh*t, how’d they do that?
Three phones, or even eight or ten, based on one OS, Jim? Have you seen how many Nokia cranks out based upon Series 60/Symbian?
IBM developerWorks has published a look inside the standard wars for ultrawideband (UWB) wireless technology.
History repeats itself again and again, doesn’t it?
CNN is celebrating twenty five years on the air with “Top 25 of the last twenty five years” lists. This month’s list: Top 25 Innovations.
Most of the things on this list seem so common place in our everyday lives today that it’s amazing to think that none of them existed (or at least they weren’t in widespread use) 25 years ago. Kids growing up now won’t believe us when we tell them we can remember life before this stuff. 🙂
For extra credit, go through the entire list (it’s in the right gutter of the article) and count the number of items related to wireless and mobility.
The massive Indian Ocean tsunamis hit one month ago today.
The effects will be felt for years, perhaps decades, to come.
Please continue to give generously.
Widespread (mis)use of 802.11 is making life easier for any air sniffer equipped black hat.
Most people plug in their new wireless router, turn it on, leave everything at the defaults, and go. Bad, bad network users! Turning on SSID broadcasting, non-MAC locked, unencrypted WiFi is akin to hanging an ethernet port off your network outside in a dark alley and inviting all the bad guys to stop by for a look at your net comms.
If you’ve read my blog for a while, you know some of the basic things to do when you’re setting up a WiFi network. Click here for a refresher on SSID broadcast (bad), MAC address ACLs (good), and using the highest level of encryption supported by all of your devices (absolutely).
What you may not know, however, is that WEP’s been cracked in significantly faster time in recent months and is approaching the point of uselessness. At least, it’s useless if you want to keep out anybody that’s spent even the smallest amount of time online reading about WEP weaknesses and attack tools. If at all possible, use at least Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA) to secure your setup.
WPA is available in a large and increasing number of WiFi products. I recently bought a Toshiba M35X-S161 laptop with built-in 802.11g/b and a Linksys WPC54G wireless adapter for a different laptop. Both support WPA out of the box. Make sure any new WiFi equipment you buy does too, and use it.
BTW, securing your WiFi network also requires securing everything connected to it. Make certain you change the password on your router’s administrative account, and that the router uses stateful packet inspection (SPI). You also need to secure all of the systems that will be connected to your network (wirelessly or wired). Verify they are running up to date antivirus and firewall software. With software such as AntiVir Personal Edition and Zone Alarm available for free download, you have absolutely no excuse not to secure even your oldest and fuddiest print server or email station.
BillDay.com 