Viewdle Lets the Camera Recognize Your Friends

Via the Wall Street Journal ...

Few technologies have improved as steadily as digital cameras, long a standard feature in cellphones. But a new phase may be coming, as companies like Viewdle allow smartphones to recognize who is in a photograph as it’s taken.

The broader concept–a hot topic at this week’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona–is called augmented reality. The term refers to overlaying labels, graphics and other information on images seen through a cellphone camera viewfinder.

In the prototypical scenario, a customer looking at goods on a shelf or walking by a restaurant could see reviews or product information superimposed on the display, allowing them to make smarter purchases. Many companies are working in the field and discussing developments this week, including metaio, a Munich-based software developer that also has offices in San Francisco.

Viewdle, based in Palo Alto, Calif., has been specializing in technology that could help apply information to faces. It has developed algorithms to recognize people in photographs and apply identifying tags–an automated alternative to the tagging that many users of Facebook and other sites do manually.

That’s not an entirely new trick. But it usually requires heavy-duty computing horsepower, often carried out by connecting to servers on the Internet in a process after a photo is taken.

Viewdle, which has grown since 2007 to 60 employees, believes it is breaking new ground in allowing smartphones to do these calculations on their own–and in real time, as faces come into a camera’s field of view. (Its software works by comparing faces it detects with images that have been previously stored and identified). The company’s website features a video of five women walking down the street toward the camera, with labels popping up that identify them and post their Facebook comments in real time.

Chip makers like augmented reality, in part because it takes a lot of computing cycles. Qualcomm, for instance, is an investor in Viewdle, which is making sure its software takes advantage of Qualcomm chips.

But Viewdle is not playing favorites. At the Barcelona event, the company is announcing a development kit to help software developers create apps that take advantage of its technology, and optimizing its software also to exploit Texas Instruments’ chips as well as Google’s popular operating system for cellphones. “It will run on all Android devices,” says Jason Mitura, Viewdle’s chief product officer.

When will consumers get to see the results? Viewdle will start by offering its own app, expected to be available in late March. Besides waiting for other apps to follow, the company is also trying to get handset makers to include the capability in their products, Mitura says.

Qualcomm, meanwhile, on Tuesday announced the winners in a contest it hosted for augmented reality applications, putting up $200,000 in total prize money. Taking first place, which entitled them to $125,000, were two men from Lithuania who developed an interactive game called Paparazzi. In it, the player looking through the smartphone viewfinder sees the superimposed image of a vain celebrity.

“You try to take a picture of the virtual guy,” says Jay Wright, a Qualcomm director of business development, before the celebrity gets agitated and attacks.

while anonymity does not equal privacy, the development of technologies like this lay bare the challenges that we face as a society in protecting our privacy and security in the digital age.

Federal Officials Call For Better Privacy, Security Protections Online

Via Dennis Fisher at ThreatPost ...

The Obama administration's top information security officials hit the stage at the RSA Conference Tuesday, looking to drum up support for several of the president's key security and privacy initiatives, including a still-nebulous plan for protecting users' freedom and privacy on the Web.

The plea for help from the thousands of security experts and enterprise executives gathered here for RSA came from Howard Schmidt, the president's cybersecurity adviser and Philip Reitinger, the deputy undersecretary of the National Protection and Programs directorate at the Department of Homeland Security, who spoke as part of a town hall meeting on cybersecurity. Schmidt, a former top security official at Microsoft and eBay, used the Internet shutdown that accompanied the recent revolution in Egypt as an example of what President Obama wants to prevent.

"It is incumbent upon all of us to make sure that we preserve those freedoms," Schmidt said. "We're going to hold others accountable on Internet freedom and make sure that we do those same things ourselves. We need to lead by example."

Earlier in the day, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton gave a similar speech to a group of students at George Washington University in which she emphasized the need for some framework of rules to help guarantee a basic level of freedom online.

"For the United States, the choice is clear. On the spectrum of Internet freedom, we place ourselves on the side of openness. Now, we recognize that an open Internet comes with challenges. It calls for ground rules to protect against wrongdoing and harm. And Internet freedom raises tensions, like all freedoms do. But we believe the benefits far exceed the costs," Clinton said.

What's less clear in all of this is exactly what the Obama administration intends to do to achieve these goals. At RSA, Schmidt and Reitinger both said that in order to improve both security and privacy online, the government needs help from the private sector. This has been a common theme in government information security plans for more than a decade and the idea of more public-private partnerships has been dismissed by many in the industry as futile. But Reitinger said that they can work if done correctly.

"When we say public-private partnership, people don't know what we mean. Neither the government nor the private sector can solve these problems on their own," he said. "People hear this and think we're just going to walk away saying kumbaya. That's not what we're talking about. The successful ones actually are a partnership and they're real and outcome-focused."

None of the panelists offered much in the way of specifics on what the administration planned to do, aside from previously announced initiatives such as the plan to create online IDs. But Schmidt stressed that there were plans in the works that would get things moving.

"We need to ensure we have the safeguards in place to protect people," he said. "It's all about collaboration. We need new ways to work faster. It's critical to our future and having that economic engine that we all need."

Lawmaker Introduces New Privacy Bill

Via the Wall Street Journal ...

Rep. Jackie Speier, D-Calif., introduced a bill Friday that would give the Federal Trade Commission authority to establish an online do-not-track system.

The bill is the first in this session to specifically tackle the creation of a do-not-track system, according to a spokesman for Ms. Speier. In December, the FTC issued a report recommending the creation of a do-not-track system and suggested that lawmakers use the report as a template for legislation.

Since the FTCs recommendation, Mozilla Corp. has said it will include a do-not-track feature in an upcoming version of its Firefox Web browser. But so far, no tracking companies have publicly stated that they will participate in a do-not-track system.

In its newest Internet Explorer browser, Microsoft will allow users to stop certain websites and tracking companies from monitoring them. And Google last month began offering a tool that lets users of its Chrome browser permanently opt out of ad-tracking cookies.

Representatives of the three companies sparred gently over the merits of the differing approaches at a conference Wednesday at the University of California, Berkeley. Alex Fowler, Mozilla’s global privacy and public-policy leader, said it wanted to give users flexibility in choosing the companies they will and won’t allow to track them.

“We’ve done this intentionally because there is a spectrum of values across our users,” Mr. Fowler said. Some “don’t want to see ads or be tracked” at all, while others “see value in free services by receiving free advertising.”

Privacy issues are heating up on Capitol Hill. Earlier this week, Rep. Bobby Rush, D-Ill., re-introduced privacy legislation that he introduced during the last session of Congress. His bill would establish baseline federal privacy laws around the collection of personal data. Rep. John Kerry, D-Mass., is also expected to introduce privacy legislation in the coming weeks.

There is no comprehensive U.S. law that protects consumer privacy online. Internet privacy issues generally are policed by the FTC, which can take action only if a privacy-violating action is deemed “deceptive” or “unfair.” Last year, the Obama Administration called for a Web privacy “bill of rights” to help regulate the personal data collection industry.

Of course, these Democratic bills face challenges in the Republican House of Representatives. Ms. Speier said while the bill has two co-sponsors, both Democrats, she is “hopeful we’ll find Republican co-sponsors — we’re hopeful of finding Tea Party-Republicans, because that’s a closely held value” of Tea Party Conservatives, she told Digits.

Ms. Speier also noted support from the Consumers’ Union, Consumer Action, Consumer Federation of America, Consumers Watchdog and the American Civil Liberties Union. The Congresswoman predicted broad support because “86 percent of the public that has been polled nationally wants to have the option of not being tracked.”

Chris Lee Resigns After Craigslist Photos Come To Light

From your classmate Ife via the Huffington Post...

Rep. Chris Lee (R-N.Y.) announced early Wednesday evening that he will resign his seat in the U.S. House of Representatives.

Buffalo-based station YNN relays a statement from Lee, who has signaled that he will vacate his post immediately:

"It has been a tremendous honor to serve the people of Western New York. I regret the harm that my actions have caused my family, my staff and my constituents. I deeply and sincerely apologize to them all. I have made profound mistakes and I promise to work as hard as I can to seek their forgiveness.
"The challenges we face in Western New York and across the country are too serious for me to allow this distraction to continue, and so I am announcing that I have resigned my seat in Congress effective immediately."
News of Lee's decision to step down comes just hours after it was reported that the married congressman sent shirtless photos of himself to a woman who he connected with on the "Women Seeking Men" section of Craigslist.

HuffPost's Nick Wing reported earlier in the day:

According to Gawker, the 46-year-old married Republican responded to a listing posted last month by a 34-year-old woman looking for "financially & emotionally secure" men who "don't look like toads."
In an email, sent from an account admittedly registered to Lee, someone reportedly replied, claiming to be a 39-year-old, "6ft 190lbs blond/blue," "divorced" "lobbyist."
After a few flirty back-and-forths, the woman told Gawker that Lee sent her a picture of himself, sans shirt.
Asked for comment, Lee's spokesman provided a denial and claimed that the congressman's email account had been hacked.
"The Congressman is happily married," the spokesman told Gawker. "The only time he or his wife posted something online was to sell old furniture when they changed the apartment they keep in DC."

__
UPDATE: "People cheat everyday, but only dumb people get caught," said the woman who received the half-naked photos. She gave a full interview to TheLoop21.com on Wednesday night.

Her blunt evaluation comes after receiving flirty emails that used the congressman's name, originated from the email address associated with his Facebook profile (since deleted), and contained photos that clearly seemed to show his face -- and shirtless torso. So much for internet anonymity.

The woman, who works in government, requested to maintain her own anonymity in exchange for the accounts provided to Gawker and TheLoop21. HuffPost spoke with a friend of the woman who confirmed her story about getting the emails and photos after posting a personal ad on Craigslist.

In the interview with TheLoop21.com, the woman said she figured the story put forward by Lee's spokesman about a hacker was "bullsh*t."

"Dating in D.C. sucks," she summed up. Click here for more.

Denying allegations

Interesting thoughts from Lawrence on maintaining our reputations in the digital age ...

Trust and reputation are two important aspects of civilization. The former is often influenced by the latter. You would not trust someone who has been charged with fraud or other such crimes. You would not vote for a politician that has been accused of (often sexually) harassing interns. In the last century, we relied on a wide array of evidence to judge whether the individual was guilty or not. Evidence such as video surveillance tapes, phone records, credit card bills and many other things. I listed these forms of evidence because I want to discuss their legitimacy in court in the 21st century.

Technology has a advanced dramatically in the recent years and we have become capable of incredible feats often experienced in movies (i.e. avatar) or less often in the form online theft (by hackers all over the world) draining your bank account.
My worry is that video surveillance and many other things might be easily altered to fit the crime (or not). Thus undermining their validity as evidence in court.
I’ll give you a few illustrations. Facebook accounts can be hacked, therefor the content also, can be altered. Imagine someone ‘unearthing’ incriminating pictures of you on Facebook and consequently, you are arrested and put on trial. You know that the pictures are fake because you never found yourself in the situation depicted on the picture. Of course you don’t, they were photo-shopped by someone who has something to gain by you going to prison. The jury does not believe your account and sends you to prison for whatever you have done (not fair, I know). Replace Facebook in this whole story with other things like credit card bills or phone call records and come to the same conclusion.

The modern court of tomorrow will pick up on these practices and revise their list of approved forms of evidence (excluding things like mentioned above).
Imagine a politician that did sexually harass an intern and it was caught on tape. This politician happened to have many allies and enemies. In court, the politician could clame that the person on the video is not really him, but a virtually rendered version of him by animators and programmers (think about animated movies these days). The court has reason to believe him because he has many enemies who would gain by faking something like this.

Therefore, technology (hacking etc) can render many forms of evidence useless.

My concern is the way we use the internet and how we behave on it. How will we be able to hold each other accountable (online) if all the things we do (good or bad) can be brushed off as conspiracy if someone presses charges?

Exabytes: Documenting the 'digital age' and huge growth in computing capacity

A hat tip to two of your classmates Katharina and Katie for pointing this Washington Post article out to me ...

Megabytes are dead.

Gigabytes are passe.

So much digital data now moves around the globe that those who endeavor to measure it employ a new - or new to non-nerds - term.

Meet the exabyte.

How much data is an exabyte? It's a billion gigabytes - and it signifies just how digital and data-intensive the world has become.

In 2007, the global capacity to store digital information - on computer hard disks, smartphones, CDs and other digital media - totaled 276 exabytes, a new report finds.

How much is that? Imagine a stack of CDs - each holding an album's worth of digital music - shooting from the top of your desk to 50,000 miles beyond the moon.

But not everyone has equal access to those resources. In fact, the digital gap between rich and poor countries appears to be growing, said Martin Hilbert of the University of Southern California, who led the audacious effort to tally all of civilization's information and computing power.

In 2002, people in developed countries had access to eight times the bandwidth - or information-carrying capacity - of people in poorer nations, Hilbert said, citing data he will publish soon. By 2007, that gap had almost doubled.

"If we want to understand the vast social changes underway in the world, we have to understand how much information people are handling," Hilbert said.

To address that question, Hilbert and co-author Priscila Lopez spent four years poring over 1,110 sources of information spanning from 1986 to 2007, including sales data from computer and cellphone makers and the music and movie industries.

In 1986, a year after digital CDs widely debuted, vinyl records still accounted for 14 percent of all data on Earth, with audiocassettes holding an additional 12 percent.

By 2000, digital media accounted for just 25 percent of all information in the world.

After that, the prevalence of digital media began to skyrocket. In 2002, digital storage capacity outstripped the non-digital variety - mostly paper and videotapes - for the first time.

"That was the turning point," said Hilbert, who published the report in the journal Science. "You could say the digital age started in 2002. It continued tremendously from there."

By 2007, the last year documented in the study, 94 percent of all information storage capacity on Earth was digital. The other 6 percent resided in books, magazines and other non-digital formats, particularly videotape, Hilbert and Lopez found.

But despite the forecasts of futurists, a paperless world has not arrived. Although stupendously outstripped in growth by digital media, the amount of paper produced for books, magazines, newspapers and office use climbed steadily over the two decades of the study.

As for computing power - the number of calculations per second available in all of the computers in the world - that grew faster than even information storage, muscling ahead at an average annual growth rate of 58 percent over 21 years. Information storage, in contrast, grew at a rate of 23 percent.

Of course, for anyone tethered to an iPhone, Gmail and Facebook all day, all of this probably comes as no surprise.

That daily digital activity contributes to a churning information tsunami. Humans generate enough data - from TV and radio broadcasts, telephone conversations and, of course, Internet traffic - to fill our 276 exabyte storage capacity every eight weeks, Hilbert said. Of course, most of the digital traffic is never stored long term, evaporating into the ether.

The study prompts deep questions, one of which Hilbert plans to explore soon: How much of this data deluge is truly useful? Or, as Hilbert distilled it, "What's the value of watching a silly cat video versus reading an overpriced book?"

While we wait for an answer, social scientists worry that the mounting data carry a hidden cost: disconnection from one another.

"We'd like to think that [information technology] changes everything, that the amazing statistics these authors cite mean that our society has fundamentally and irreversibly changed," said Thomas J. Misa, who studies the history of technology at the University of Minnesota. "I'm a bit more skeptical." After all, Misa said, "there are still secret prisons in Cairo where government agents savagely beat people. Cellphones and social media didn't change that."

Perhaps not, but widespread reports from Egypt suggest that online social networking contributed to - or even prompted - the ongoing demonstrations there.

The study also found that Earth had 3.4 billion cellphones in 2007, with telecommunications traffic growing at an average rate of 28 percent per year between 1986 and 2007. That's a lot of minutes on your plan.

In a second report Hilbert plans to publish in a few months, he found that an ever-increasing slice of our daily data resides not on home computers and the smartphones in our pockets, but in giant data warehouses owned by Google, Facebook, Citibank, the federal government and other huge entities. Microsoft's recent ad campaign touts the benefits of moving all of your personal data to "the cloud," invoking white puffs that magically - and cleanly - store our home photos.

The reality is much dirtier. In 2006, the nation's "server farms" - the home of the cloud - sucked down 1.5 percent of all electricity in the United States, double the amount used in 2000, the Environmental Protection Agency reported. Congress ordered the report out of concern that our insatiable demand for Facebook and YouTube would push the United States to build 10 new pollution-spewing coal plants.

But Hilbert offers a humbling comparison. Despite our gargantuan digital growth, the DNA in a single human body still stores far more information - and a single human brain computes far more calculations - than all the technology on Earth.

"Compared to Mother Nature," Hilbert said, "we are humble apprentices."

Fake Dating Site Lifts Pictures And Names from Facebook -- Without Asking

From the San Francisco Chronicle ...

A pair of artists gathered the public profiles of more than 1 million Facebook users, then took the pictures and created a fake dating site called Lovely-Faces.com.

Users can search based on nationality, traits like "easy going," and gender, or can simply enter a name and see if they're in the database. When users click a result to "arrange a date," they're taken to the person's public Facebook profile.

The site scraped Facebook data without permission, and the company told Wired that it's not amused and will "take appropriate action."

Basically, it looks like an awkward commentary on the shallowness of online dating profiles and Facebook's confusing privacy policies, but violating privacy to make a point about privacy doesn't work very well.The artists, Paolo Cirio and Alessandro Ludovico, tried to explain their point in a press release issued yesterday (PDF here), but it's basically a bunch of gibberish -- or maybe that's part of the art.