November 2012
72 posts
“Something far more concerning than marching bands, balloons, cheerleaders and clowns was at the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. Confidential personal information is what some paradegoers found among confetti tossed during the world’s most famous parade. That information included social security numbers and banking information for police employees, some of whom are undercover officers.”
—Confidential Police Docs Found in Macy’s Parade Confetti Spark Investigation [Exclusive] - WPIX
“Creepy is the go-to term for broadcasting how technology unsettles us. Time and time again we’re asked to think in binary terms and identify a device or app either as good or its polar opposite, creepy. Although we’re often led to believe that creepy is an emotional response to things going horribly awry, our creepy radar isn’t nearly as reliable as Peter Parker’s danger determining spider sense.”
—Facial recognition software, targeted advertising: We love to call new technologies “creepy.” - Slate Magazine
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“Last winter, Dan Harmon, who was then the executive producer of the television sitcom Community, shared that he tried, “many times a season” to put star Alison Brie “in a situation, wardrobe-wise, that I know is going to end up as an animated GIF file!”
—Rhizome | GIFABILITY
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Two porn companies are courting web surfers to upload photos they find online to the companies’ free facial-recognition, face-matching database services.
With SexFaceFinder.com and Naughty America’s “Face” anyone can upload an image and have the services match it with images and faces in image databases.
SexFaceFinder positions its service as a way for users to find a performer that looks like s specific person.
Or to find performers that look like the user’s favorite type of model, in an effort to engage the user with a service that closes the marketing gap between a user and their fantasy.
Another company, Naughty America, openly solicits users to upload images of girls found on Instagram and other internet destinations in an effort to find the photo’s subjects in porn - or find celebrity look-alikes, girlfriend and ex-girlfriend look-alikes, or similar/specific porn performers.
Naughty America’s facial recognition matching openly asks users to try photos of girls they find on Instagram and other social media websites.
” —Porn companies adopt facial-recognition technology, encourage Instagram photos | ZDNet
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“Walking home tonight from dinner with a friend in the East Village, NY, I was passing south along Pitt Street, one block north of Delancey, when I heard the throaty rumble of a low-flying plane getting louder overhead. I didn’t pay it much attention but it was loud enough for me to clock it. Up ahead, I saw three guys emerge from one of the projects on the east side of Pitt St. As I got closer to them, they paused. The plane was passing right above us, heading north along the east river Manhattan shoreline, and I suddenly saw what could only be described as a wide, flat green laser beam start sweeping the street from the plane. It passed over the three guys up ahead, and then me. It was like a giant laser bar-code scanner passing across every contour of the street - for a brief second like suddenly being in a bad light show at a 1990s rave. The three guys ahead of me stopped in their tracks, dumbfounded. I caught up with them and we all looked at each other, then back up to the sky, and then saw this fat triangle of green light beaming down from the plane as it headed north. I talked to them, and none of us could work out what it was, but we had all seen the same thing. I continued walking south towards Grand Street, where I live, and just as I was entering my building I heard the plane come back, this time flying south. I stopped and watched it’s green beam cover ground just a little further west of where I’d been walking. As I write this I can still hear the plane making passes overhead - it’s engines have quite a distinct sound.”
—As related by a friend, November 19th, 2012. This appears to be LIDAR scanning of New York in operation. This was first proposed in 2010, and reported by Fast Company and the New York Times. Green LIDAR in particular is used for marine environments - it seems likely that the current scan is in response to recent flooding caused by Hurricane Sandy. The technical term for this process is EEARL, but I haven’t yet been able to establish who is doing the scanning.
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“Impermium provides social content cleaning for web sites and social networks, defending them against social spam, fake registrations, racist and inappropriate language, and other forms of abuse. Our system combines advanced technology and broad, Internet scale threat information to provide cost-effective, real-time protection for more than a 300,000 sites across the globe.”
—About Impermium | Impermium
“In a Dilbert-esque faux pax, a Taliban spokesperson sent out a routine email last week with one notable difference.He publicly CC’d the names of everyone on his mailing list.”
—Taliban Accidentally Reveal Identities of Their Mailing List Members - ABC News
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Information Age Prayer is a site that charges you a monthly fee to say prayers for you. A typical charge is $4.95 per month to say three prayers specified by you each day.
“We use state of the art text to speech synthesizers to voice each prayer at a volume and speed equivalent to typical person praying,” the company states. “Each prayer is voiced individually, with the name of the subscriber displayed on screen.”
” —Information Age Prayer | Know that your prayers will always be said, via Dan W.
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