The Iraqi Army (read "the U.S. Army") is registering all of their soldiers using a portable iris scanner which reduces the complexity of the retina eye into a 512-byte code. The system, called the Biometric Automated Toolset, has a false acceptance rate of 1 in 1.2 million and can enroll users without an attached PC.
This system has also been used to identify prisoners and insurgency suspects.
Retina scanning Iraqi recruits [MurdocOnline]
Back in the late 1990s Google launched a feature called Google Scout, which showed you links related to a link you chose on Google. It was a clever use of PageRank, but it never caught on. Well, Google has relaunched the concept, this time as...."related links," and instead of making it a feature on Google's site, you can put it on your own site. Innaresting.
Abstract:ef=http://www.securityfocus.com/brief/176>an article on the paper.To build systems shielding users from fraudulent (or phishing) websites, designers need to know which attack strategies work and why. This paper provides the first empirical evidence about which malicious strategies are successful at deceiving general users. We first analyzed a large set of captured phishing attacks and developed a set of hypotheses about why these strategies might work. We then assessed these hypotheses with a usability study in which 22 participants were shown 20 web sites and asked to determine which ones were fraudulent. We found that 23% of the participants did not look at browser-based cues such as the address bar, status bar and the security indicators, leading to incorrect choices 40% of the time. We also found that some visual deception attacks can fool even the most sophisticated users. These results illustrate that standard security indicators are not effective for a substantial fraction of users, and suggest that alternative approaches are needed.
For $20.00 a month in San Francisco you will get a megabit of wireless access from EarthLink and Google. For free you get 300 kilobite.
That means this to me. First EvDO and UMTS for those who never leave the city is unnecessary. For a third of the price you can get coverage that is at least twice if not three times as fast. If you don't need speed and can live with 300 k (and most people could) you just use the free service. Personally, I'd love to see the cities add a $2.00 a day visitor's pass or something like $10.00 a week for those who don't live there but visit.
My other guess is that at some point the various muni-setups work out a roaming relationship so you can be a resident of Philadelphia and visit another city and have access.
These two ideas alone could change the way we all acces the Internet and how much (or how little) we end up paying...
The word "platform" has become quite popular in the Yahoo! vocabulary in recent months. That's a good thing because it means more and more people are staring to think about our products and services and more than just, well, products and services for end users (I hate the term "consumers" too).
It wasn't that long ago that Bill Gates said:
Yahoo doesn't think of themselves as a platform company. I don't think you will ever have the Yahoo PDC.
That's slightly amusing, because we're certainly headed that way. And Microsoft seems to be trying (and trying and trying) to, with MSN, become more and more of a content/portal/search company. Or some may say "more like Yahoo."
Anyway, there's a lot of confusion about platforms: what is and is not a platform and stuff like that. We also talk about ecosystems and how they related to platforms.
Leave to ex-Yahoo Gary Flake to help connect the dots, now that he's at Microsoft:
People from Redmond often speak of a "platform" while in the valley they speak of an "ecosystem". Here's the surprise: both groups are talking about the same thing. To MS, Windows is a platform because it fosters a virtuous cycle in two parts: developers come to the platform because it has the most users; users come to the platform because it has the most software.
Well said.
I hope Bill Gates will accept an invitation to keynote the first Yahoo Developer's Conference, should we decide to host one. :-)
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The Linux wireless LAN support site offers a searchable directory of wireless devices with information regarding their level of support in Linux.
Since I'm a big proponent of repurposing old laptops the Linux way, this is a really handy resource, especially since wireless support in Linux can be a tricky thing. You can save a lot of time going into a Linux install if you already know whether or not your wireless device is supported and how to get it up and running.
Heather Green reports that YouTube, has raised $8 million, from backer, Sequoia Capital, bringing the total to around $11.5 million. Why the need for the money? I bet it is to pay for their ever growing need for storage, hardware and bandwidth. They are also trying to clean-up their act and avoid the fate of Napster.
Freedom 2 Connect conference organized by David Isenberg is proving to be a network neutrality lovefest. I was scheduled to attend, but work commitments prevented me from going. Filling in admirably is my colleague Erick Schonfeld who is blogging up a storm on Business2blog. He writes about Michael Powell’s speech. Former FCC commish was pretty blunt in saying that legislating network neutrality is not going to happen, and it is a bad idea anyway.
“It is too facile to say the Internet belongs to the public. People are married to the metaphor of the public space, but they run into trouble when it comes to who should pay for this stuff. They think it should be the government. That’s not going to happen. The government is broke, It’s going to stay broke.”
Powell’s thoughts were matched by Martin Geddes, one of my favorite broadband pundits. “Network neutrality can’t be made to stick. Telcos will evade whatever definition you put up; it’s easier than fighting UNE-P unbundling rules. It’s easy to create atilted playing field,” he said in his speech today. Martin, makes a lot of sense, and offers a very coherent reasons why getting politics involved in NN is going to create one messy situation.
makezine.com points to a NY Times article on NASA contests that aim to reach out to the DIY set:
"Contracts belonged mostly to the Boeings of the world. Tinkerers and students were kept at the far edge of the periphery. But with budgets tightening and the obstacles to human space exploration looking more daunting, NASA is enlisting the expertise of outsiders. For example, the agency is offering 13 contests, which it calls Centennial Challenges, that anyone can enter. The prizes range from $200,000 to more than $5 million, for building gear as diverse as solar sails, lunar excavators and the tiny elevators."
It's wonderful to see increased mainstream recognition that innovation often comes from the edges. This is the root of our methodology of watching the alpha geeks to get ideas about emerging trends and technologies, and the exploration of the DIY ethic that we're committed to with Make: magazine.
Business theorists have started to grasp the risks to established businesses of asymmetric competition. (By analogy to the concept of asymmetric warfare, sometimes companies are competing with rivals whose different business model transforms the nature of the conflict. For example, the competition between Netscape and Microsoft was symmetric because both companies employed the software distribution business model, but the competition between Google and Microsoft, or (more granularly), between Firefox and IE or Linux and Windows, is asymmetric.)
But the NY Times points out an even more disruptive trend in an article entitled Death by Smiley Face: When Rivals Disdain Profit: "There is another breed of rival lurking online for traditional media, and it is perhaps the most vexing yet: call it purpose-driven media, with a shout-out to Rick Warren, the author of "A Purpose-Driven Life," for borrowing his catchphrase. These are new-media ventures that leave the competition scratching their heads because they don't really aim to compete in the first place; their creators are merely taking advantage of the economics of the online medium to do something that they feel good about. They would certainly like to cover their costs and maybe make a buck or two, but really, they're not in it for the money. By purely commercial measures, they are illogical. If your name were, say, Rupert or Sumner, they would represent the kind of terror that might keep you up at night: death by smiley face."
CraigsList is the obvious poster child of this movement, with open source projects like Firefox another good example, but as the article points out, even Google began as such a "purpose driven" company, and its non-commercial ideals still drive parts of its business strategy. (I recall a recent conversation with Larry or Sergey (I don't remember which) in which he was commenting on why he'd prefer the ad model to work for Google Book Search if possible, because it would enable poor people to access books, while subscriptions would preserve the old economic dynamics.)
Of course, there have always been purpose-driven entities, some of them great enterprises. But the disconnect between economic ambition and business impact seems greater today than at any time I can remember. Is Craig Newmark an aberration, or an early sign of an emergent new economy of whuffie?
The National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST, President: Hiroyuki Yoshikawa) and Keio University (President: Yuichiro Anzai), in collaboration with Burton Inc. (CEO: Hideki Kimura), have succeeded in the experimental fabrication of a device displaying “real 3D images” which consist of dot arrays in space where there is nothing but air.
via Interactive Architecture dot org
p://feeds.feedburner.com/~a/FutureFeeder?a=tT608X">
Internal AT&T Documents Had Been Temporarily Held Back Due To Government's Concerns
San Francisco - The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) on Wednesday filed the legal briefs and evidence supporting its motion for a preliminary injunction in its class-action lawsuit against AT&T. After asking EFF to hold back the documents so that it could review them, the Department of Justice consented to EFF's filing them under seal -- a well-established procedure that prohibits public access and permits only the judge and the litigants to see the evidence. While not a party to the case, the government was concerned that even this procedure would not provide sufficient security and has represented to the Court that it is "presently considering whether and, if so, how it will participate in this case."
"The evidence that we are filing supports our claim that AT&T is diverting Internet traffic into the hands of the NSA wholesale, in violation of federal wiretapping laws and the Fourth Amendment," said EFF Staff Attorney Kevin Bankston. "More than just threatening individuals' privacy, AT&T's apparent choice to give the government secret, direct access to millions of ordinary Americans' Internet communications is a threat to the Constitution itself. We are asking the Court to put a stop to it now."
EFF's evidence regarding AT&T's dragnet surveillance of its networks includes a declaration by Mark Klein, a retired AT&T telecommunications technician, and several internal AT&T documents. This evidence was bolstered and explained by the expert opinion of J. Scott Marcus, who served as Senior Technical Advisor for Internet Technology to the Federal Communications Commission from July 2001 until July 2005.
The internal AT&T documents and portions of the supporting declarations have been submitted to the Court under a tentative seal, a procedure that allows AT&T five court days to explain to the Court why the information should be kept from the public.
"The public deserves to know about AT&T's illegal program," said EFF Legal Director Cindy Cohn. "In an abundance of caution, we are providing AT&T with an opportunity to explain itself before this material goes on the public docket, but we believe that justice will ultimately require full disclosure."
The NSA program came to light in December, when the New York Times reported that the President had authorized the agency to intercept telephone and Internet communications inside the United States without the authorization of any court. Over the ensuing weeks, it became clear that the NSA program has been intercepting and analyzing millions of Americans' communications, with the help of the country's largest phone and Internet companies, including AT&T.
"Mark Klein is a true American hero," said EFF Staff Attorney Kurt Opsahl. "He has bravely come forward with information critical for proving AT&T's involvement with the government's invasive surveillance program."
In the lawsuit, EFF is representing the class of all AT&T residential customers nationwide. Working with EFF in the lawsuit are the law firms Traber & Voorhees, Lerach Coughlin Stoia Geller Rudman & Robbins LLP and the Law Office of Richard R. Wiebe.
For the notice of motion for preliminary injunction:
http://www.eff.org/legal/cases/att/NotMot.pdf
For the motion to lodge under temporary seal:
http://www.eff.org/legal/cases/att/MotionReSealing.pdf
For more on EFF's suit:
http://www.eff.org/legal/cases/att/
Contacts:
Derek Slater
Acting Media Coordinator
Electronic Frontier Foundation
derek@eff.org
For Mark Klein:
Miles Ehrlich, Esq.
Ramsey & Ehrlich
miles@ramsey-ehrlich.com
No sooner did I proclaim Motionbox the best online video sharing service (mostly for its editing and deep tagging tools), than a new contender arrives on the scene. San Francisco based stealth startup Jumpcut, founded by Mike Folgner and Ryan Cunningham, just launched minutes ago.
In my mind there are now two distinct types of video sharing services. The first is the YouTube crowd and its dozens of clones, which allow easy uploading of files which are then transcoded into flash, and tagging of those files. The goal is to get video and page views, and it’s working.
It’s working so well, in fact, that it raises questions on their business model. YouTube is free but has very real bandwidth costs from showing these videos. They are dealing with this in two ways - by degrading the quality of the flash video files to reduce file size, and by raising another $8m from Sequoia, raising the total to $11.5 million.
The second group does what YouTube does, but also has some basic editing features. Included in this group is Grouper, Motionbox, Jumpcut and, to some extent, YouTube. Grouper and VideoEgg require a client download to use the service. Motionbox and Jumpcut don’t, although Jumpcut says they’ll have one as an option soon. With these last two, the editing occurs online, and therefore facilitates editing by a group on a shared video.
Jumpcut, as the newest entrant, has some really spectacular features, that should encourage video mashing between users. It’s editing features, also using Flash, are better than what I saw with Motionbox. Any video can be cloned (unless restricted by the publisher), and other clips can be added to the cloned video. Sound files can be added to either overwrite existing audio or mix in with it. They also allow a number of “transition” features as effects. Overall, its pretty cool. Check it out by clicking “remix” on this video screen.
Like YouTube, finished videos can be kept private, shared or made public. Jumpcuts provides code snippets to allow video playback from blogs and other websites as well. Unlike Motionbox, Jumpcut does not have a deep tagging feature, although Mike Folger says it is being built and that “it’s fairly straightforward using the Flash development tools”.
The service is currently free and allows uploads of up to 50 MB (YouTube allows 100MB). A paid service will be available soon in the $5/month range, and Jumpcut will also have a client install available to allow users to do some of the editing and transcoding work before uploading it to the Jumpcut server.
Overall, the service is eerily similar to Motionbox. Jumpcut has slightly better editing features, and Motionbox’s deep tagging is a definite feature win. Both of these services will be very useful for creating a single video from a group event where lots of different people are recording video - a wedding, for example. Jumpcut has angel funding by Westlake Venture Partners and Great Oaks Capital.
There have been big changes in the online video space since I wrote a comparison post of the companies in the space (Flickrs of Video) last November.
Some things haven’t changed: Flickr still hasn’t released a video product, and YouTube (TechCrunch posts here) is still the reigning champ of online video with just massive traffic growth and mindshare.
But new tools are coming out to make sharing videos online even easier. Both Video Egg and Grouper (TechCrunch posts here and here) have downloadable clients that allow encoding to flash on the desktop (saving users from uploading very large files to the service) and some very basic editing features. Grouper also allows users to string together multiple video files (VideoEgg does not yet allow this). Also, while working from the desktop is easier than online, you must install the software. Grouper is not available on the Mac. VideoEgg has a Mac client that works with Safari, but I cannot get it to install on my new Intel based Mac.
New service Motionbox, which will launch in the next few weeks, goes way beyond all of this. CEO Chris O’Brien and investor Derek Idemoto came by to demo the service to me last week and, well, I’m impressed.
Motionbox doesn’t have a client uploader like Grouper and VideoEgg. You must upload the full video files to the service. And while those uploads are a pain, Motionbox has very good reasons for doing this.
To get what Motionbox is doing, take a YouTube and add a ton of really great editing, mashup and deep tagging features. Like YouTube, Motionbox transcodes files to flash to reduce file size and standardize viewing. But they also store the original files and allow you or those you authorize to download those files and/or purchase DVDs with the files.
I also had a chance to test MotionBox’s video editiing tools. When editing a video, Motionbox breaks it down visually into frames (see screenshot above). Users can edit the file extensively, including linking several video files and removing any portion(s) of files. Mashups with other users’ public or shared videos can also be created using this editing feature. Frankly, this goes way beyond what anyone else is doing, including VideoEgg and Grouper’s current offerings. All of these changes can be pushed back to the original quality files for downloading or DVD burning.
Like YouTube and other services, Motionbox allows tagging of video files. But they also allow deep tagging of parts of video files. Open a file (see screenshot above) select a portion of the video, and tag it. Viewers later will be able to skip right to that clip of the video by clicking on the tag. Longer videos can now easily be broken down into linkable pieces. This is a huge leap forward over competiting services.
Chris gave few details on pricing and limitations on files sizes, other than to say that any limits will be time based v. file size based like YouTube (which has a 100 mb file size limitation), and many or all of the restrictions will be lifted for premium users (expect a $25/year premium subscription fee).
Sign up to be notified of the Motionbox launch here.