Every week, a new and interesting human being tackles our decidedly geeky take on the Proustian Q&A. This is the Engadget Questionnaire.
In this week’s installment of your smattering of queries, HTC’s Creative Director Daniel Hundt chats up the versatile smartphone and responsible consumption. For a look at all of the responses, cozy up on the other side of the break.
Every week, a new and interesting human being tackles our decidedly geeky take on the Proustian Q&A. This is the Engadget Questionnaire.
In this week’s installment of your smattering of queries, HTC’s Creative Director Daniel Hundt chats up the versatile smartphone and responsible consumption. For a look at all of the responses, cozy up on the other side of the break.
People are becoming more vigilant when it comes to online privacy, so Stanford University’s new initiative couldn’t have come at a better time. The project, called Cookie Clearinghouse, will curate catalogues of websites whose cookies browsers should or shouldn’t allow. As designed, it works along with a Safari-like patch Mozilla is testing for Firefox that allows cookies from sites you’ve visited but blocks third-party cookies from sites you haven’t. Theoretically, that’ll prevent advertisers or other entities from tracking you around the web, but the method isn’t foolproof — having a centralized list will prevent your browser from saving the cookies of an ad or a spam website you’ve accidentally clicked on.
To establish which sites are kosher and which aren’t, the folks at Stanford are slated to meet up with an advisory board. It will be comprised of privacy researchers, law pundits, small business experts, as well as reps from Mozilla and Opera. Unlike Do Not Track — another Stanford initiative from which this one later evolved — advertisers don’t have to opt in for inclusion on either list. It’s just up to developers (other than Mozilla) to integrate this more thorough solution into their browsers’ privacy options.
We’ve been hearing rumblings that the FAA wants to start letting you use certain gadgets on airplanes through the “terrible 10,000 feet,” and according to the WSJ, it’s about to do just that. A 28-member industry and government panel’s draft report strongly recommended relaxing blanket rules against electronics that have been in place since 1966 due to massive changes in technology since then. The committee also cited reports showing that passengers often forget to turn off gadgets without any consequences and that airlines, left to enact their own rules, are much too conservative. If it goes along with the document, the FAA will likely allow the use of certain devices, like e-readers and music players, during all phases of flight — though the ban on cellphones is expected to continue since the panel wasn’t authorized to broach that controversial issue. As for other devices, the details are still being bandied about, and the FAA is unlikely to announce a formal decision until the end of September. Still, now might be a good time to start fortifying that music and book collection ahead of your next big trip.
Sure, they’re mostly just pictures of sand and rocks, but we still have to thank the Curiosity rover for beaming back images of landscapes we’ll never walk on. To give you a panoramic view of a Mars area called “Rocknest” with Mount Sharp visible on the horizon, NASA stitched together almost 900 exposure shots into a single 1.3-billion-pixel image. The photos were taken over the course of more than a month (from October 5th to November 16th last year) at different times of the day, so you can observe variations in illumination and thickness of dust in the atmosphere throughout the panorama. Head over to the source to access the whole interactive mosaic replete with pan and zoom controls, and if you’re lucky, you might even see a rock the rover’s laser zapped in the past.
Now that Aviary has been on its own for a year, its developers have seen it fit to give its Android app a modest overhaul. Aviary version 3.0 packs in a new interface, an improved focus tool, a beefed up color splash feature and an array of goofy stickers. The Enhance tool has also been expanded to offer three distinct options — Hi-Def, Illuminate and Color Fix — each tweaking your photo’s sharpness, brightness and color settings, respectively. Aviary’s filters went through a renovation as well, with the developers adding the erstwhile iOS-only Woodlands Effect Pack as an in-app purchase. Head on over to Google Play or click the source links below to download the app — it was good enough for Jeff Bezos, so it might have the potential to win your photo-filter-loving heart.
Writing code for an Arduino-friendly board is relatively easy; creating the board is the hard part, unless you live and breathe electrical engineering. If HackEDA has its way, however, the design process could be almost as easy as window shopping. Its new Kickstarter-backed project lets tinkerers choose from a list of parts and get a made-to-order board without knowing a lick about PCB assembly — algorithms sort out the finer details. While the initial effort includes just 36 combos based around an Atmega328 processor, contributors who want tangible hardware can pay anything from $30 for a bare board through to $10,000 for the first stages of mass production. The truly committed will have to wait until December for the finished goods, but those willing to try HackEDA can use its existing web tool for free.
BitTorrent announced its new file format, the Bundle, just over a month ago, giving artists new tools to control content distributed P2P. Now, Public Enemy is one of the first to take advantage of those features by releasing its latest single as a Bundle and announcing a BitTorrent-based remix contest. Downloading the torrent gets you a copy of “Get Up Stand Up,” and giving Chuck D and his mates your email address unlocks the Bundle — thereby netting you the song’s music video, outtakes and 37 remix-able multitracks. That last bit is key, as Public Enemy’s encouraging folks to submit remixes of the song to the group using BitTorrent SoShare. From those submissions, Public Enemy will pick the best remix, officially release it, and give the winner recording gear and a smattering of Public Enemy swag. Sound good? You bring the DJ skills, and we’ve got you covered with the source tracks and more info below.
Sick of endless patent wars yet? According to the New York Times, so is the Federal Trade Commission. Referencing the usual persons briefed on the matter, the NYT reports that FTC chairwoman Edith Ramirez is preparing to propose an inquiry that will put patent-assertion entities — companies that exist solely to buy and collect royalties on patents — under federal scrutiny. If approved, patent trolls that catch the FTC’s attention will need to detail how they operate and if their legal proceeds pay out to the original patent owner. The chairwoman is expected to explain the proposal in more detail at a patent law workshop later this week. According to the NYT, Ramirez doesn’t have any specific company in mind, but aims to investigate companies that might hamper innovation. With any luck, the inquiry will help curb spurious litigation and rampant patent trolling — something most of us can probably get behind.
This is the world’s first pair of glasses which prevent facial recognition by cameras. They are currently under development by Japan’s National Institute of Informatics.
Photos taken without people’s knowledge can violate privacy. For example, photos may be posted online, along with metadata including the time and location. But by wearing this device, you can stop your privacy from being infringed in such ways.
“You can try wearing sunglasses. But sunglasses alone can’t prevent face detection. Because face detection uses features like the eyes and nose, it’s hard to prevent just by concealing your eyes. This is the privacy visor I have developed, which uses 11 near-infrared LEDs. I’m switching it on now. It prevents face detection, like this.”
“Light from these near-infrared LEDs can’t be seen by the human eye, but when it passes through a camera’s imaging device, it appears bright. The LEDs are installed in these locations because, a feature of face detection is, the eyes and part of the nose appear dark, while another part of the nose appears bright. So, by placing light sources mostly near dark parts of the face, we’ve succeeded in canceling face detection characteristics, making face detection fail.”
Compared with previous ways of physically hiding the face, this technology can protect privacy without obstructing communication, as all users need to do is wear a pair of glasses.
However, because this system utilizes the difference in spectral sensitivity between human vision and imaging devices, another method is needed for cameras that aren’t affected by infrared light.
“In that regard, what we’re thinking of is a visor that doesn’t use electricity, but uses reflective material. For example, one like this. This makes light from outside look white, or absorbs it. That pattern breaks up the features used in face detection. So you can prevent face detection even without using electricity, by wearing this visor. It is also very cheap to make.”
Event: NII Open House 2013
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