Hasta La Gadget!

Recently I picked up a shiny new iPhone 5 and handed down my old Android smartphone to my daughter. She’s too young to really need a smartphone, but it’s nice to be able to know where she is in the neighborhood anytime. She uses it to listen to music all the time. She’s a big music fan and seems to be constantly asking me the name of a song and expects me to know it simply by her humming a few notes or telling me a few keywords from the lyrics.

I’m totally going to load her phone up with the new Rhapsody SongMatch app. The app is able to listen to music playing anywhere and identify the name of the artist, album, and song for you. You can save identified songs as playlists and share the song data with other people.

This isn’t the only app available that can identify music for you – SoundHound and Shazam have been around for quite a while – but Rhapsody’s free app is totally free of annoying ads (other than promoting the Rhapsody brand, of course.) While you don’t need a subscription to Rhapsody to use the app, if you do have a subscription you get extra benefits. You can listen to the track on Rhapsody if it’s available, view the rest of the artist’s catalog, and discover similar artists.

Rhapsody SongMatch is available on the Google Play store right now for download.

They’re watching you — or at least will be in a couple of years. That’s when the FBI is gearing up for a nationwide launch of a $1 billion project designed to identify people of interest, according to the New Scientist. Dubbed the Next Generation Identification (NGI) program, the high-tech endeavor uses biometric data such as DNA analysis, iris scans and voice identification to track down folks with a criminal history. The FBI also plans to take NGI on the road literally by using public cameras to pick faces from the crowd and cross check them with its national repository of images. Let’s just say this facial technology isn’t going to be used for lighthearted Japanese vocaloid hijinks or unlocking your electronic device. The use and scope of NGI, which kicked off a pilot program in February, will likely be questioned not just by black helicopter watchers but privacy advocates as well. Facial recognition has certainly been a touchy issue in privacy circles — something Facebook learned firsthand in Germany. Meanwhile, the Electronic Frontier Foundation is already raising concerns about innocent civilians being mixed up or included in the database. Naturally, the FBI claims that the NGI program is in compliance with the U.S. Privacy Act. On the positive side, at least they didn’t name it the Genetic Lifeform and Disk Operating System.

Filed under: Misc

FBI to roll out $1 billion public facial recognition system in 2014, will be on to your evildoing everywhere originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 09 Sep 2012 08:46:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Brain Corporation has developed a system that can individually identify all kinds of baked goods on a tray, in just one second. A trial has started at a Tokyo bakery store.
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