Rule #1: Don’t change your relationship status without consulting the other person.
Rule #2: Don’t post embarrassing photographs of other people.
Rule #3: Be discreet when posting messages on another person’s wall.
Rule #4: Don’t steal other people’s friends.
Rule #5: Don’t start hate groups.
Got any other rules to add to this list? Let us know about them!
[Via Bitsandpieces]
Designed by engineers at Kagawa University in Japan, this creepy robotic mouth simulates the human voice by using an air pump, artificial vocal chords, a nasal cavity, a resonance tube, and a microphone. Check it out:
Oh, and naturally, it didn’t take very long before people on youtube used the footage to create some pretty awesome mashups, such as this one featuring the voice of the trolololo guy.
[Via Neatorama]
Facebook is said to be looking at ways to turn its “like” button into a multi-million dollar bonanza.
The feature, which is currently used simply for giving a thumbs up to user content such as status update, could be the key to breaking through in the contextual advertising market.
The company wants to make it possible for websites to put a Facebook “like” button on their pages, similar to those which many already make available for social media sites such as Digg.
While a user “liking” a web page could publish a link on their profile and act as a form of promotion for the site — as already happens via a “post to profile” or “share” button — , it’s got a more valuable potential use for Facebook itself.
Though the company has said “we have no announcements or changes planned to our ad offering and policies”, there’s a strong suspicion it would like to use the data from the buttons to learn more about individual users’ tastes and interests, further refining the personalized adverts it shows users when they log-in… and further increasing the rates it can charge advertisers for ever more targeted advertising.
It’s notable that the scheme would require users to specifically click on a Facebook-branded button, which means they shouldn’t be surprised when the details appear on their profile. That’s in stark contrast to the much-maligned Facebook Beacon program which updated user profiles with details of activity on partner sites such as when they ordered a book or CD from an online store.
In that situation, Facebook’s biggest blunder was making the scheme opt-out, meaning users, whether or not they knew about it, were enrolled by default. To make things worse, the scheme launched just in late 2007, meaning some users surprise Christmas gift purchases were revealed to the recipients.
It’s not just Facebook which will come under scrutiny from the new scheme, though. There’s also a possibility that the websites displaying the “like” button will use the details for marketing purposes. After all, it’s one thing to know somebody has visited your website, but quite another to know exactly which pages earned their approval.
So someone leaves a phone on a bar, someone else picks it up and plays with it, and the next thing you know Gizmodo is taking it apart and declaring that this disguised iPhone is a test model of the not-yet-released 4G iPhone.
They’ve delivered many of the features people have been waiting for—that damn front camera!—while at the same time upgrading everything else. Flash, better back camera, better battery life and another microphone for better voice clarity. People who bought the 3G two years ago and are now in the perfect position to upgrade and get a dramatically different, and better, phone. If confirmed this summer, and if it performs as we expect, this next-generation iPhone looks like a winner.
Gizmodo has a list of specs, features, and the story of how they determined what it is and what it does. And a couple of videos. Engadget compared the missing (leaked? stolen?) iPhone with an earlier photo posted online and pictures they had in their files and confirmed that yes, it is what it is.
You’ve probably heard by now about the school district in Pennsylvania that was using webcams in school-issued laptops to spy on students. And they might never have known except for one observant administrator who saw a student engaging in behavior mistaken for pill-popping and confronted him – at which point it was revealed that those “pills” were actually candy. Unsurprisingly, the student’s parents were wondering how the school knew about something that had happened in his house – which is when it all came tumbling down.
The school still maintains that the remote-webcam-activation was actually a “security feature” intended to help them recover lost or stolen laptops. Of course, the student in question didn’t have a lost or stolen laptop – just one he’d failed to pay the $55 security deposit for.
But now there’s a lawsuit, which means there’s discovery, and a motion filed by the students’ attorney last week claims that the school might have thousands of images collected by the school, many of which featured students who did not have lost or stolen (or uninsured) laptops. And according to the motion, “There were numerous webcam pictures of Blake and other members of his family, including pictures of Blake partially undressed and of Blake sleeping.” Which is just, you know, kind of creepy.
The motion itself is an attempt to get to the personal computers of school technology coordinator Carol Cafiero, who recently took the Fifth during a deposition. She was one of a very few administrators able to access the images, and the students’ attorney is calling her a “voyeur” – largely because of an email exchange between her and a colleague, who noted that seeing the webcam footage was kind of like a “soap opera” – to which Cafiero replied, “I know, I love it!”
I wrote some time ago about the iPhone tracking that some schools in Japan were implementing and noted the similarities to Cory Doctorow’s science fiction novel Little Brother. I think the comparison is even more apt here, and I think a lot of people are unsettled by the situation. The post from Threat Level on this subject included with permission one of the images that a laptop recorded, of a student sleeping. The schools might have seemed like Santa Claus, giving away laptops for free… but now they see you when you’re sleeping, they know when you’re awake, they know if you’ve been bad or good, so be good for goodness sake.
A few weeks ago, Nathan Fillion (Captain Malcolm Reynolds in Firefly) made a total geek of himself on Jimmy Kimmel’s show, expressing his unending love for lightsabers. Watch and laugh.
If you’ve considered getting involved in open source software development before but didn’t know where to start, keep reading.
Even before you get down to it, the first thing you must consider is what sort of task you would like to do. The second is contemplating your skillset. Do they match up? If not, you might have some learning to do.
If you aren’t a programmer and have no idea what else could possibly need to be done, here are a few ideas:
Most of these may sound straightforward at first, but they all have at least some learning curve. Once you’ve established what you’re interested in pursuing, the tough questions start.
Tags: open source
185 voices from 12 countries join a choir that spans the globe: “Lux Aurumque,” composed and conducted by Eric Whitacre, merges hundreds of tracks individually recorded and posted to YouTube. It’s an astonishing illustration of how technology can connect us.
[Via Ted]