Karl's Weird News

Stalker fear over facial recognition phone app

A CAMERAPHONE application that finds names and addresses of total STRANGERS was blasted as a “stalker’s dream” last night.

The facial recognition “app” instantly identifies snaps by matching them to photos on websites like Facebook and Twitter, where personal info is accessed.

 Horrified security experts claim BURGLARS taking secret snaps of revellers could find out their addresses. Unsuspecting strangers fooling around on nights out could also fall prey to BLACKMAIL.

And women could be stalked by PERVERTS. Simon Davies, of Privacy International, slammed the “Recognizr” gizmo as an “atrocious invasion”.

He warned: “It takes the dangers that already exist and increases them infinitely.”

Dr Ian Brown, of the Oxford Internet Institute, said: “A guy could take a picture of a girl in a bar and find out all sorts of information.”

Hat tip to Jonathan!

Sidekick Users See Their Data Vanish Into a Cloud:

A server meltdown over the weekend wiped out the master copies of personal data — including address books, calendars, to-do lists and photos — accumulated by users of T-Mobile’s formerly popular Sidekick smartphone.

This computing calamity allows Sidekick owners only a faint hope of backing up the information currently on their devices, and none of recovering anything they’d trusted to online storage. And it leaves T-Mobile and the operator of the Sidekick’s data service, a Microsoft subsidiary formerly known as Danger Inc. — oh, the irony! — with serious explaining to do.

A statement on T-Mobile’s site phrased things a little more bluntly than the average exercise in corporate contrition: “we must now inform you that personal information stored on your device — such as contacts, calendar entries, to-do lists or photos — that is no longer on your Sidekick almost certainly has been lost as a result of a server failure at Microsoft/Danger.”

Residents challenge Google camera:

Angry residents of a Buckinghamshire town blocked the driver of a Google Street View car when he started taking photographs of their homes.

Police were called to Broughton, near Milton Keynes, after residents staged the protest accusing Google of invading their privacy and “facilitating crime”.

“Google have taken a tremendous liberty,” resident Paul Jacobs told the BBC. Google said it observed UK law and only filmed from public areas.

Experts Warn of ‘Terminator’-Style Military-Robot Rebellion

Autonomous military robots that will fight future wars must be programmed to live by a strict warrior code, or the world risks untold atrocities at their steely hands.

The stark warning — which includes discussion of a “Terminator”-style scenario in which robots turn on their human masters — is part of a hefty report funded by and prepared for the U.S. Navy’s high-tech and secretive Office of Naval Research.

The report, the first serious work of its kind on military robot ethics, envisages a fast-approaching era where robots are smart enough to make battlefield decisions that are at present the preserve of humans.

Man Vs Machine: Boy Killed Anally When Office Chair Explodes:

Well, stories don’t get much worse than this.

A 14-year-old boy in China was killed when his chair exploded, sending chunks of metal into his rectum. The bleeding this caused killed him. The alleged explosion came from the gas cylinder that was in the base of the chair, the part that allowed the user to adjust the seat up and down.

The canister gets compressed when you sit on it, but can it actually create enough energy to make the seat cushion explode like that and kill a man? I doubt it, but this is what people are reporting.

Users baffled as Zune MP3 players freeze up 

Baffled consumers are griping about a mysterious glitch that appeared to cause thousands of Zune music players to simultaneously stop working late Tuesday and early Wednesday.

Internet message boards have been flooded with complaints about Zune’s 30GB models freezing, prompting Y2K-like speculation about end-of-year hardware or software problems.

“It seems that every Zune on the planet has just frozen up and will not work,” posted a Mountain Home, Idaho, user on CNN’s iReport.com. “I have 3 and they all in the same night stopped working.”

Another iReporter said he was working the night shift at a Toys R Us store in Puerto Rico when his Zune player and the Zunes of four co-workers all failed about 1:30 a.m. ET Wednesday.

Packs of robots will hunt down uncooperative humans

The latest request from the Pentagon jars the senses. At least, it did mine. They are looking for contractors to provide a “Multi-Robot Pursuit System” that will let packs of robots “search for and detect a non-cooperative human”.

One thing that really bugs defence chiefs is having their troops diverted from other duties to control robots. So having a pack of them controlled by one person makes logistical sense. But I’m concerned about where this technology will end up.

Given that iRobot last year struck a deal with Taser International to mount stun weapons on its military robots, how long before we see packs of droids hunting down pesky demonstrators with paralysing weapons? Or could the packs even be lethally armed? I asked two experts on automated weapons what they thought – click the continue reading link to read what they said.

Japanese Woman Arrested for Virtual-World ‘Murder’

A 43-year-old Japanese woman whose sudden divorce in a virtual game world made her so angry that she killed her online husband’s digital persona has been arrested on suspicion of hacking, police said Thursday.

The woman, who is jailed on suspicion of illegally accessing a computer and manipulating electronic data, used his identification and password to log onto popular interactive game “Maple Story” to carry out the virtual murder in mid-May, a police official in northern Sapporo said on condition of anonymity, citing department policy.

“I was suddenly divorced, without a word of warning. That made me so angry,” the official quoted her as telling investigators and admitting the allegations.

The woman had not plotted any revenge in the real world, the official said.

She has not yet been formally charged, but if convicted could face a prison term of up to five years or a fine up to $5,000.

Players in “Maple Story” raise and manipulate digital images called “avatars” that represent themselves, while engaging in relationships, social activities and fighting against monsters and other obstacles.

Workout for brain just a few clicks away:

Searching the Internet may help middle-aged and older adults keep their memories sharp, U.S. researchers said on Tuesday. Researchers at the University of California Los Angeles studied people doing Web searches while their brain activity was recorded with functional magnetic resonance imaging scans. “What we saw was people who had Internet experience used more of their brain during the search,” Dr. Gary Small, a UCLA expert on aging, said in a telephone interview. “This suggests that just searching on the Internet may train the brain — that it may keep it active and healthy,” said Small, whose research appears in the American Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry. Many studies have found that challenging mental activities such as puzzles can help preserve brain function, but few have looked at what role the Internet might play. “This is the first time anyone has simulated an Internet search task while scanning the brain,” Small said.

Spam reaches 30-year anniversary

Spam – the scourge of every e-mail inbox – celebrates its 30th anniversary this weekend.

The first recognisable e-mail marketing message was sent on 3 May, 1978 to 400 people on behalf of DEC – a now-defunct computer-maker.

The message was sent via Arpanet – the internet’s forerunner – and won its sender much criticism from recipients.

Thirty years on, spam has grown into an underground industry that sends out billions of messages every day.

Arm-wrestling game recalled for breaking arms

Japanese game maker Atlus said on Tuesday that it would remove 150 Arm Spirit arm-wrestling machines from Japanese arcades after three players broke their arms while wrestling with the machine’s mechanized appendage.

“The machine isn’t that strong, much less so than a muscular man,” said an Atlus spokeswoman. “Even women should be able to beat it,” the company claimed, saying that it would check the machines for malfunctions as “a precaution.”

Testing Video Games Can’t Possibly Be Harder Than an Afternoon With Xbox, Right?

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The “dream job” of being a video game tester may sound like a way to get paid for doing exactly what you’d choose to do in the middle of the afternoon on your own living-room sofa, but the reality is very different. To find out how different, I spent a couple of weeks at Volt, a Redmond company that is the country’s largest independent video game tester. Hundreds of testers work at Nintendo and Microsoft during crunch times. More than 50 smaller Seattle-area video game developers—like Surreal, Valve, and Zipper—employ anywhere from five to 20 testers each. But when it’s time to contract out some of the most grunt-worthy testing tasks, companies call Volt.

Power returning to Colombia after nationwide blackout

Colombia’s electrical grid collapsed Thursday, causing a nationwide blackout that briefly halted stock trading, trapped people in elevators and left authorities struggling to determine the cause.

President Alvaro Uribe told journalists in the southern city of Cali that the blackout, which began at midmorning, “appears to have affected the entire country.”

Luis Alarcon, manager of state-controlled electricity distributor ISA, issued a statement that the power outage apparently began with an undetermined technical glitch at a substation in Bogota and quickly spread to the rest of the country.

He said work crews had re-established power to about 20 percent of the country and hoped to reconnect the rest in a few hours.

Massive System Failure Affects Blackberry Users

NewsChannel 4 learned of a massive system failure that affected all blackberry users in the western hemisphere late Tuesday.

 The RIM Company, which stands for Research In Motion, developed blackberry technology and said its infrastructure failed around 8 p.m. Tuesday and was until about 7 a.m. Wenesday.

E-mails were not being pushed to portable blackberry devices.

Officials with RIM said they tried to reset the system and they were concerned that the backlog of data, which could cause a bigger problem as it rushes through now that the system appears to be online.

Single-pixel camera takes on digital:

Researchers in the US are developing a single-pixel camera to capture high-quality images without the expense of traditional digital photography. Being developed by a lab at Rice University in Houston, Texas, the single-pixel camera is designed to tackle what its developers see as the “inefficiencies” of modern digital camera.

Duke Patents Mind-Controlled Weapons

Work on Brain-Machine Interface (think monkey controlling a joystick with its thoughts) is old news, but a patent granted earlier this month underscores researchers’ confidence that a broader set of military applications is possible: like controlling weapons with your mind.

In “Apparatus for acquiring and transmitting neural signals and related methods,” researchers at Duke University are laying claim to a device that can use the brain’s thoughts to control an array of mechanical and electrical devices, up to and including weapons

Computer Tech Accidentally Erases Info on Alaska’s $38 Billion Oil Fund

Perhaps you know that sinking feeling when a single keystroke accidentally destroy hours of work. Now imagine wiping out a disc drive containing an account worth $38 billion.

A computer technician at the Alaska Department of Revenue deleted applicant information for an oil-funded sales account — one of state residents’ biggest perks. While reformatting the disk drive during a routine maintenance check, the technician mistakenly reformatted the backup drive as well and, suddenly, all the data disappeared.

A third line of defense — backup tapes that are updated nightly — were unreadable.

Harsh Words Die Hard on the Web

She graduated Phi Beta Kappa, has published in top legal journals and completed internships at leading institutions in her field. So when the Yale law student interviewed with 16 firms for a job this summer, she was concerned that she had only four call-backs. She was stunned when she had zero offers.

Though it is difficult to prove a direct link, the woman thinks she is a victim of a new form of reputation-maligning: online postings with offensive content and personal attacks that can be stored forever and are easily accessible through a Google search.

 Lockheed’s F-22 Raptor Gets Zapped by International Date Line:

Lockheed’s F-22 Raptor is the most advanced fighter in the world with its stealth capabilities, advanced radar, state of the art weapons systems and ultra-efficient turbofans which allow the F-22 to “supercruise” at supersonic speeds without an afterburner.
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But while the simulated war games were a somewhat easy feat for the Raptor, something more mundane was able to cripple six aircraft on a 12 to 15 hours flight from Hawaii to Kadena Air Base in Okinawa, Japan. The U.S. Air Force’s mighty Raptor was felled by the International Date Line (IDL).

When the group of Raptors crossed over the IDL, multiple computer systems crashed on the planes. Everything from fuel subsystems, to navigation and partial communications were completely taken offline. Numerous attempts were made to “reboot” the systems to no avail.

Woman killed by exploding TV

A 78-year-old Norwegian woman died this week from burns suffered when her television set exploded in her apartment.

The woman lived alone in a senior citizens’ housing project in Odda, western Norway. The explosion was apparently so powerful that the TV itself was virtually pulverized.

It’s taps for Morse code:

Morse code is in need of some serious SOS.The language of dots and dashes, first used during the infancy of electronic communication in the mid-1800s, is going the way of Latin.

Beginning today, amateur or “ham” radio operators in the United States won’t be tested in Morse code – also known as Continuous Wave – in order to be licensed by the federal government.

Computerized Babies Cry, Burp at Students

High school students in the Mexican state of Chihuahua are being made to care for screaming, hiccuping baby dolls that run on computer chips to try to bring down the state’s soaring teenage pregnancy rate.

Pairs of teen-age boys and girls aged 13 to 17 have to spend two or three days tending to the computerized babies, programed to cry for food, burp and wake up screaming at night until they are rocked back to sleep.

“You have to change their diapers, feed them and slap them on the back so they burp. They laugh, they get colic. They simulate the behavior of a real baby,” said state education official Pilar Huidobro, who is in charge of the program.

TV remote inventor dies aged 93:

Robert Adler, a US inventor best known for the creation of the couch potato’s dream device, the TV remote control, has died at the age of 93.

He received an Emmy award in 1997 for the 1956 invention jointly with fellow engineer Eugene Polley.

Mind Games

Girard’s description of himself is matter-of-fact, until he explains what’s in the bag: documents he believes prove that the government is attempting to control his mind. He carries that black, weathered bag everywhere he goes. “Every time I go out, I’m prepared to come home and find everything is stolen,” he says.

The bag aside, Girard appears intelligent and coherent. At a table in front of Dunkin’ Donuts inside the train station, Girard opens the bag and pulls out a thick stack of documents, carefully labeled and sorted with yellow sticky notes bearing neat block print. The documents are an authentic-looking mix of news stories, articles culled from military journals and even some declassified national security documents that do seem to show that the U.S. government has attempted to develop weapons that send voices into people’s heads.

Turn Your Car Into a Wi-Fi Hotspot:

The era of permanent internet connectivity comes a step closer next week when Autonet Mobile launches its new wireless service that turns any car into a WiFi Hotspot at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

Quake cuts off much of Asia Internet:

Internet and phone services have been disrupted across much of Asia after an earthquake damaged undersea cables, leaving one of the world’s most tech-savvy regions in a virtual blackout. From frustrated traders seeking in vain for stock quotes to anxious newshounds accustomed to round-the-clock updates on world events, millions of people from China to Japan to Australia were believed to have been affected. There was no chaos on the stock exchanges or any of the other doomsday scenarios of science fiction, but reports that services could be down for weeks were dramatic enough.