Intel kicks off IDF with an own goal

Tuesday, September 22nd, 2009

Greetings from San Francisco! Back in the UK, I know most of you are probably gearing up to go home for the day; but out here it’s 8.15 in the morning and the Intel Developer Forum starts in 45 minutes. Over the next three days we’ll be learning more about 32nm CPUs, scoping out the successor (already) to Nehalem and – inevitably – enjoying more talk about Larrabee, Intel’s multi-core x86-based graphic system, now coming up to a glorious three years of development with no release in sight.

Still, leaving that aside, Intel’s doing pretty well right now. With Lynnfield barely out of the traps and a die-shrink already rumoured before Christmas, it’s clear that the company is, right now, at the top of its game in terms of innovation and engineering.

Which is why I was amused this morning when my very first interaction with IDF – the registration process – exposed a glaring security slip.

(more…)

The Government wants to track our cars… but should we care?

Tuesday, March 31st, 2009

I’m not generally the type of person to be worried by CCTV cameras and the concept of Big Brother watching my every move (my every move is very dull), but even I was a little perturbed to read an article in this morning’s Guardian suggesting that the UK Government “is backing a project to install a ‘communication box’ in new cars to track the whereabouts of drivers anywhere in Europe”. (Click here if you want to hear the author of the report discussing the story.)

Now it turns out this is a slightly over-dramatic first sentence to the Guardian article. (more…)

How easy is it to vandalise Street View?

Tuesday, March 24th, 2009

Answer: alarmingly easy. Last Friday, I asked Google to remove a photo of me and my young family standing on a Kensington street. This morning, I received an email confirming my image had been removed. Just one problem: it wasn’t me or my family in the picture. 

Google, it appears, will take down any image – without any checks or balances – if you appear to have a legitimate complaint. In my case, I argued the picture of my pretend family and I standing outside our house was a “privacy concern”. Google asked for no proof of identity, other than a contact email address (which was a generic Gmail account, with no surname to cross-reference against the address). On that flimsiest of pretext, we’ve been able to black out part of a Kensington street.

We will, of course, ask Google’s press office to reinstate our deleted image. But our little experiment highlights how effortless it is to vandalise the service. How easy would it be, for example, to remove a photo of a rival business from the high street, by claiming you’ve been caught walking past?  

(more…)

iLife, Lemurs, and Me

Monday, February 2nd, 2009

I am not a Lemur. I’m sure you can tell that from my picture (and I bet someone like BC finds a lemur picture for this blog within moments): A recent tour of the new iLife ‘09 with Apple reinforced this easy bit of species-identification in just a few moments – but I’m not entirely sure that the conclusion to my investigations is entirely flattering.

But first – those Lemurs. Apparently, Lemurs don’t recognise Leopards. Instead, they simply maintain a count of the number of nearby Lemurs. If this should decrement by 1, they run up a tree. So much easier than bothering to look for spots in the undergrowth, and big sharp teeth…

How does this relate to iLife? Easy. Faces. iPhoto ‘09 Does Things With Faces, in photographs, automatically matching up your photo library so you can view all the pictures linked by having one person’s face somewhere in them. If you can’t work out who someone is, then you can throw the photo up to Facebook and wait for someone to tag it. If the tagged face you don’t know is in more than one picture, then you get another person tile in your by-people view.

This feature was shown to a room full of writers and analysts, and it went down like a lead balloon. Apple were a trifle crestfallen; and I think I know why. I strongly suspect that writers, as a tribe, do not have lots of those “family pictures” scattered around their phones, cameras, laptops et cetera. If I had just grabbed a copy of iPhoto ‘09 and gone home with it I would very likely not have found this smart feature in a million years – because the fewer people there are in a photo, the more I like it. All those family shots, I just don’t understand – I think of them as “here’s the same troop of Lemurs, with a tiny rim of the Arc de Triomphe in the background”, and all those gurning faces just don’t connect for me.

From the reactions of the journalists in the room, I suspect I’m not alone in that clearly dysfunctional reaction. Apple fortunately provided a pre-loaded library of happy models, smiling for the camera in front of a wide selection of the world’s landmarks, so you can see for yourself the rather bizarre Godley & Creme pop-video effect of scrolling through all your pix of a particular person, with their eyes and mouth locked in position in the middle of each snap.

It creeps me out, really. Especially when my nephew scanned in a load of black and whites from my parents’ photo album, which stretches back to the 1900’s – and iPhoto tracked people through 50 years of life, unerringly. I also still have a massive server here, as yet untouched, packed with several gigabytes of capture frames from a large factory CCTV system. I wonder how long iPhoto would take to find frames in that lot with faces in?

My suspicion is that Family type people will come up with some equally disparaging term for us loners, to balance out my “Lemur” tag, and will think this is just a brilliant tool for turning casual snaps into a lifetime’s documentary: but I can’t help worrying a little bit about what could be done with something this capable.

Privacy, mobiles and my nan

Tuesday, September 23rd, 2008

My nan hated mobile phones. Just taking one into her living room was enough to invite her rambling wrath, invetiably finished off with being called love in a tone that was more hand grenade than full stop.

 In my nan’s mind a mobile phone was basically a cancer wand, the merest waft of which could kill a man stone dead. If she was feeling particularly vitriolic on the subject, she would then claim Doris next-door (which I genuinely believed was her full name until I was twelve or so) knew somebody who’d gone deaf using one, before delivering the coup de grace – a stunning exposition on how my mobile phone was pretty much everything that was wrong with the modern world, bar Genocide and Carrot and Coriander soup.

(more…)

I am scared of Google

Wednesday, June 25th, 2008

First off, I’m not paranoid. I don’t have a tin-foil hat, subscription to conspiracy weekly, or a pressing need to take a different route to work every day to stop people following me. I genuinely believe Diana died in a car crash, Elvis died on the toilet, and the lone gunman actually did it. I understand that Governments cover things up, and I’m happy with that because I suspect their secrets are either a) boring or b) terrifying – both of which are covered in my life by a) tax returns and b) overdrafts. There’s no such thing as aliens, and even if there were, I certainly wouldn’t believe they travelled all this way to stick something unpleasant up my bottom. And if they did, why is everybody in such a hurry to meet them?

But I am scared of Google. Not because of the conspiracy theories, or because it’s fashionable, but in the same way I’m scared of the sea. It’s huge, mostly benevolent, and unpredicatable – and the vast majority of us depend on it far too much.

(more…)

Microsoft’s manners masterplan: Why we’ve brought it on ourselves

Friday, June 13th, 2008

So, Microsoft wants to be able to silence your mobile at will… I like it.

Let’s begin where all good stories should. Microsoft has filed a patent for a technology it’s calling Digital Manners Policy which would basically tell your phone what features could be used in certain situations. For example, enter a cinema and DMP would automatically shift your phone to vibrate mode, so the ringing doesn’t disturb others watching the film. In a museum it could disable your camera, stopping you from photographing rare portraits. If somebody robbed a bank, they could presumably hack the DMP to stop outgoing phonecalls – but that’s neither here or there, really.
(more…)