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AMD is an interesting company; on the one hand they have some incredible ideas and can really bring some great features to life. Where they sometimes have an issue is bringing them to market and conclusion. One of the reasons for this is their lack of funds. If you do not have enough money to push your products (like Intel and nVidia usually do) then you have to rely on the community to adopt and support your goals. We have watched this happen multiple times with everything from GPU based Physics (the integration of Ageia PhysX onto the X19xx series GPUs) to OpenCL.  AMD shows off what is capable and then due to lack of support and money has to step back and watch as the “rich kids” run off with the toys.

Intel has kicked a new contest into high gear to go along with the launch of their latest CPU lineup. To get a chance at the grand prize all you have to do it submit a video explaining why you should get a chance to build the ultimate Sandy Bridge Unlocked system... The catch is that you only have 32 seconds to do it in...

Win an Incredible Intel Unlocked PC & More

Get chances to win Intel Unlocked components in the 32 in 32 Challenge. Take home the grand prize and you and a friend will fly to Newegg.com HQ to choose components and build your ultimate Intel enthusiast PC valued at over $5,000. Giveaway begins November 14: http://www.facebook.com/Intel?sk=app_151472421569461

Well, well, well; it appears that Google’s Face Unlock feature in their upcoming Android 4.0 OS has been shown to be insecure. If you are surprised by this news then you are one of the few. The feature, just like many other “facial recognition” applications is built on an imperfect method for identification. But let’s not get too far into the story before we give away the plot.

Google showed off the new Face Unlock as one of the major features of Ice Cream Sandwich at the launch event. It was interesting because at the time they showed how particular it could be to facial expressions. Not that much later the question was raised about the possibility of fooling this with a digital image or a photograph. Given the commentary from Google on this feature I would have thought that someone might have replied that it was possible, but unlikely. Apparently that was not the case. After the question was tweeted, SonyaCincau decided to test this out.

According to a YouTube video the blogger went to a show where the Galaxy Nexus was on display and after setting up the Face Unlock using his own face he then proceeded to unlock the phone with a picture of himself taken on another phone.  Now, the problem with this video is that we never see the original setup of the Face Unlock. All we see is the phone being unlocked using an image shown on the screen of another phone. This has led many to believe that the Galaxy Nexus was setup with the picture on the phone in the first place. I am not here to debate that; it still raises concerns about the actual feature even if the phone was used to setup the original lock.

Getting back to our point about the Face Unlock feature being incapable of being truly secure let me explain why. First of all the camera on the front of the phone is a 2D low resolution camera. It’s black point and white points are not what you would call top notch. This means that it is not capable of compositing shadows correctly or efficiently. In order to do true facial recognition you have to do something called facial mapping. This means that you calculate the depth of the facial contours using shadows (unless you are using stereographic 3D). As the camera is not capable of accurately capturing this in the first place there is no way that the software can accurately calculate the true facial contours. So all you have to do is provide a close enough image to fool the system. For those that will comment about the demonstration of this feature before take a look at the differences in the two faces used. They are very different with different outlines and even basic contours; in other words the demo was stacked to ensure that it worked properly (as most demos are).



So what do we have here? We have a system that cannot really be more than an entertaining way to “lock” your phone controlled by a technology that has a very limited capacity to even get the original image captured properly. We have some misleading comments about this feature on the part of Google and now a viral video showing it failing on a demo phone. To be honest with you, I would never put my trust in something like this in the first place. The technology just isn’t there in the phone or the OS. However, I do think that Google needs to be a little more honest about this and admit that while this can be fun to use, it is not a security feature by any means.

Source Huffington Post

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There are times when I read about something on the Internet and I have to stop and wonder if the site reporting on the item has gotten something wrong. As an example I recently read about a new act called SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act). According to the article on TorrentFreak.com this new act will allow corporations the ability to shut down websites by submitting a complaint to the sites host. Now I thought that this sounded unlikely so I looked into the act and found out that it is even more disturbing that what TorrentFreak posted.

It turns out that the bill is a revision of one what was first presented in the Senate call the “Protect IP Act”. This revision was supposed to correct issues with that first bill and instead has only succeeded in extending them and making them more vague. For example in the bill it uses the verbiage that includes any site or “portion of” a site that is "dedicated to theft of U.S. property," this is a very broad category that has no clear definition. For example if someone posts a YouTube video with copyrighted music in the background, is that theft? What about a cover of a song where the music and lyrics were legally purchased?  These two “violations” could get the offending website cut off from payment provides (PayPal), advertisers (advertisers Google Adsense etc.), and get the site completely shut down.

To make matters worse the shutdown order would not go to the site owner, but directly to the Payment providers, advertisers, and ISPs for the host of the site (or if the owners host it themselves their ISP). The The ISPs, advertisers and payment providers must comply to the complaint or they face fines. The site owner does not get notification from the complaint, they just get shut down. To add insult to injury the site owner has limited rights to appeal the complaint before or after they have the rug pulled out from under them.  

This new legislation is an abomination and nothing more than an attempt to grant corporations (not just the media) license to shut down any site that offends them. To give you an example of what can happen if this bill is allowed to go through, let’s say that a site writes up an article criticizing a company for a product and uses images of the packaging or quotes from their website in the review. Under this new act that company who holds copyright over the logo’s and the wording on the website could send a complaint to the site’s host, advertisers and payment providers and get them locked out.  This type of heavy handed control over the internet is simply terrifying.

To combat this most of the consumer advocacy groups have challenged the bill and congress men and women from both sides of the fence have spoken out about this. There is also an American Censorship Day planned. The Fight For the Future Organization is asking web sites to post a snipet of code to their websites on November 16th the code will pop-up with a fake seizure notice that will explain the new bill and how each user can act to contact their congress person to try and get this bill stopped now.



We will be participating in this and urge all of you to help out with this as this act is about more than copyrighted content. It is about control of the content on the internet.

Source TorrentFreak

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