Google's face recognition: Just Plain Creepy

Technology Review: Face Recognition: Clever or Just Plain Creepy?

This real-name tagging is what makes Google's face recognition so creepy. Remember, all these photos aren't on your computer: they're on Google's server. And because e-mail addresses are unique, Google could use the tagged photos from all its Picasa users to create a global database matching photos to e-mail addresses. Doing so would not even violate Google's privacy policy, so long as Google only uses this information to make its service "better" and does not make the database generally available.

But what's really unsettling about Google's service is that it doesn't just stop at your friends. Before you know it, Google is asking you to identify all those other faces in your photographs--the people standing in the background, the faces in the crowds, even the faces on posters. This is certainly keeping with Google's corporate mission "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." But is that what we really want from a photo-sharing website?

Sen. Russ Feingold (D-WI): After seven years of war, will more troops help us achieve our strategic goals in Afghanistan?

The Raw Story | Not so fast on Afghanistan, top Democrat warns

"We must target Al Qaeda aggressively, and we cannot allow Afghanistan to be used again as a launching pad for attacks on America," he added. "It is far from clear, however, that a larger military presence there would advance these goals."

IRWIN KELLNER: Mass-transit transit fares should be eliminated, not increased

Mass-transit systems taking wrong turn - MarketWatch

  That's a damn good idea that I've had for a long time. A tax should be added to gasoline so everyone driving is paying for someone to ride the same distance on mass transit.

Muammar Qaddafi: The Mideast's one-state solution

The Mideast's one-state solution

Really pretty moderate, sensible-sounding stuff.

The Mideast's one-state solution

By Muammar Qaddafi

Thursday, January 22, 2009

TRIPOLI, Libya:

The shocking level of the last wave of Israeli-Palestinian violence, which ended with this weekend's cease-fire, reminds us why a final resolution to the so-called Middle East crisis is so important. It is vital not just to break this cycle of destruction and injustice, but also to deny the religious extremists in the region who feed on the conflict an excuse to advance their own causes.

But everywhere one looks, among the speeches and the desperate diplomacy, there is no real way forward. A just and lasting peace between Israel and the Palestinians is possible, but it lies in the history of the people of this conflicted land, and not in the tired rhetoric of partition and two-state solutions.

Although it's hard to realize after the horrors we've just witnessed, the state of war between the Jews and Palestinians has not always existed. In fact, many of the divisions between Jews and Palestinians are recent ones. The very name "Palestine" was commonly used to describe the whole area, even by the Jews who lived there, until 1948, when the name "Israel" came into use.

Jews and Muslims are cousins descended from Abraham. Throughout the centuries both faced cruel persecution and often found refuge with one another. Arabs sheltered Jews and protected them after maltreatment at the hands of the Romans and their expulsion from Spain in the Middle Ages.....

Me to Facebook: Get Lost!

The Consumerist, by way of Slashdot, is telling us that Facebook has decided they have perpetual total rights to anything you put on their site, including your own picture, even if you delete your account. I don't think so. I never agreed to that. I'll give them a few days to climb down, then delete the account and get ready to join the inevitable class action suit.

Debian 5.0 (Lenny) out

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/02/16/debian_lenny_review/ I've tried other distributions from time to time over the decades, usually when I've manage to trash my filesystems, but always come back to Debian. The core of a distribution is package management, and the Debian system (apt on top of dpkg) is the only one that actually works well in a reasonable amount of time. None of the other ones I've tried come close. Sorry RedHat etc.: if y'all would just ditch your inferior package-management and adopt the Debian way, I'd give you another try. Package management doesn't matter for someone who just wants to install from a disk and then let it sit except for maybe light security upgrades and so forth. I stay right on the bleeding edge, so package management is important for me. Ubuntu is apt-based because it is Debian-based. I don't see how Ubuntu could survive if Debian quit. I tried it repeatedly but their attitude is very MSFT: they know best and you will do things their way or else. If you're running Ubuntu, you'll probably eventually switch to Debian or throw in the towel and submit to AAPL or MSFT (less and less difference between them). Debian is by no means perfect, but their extremely conservative philosophy (I have to run Debian/experimental just to have even a chance of trashing my FSs or otherwise having some fun) compensates to some degree for what I see as the main deficit of Free Software as opposed to corporate products: good release engineering. Face it, testing and bug-hunting are boring and not at all sexy, so it is not surprising it is harder to get people to do it for free than the more flashy aspects of hacking. The Linux Kernel has serious ongoing bugs (I've documented a few) which are simply ignored, probably because working on new features is more fun. I keep an eye on things like Haiku because I think Linux has been around long enough that it might be succumbing to the inevitable accumulation of dead wood at the top of the food chain, creating an opening for a fresh start. But Debian already runs (to some degree at least) on kernels other than Linux, and I think it will survive longer than the Linux kernel does. Of course, MSFT and (according to some reports) AAPL manage to remain bug-ridden even with a paid cast of thousands. There are apparently some things even money can't fix.

Android > Symbian MSFT OSX etcetc. Apple doomed.

Ultimi Barbarorum: Do Androids Dream of Apple-Blackberry Crumble?

So here’s a post about something micro: I think Apple has blown it in the handset market, and the collapse is coming soon. You will recall my (rather insane and obsessed) contention that the iPhone may well blow Apple up, but was and is the only way they have to play a weak hand. Also, subsequently, my admiration of the actual phone, their amazing initial sales and my guess that Apple had a window to build scale in handset markets. Well, they did precisely nothing with their window and now, I suspect, it has closed. They may be toast. Except they and their fanboy analysts don’t know it yet.

I decided about five years ago that what happened to PCs when the IBM-PC came out would happen to cells. Anyone remember trash-80s? The CP/M operating system? Altair? Imsai?

If ATT hadn't retarded the spread of Unix by ten years or so by dog-in-the-mangering it via their license, MSFT would either be nothing or much less than they are. I was using an X-windows precursor and Unix on a machine with 512K of ram clocking at about 1MHz back in the early 1980s. I figured that what with Stallman's GNU and Linux finally having freed Unix, the commoditized standard-architecture cells would be running some Unix variant (that's what OSX is: BSD Unix on top of the Mach Microkernel with a nice GUI on top, the latter being Apple's claim to fame, aside from basically hijacking some open source [which the GPL license GNU and Linux have should prevent]).

I've got a G1. It is basically an ugly prototype. The software is what counts. I put the 1.1 upgrade on it and the progress is impressive, and I expect that to accelerate as interest grows.

Symbian, one of the ugliest messes I've run across, is dead dead dead. Palm has seen the writing and is apparently switching to some kind of Linux. MSFT being basically like a cockroach, their crap will be hard to eliminate, but I think in five or so years cells running anything other than a Unix variant (or maybe Haiku or some other upcoming free software OS) will be have already been history for a year or so.

[Update] More signs of doom for AAPL and MSFT:

Nvidia Tegra: Not just Windows, Android too

Folklorica de Argentina (Music)

.:::Santiagomanta:::. You can listen either via the website or via playlist links. They are in Santiago del Estero, ground zero for this kind of Argentinian music. I can't wait to get back. Never been to Santiago del Estero, but I may go someday just because of the music.

James Saft at Reuters: Nationalization by autumn, bank on it | The Great Debate |

Nationalization by autumn, bank on it

All in all, it’s a bit like watching a man trying to eat a steak without using his teeth.

Obama's Justice Department backs Bush secrecy on renditions suit

The Raw Story | Obama's Justice Department backs Bush secrecy on renditions suit: "'Eric Holder’s Justice Department stood up in court today and said that it would continue the Bush policy of invoking state secrets to hide the reprehensible history of torture, rendition and the most grievous human rights violations committed by the American government,' Anthony D. Romero, Executive Director of the ACLU, said in the same release. 'This is not change. This is definitely more of the same. Candidate Obama ran on a platform that would reform the abuse of state secrets, but President Obama’s Justice Department has disappointingly reneged on that important civil liberties issue. If this is a harbinger of things to come, it will be a long and arduous road to give us back an America we can be proud of again.'"

Some Linux kernel hacks-in-progress

I've been doing a bit of playing with Linux kernel cpu-frequency control. Two patches so far; both still need work. http://sites.google.com/site/cashmundy/linux-kernel-stuff

How to get RC33 on your G1 without the wait

How to get RC33 on your G1 without the wait

I didn't even need to use my USB cable. Downloaded it with the phone browser (went into /sdcard/downloads), then used Linda File Manager to rename it to update.zip and move it (via cut and paste) to /sdcard. I've already made it to the first reboot without any problems.

1) Go to https://android.clients.google.com/updates/signed-PLAT-RC33-from-RC30.f06aa9b3.zip with phone browser (just search for 'android 1.1 update) if you don't want to type in the link above.

2) Do rename and cut-and-paste as above.

3) Power phone down.

4) Reboot to recovery console by holding Home and Back and (meaning the white "house" key and the red "hangup" key) until you get past the initial G1 logo and the recovery icon comes up.

5) Type Alt (the Alt key), then l (letter "L", lowercase).

6) Type Alt, then s (letter "S", lowercase).

That's it. I'm now running Android 1.1. Now, in Settings/About-Phone, there is a System-Updates option, so I will probably never have to do this again. Cool.

Best thing is, I did this with no Sim card. I'm back to using my Nokia 6133 (which I hacked into a 6131 so I could use Gmail and the Opera browser (the software the 6133 comes with is Absolute Shit, and Nokia is Dead Meat if they keep their shitty software (I'm going to buy puts on them next time they run up at all) because my 6131 is better at being a phone than the G1, and I have no 3G anywhere near me at present. I use the G1 as a very small netbook. Don't need no stinkin' Sim card for that.

Brad Setser: Follow the Money � Blog Archive � More to worry about … the US downturn looks to be getting worse when it should be getting better

Brad Setser: Follow the Money � Blog Archive � More to worry about … the US downturn looks to be getting worse when it should be getting better: "Unfortunately, the fall in US industrial production is approaching the worst falls in the post-World War 2 data set. Some recessions in the past produced a sharper initial fall. But in an average post-World War 2 recession, the economy would be recovering by now — not getting worse. If things don’t improve, the current fall may match the biggest fall in the post war data. And remember, industrial production wasn’t exactly booming during the boom years of this cycle; it took an awful long time for industrial production to top its 2000 levels …"

Synchronised depression

FT Alphaville � Blog Archive � Synchronised depression: "Synchronised depression"

The OECD has published its latest set of leading indicators. They’re not great. But you don’t need us to tell you that. Here’s Albert Edwards:

The OECD have just released their latest leading indicators. Amid mounting optimism of investors that the global economy is bottoming, these data suggest no such thing is occurring. Indeed they are catastrophically weak. Of particular interest in this context is the leading indicator for China (chart included, but also see website). It is suffering one of the biggest collapses of all the lead indictors that the OECD monitor. This suggests no imminent recovery is at hand there . Indeed as per my recent note, and despite the hopes of many in the markets the data confirms the prospects of continued recession.