Kotaku's Luke Plunkett delves into a newly disclosed Microsoft patent that covers spying on people in their homes using cameras attached to their TVs, in order to levy fines against them for allowing too many people to watch movies at once:
Basically, when you buy or rent something like a movie, you’ll only be granted a “license” for a certain number of people to watch it. If Kinect detects more people in the room than you had a licence for, it can stop the movie, and even charge you extra.
So if Microsoft has its way, you won’t just be renting movies any more. You’ll have to decide how many people are watching, and no doubt pay more. And if one extra person turns up to your movie night? So help you God, you are going to pay.
Of course, big companies patent all sorts of stupid ideas, many of which never get incorporated into products. But hey, now you know that researchers at Microsoft sit around spitballing ideas like, "Wouldn't it be awesome to spy on our customers in their homes so that we could fine them for having too many people over to watch movies? Wonder if anyone is Hollywood would give us preferential access to movies if we could promise them that they could do nose-counts of people in their own homes?"
Felix Salmon at Reuters: "If you think that the value of Nate Silver is in the model, you’re missing the most important part: there are lots of people with models, and most of those models are pretty similar to each other. The thing which sets Silver apart from the rest is that he can write: he can take a model and turn it into a narrative, walking his readers through to his conclusions." — Xeni
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Francesco sez, "In my blog on Wired.it I posted a new series of wonderful 'manga inspired' plates created by the Japanese designer Mika Tsutai.
Positioning the food in the right way Geek Chefs can tell a story or almost make the food more fun!
Each plate costs 2980 Yen and for now is available only in Japanese design stores."
Ethan Persoff has remixed the "Drunk Lady on YouTube upset about Obama's reelection;" now she has an orchestra to match the tinkling ice cubes in her shot glass.
"Superb fairy-wren (Malurus cyaneus) mothers sing to their unhatched eggs to teach the embryo inside a 'password' — a single unique note — which the nestlings must later incorporate into their begging calls if they want to get fed." Zoë Corbyn in Scientific American, on a very unusual example of avian communication. — Xeni
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Imagine you have an account with a major free webmail provider. You log into your account via your web browser and notice ads in your inbox and when you read a message. Now imagine that these ads are displayed based on what you write in the email you send as well as the content of the emails you receive. Oh, and the ads are also influenced by the videos you watch, the stuff you search for and the files you upload while on your webmail providers network of sites and services.
Sound unlikely? In 2009, Carnegie Mellon researchers conducted a study about behavioral online advertising and nearly 60% of the participants didn't believe that email providers (like Gmail) could serve ads in this fashion. In fact, a third of the participants thought laws or consumer backlash would put an end to this kind of advertising before it even started.
Outlook.com doesn’t force you to trade your privacy for a free webmail account.
David Kravets at Wired News writes about the 2-year-old federal grand jury probe into WikiLeaks, which is still “ongoing,” according to a brief ruling by a federal judge in Virginia this week. The statement is the first official word on the investigation since Assange's Ecuadorean asylum plea last August.
U.S. District Judge Liam O’Grady of Alexandria, Virginia, noted the investigation in a legal flap surrounding three WikiLeaks associates who lost their bid to protect their Twitter records from U.S. investigators. The three had asked the court to unseal documents in their case. In May, O’Grady ordered the documents remain under seal for six months. On Wednesday he renewed that order, based on a government filing.
“For reasons stated in the memorandum of the United States, unsealing of the documents at this time would damage an ongoing criminal investigation,” O’Grady ruled. (.pdf)
The Justice Department served Twitter with a records demand in December 2010 as part of the investigation into WikiLeaks. The targets of the records demand are WikiLeaks’ official Twitter account, and the accounts of three people connected to the group: Seattle coder and activist Jacob Appelbaum; Birgitta Jonsdottir, a member of Iceland’s parliament; and Dutch businessman Rop Gonggrijp. Jonsdottir and Gonggrijp helped WikiLeaks prepare the release of a classified U.S. Army video published last year, “Collateral Murder,” and Appelbaum was the site’s U.S. representative.
At Gizmodo, Jeff Wise writes about antivirus firm MacAfee founder John McAfee’s bizarre life in Belize, holed up with heavily-armed gang members, "garbage bags full of Viagra," 17 year old local girls, did we mention lots and lots of guns, and many unanswered questions. — Xeni
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"Our federal marijuana policy is increasingly out of step with both the values of American citizens and with state law," she writes. "The result is a system of justice that is schizophrenic and at times appalling."
After the elections, medical pot is now legal in 18 states and Washington, D.C., and pot is legal for adults to use for recreational use as well in Colorado and Washington State. But the federal government plans to continue its draconian enforcement approach, regardless of state voters' choices.
Writing at the Washington Post, Max Fisher explains a creepy photo making the foreign correspondent rounds: "This week’s very public display of firefighters in Tiananmen – noticed by McClatchy’s Tom Lasseter, who posted the photo to his McClatchy China blog and kindly granted permission for me to reproduce it – is meant to deter potential self-immolators, or at least to put them out as quickly as possible."
"Of all the indignities involved in losing a presidential race, none is more stark than the sudden emptiness of your entourage. The Secret Service detail guarding Governor Romney since Feb 1. stood down quickly. He had ridden in a 15-car motorcade to the Intercontinental Hotel in Boston for his concession speech. He rode in a single-car motorcade back across the Charles River to Belmont. His son, Tagg, did the driving."—GQ. — Xeni
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Nothing is official yet, but Vulture is reporting that a possible candidate to write the screenplay for Star Wars: Episode VII is Michael Arndt, an Oscar winner for writing Little Miss Sunshine and a nominee for the emotionally-charged Toy Story 3. Arndt, according to Vulture, wrote a 40-50-page treatment for the next installment of George Lucas' classic franchise and Disney/Lucasfilm liked it a lot. Even better, the writer had been working on this before the merger last week, so they didn't have to vet a bunch of losers first!
But seriously -- Michael Arndt might be perfect for this.
If you are a lady, and you think you might be pregnant, you can take an at-home test to find out. You simply pee on a stick. Whether the results are measured in pink lines, blue lines, plus and minus symbols, or a "pregnant"/"not pregnant" digital readout, all the home pregnancy tests on the market are really looking for the same thing — Human chorionic gonadotropin (HCG).
HCG is a pregnancy hormone. It's produced by the placenta, a temporary organ that only forms in female bodies when an embryo has attached to the uterine lining. And so it was kind of weird when a male friend of a Reddit user known as CappnPoopDeck peed on a home pregnancy test and it came back positive.
Turns out, HCG can show up in men, too. And when it does, bad things are happening. You might have seen this story on Gawker earlier this week, but the science behind it is so crazy that I wanted to discuss it in a little more depth.
Francesco sez, "In my blog on Wired.it I posted a new series of wonderful 'manga inspired' plates created by the Japanese designer Mika Tsutai.
Positioning the food in the right way Geek Chefs can tell a story or almost make the food more fun!
Each plate costs 2980 Yen and for now is available only in Japanese design stores."
