__/ [ Mark Kent ] on Monday 04 September 2006 11:40 \__
> begin oe_protect.scr
> Rex Ballard <rex.ballard@xxxxxxxxx> espoused:
>>
>> casioculture@xxxxxxxxx wrote:
>>> Microsoft has never bothered me as much as Google does.
>>>
>>> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/09/03/google_eavesdropping_software/
>>> http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060609-7028.html
>>
>> OK. That one really does make me nervous. Turn on the microsoft so
>> that we can just "listen to what's going on" and use "fingerprinting"
>> to identify "target noises". This sounds so much like "big Brother"
>> it's really spooky.
>>
>> I'm a big fan of google, and I think it's really great that they are
>> willing to index my web site and anything else I want indexed for the
>> public.
>>
>> I like google desktop, and I like that they can index anything on my
>> desktop - for me.
>>
>> But what if google decides that this Microphone should start doing
>> text-to-speech, recording everything I say, on the phone, to my wife,
>> or to a coworker, or to a client, and starts publishing it in real-time
>> even before I know what I want published an what I don't.
>>
>> That seems like something Microsoft would do, not google.
>>
>> I hope they've slapped this research guy silly for suggesting this
>> brilliant idea.
>> On the other hand, if they have a patent, they can at least prevent
>> anyone else from doing it for the next 20 years.
>>
>
> This kind of thing is likely to happen, though, isn't it? Imagine that
> a smallish device has a flat, internal microphone embedded, maybe just a
> simple piezo device (crystal mike, as they used to be called, I think?),
> something without the capability of determining actual speech, but good
> enough to take a reliable guess at a few things...
>
> Of course, if you become the television, then it would be easier to get
> the broadcaster to insert RDS-like data to focus the advertising on your
> web-browsing to match what's on the tele, /but/, this does assume that
> the same person is doing both.
And closed systems encourage this. In Digg, the following is added: "Peter
Norvig, who directs research at Google, told Technology Review that this
software would start to show up in Google software 'sooner rather than
later'."
> This reminds me of a claim by a senior researcher from an Israeli NEP I
> used to do business with claiming that people would never want more than
> 2Mbit/s into their houses because that's all your brain could handle in
> one go. I told him what I thought of that at the time... it's just
> naive thinking; imagining that you can predict just /what/ a person is
> going to do with something.
It's not a question of how much a person can process (per unit of time). It's
about what one might 'pull', for subsequent processing, like in post-crime
CCTV footage.
Have a load of /this/ (explains subject line):
Tech boost for memory power
http://edition.cnn.com/2006/TECH/science/08/31/memory.sensecam/index.html
,----[ Quote ]
| One prototype that already goes some way towards that eventuality
| is Microsoft's SenseCam, picked out by Bill Gates in a recent Time
| magazine interview as one of the software giant's most exciting projects.
|
| [...]
|
| For the past eight years researcher Gordon Bell has been digitally
| documenting every photograph, note, e-mail and document relevant to his
| life. More recently, he has started using a SenseCam to automatically
| record details of his daily movements. All that material is then uploaded
| to a searchable database called "MyLifeBits."
|
| Bell says his ambition is to have "a complete record of my physical being
| in cyberspace" and even admits feeling a sense of emotional loss after
| misplacing an Outlook folder recently.
`----
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
*LOL* Outlook...
It's like that Frasier episode where Daphne loses a tape of one of his radio
shows, which he cannot recover.
As I said in the reply to Rex, Microsoft is copying Google's pattern, whether
it's benevolent or not.
Best wishes,
Roy
--
Roy S. Schestowitz | "No, I didn't buy that from eBay"
http://Schestowitz.com | SuSE GNU/Linux ¦ PGP-Key: 0x74572E8E
run-level 5 Jul 20 12:15 last=S
http://iuron.com - help build a non-profit search engine
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