theverge.com
analyse
How Apple and Google plan to reinvent healthcare - 22 juillet 2014
The tech titans are about to throw their muscle behind big platforms for digital health and fitness
Mike Dittenber had always wanted to go skydiving. There was only one problem : "At my heaviest I clocked in around 330 pounds," says Dittenber, a technical writer from Michigan. "That’s above the weight restriction (...)
analyse
UK police start using face recognition software to catch criminals - 17 juillet 2014
Leicestershire force can compare any digital image against their database
British police officers have this week started using facial recognition software designed to automatically identify criminals from digital images. Police in Leicestershire become the first in the UK to test NEC’s NeoFace software, which the (...)
analyse
Google is building a hardware empire, and this is what it looks like - 28 mai 2014
From self-driving cars to contact lenses, Google makes a surprising amount of stuff
Google began the 21st century as a small but growing search engine. 14 years later, the California-based company has built smartphones, mapped the globe, purchased a firm that makes advanced smoke detectors, and obtained a (...)
information
Google wants to serve ads on ’refrigerators, car dashboards, thermostats’ - 24 mai 2014
Google’s ad ambitions may reach further than you think. In a newly revealed letter to the SEC, the company said it could someday be serving ads on "refrigerators, car dashboards, thermostats, glasses, and watches, to name just a few possibilities," as part of a larger point about breaking out mobile ad revenue. As (...)
analyse
Dubai police use Google Glass to crack down on traffic violators - 22 mai 2014
Applications allow officers to record violators and identify wanted vehicles
Police in Dubai have begun using Google Glass as part of an effort to crack down on traffic violations. An official with the emirate’s police force confirmed to Gulf News this week that traffic officers are testing the wearable devices, (...)
information
Samsung offers ’deep apology’ and compensation to workers who’ve contracted incurable diseases - 14 mai 2014
Recent documentary uncovered 56 cases of leukemia
South Korean electronics giant Samsung has officially apologized over the illnesses and deaths of some of its factory workers. In a public statement, Samsung Electronics CEO Kwon Oh-hyun said "several workers at our production facilities suffered from leukemia and (...)
information
Motion-tracking app Moves said it wouldn’t share your data with Facebook, but it’s going to anyway - 7 mai 2014
A few weeks ago, Facebook purchased the company behind fitness-tracking app Moves "” and as is often the case when Facebook snaps up a company, Moves users were immediately concerned about what might happen to their data. The company tried to head that off in its blog post announcing the acquisition, saying "the (...)
analyse
Facebook wants to find your nearby friends - 17 avril 2014
Can Facebook succeed where every ’people discovery’ app has failed ?
Two years ago, a battle was raging over "people discovery" apps. Highlight wanted to introduce you to strangers on the street, Sonar hoped to connect you with friends of friends at a bar, and Glancee wanted to hook you up with nearby Tolkien fans. (...)
analyse
Nest thermostat arrives in the UK ahead of an ’aggressive’ European expansion - 2 avril 2014
Priced at £179 and available through Amazon, Apple, B&Q, and npower
Although it’s only been available to buy in the US and Canada so far, the Nest Learning Thermostat has already been installed in over 120 countries around the world. As of today, the market for its purchase is growing in number with the (...)
analyse
Google says Turkey is intercepting web traffic to spy on users - 30 mars 2014
Turkey’s decision to block access to popular websites has prompted many citizens to evade the ban using Google’s domain name service. Now Google reports that most Turkish internet service providers are masquerading as Google DNS, presumably to spy on users. The move comes a week after reports emerged that Turkey had (...)
analyse
Future Samsung phones could share what you type with other apps - 11 février 2014
’Context’ would reportedly share typing, sensor data, and app use
Samsung is said to be considering letting app developers know a whole lot more detail about what individual users do with their phones. According to The Information, Samsung has been developing a service called Context that would collect what a (...)
analyse
Hackers aren’t the problem at Sochi, surveillance is - 10 février 2014
It was a story too good to check. Olympics-bound NBC News reporter Richard Engel gets off the plane in Sochi and steps into a fog of malware, Wi-Fi honeypots and sinister auto-downloads. Within minutes, his phone is compromised. Rushing to turn off his Wi-Fi and freeze his banking apps, he barely escapes with his (...)
analyse
Google’s chief internet evangelist says ’privacy may actually be an anomaly’ - The Verge - 20 novembre 2013
Google’s chief internet evangelist, Vint Cerf, suggests that privacy is a fairly new development that may not be sustainable. "Privacy may actually be an anomaly," Cerf said at an FTC event yesterday while taking questions. Elaborating, he explained that privacy wasn’t even guaranteed a few decades ago : he used to (...)
analyse
Facepalm : new program lands facial recognition software in cops’ hands - 17 novembre 2013
When San Diego police detain criminal suspects, they don’t only rely on Q&As to extract information about the person in cuffs. Using new facial recognition technology, San Diego police can now match field images with about 348,000 San Diego County arrestees "” all they need is a tablet or a smartphone. In an (...)
analyse
City of London orders Renew to stop tracking citizens with its trash cans - 15 août 2013
Apparently Londoners aren’t fond of being tracked by public trash cans. Less than a month after Renew began anonymously collecting information about people walking past their Wi-Fi-enabled trash bins, the City of London has put a stop to the practice. "We have already asked the firm concerned to stop this data (...)
analyse
Mayor Bloomberg says surveillance drones are inevitable in NYC : ’get used to it’ - 25 mars 2013
Governmental use of unmanned surveillance drones has inspired a lot of concern about privacy, but New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg thinks the battle’s already over. In a radio interview this week, Bloomberg said essentially that drones are an inevitable part of our future (and maybe our present), comparing (...)
information
Researchers using data from suicide victims’ Facebook profiles to identify warning signs - 27 janvier 2013
Facebook often flaunts the vast stores of data it has on its users "” last week’s announcement of Graph Search is only the latest example "” but some of the information posted onto the site is undoubtedly a bit darker than relationship statuses and tastes in music. The social network offers a record of its users’ (...)
analyse
New surveillance system can compare your face against 36 million others in a single second - 25 mars 2012
Using facial recognition to process surveillance footage isn’t a new concept "” Scotland Yard began using the technique in the wake of last year’s London riots "” but a new system developed by Hitachi Kokusai Electric could make the process quicker and more flexible than ever before. Shown off at this year’s Security (...)
