Facebook might have come under fire on numerous occasions over privacy concerns; however, the fact is that Facebook has always offered fairly granular settings. The trouble has always been with the default settings, and the often convoluted process involved in changing these default settings.
Saturday, 30 July 2011
Thursday, 28 July 2011
Facebook facial-recognition feature won't be available to Canadians
Facebook’s controversial facial-recognition technology for photographs will not be available to Canadian users, the social-networking site says.
A spokesperson for Facebook did not say why Canadians would not get access to the feature but wrote in an e-mail: “Not all of our launches roll out globally and each of our different products and features have varying launch schedules, and we don’t have plans to roll this feature out in Canada at this time.
The feature, referred to by
How does facial recognition work?
There are two methods used to assess faces. One is the "fiducial" method, shown below, which hunts for distinctive features in a face, often where the bone structure is most apparent. Measurements are taken at these nodal points to give a map of the face. These points make up a numerical code called the faceprint.This code is then compared to other codes in the database to see if there is a match.
Some measurements taken:
Wednesday, 27 July 2011
Team Develops Accurate Prototype to Detect Fake Sites
Despite the wide use of the internet, there is a surprising lack of awareness amongst most users about fake sites on the net. The number of sites is on the rise and the number of victims is also rising at an accelerating pace. Now a team of researchers from the Arizona Eller College of Management have developed a prototype system that can detect fake websites
The system can detect fake sites much better than a human can. The article by the team on this development got published in the prestigious journal MIS Quarterly, published by the Management Information Systems Research Center, Carlson School of Management and the University of Minnesota. An MISQ publication is a trophy in one’s research career.
Importance
The importance can hardly be over-emphasised. Fake sites are responsible for robbing people of a lot of money or phishing attempts and other such acts of cyber crimes.
Ahmed Abbasi, the lead author of the paper and now a University of Virginia professor of information technology, says:
The problem we’re looking at is quite big. Fake websites constitute much of the Internet fraud’s multi-billion dollar industry, and that is monetary loss…we can’t even quantify the social ramifications. That’s the whole motivation. It is so profitable for fraudsters, and it is slipping through the cracks.
The Methodology
The methodology was two-part.
The first involved checking the easily verifiable information. The prototype checked whether a site’s URL contained ‘http’ instead of an expected ‘https’. Further, it can check when the site was last updated, whether a security key is missing or if the images appear unexpectedly pixelated.
The second part used more hidden information like URL length, number of links and to which sites it is linking to, the character types on the site and how the FAQ section on a site is maintained.
Way forward
Abbasi emphasises the use of great amounts of information for improving the prototype. Fake sites are constantly evolving their look and how they look is not really a criteria any longer, which makes it all the more difficult for a human to detect them. The days of long-held idea of a fake site having a lot of Unicode characters and other unreadable nonsense are gone.
The project is still underway and very much on track. It is, however, a long way from sneaking into our own lives and saving us from a lot of harassment.
Why I’m Afraid to Switch to Google Apps
I love the idea of Google Apps. I mean, who won’t get into the idea of being able of being able to access their documents from anywhere? There are so many advantages to using Google Apps. You don’t have to invest in a costly data center to house your files. You can access your files from any web browser on any computer, as long as you’re connected to the internet. You don’t have to purchase 
Tuesday, 26 July 2011
Expand Short Urls Without Actually Visiting them
Short URLs are easy to share thus solves the problem of sharing long urls with limited space length at Twitter, Facebook, etc. But with this useful advantages there’s also a major disadvantage with short urls and that is obfuscation.
Nobody by looking at a short url can say where it leads to. So anyone can use this to their advantage. Using a short url anyone could mischievously send you to an unrelated or malicious web page.
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