East of the Sun, West of the Moon

Wired describes an interesting new approach taken by :

Riya has developed software that can automatically recognize who is in a picture and tag it with their names.

Currently in alpha testing, the software has proven sensitive enough to tell the difference between twins and recognize members of the same family. It can even read street signs for clues about a picture’s location.

I like it, but I’ll sit back and wait until there’s an open source solution I can reuse for our private collection of pictures. So far we have a fairly workable web-interface to edit names, groups, title, description, just wish I could find some time to rework the public side of things and move it off of our internet connection at home. It’s the one thing still running here, for practical reasons.

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Fancy a spacestation? You can buy a virtual one (Ars Technica) for only $100,000:

Jon Jacobs, a director of independent films who hails from Miami, FL, has purchased a virtual space station from the Swedish software company that owns and operates the Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Game (MMORPG) Project Entropia. This is believed to be the largest single purchase of virtual real estate by an individual.

… Nuts!

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Also quite nuts, but in an entirely different way, is this planned iPod add-on:

Makes browsing your collection a bit tricky, I’d say.

Please learn, before somebody gets hurt, m’kay?

Just got an email about one of my CCs, let’s call it foobank. They proudly announce their redone website, but then while the link reference is to foobankaccount.com the text it’s linking calls it foobank.com, making me wonder if someone is trying a phishing scam on me. If I wrote software to alert about phishing, this email would certainly trigger it!

Thankfully I remembered that they announced an upgrade, so I checked that email and it’s the right domain. The irony is that when I follow the link, it redirects me back to… foobank.com!