Your Phone Knows Your Secrets

Washington Post article about a company that bought cellphones on eBay and resurrected the text messages on them — some of them quite embarrassing.  Erasing the info isn’t enough, it can still be read.  My phone has a place for me to enter my passwords, credit card numbers, and the like — not that I’d ever do such a thing.

Face Recognition for Family Photos

This new site claims to be able to use face recognition on personal photos. Our research shows that, while family photos are important, people don’t annotate them. The photographer and his/her contemporaries claim they know who everyone is; and then subsequent generations end up with photos full of people they have difficulty identifying. This site seeks to solve that problem: once you label someone, it claims to be able to recognize them in other images. I haven’t tried it out.

Flickr Adds Map Interface

You can now locate your Flickr photos on a map, and browse others’ images. Go to your account, then organize, then map, to map your photos. To see others’, go to http://flickr.com/map/.

I love being able to locate my photos on the map — I just went through and geo-located most of my images from Japan, Viet Nam, Colorado, and New Mexico. Generally it’s possible to be quite accurate, once you get down to the needed level of detail. It would be nice to be able to search on place name. For example, I know Kamakura (where I took lots of pictures) is south and west of Tokyo, but I couldn’t find it until I got to a high resolution, so had to do a lot of wandering around the map to find it, exactly. You have to know where a place is, at least a ballpark idea, to find it.

A couple of place names weren’t on the map, and I had a general idea of where they are but not specifically. For example, Sapa, Viet Nam, doesn’t show up on the map but it’s a common tourist destination, so I predict that there will be lots of pictures scattered around that general area.

Looking at other people’s images — I think that common places are going to be overwhelming. (There are already more than 2 million images geo-located; 90 for San Francisco.) For rare places, however, this could be very useful — I was looking into a trip in Western China and wanted to see pictures of the places I might go, and most tagging wasn’t specific enough. It’s possible that with this interface I would have been able to find useful images via geo-location, since I was looking at places for which there probably aren’t that many Flickr images, and to geo-locate them the owner has to pick a spot — so even if the spot isn’t very close to reality, it’ll be better than a tag like “China.”

I think it doesn’t show your own images when you look at “everyone’s” — I geo-located several in Yosemite, southern Colorado, and New Mexico, and none of them showed up when I looked at “everyone’s.”

Needed: an easy way to batch edit the images sharing a location. I accidentally labeled a bunch of photos for the wrong place (not realizing that my previous set was still selected) and I had to go find them in my larger collection to re-locate them and thereby remove them from the wrong location. In the edit function in the location interface, images are edited one at a time, and one choice is “delete” — but I didn’t know whether that would merely delete it from the geo-located set, or completely delete it from Flickr .

New Pew Report on Internet Use

The Pew Internet and American Life Project has published a new report on US internet use.

Some key findings:

• While 73% of American adults use the internet, that drops to 32% of those over 65.
• More homes have high-speed access (62%) than dial-up (34%).
• While 91% of internet users have sent email, only 8% report ever having blogged (Feb-April 2006). Thirty-nine percent have read someone else’s blog.
• Among internet users, 66% use the internet on a typical day; 53% send email on a typical day.
• Only 4% admit to ever “downloading or sharing adult content online.”
• Sixty-seven percent of internet users have bought something online (as of Sept 2005).
• Twenty-five percent have downloaded music (Dec ‘05).
  

Crocodile Hunter Irwin Killed in Action

Steve Irwin, the Crocodile Hunter, was killed while filming an interaction with a stingray. For those of us who’ve watched him over the years, this isn’t a surprise — I remember an episode where he went around looking at rattlesnakes in various parts of the US, and repeatedly reached into a nest to pull out a snake. Ironically, according to news reports this was a freak accident, a sting that’s rarely fatal, but the barb went into his heart.

I’m glad it wasn’t one of his beloved “crocs” that killed him.