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Biometric Data-Gathering Sets Off a Privacy Debate – NYTimes.com
“PLEASE put your hand on the scanner,” a receptionist at a doctor’s office at New York University Langone Medical Center said to me recently, pointing to a small plastic device on the counter between us. “I need to take a palm scan for your file.”
I balked.
As a reporter who has been covering the growing business of data collection, I know the potential drawbacks — like customer profiling — of giving out my personal details. But the idea of submitting to an infrared scan at a medical center that would take a copy of the unique vein patterns in my palm seemed fraught.
The receptionist said it was for my own good. The medical center, she said, had recently instituted a biometric patient identification system to protect against identity theft.
I reluctantly stuck my hand on the machine. If I demurred, I thought, perhaps I’d be denied medical care.
Next, the receptionist said she needed to take my photo. After the palm scan, that seemed like data-collection overkill. Then an office manager appeared and explained that the scans and pictures were optional. Alas, my palm was already in the system.
No longer the province of security services and science-fiction films, biometric technology is on the march. Facebook uses facial-recognition software so its members can automatically put name tags on friends when they upload their photos. Apple uses voice recognition to power Siri. Some theme parks take digital fingerprints to help recognize season pass holders. Now some hospitals and school districts are using palm vein pattern recognition to identify and efficiently manage their patients or students — in effect, turning your palm into an E-ZPass.
via Biometric Data-Gathering Sets Off a Privacy Debate – NYTimes.com.
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The long knives at Apple: What the experts are saying – Apple 2.0 – Fortune Tech
AllThingsD‘s John Paczkowski: Welcome to the Jony Ive Era at Apple. “While details of the ousters of Scott Forstall and John Browett — the guy who oversaw Apple’s iOS operating system and the new hire who ran its retail stores, are certainly intriguing — they’re a sideshow to the bigger story here: The clear ascendancy of design chief Jony Ive. That’s because on Monday, Ive was given a role that no executive other than co-founder Steve Jobs has ever held before — oversight of all Apple product design. The buck has finally stopped, with Cook trying to put an end to what had become internecine executive battles within Apple. While perhaps a good thing, it also puts a lot of pressure on the elegant Ive, who will now be the integrator of Apple’s two sides and the center of its future direction.”
GigaOm‘s Om Malik: From Inside Apple: The Scott Forstall Fallout. “Forstall’s firing was met with a sense of quiet jubilation, especially among people who worked in the engineering groups. Or as one of my sources quipped: there are a lot of people going for celebratory drinks, even if there is a little bit of doubt about their roles in the future. While the now-rescinded resignation of Bob Mansfield was masterfully planned, my sources say that Forstall’s exit was fairly last minute and not something he initiated. Many within the iOS and OS X teams only heard about it minutes after the news went out. Engineers were caught off guard, a source told me. Many feel that Craig Federighi, who is taking over Forstall’s job in addition to overseeing the Mac OS X software business, is someone who needs to prove himself. He is not as decisive and divisive as Forstall.”
New York Times Scott Wingfield and Nick Bilton: In Shake-Up, Apple’s Mobile Software and Retail Chiefs to Depart. “Mr. Forstall was a staunch believer in a type of user interface, skeuomorphic design, which tries to imitate artifacts and textures in real life. Most of Apple’s built-in applications for iOS use skeuomorphic design, including imitating thread of a leather binder in the Game Center application and a wooden bookshelf feel in the newsstand application. Mr. Jobs was also a proponent of skeuomorphic design; he had a leather texture added to apps that mimicked the seats on his private jet. Yet most other executives, specifically Mr. Ive, have always believed that these artifacts looked outdated and that user interface design on the computer had reached a point where skeuomorph was no longer necessary… According to two people who have worked with Apple to develop new third-party products for the iPhone, the relationship between Mr. Forstall and Mr. Ive had soured to a point that the two executives would not sit in the same meeting room together.”
via The long knives at Apple: What the experts are saying – Apple 2.0 – Fortune Tech.
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AOL unveils Alto, an email service that syncs 5 accounts – Oct. 18, 2012
NEW YORK (CNNMoney) — AOL, struggling to shed its outdated image, is reimagining one of the most visibly aging parts of its platform: Its email service.
Alto is a new web-based email service that syncs up to five email accounts through a highly visual system — and you don’t even need an AOL address to use it. It’s designed to minimize “inbox fatigue”: those seemingly endless email threads, daily deal notifications and newsletter subscriptions most of us have strewn across multiple accounts.
Alto streamlines all of your inboxes into one and sorts messages into a more visual format. Right now, the service can sync as many as five email accounts: Google’s (GOOG, Fortune 500) Gmail, Yahoo (YHOO, Fortune 500) Mail, AOL Mail, and Apple’s (AAPL, Fortune 500) @mac.com and @me.com. AOL executives say they’ll add more platforms eventually.
Users simply log in to Alto with their username and password for one of those supported accounts, and then add as many as they’d like — no AOL (AOL) address is necessary. New users can sign up for an invitation at altomail.com.
“People need a new email address like they need a hole in the head,” David Temkin, AOL’s senior vice president of mail and mobile, told CNNMoney in an interview. “What they need is an email service that addresses the way we use email today.”
To AOL’s product team, that meant focusing on two key points: quick organization, and a stylish, ad-free design that Temkin said was “created with the iPad in mind.”
via AOL unveils Alto, an email service that syncs 5 accounts – Oct. 18, 2012.
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Books that leap off the page | Cranium Universe digital books
EVERYONE, they say, has a book in them. That is not to say the world is overflowing with unrequited rivals of J.K. Rowling – for which you might be grateful. But you never know until you try and never has it been easier to create and publish a book, with software packages such as Apple’s iBooks Author. With it you can produce a real book, in digital form, well printed, illustrated and even with videos and audio embedded in the text, save it as a PDF or bung it on the internet for all to admire.
iBooks Author can be downloaded from the Mac App Store and is free, which, given its power, is a bargain. Released in January, it was originally intended by Apple for teachers and students to produce in-house textbooks in schools and universities, and, indeed, thousands have been produced in the past few months.
The application, which runs on a Macintosh but produces books to be read on iPads, iPhones and iPod Touches, includes some elegant templates but it’s easy to create your own designs. From then on, it’s almost ridiculously simple to drop in text, images and videos, then publish your masterpiece.
But now one of the world’s great publishing houses is getting with the trend. The Australian arm of publisher HarperCollins has produced what may be the first multi-touch digital book, Cranium Universe, created by their designer Matt Stanton and author Reg Mombassa using iBooks Author.
Mombassa, a poet, writer, musician and, perhaps mostly, an artist, wasn’t always a Mombassa or even a Reg. His mum, Mrs O’Doherty, called him Christopher when he was born in New Zealand but he moved to Australia and became Mombassa when he founded the band Mental As Anything. He kept the name and also won global fame for his now collectable designs for surfwear company Mambo. Author Patrick White was a fan, buying many of Mombassa’s landscapes and portraits.
via Books that leap off the page | Cranium Universe digital books.
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Google tablet set to limbo in at low $199 entry point | Business Tech – CNET News
Google will launch a $199 tablet this week at its developers conference co-branded with Asus, Bloomberg is reporting.
This follows a series of reports that have been trickling out for months about a 7-inch Nexus tablet being developed with Asus. The tablet is slated to debut at the Google I/O conference that starts Wednesday.
The one feature garnering the most attention is price. At $199, the Google tablet is $200 less than Apple’s $399 iPad 2.
Previous reports have claimed the Nexus device will sport the Android 4.1 “Jelly Bean” operating system, a quad-core Nvidia Tegra 3 processor, 1GB of memory, and IPS in-plane-switching screen — which boasts wide viewing angles.
The $399 iPad 2, by comparison, comes with a dual-core A5 and 512MB of RAM.
The Google tablet is expected, however, to have a 7-inch screen, considerably smaller than the iPad’s 9.7-incher which is also IPS, by the way.
Of course, apps are what matter to many, if not most, people. Though Google claims hundreds of thousands of apps, the iPad has more apps overall and more apps designed specifically for the tablet format, as reviewers are wont to point out.
Other expected Google tablet features include NFC (near field communication), Google Wallet, and Android Beam.
An 8GB model will cost $199, while the 16GB version will still be pretty cheap at $249, according to Gizmodo Australia.
It’s worth noting this isn’t the first highly anticipated $199 Android tablet. The $199 Amazon Kindle Fire was announced last year to great fanfare and a new Kindle Fire could arrive as early as July.
via Google tablet set to limbo in at low $199 entry point | Business Tech – CNET News.
Strange Random Technology Quote:
“Technology has the shelf life of a banana.” – Scott McNealy
Related articles
- Bloomberg confirms Google announcing $199 Nexus-branded Asus tablet at I/O (theverge.com)
- Google takes on iPad with new £150 tablet (thesun.co.uk)
- Google said to unveil tablet this week, taking aim at Apple’s iPad (macdailynews.com)
- LEAK: This Is Google’s Tablet (GOOG, AMZN, AAPL) (businessinsider.com)
- Details Leak Out on $199 Google Tablet (newser.com)
- Nexus 7: This Is Google’s New Nexus Tablet – Gizmodo Australia (gizmodo.com.au)
- Kindle Fire 2 coming in July, new report says (androidauthority.com)
- Why Google’s New Tablet Could Be The iPad’s First Real Competition (robhof.com)
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