iBurgh complaint department for iPhone gets to the heart of city living

I hope more cities will join the idea soon, this is a brilliant way to use the technology to improve city living for all. I know City of Toronto could use an App like this:

As anybody who lives in a mid-sized American city knows, the only good reason to contact the mayor's office is to complain about something. Now Pittsburgh, which usually only graces this site when one of its universities develops a robot or a weapon of some sort, has put its own high-tech spin on this with iBurgh. Described by city councilman Bill Peduto as "the first mobile application for city government," the app lets iPhone owners snap a picture of their favorite eyesore or attractive nuisance, attach a quick note, and send the geotagged information to the city's 311 operators. Not only is this good for potholes and gridlocked traffic, but it's sure to be a hit among rioting college students the next time the Steelers win some sort of big game -- and if you don't know what we're talking about, just punch +steelers +riot into Google. And then hit the read link to download for yourself.

How 10 digits will end privacy as we know it

The era of anonymity has really ended years ago (if not a century ago), frankly with the today's technology surrounding us on daily basis one would really have to break a lot sweat to try staying anonymous. The only way to keep your privacy is to disconnect yourself from a society and move into a cave in a very remote area... Besides, why are we so paranoid when it comes our privacy? There are a lot of articles popping around lately creating unnecessary fear in people. Most people are just a bunch of larger crowd, often really unimportant for anyone to pay any attention to them. Personally I do not care who and what people know about me, as long as it does not have any bad effect on my life. There is nothing wrong with "wearing our names on our foreheads". In today's world you cannot hide and live at the same time.

The population of the world stands at about 7 billion. So it takes only 10 digits to label each human being on the planet uniquely.

This simple arithmetic observation offers powerful insight into the limits of privacy. It dictates something we might call the 10-Digit Rule: just 10 digits or so of distinctive personal information are enough to identify you uniquely. They're enough to strip away your anonymity on the Internet or call out your name as you walk down the street. The 10-Digit Rule means that as our electronic gadgets grow chattier, and databases swell, we must accept that in most walks of life, we'll soon be wearing our names on our foreheads.

A study of 1990 U.S. Census data revealed that 87 percent of the people in the United States were uniquely identifiable with just three pieces of information (PDF): five-digit ZIP code, gender, and date of birth. Internet surfers today spew considerably more information than that. Web sites can pinpoint our geographical locations, computer models, and browser types, and they can silently track us using cookies. Banking sites even confirm our identities by verifying that our log-ins take place at consistent times of day.

Database dossiers, too, carry surprising amounts of identifying information, even when specifically anonymized for privacy. Researchers at the University of Texas at Austin last year studied a set of movie-rating profiles from about 500,000 unnamed Netflix subscribers (PDF).

Knowing just a little about a subscriber--say, six to eight movie preferences, the type of thing you might post on a social-networking site--the researchers found that they could pick out your anonymous Netflix profile, if you had one in the set. The Netflix study shows that those 10 deanonymizing digits can hide in surprising places.

Our physical belongings also betray our anonymity by silently calling out identity-betraying digits. Small wireless microchips--often called radio frequency identification, or RFID, tags--reside in car keys, credit cards, passports, building entrance badges, and transit passes. They emit unique serial numbers.

Once linked to our names--when we make credit card purchases, for instance--these microchips enable us to be tracked without our realizing it. One popular book inflames imaginations with the lurid title, "Spychips: How Major Corporations and Government Plan to Track your Every Move with RFID."

 

Hurricane Bill on EarthDesk

I love my EarthDesk, I have just noticed the Hurricane Bill on my iMac wallpaper... here is screen capture from it:

08170902

About EarthDesk: 

EarthDesk replaces your Macintosh desktop or Windows wallpaper with a stunning, real-time dynamic image of our planet continuously updating in the background while you work. With 3 maps, 11 projections and 10,000 cities, EarthDesk is truly a map-lover's dream. Put it on your desktop today.

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Retouching Presets

More great presets for Adobe Photoshop Lightroom from Matt's blog (one of my favorite resources when it comes to the Lightroom):

These presets focus on some of the basic retouching effects you can achieve with the Adjustment Brush. Now, before you download them, keep one thing in mind. These aren't for high-end fashion retouching. Photoshop is still the best place for that. They're geared for some quick enhancements that you can do right in Lightroom when you just don't have the time to move the photos into Photoshop. In this set, I've included:

1) Brightening/Whitening Teeth
2) Whiten Eyes
3) Red Lips
4) Iris Enhance
5) Skin Softening (Low)
6) Skin Softening (High)

 

Londoners Through a Lens

Londoners Through a Lens

Fascinating black and white photographs of 20th-century London and its inhabitants, taken from a new exhibition at the Getty Images Gallery.

October 11, 1912

English suffragette Estelle Sylvia Pankhurst (1882-1960) stands on a platform to paint the front of the Women's Social Defence League premises in Bow Road, East London.

Hit and Run Hula Ambushes the Apple Store

Simply awesome idea...



It's been a busy day for the Nā Lei Hulu I Ka Wēkiu Dancers, who started their Hit and Run Hula at Pier 39 this morning, bused over to the Ferry Building, made their way to the stage at Union Square, stopped at the Apple Store, the Cable Car Turnaround, were kicked out of the Westfield Mall food court by security (figures), and quickly ambushed the BART station instead. They spent this afternoon at Dolores Park, the Castro, Academy of Sciences, and should be on their way to Ocean Beach for a picnic right about now.

SFist caught up with them at the Apple Store, and it was quite a delight. The employees were thoroughly surprised and the customers highly entertained. The dancers all have such pretty smiles on their faces when they dance, which makes everyone around them happy.

Let us know if you caught a glimpse of the Hit and Run Hula at some point today!

Apple's Snow Leopard: A flurry of changes

Looking forward to faster boot times, quicker shut down, a speedier and faster backups to Time Machine. And the fact I will re-gain up to 6GB of space which I really need as my hard drive is getting very low on space now.

What's the difference between Snow Leopard and Leopard?

First thing to know: This is not a complete overhaul of Mac OS X. Rather, it's a series of small to medium-sized improvements, what Apple calls "refinements." Much of the new shine to OS X 10.6 comes from changes that are under the surface, possibly not obvious to the unobservant. But Apple does say that the improvements make the overall OS much faster, including a 45-percent faster installation than the previous version of the operating system, OS X 10.5, or Leopard. Apple is also promising faster boot times, quicker shut down, a speedier process when joining wireless networks, and faster backups to Time Machine. And it's not just quicker, Apple says, it's lighter: Upon install it frees up 6GB of space.

Specific applications have been tinkered with as well, with a lot of attention focused on Quicktime, Expose, and a shiny new Safari 4 browser, which was released in June. For more on that, see here.

Quicktime gets a mysterious new version number, and is now called Quicktime X. It's a bit slicker, and the new interface appears similar to the iPhone's media player. The real change is that many features that were previously in the Pro version of Quicktime are now in the free version. You will be able to edit video inside QuickTime using a video timeline ribbon that appears along the bottom of the screen. And there will be fewer steps involved in video uploading. You don't have to worry about file formats--Quicktime will do any necessary conversion and upload directly to video-hosting sites or MobileMe, Apple's subscription service that syncs personal files on any of its devices. Apple promises it will take just one click to record audio or video (on a Mac's built-in mic or camera) with the new Quicktime. It will also support HTTP streaming of a wider variety of file formats (like h.264 and AAC). It's a feature that many competing media players have long offered, and it automatically adjusts the playback bit rate according to what the connection can handle. It also means you can stream video or audio through more firewalls.

Expose, an operating system UI feature for organizing open application windows, or just the windows from a particular application currently running, gets tweaked a bit too. In Snow Leopard, Expose is integrated with app icons in the dock, which cuts out the need to first switch to the specific application you want before activating Expose to see its open windows. It also means you don't have to use a keyboard, or use a trackpad gesture to call it up. Clicking and holding an app's icon will bring all windows open that are associated with that program to the front.