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Xuuk’s eyebox is a long-range an eye-counting video camera. The device “simply shines a beam of IR light and counts how many times it sees redeye in the ensuing images, indicating that the subject was looking right at the camera”. “We decided not to incorporate iris scanning,” says inventor Roel Vertegaal. “We don’t need to know the identity of the people looking at the ad. That’s for other companies to do. And when that happens, we’re happy to tag along, but we’re not interested in moving in that direction if it’s not necessary.”

To copy a comment from the thread: Hopefully, hackers will figure out to cripple this by using EXIF injection techniques delivered by cross-retina scripting.

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Justice Antonin Scalia is one of the most powerful judges on the planet.

The job of the veteran U.S. Supreme Court judge is to ensure that the superpower lives up to its Constitution. But in his free time, he is a fan of 24, the popular TV drama where the maverick federal agent Jack Bauer routinely tortures terrorists to save American lives. This much was made clear at a legal conference in Ottawa this week.

Senior judges from North America and Europe were in the midst of a panel discussion about torture and terrorism law, when a Canadian judge’s passing remark – “Thankfully, security agencies in all our countries do not subscribe to the mantra ‘What would Jack Bauer do?’ ” – got the legal bulldog in Judge Scalia barking.

The conservative jurist stuck up for Agent Bauer, arguing that fictional or not, federal agents require latitude in times of great crisis. “Jack Bauer saved Los Angeles. … He saved hundreds of thousands of lives,” Judge Scalia said. Then, recalling Season 2, where the agent’s rough interrogation tactics saved California from a terrorist nuke, the Supreme Court judge etched a line in the sand.

“Are you going to convict Jack Bauer?” Judge Scalia challenged his fellow judges. “Say that criminal law is against him? ‘You have the right to a jury trial?’ Is any jury going to convict Jack Bauer? I don’t think so.

it makes me feel so fantastic to know that a justice of the United States Supreme Court, the highest legal deliberative body in all the land, is basing his judicial philosophy regarding constitutional protection, on the exploits of a character Keifer Sutherland plays on the telly.

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Red Hat, the largest Linux vendor, and Ubuntu-maker Canonical have both rejected calls from Microsoft to forge a deal similar to the one the Redmond giant signed with Linux distributors Novell, Xandros, and Linspire.

Mark Shuttleworth, Canonical’s CEO, said in a blog posting on Saturday, that Canonical has declined to talk to Microsoft about any agreement that provides legal protection to Ubuntu users related to “unspecified patents”.

“Allegations of ‘infringement of unspecified patents’ carry no weight whatsoever. We don’t think they have any legal merit, and they are no incentive for us to work with Microsoft on any of the wonderful things we could do together,” he wrote.

Shuttleworth said these patent agreements create “a false sense of security” and do not effectively protect the user from a patent suit from a big company like Microsoft.

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No deal between Microsoft and leading commercial Linux distributor Red Hat has happened. After the announcement of Microsoft’s Novell contract, Red Hat said it would not pay an “innovation tax” to Microsoft.

Many companies successfully partner with Microsoft.

All it takes is a clear understanding of just who wears the condom, and who bends over and assumes the position.

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During my keynote at the iCommons iSummit 07, I made an announcement that surprised some, but which, from reports on the web at least, was also not fully understood by some. So here again is the announcement, with some reasoning behind it.

The bottom line: I have decided to shift my academic work, and soon, my activism, away from the issues that have consumed me for the last 10 years, towards a new set of issues. Why and what are explained in the extended entry below.

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That thought triggered a second, this one tied to Gore.

In one of the handful of opportunities I had to watch Gore deliver his global warming Keynote, I recognized a link in the problem that he was describing and the work that I have been doing during this past decade. After talking about the basic inability of our political system to reckon the truth about global warming, Gore observed that this was really just part of a much bigger problem. That the real problem here was (what I will call a “corruption” of) the political process. That our government can’t understand basic facts when strong interests have an interest in its misunderstanding.

This is a thought I’ve often had in the debates I’ve been a part of, especially with respect to IP. Think, for example, about term extension. From a public policy perspective, the question of extending existing copyright terms is, as Milton Friedman put it, a “no brainer.” As the Gowers Commission concluded in Britain, a government should never extend an existing copyright term. No public regarding justification could justify the extraordinary deadweight loss that such extensions impose.

Yet governments continue to push ahead with this idiot idea — both Britain and Japan for example are considering extending existing terms. Why?

The answer is a kind of corruption of the political process. Or better, a “corruption” of the political process. I don’t mean corruption in the simple sense of bribery. I mean “corruption” in the sense that the system is so queered by the influence of money that it can’t even get an issue as simple and clear as term extension right. Politicians are starved for the resources concentrated interests can provide. In the US, listening to money is the only way to secure reelection. And so an economy of influence bends public policy away from sense, always to dollars.

The point of course is not new. Indeed, the fear of factions is as old as the Republic. There are thousands who are doing amazing work to make clear just how corrupt this system has become. There have been scores of solutions proposed. This is not a field lacking in good work, or in people who can do this work well.

But a third person — this time anonymous — made me realize that I wanted to be one of these many trying to find a solution to this “corruption.” This man, a Republican of prominence in Washington, wrote me a reply to an email I had written to him about net neutrality. As he wrote, “And don’t shill for the big guys protecting market share through neutrality REGULATION either.”

“Shill.”

If you’ve been reading these pages recently, you’ll know my allergy to that word. But this friend’s use of the term not to condemn me, but rather as play, made me recognize just how general this corruption is. Of course he would expect I was in the pay of those whose interests I advanced. Why else would I advance them? Both he and I were in a business in which such shilling was the norm. It was totally reasonable to thus expect that money explained my desire to argue with him about public policy.

I don’t want to be a part of that business. And more importantly, I don’t want this kind of business to be a part of public policy making. We’ve all been whining about the “corruption” of government forever. We all should be whining about the corruption of professions too. But rather than whining, I want to work on this problem that I’ve come to believe is the most important problem in making government work.

And so as I said at the top (in my “bottom line”), I have decided to shift my academic work, and soon, my activism, away from the issues that have consumed me for the last 10 years, towards a new set of issues: Namely, these. “Corruption” as I’ve defined it elsewhere will be the focus of my work. For at least the next 10 years, it is the problem I will try to help solve.

hear hear!

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Self-important IT experts will continue to insist that the iPhone “must” or “needs to” support “business software systems”, but in the meantime, their employees will be buying iPhones on their own. Make no mistake, when IT blowhards dismiss the iPhone because it doesn’t integrate with “business software systems”, what they mean is Exchange. Apple’s answer to the enterprise “problem” isn’t to kowtow to the Microsoft Exchange hegemony; it’s to point in the opposite direction, and show how much better things can be with open industry protocols like IMAP and CalDAV and with simple web-based solutions.

Like many successful revolutions, this one might come from the bottom.