Facebook Will Soon Be Able to ID You in Any Photo

Facebook’s DeepFace System

When one appears in a photo taken at any event, they are recognized most of the time but a machine may fail to do so unless a computer has been programmed to look for you and has been trained on several photos of the face with high quality images to examine you.

However, in Facebook, where one will find the largest collection of personal photographs, the technology is making some headway in that direction. The California based company besides several other corporate players in the field – Facebook’s DeepFace System, is presently as accurate as a human being with few constrained facial recognition tasks. According to Yann LeCun, a computer scientist at New York University in New York City directing Facebook’s artificial intelligence research, states that the purpose is not to intrude on the privacy of Facebook user which is more than 1.3 billion active users but to protect it.

When DeepFace tends to identify a face in one of the 400 million new photos which the users upload daily, ‘one will get an alert from Facebook informing them of their appearance in the picture. The user then has the option to blur their image from the picture in order to protect their privacy.

Automated Facial Recognition – Usage/Limitation - Unknown

Most of the people tend to get disturbed on being identified particularly in stranger’s pictures and Facebook has already begun using the system though its face tagging system reveals only the identities of their friends. Besides DeepFace, the U.S government has also been funding in university based facial recognition research while others in the private sectors, like Google together with other companies are proceeding with their own projects to identify individuals automatically who tend to appear in videos and photos.

How automated facial recognition will be used and its limitation on the law is unknown though once the technology takes shape it would create many privacy problems as it solves. Brian Mennecke, an information systems research at Iowa State University in Ames, studying privacy states `the genie is or soon will be out of the bottle and there will be no going back’.

Social Face Classification 

LeCun comments that identifying a face could be much harder problem than detecting it which unlike fingerprints constantly tends to change. By just a smile, the face gets transformed where the corners of the eyes wrinkle, nostrils flare and the teeth are seen. When the head is thrown back with laughter, the apparent shape of the face contorts and when one has the same expression, the hair varies from each photo particularly after a visit to a hair dresser.

Yet most of them are recognized without any effort even if they have been seen in just one photo. The greatest advantage of DeepFace and the aspect of the project which sparked off is its training data. The DeepFace paper mentions the presence of a data set called SFC – Social Face Classification, which is a library of 4.4 million labelled faces taken from the Facebook pages of 4030 users and though users have given permission to Facebook to use their personal data on signing up for the website, DeepFace research paper does not make a mention on the consent of the owner’s photos.

Net Neutrality

Net Neutrality – Guiding Principle of Internet

Net Neutrality is the guiding principle of Internet and preserves our right to freely communicate online which is defined as an open Internet. It is the principle that all Internet traffic should be treated equally.In other words it means an Internet which allows and protects free speech wherein the internet provider provides the user with open networks and should not block or discriminate against any content or application which rides over the networks.

It is the principle which Internet service providers as well as government should treat the data on the internet equally without discriminating or making any charges differentially by user, site, content, platform, and application, type of attached equipment or mode of communication. Tim Wu, Professor of Columbia Law School states that the best way to explain network neutrality could be as a principle which could be used while designing a network which a public information network could end up being useful for all content, sites and platform, are equally treated.

Absence of Net Neutrality 

With the absence of Net Neutrality, phone and cable companies could carve the internet in fast and slow lanes while an ISP could slow down its rivals’ content or block political views disagreed upon. ISPs could also charge additional fees to the few content companies which could afford to pay for preferred treatments reducing the others to a slower tier of service thereby affecting the open internet.

Several debates are on with regards to Net Neutrality being required by law, especially in the United States. Lawrence Lessig, advocate of net neutrality has raised concern with regards to the ability of broadband provider using their last mile infrastructure to block Internet applications as well as content and to block out competitors. Neutrality advocate claims that the telecom companies need to impose a tiered service model to control and remove competitors, create artificial scarcity as well as oblige subscribers to purchase other uncompetitive services.

Important as Preservation 

Many are of the opinion that net neutrality is primarily important as preservation for current freedom and prominent supporter of net neutrality comprises of Vinton Cert, co-inventor of the Internet Protocol as well as Tim Berners-Lee, creator of the Web.

It is crucial for small business owners, entrepreneurs as well as for start-ups, who tend to depend on the open internet in order to launch their business, advertise their products and services, create a market, and distribute products to their customers. The need of open Internet is essential for job growth, competition as well as innovation.

It also tends to lower the obstacle of entry for entrepreneurs, start-ups and the small businesses by making sure that the Web is a fair and a level playing ground and the internet is used to reach the audiences and showcase their goods, services and applications. Interference from any company should not be permitted with this open marketplace. According to definition, ISPs are the gatekeepers to the Internet wherein without the Net Neutrality; they would take then every possible opportunity in order to profit from the gatekeeper control.

Microsoft's Outlook App for iOS is better than Gmail

Microsoft’s new e-mail app, which is exclusively for iOS was released at the end of January 2015 and it seems that Microsoft’s Outlook app is getting a lot of positive reviews in terms of function and look as this app supports Yahoo-Mail, Gmail, Exchange and more with inbuilt calendar syncs. It is expected that this app will be better alternative of Gmail’s official app on iOS platform.

According to anonymous users Microsoft’s Outlook app deserves hype because after installing and using this app I’ve not felt the need to use Gmail app since then. Yes, it is true that there are scopes for few improvements as Gmail and Inbox by Gmail is better in categorizing mails.

While using this app I felt that sometimes it doesn’t show most relevant contacts and to find any specific contact you might have to scroll a lot. In Microsoft’s Outlook app account setting is pretty easy. If you wish to set up multiple accounts, so you can do same in one app and as per wish you can view each inbox separately or together. This app is good enough to cover all the major e-mail service providers such as; Yahoo, Box, Exchange, Dropbox, Outlook, Exchange, iCloud, OneDrive and Gmail and with this facility you can sync your Gmail and Office mail at the same time in same app.

This app also allows you to set different swiping gestures for every e-mail as you can swipe an email from left to right. If you have subscribe for many different website or getting a lot of emails from different websites, so sometimes it becomes tedious task to hunt for important mails, but with this app you can bundle them into one particular coherent group as per the content of mail. Same as Gmail, which is good enough to categorizes emails into different tabs such as; Promotions, Primary, Updates, Group or Inbox, it has Focus inbox that has emails from your colleagues and as well as personal contacts.

The other tabs are useful to keep the record of emails from Twitter, Facebook, your bank bill, Amazon and your purchases, but the good thing is that it keep Focus tab clean and simple. Apart from basic features, you can set Mark as Read¸ None, Flag, Delete, Schedule, Move, Archive and more. The other interesting feature is that if you have gotten some annoying email, so you will get the freedom to delete it straight from the notification bar.

This new app will help you to make the good use of extensions feature in iOS8 because it let you to share the files and attachment in another supporting app. This app have automatically sync feature with your iOS and Google calendar as well, which make it’s pretty convenient to schedule meeting or events. In emails separate tab showcase all the files and attachment, but the best thing is that it will syncs with Dropbox and Google Drive as well, whereas; on slide menu on left side you can see the Birthday, Holidays in India, Contacts’ and more in the calendar as well and this feature can be pretty important and useful for users in India.

A New App That Provides Real-Time Sun Protection Advice

Now to get the real time sun protection advice, all you need to use a new smartphone app, which is good enough to provide individually personalized, real-time sun protection advice to improve sun protection behavior, according to new study reports.

This new Smartphone app provides real time sun-protection advice purely based on personal information from users and UV Index forecasts, as well as basic alerts to apply or recover skin with sunscreen. Klein Buendel, Colorado in an association with National Cancer Institute of US have developed “The Solar Cell app” for the purpose of real time sun protection advice.

In 2012, David B Buller from Klein Buendel and few other co-authors conducted a randomized clinical trial that enrolled 604 participants with 305 individuals in the treatment group. In research 232 people have downloaded the Solar Cell app whereas; 41 per cent or only 125 individuals used it. After the whole research data was available as per the study on 454 individuals in which 222 people were in the treatment group and rest 232 people were in the control group.

As per the study reports it’s clear that there were no significant difference in the number of sunburns, which were for the duration of three months between two different groups. Users of the Solar Cell app reported spending more use of sun protection behaviors while spending less time in the sun like; use of protective clothing, sunscreen and shade combined. All participants from same treatment group reported that they spend more time in shades with an average of 41 per cent and use less sunscreen for that particular duration with an average of 34.5 per cent.

It is expected that “the Solar Cell mobile app” will promote the sun protection practices and it will also spread the harm of UV rays among the public. The other possibility is that it can enhance the use of shade because shades are good enough to reduce the direct exposure of UV radiation or UV-R, but to avail these benefits person should have this app on their Smartphone, as authors said. In second randomized trial of the app, it showed some specific improvements, which was associated with more sun protection.

Researchers and scientists have found that all participants in the group have received the app with wide-brimmed hats for the duration of seven-week through follow-up process and then it control participants, who didn’t receive any app.

The ratio between men and women participants, who used the Solar Cell app reported that more use of sun protection like; protective clothing, shades and sunscreen was 46.4 per cent vs 43.3 per cent, whereas; the ratio between men and older participants were 32.7 per cent vs 35.5 per cent.

Now if you have the Solar Cell app on your smartphone, so you don’t have to take advice from medical experts or doctors as it is obvious that app is providing authentic advice and as well as information.

The JAMA Dermatology was published same study and research in their online journal.

Your Broadband Internet Technically Isn't Broadband Anymore

Recently, the FCC (the Federal Communications Commission) has given a fresh definition of high-speed internet and there are chances are that your current connection is not according to the standards. The Federal Communications Commission was given the task of overseeing the regulations and rules, which govern the internet. They have now raised the standard for broadband to nearly 25 megabits per second from what it used to be at 4 Mbps. The upload speed has been increased from 1 Mbps to 3 Mbps.

What the report says? 

According to the reports, while dissenting Republican commissioners have blasted the new move stating it as over reaction, the other commissioners have voted 3 to 2 in support of the change. These changes came into limelight when FCC published their 2015 Broadband Progress Report. This progress report is used by Congress to assess the US broadband market.

The main meaning behind the new definition indicates that the millions of American customers who have subscribed for the internet services but receiving less than 25 Mbps will no longer be considered as "broadband" subscribers. The average speed of service that can be expected in America is around 10 Mbps. Going by the standards the agency identified that in the report it has been highlighted that the current broadband speed is never delivered at a timely manner.

According to the agency’s report, 17 percent of the population or 55 million Americans have no access to the advanced broadband services. Most of the rural areas have no access to such high speeds. The report also indicated that nearly 53 percent of rural Americans lack broadband and do not have the download speeds of 25 Mbps.

A controversial decision: 

This decision has put Chairman Tom Wheeler, who is a Democrat, appointed by President Barack Obama, against Ajit Pai and Michael O'Rielly, the two Republicans on the commission, who were selected by the Republican-controlled Congress, into a very bad state. According to Wheeler, this change is an inspirational target in accordance with the marketing claims of broadband providers and increasing demands of the customers. According to the other counterparts, this move is completely over reaction and a broadband should be considered as what actually a consumer can buy.

Strong viewpoints: 

Consumers are happy with this decision. This decision was also applauded by the Communications Workers of America union. But on the other hand, the conservative groups derided this decision. According to FCC's Republican commissioners, the broadband vote looks to be a setup for the agency's for settling the Net neutrality fight with new regulations and also force the local municipalities to build new laws and their own Internet networks.

At the center of the et neutrality debate, there is an option for a new rule that will help in reclassifying the broadband under the Telecommunications Act as Title II service. The FCC is expected to allow two new rules that will supersede state laws in North Carolina and Tennessee, which actually forbids municipalities from constructing or expanding broadband networks.