Everyone knows that if you’re searching for or visiting sites that contain questionable material, such as sites that distribute warez or passwords, that you are opening yourself up to a wold of malicious software. These types of damaging programs like viruses and trojan horses (which we’ll learn all about) are prevalent enough without going to sites like those.

But what if you’re just trying to find out about a celebrity? See what movies they’ve been in? Or perhaps just looking for a nice wallpaper for your desktop? Well, you’d better be careful then too, depending on who you’re searching for. It turns out that some celebrities are more likely to lead to a computer virus on your machine than others.

So if you’re looking for Phil Collins’ daughter or any of these other celebrities, you’d better be careful. And use good anti-virus software, even if you’re on a Mac.

With the announcement of the new iPhone, one of the biggest bits of news – for reasons I haven’t yet figured out – is that will come in a not-quite-rainbow of colors. In fact, it was mentioned in class that some will be available in gold. And the most popular color according to the the pre-orders? Yellow. Go figure.

Color is a big deal to Apple and its products, and has been all the way back to the original iMac, which was available in colors like, and I’m not kidding about this, ‘Blueberry.’

It was also true of the iPod nano which came in a spectrum of hues,even the original iPhones would tease consumers with an early version of color, that is, black and white. Strange the current iMacs don’t come in colors but who knows? We may see it yet.

The only color I would ever consider getting is orange. Sadly, there’s never been a phone in that color as of yet. But I’m waiting.

OK, so I mentioned in class on Friday that I would show you some videos of robots to see how far we’ve come in the field, and to illustrate the concept of the Uncanny Valley that we will talk about later in the semester (so I’m not going to go into detail about it here, although you can read about it at the link).

The robots I am showing are not the familiar or cute ones that we see in movies, such as R2-D2, Johnny 5, or Wall-E, or even the ones we occasionally use in our houses, like the Roomba. The ones you will see below are the ones that are attempting to narrow the gap between human and robot, and work towards the goal of integrating robots into society and letting them act as helpful companions.

As you will see, we’re not there yet, but we’re getting eerily close. Take a look at the videos below, see what you think, and offer your feedback in the comments. And remember, you can only make something that isn’t human look human to a point, after which it actually starts to look *less* human. And we’ll learn why later.

Last time it was Google, now it’s Microsoft. If you want to get an interesting behind the scenes tour of some Microsoft offices, there is a post at businesinsider.com that walks you through some of the campus in Redmond. It’s so big people have to take shuttles to get around.

In fact, while the article doesn’t say it, the Redmond campus of Microsoft is over 500 acres! A massive, sprawling pseudo-metropolis complete with all the accouterments of a city including stores, athletic facilities and a movie theater.

Microsoft West campus

Most technology companies provide a very supportive for their employees, providing many amenities, including the things I mentioned above at no charge, as well as food and sometimes even such things as car washes, dry leaning, and even massages as part of their employment.

I’m not such a big fan of the high-five hallway, though.

Not a bad job if you can get it.

Apparently, if you’re one of the…many? Few? people who still carry around an iPod classic, it’s time as an official product may be coming to an end. This isn’t terribly surprising as all electronic devices eventually reach the end of their officially supported lifecycle, and the company that manufactures them decides it’s no longer in their best interests to provide parts and service for said device. For some things, the support can continue for a very long time; the original Atari 2600, originally released in 1977, was supported all the way into the 1990s. Apple even has a support page for ‘Vintage and Obsolete Products.’

I’ve never owned an iPod, but it, along with iTunes that was released later, revolutionized digital music. It was by no means the first digital media player, but it was certainly the most important. I do still have many (MANY) legacy electronics hanging around, below is the pocket color TV I had all the way in the early 80’s! It still works, but of course gets no signal since we’re on digital broadcasts now.

One other thing I should mention: In the article linked above, the author mentions the carrying capacity of the original iPod (160 GB) and says that’s one of the reasons he keeps his. While it is true that t had more capacity than current models, that is due to the fact it uses an actual spinning, mechanical hard drive – similar to what you would find in your PC – as opposed to solid state storage that has no moving parts, like a flash drive. The problem is, those mechanical drives are prone to failure and impact, and we moved away from them for portable storage pretty quickly.

Either way, the moral is if you still have an original click-wheel iPod, you should hang on to it.

This article on nbcnews.com is pretty remarkable. It is well known that during WWII, the Nazi regime seized the belongings  including property, of the citizens it deemed undesirable. For decades it was all thought to be lost, however detailed records were, surprisingly, maintained over all this time. In one of the examples given in the article, it was compensation for the property as opposed to the property itself.

Now, using database technology that is available to everyone, records are being matched up with the properties’ original owners and being returned, if not to them to their heirs.

It is carried out using standard family-tree making software. My mother took a class recently on genealogy  and students used Ancestry.com to trace their lineage. She made many discoveries and found many documents shedding light on many aspects of her history she didn’t know, and she already knew a lot. My father’s side of the family fled Romania, leaving behind an oil field in the process, to avoid the advancement of the Axis powers in the area. Now, using databases of information along with the ability of this genealogy software to trace family lines, more seized property is being returned o its rightful place after decades of being lost.

I need to make one minor clarification, however – the linked article claims ‘social media’ is helping the cause, but email and data mining are not actually social media. It’s standard communications media that we have always used.

Recently, I was notified by NVEnergy that I qualified for a free upgrade to my thermostats (which are just standard mercury-controlled numbers for now) through a program called “mPowered Home Energy Management.”

I just use the old-fashioned ones. No breaking in to these.

The deal is that they install these flashy digital thermostats, and that gives them the ability to remotely adjust your settings by +/- 4 degrees. In other words  they have remote control of that aspect of your house. Even so, they would never shut off your climate control if it were very hot or very cold, or make radical adjustments, but the thought of someone else being able to access and manipulate any aspect of my own house is unsettling.

How NVEnergy wants to do it.

This is especially true as the idea of a smart grid becomes more and more of a reality. What the linked page is ultimately telling you is that appliances and electrical infrastructure inside your house will be connected to an electrical grid that can gather data about them and allow for them to be controlled remotely, ostensibly by you.  But it leads to a whole host of other problems. For example, digital haunting.

Consider this article in Forbes, in which security experts hacked into houses and gained the ability to turn lights on and off, as well as the TV, and even gather information about the house itself and in one case a child who lived there. They would actually call the people, tell the people they had gained access to their house’s automated control, then proving it by doing some pretty ghostly things. It’s more an issue of the poor security designed into the products than the invalidity of the products themselves.

See, this is why I stick to the manual climate control. It’s all me.

The things robots can do are pretty amazing, but we’ve also seen the amazing ability of prosthetic limbs to transform lives. Now, we have computers capable of doing some very low level types of mind-reading. It’s not what it seems, they can’t pick up on complete sentences or type papers from your thoughts, but just as a prosthetic limb can by manipulated by a person simply thinking about it, which is how our actual limbs are moved anyway, they are now able to identify individual letters from our thoughts and extend the ability of our movements from thought.

To see something truly amazing, watch this segment form 60 minutes. It shows how machines can read and interpret letters and even intent from thought. If you’re queasy, be aware there are a couple of very mild scenes where a restrained monkey has electrodes implanted into his brain (you can’t see that, though) and a lady who suffered a stroke has been fitted with a coupler attached directly to her skull.

But what it shows is really amazing, and keep in mind this was from 2009! Not only that, a year earlier scientists in Japan were able to determine images someone was seeing based solely on their brain activity. Truly incredible stuff.

Have fun! And in case you’re worried you won’t, the land of mouse has been using the FastPass system there for a long, long time. This system, originally developed in the mid-’90s and put into service in late 1999, allows visitors to essentially pre-book a time on a ride so they don’t have to wait in what can be excruciatingly long lines.

From my personal archive!

Even so, Disney has decided to keep up with available technology, and is now experimenting with what may become the futuristic successor to FastPass, a wristband that would be created just for you, and is capable of transmitting wireless signals to receivers placed at strategic locations throughout the park. It can also pass as a payment system and hotel door key. According to this site (which also has a nifty image of the receiver), a smart-phone app will let you know when it’s your time to ride.

I’d give you more info, but there isn’t much to offer. In testing at Disney World, apparently guests spent more because they “had fun with the technology.” I can also offer this website which shows the bands in different colors. Be aware that the linked site has a list of items under the heading “Here is how it works” but it doesn’t actually state how it works, it simply says what you can do with it. Reading that list, though, one might deduce that the bands would most likely operate using Radio Frequency ID (RFID) or Near-Field Communications (NFC), the latter even more likely since it was suggested you could use them to make payments.

Until then, don’t try to game the FastPass system, Disney isn’t putting up with that crap anymore!

Now, I’m not a huge sports fan as the misleading title would indicate, but since we talked about artificial intelligence, and building on the previous post, I thought I’d share with you a story about an AI program that can play fantasy football (in this case meaning soccer) better than any human being. Well, not every human being, but almost.

In the ieee Spectrum, there is a story about a team of computer scientists whose program can beat 99 percent of all human fantasy football players. In case you’re unfamiliar, fantasy football players create teams from all players in a sport, and when the actual player makes a play the fantasy player is awarded points for the team.

That still leaves the 2500 players the system *can’t* beat, and these people must be serious fantasy football players. Now, whether or not this is an AI or an expert system would depend on how it was programmed, how its rules are implemented, and how it makes its choices, it could even be a combination of principles from both.

It’s when any of the following start to think for themselves that we’re in trouble:

This is just a picture, but the terror is very real.