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Microsoft Gadget Keeps Record of Your Life
An anonymous reader writes "SenseCam, touted as a visual diary of sorts by Microsoft Corp., is designed to be worn around the neck and take up to 2,000 images a 12-hour day automatically. The prototype responds to changes such as bright lights and sudden movements and might one day even respond to other stimuli such as heart rate or skin temperature -- to track medical problems as easily as to record a Hawaiian vacation."
"Strange days" anyone? Can users sell thier "Record of Your Life recordings"? Can "Record of Your Life recordings" be held against you in a court of law?
"It's so convenient to have a system where everyone is a criminal" - A. Hitler
Does this mean I will have to sit through all (2000 * 2 * 7) = 28,000 pictures from my jerk-wad Brother-In-Law's boring one week Hawaiian vacation? Talk about a death wish.
WOW! This does sound fascinating but I hope it comes with a better manual, the info from MS' page info doesn't even explain what type of batteries it requires:
Maybe I need more coffee this fine morning...
Trolling is a art,
This is like one of those electronic probation tether things for crooks, but it reports back to Bill Gates instead of to the courts.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
If I wear one of these and my PDA wristwatch at the same time, I'll be getting more @ss than a toilet seat.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
From The Artical:
"Perhaps weeks or months later, she might have zipped through them to figure out when she last saw a particular colleague or what bottle of wine she had been drinking that night."
Two THOUSAND pictures a day? ZIP through them?
This thing looks larger than my Cybershot-U (which much better pictures than what I saw on Microsoft's site from it), and seems like it would require a _lot_ of work to constantly maintain and keep organized the hundreds to thousands of photos taken everyday. Let alone time to download them on a regular basis... There are defiently some cool things on that Microsoft page though, this just isn't one of them =P
While I can see the interest in a gadget like SenseCam, how many of you believe that it will be turned into spyware by a large number of people almost immediately?
We've already seen some of the negative effects of putting cameras into cell phones: Guys snipping pictures up skirts in bars, etc.. You also hear about pictures being taken by witnesses of license plates on cars used in crimes, but not as often. These events don't occur very often because people still have to actually take the picture, and that takes time and coordination, and also because cell phone cameras suck so bad.
But let's give people a very, very easy way to take pictures of whatever is in front of them. What happens? People go looking for interesting things to stand in front of. Other people are interesting, especially when they're doing something out of the ordinary. Or something wrong.
Because the SenseCam people don't have a BatPhone, they don't know where the interesting people are minute-to-minute. They take their cameras and just start hanging around places. The cameras take lots of pictures. Later, the pictures get reviewed. Many get deleted, some are saved, some are posted to the Internet as some kind of video blog.
Slashdot readers can take it from there.
There are some things that I just don't want Microsoft to see in my daily routines. Some of which occur in front of my computer...
http://github.com/gbook/nidb
the communications relvolution is slowly becoming a digital prison
Never underestimate the logical power of sarcasm
If I come across anyone using this near me.. I will punch them in the face. That, or bring out a large camera with flash and continually photograph them every moment they're talking to me
They'll either go away or turn the gadget off. Freaks
first MS Word keeps track of all of my editing and now another MS gadgt keeps track of my life. That can't be too good. Maybe we need to buy one of these for SCO lawyers.
Consensus is good, but informed dictatorship is better
"hehe. I used Grokster to download 120 people's lives, and now my hard drive is full of them."
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
Let's replay my week using my nifty new SenseCam:
Monday: go to work ass early. sit in cube. go home.
Tuesday: go to work ass early. sit in cube. go home.
Wednesday: go to work ass early. sit in cube. go home.
Thursday: go to work ass early. sit in cube. go home.
Friday: go to work ass early. sit in cube. go home.
Weekend: sit in front of computer and take recursive pictures of self.
Omigosh!! It would be hard to live in denial with one of these things =)
"My mother never saw the irony in calling me a son-of-a-bitch." - Jack Nicholson
The millions of blogs out there didn't clog searches up nearly enough, now maybe we can fill google image search with the hundreds of thousands of pictures that will now go along with the description of "got up this morning, had breakfast, went out of the front door..."
slashdot, news for crazed liberal socialist zealots
it captures VGA sized pics.. how well can it grab handwritten notes or (as I read in another article) a bottle of wine well enough that you can ID it?
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
So when the latest virus attacks MSFT systems, your life will stop until they can issue a patch. :-)
But...they will pledge to restore it to the point before the attack.
This is a great thing for personal security. If you get mugged or robbed, rape or such you have a picture of your attacker. I can see this being marketed this way
Monitoring device around you neck?
Will next version include a small explosive to keep you from doing bad things like watching DVDs in Linux?
OK, now put all this news together: Microsoft life camera, the Japanese robot, the neuron/silicon chips, the powered exoskeleton, ...
Maybe the Slashdot graphic of Bill Gates as a Borg is not so far off.
"Were do you want to be assimilated today?"
this thing would be great on those days you have really, really bad diarrhea.
free online diet tracking.
Check it out yer damn self- here-
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
Woke up. Got out of bed. Dragged a comb across my hea Stop: 0X0000000A (0X00000000, 0X00000002, 0X00000001, 0X80448BF6)
IRQL_NOT_LESS OR EQUAL
Adress 80448BF6 base at 80400000, DateStamp
3d366b8b - ntoskrnl.exe
Beginning dump of a bunch of really unimportant crap
I can see this as easily being banned in buildings with sensitive material, like military schools, and certainly business meatings and production floors.
I only really see this being useful for teenagers and people whose companies don't depend on secrecy at their level.
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
I know this is a MS product with potential privacy concerns, and therefore likely to get slammed into the ground around here, but it raises some interesting notions that keep gnawing at me when I see tourists literally just walking around Times Square with a video camera.
What is the inherent value in recording your life in such minute detail? Isn't that what our memory is supposed to be for? What happens to your life when it becomes about recording your life? Is that a meta-life? What about recording yourself watching earlier recorded activities? Is it possible to become consumed with recording your life that you stop living it?
Sure it'll help me "to figure out when [I] last saw a particular colleague or what bottle of wine [I] had been drinking that night" but will it help me figure out where I am, who this person is beside me and what kind of tequila got me here?
A company called Videolife has a more primitive, but essentially the same thing, in the early 90s.
It's called Passport
until they take this thing and use it to photograph the rape for their sick, twisited pleasure. I don't think that this is a good marketing scheme for these.
/me/ buy one. Of course, I do have a tendency to over estimate the sanity of the average tech consumer (which is sad, because they must be buying, in droves, all kinds of stupid shit or companies would not continue to make them).
In fact, I don't think there is any way to market these things that'd make
you don't THINK you have anything to hide...
now I am not paranoid by any means, but to think that everything about you can be public information without any dangers is utter folly!
for one: SOCIAL SECURITY NUMBER
what about credit card numbers, bank statements, taxes, ANYTHING
plus just because you "don't have anything to hide" doesn't affect the right to privacy that we as americans enjoy...even if someone is a criminal, the potential Big Brother risks STILL violate his civil rights...
i don't have anything to hide, but i still don't want to be followed
i believe in my rights as guaranteed by the US Constitution
however, if you CHOOSE to allow yourself to be tracked...well, i have no quarrel with that
if it was forced, however...
I encrypted my life and now I've forgotten the password and can't get my life back.
all the hot chicks i see when walking around the campus i work at i can now record for prosperity and keep for later ..uh... analysis, instead of trying to remember them all. bring it to market ASAP!!
That was my impression, from reading the article in question.
-MT.
-MT.
I'm sure lots of minimum wage hour employers would welcome this..
Welcome Wally World Employees..
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
Reminds me of Snow Crash, whereas ubergeeks wore equipmemnt that recorded EVERYTHING, w/ the hopes that someone would want to buy a peice of their data.
Awesome!
Cheap vacations without leaving the comfort of your home!
Great minds think alike; fools seldom differ.
For those who missed the link, or didn't even read the article before posting, here's a list of other hardware MS Research is (or has been) working on. Stick to software, guys!
You mean Windows XP?
I hate sigs.
If I ever see people start carrying one of these, I'll start carrying a can of black spray paint.
You mean Stephen Baxter.
And the novel is called "Manifold: Time" - part of the Manifold trilogy, the other two of which are "Manifold: Space" and "Manifold: Origin"
Isn't this similar to a slashdot story of about 2 years ago?
Basically a small recorder that broadcasted a RFID, and would record that of others.
This would result in a log of every RFID tag you came across, remember what books you looked at, which people you saw.
The privacy issue pointed that out too.
Yeah, like nobody ever made money from selling tech to teenage Japanese girls. Who do you think bought all those camera phones and sent all those DOCOMO messages?
I don't think there would be a problem finding a market for this. Also if you look at the pictures it would be pretty easy to hide. Looks to me like it would fit in a breast pocket fairly easily.
So I would expect there would be objections to folk taking them into movie theatres and such.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
You know those pictures that are a compilation of thousands of pictures? One could use these to do that. BTW, does anyone know of a program to make one of those collage pictures?
Could this device be the next step in tracking criminals on house arrest, or tracking parolee where-abouts? What types of applications might be possible when you can tell where a person has been all day, or while they were on a work-release program? Could this provide law enforcement with further accountability than the 'ankle-bracelet'?
In 2001 I paddled the Yukon from Whitehorse (Canada) to Emmonak (Alaska, at the mouth of the river) in a 17 ft. canoe. To document the experience without too much hassle, I built a solar-powered waterproof computer out of a Virgin WebPlayer (remember those?) and some assorted electronic parts. The machine was/is equipped with a VGA webcam, which took pictures with regular intervals or when ordered to do so (whichever came first). It could also do motion tracking, snapping shots of passing animals etc. It could also record sound if needed. All of that was stored on two 20 GB notebook harddrives inside the machine. I mentioned the project on /. in this posting.
Had I still had my webserver (...no broadband where I now live, in Sweden...) those pictures would be visible for all to see. The camera was attached with a velcro strip to my hat, or sometimes to the canoe. It contains a microphone as well, so it could also record sounds (a function I did not use at the time). The whole setup worked fine, right until a leak in the camera's waterproofing and a subsequent rainy week smudged the CCD sensor. Pictures were blurry after that...
Of course I'm not the only one who has done things like this. There is a lot of 'prior art' in this field.
--frank[at]unternet.org
Great, now I can catch some sleep on the way to work. The Sensecam will wake me up before I cause an accident
I didn't see any reference to this in the first article (and as a good slashdotter, I haven't looked at the second, Microsoft one yet), but clearly to "zip through" 1000s of pictures, you need to store tons of meta-data for each one. GPS-like location for outdoors, trianglation based on 802.11 access points for indoors???, maybe you could enable yours to transfer a digital business card to other people's sense-cam at the push of a button, so another part of the meta-data would be who you were talking to.
Upload not only pictures but also meta-data to your PC at night and have software that generates a log of what you did that day. The privacy issues are a little scary, but (like video cameras today) you could just disallow them in buildings/situations you don't want to be photographed. Technology is just a tool... its how you use it... blah blah blah...
Its called Final Cut, where Robin Williams plays a man who after you die edits together the highlight film of your life for your funeral. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0364343/ Tagline:Every moment of your life recorded. Would you live it differently? Hell I wouldnt be as naked as often ;)
Trix are for kids!
Two thousand views of my PC monitor.
-----
Sorry, I'm only a 1336 h4x0r.
{teen1 dons new Microsoft Personal Datalogger}
Teen1: W00T! Check my l33t PDL. It'll record all the uder stuff we do tonight.
Teen2 and 3: Whoa! Awesome, dude!
Teen1: Alright, everyone got their paint-ball guns?
Teen2: Hell, Yeah!
Teen3: Locked and loaded!
Teen1: Sweet! I'll drive.
Clippy PDL: It looks like you're about to raise hell in your neighborhood! Would you like me to:
-Phone Angry Man Smith and have him step outside so as you can get a better shot at him?
-Automatically search for unsecured wireless networks and e-mail them home for you?
-Record all your nights activities to be used against you in a court of law?
In the spirit of bio companies before them,
microsoft has patented all the information
about your life. If you should need
to communicate any facts abour your
existence please get microsoft approval first.
A better comparison would be Earth, by David Brin. In one tiny aspect of a huge book, America's growing retired population reclaims the streets by sitting outside with netcams aimed at anything interesting. Everything from jaywalking and youthful hijinks to car crashes gets recorded and submitted as evidence not by big brother, but by we the people ...
Yet another example of how Microsoft refuse to interoperate - I'm a UNIX hacker and my days have 24 hours in them, as required by ISO 8601. What annoys me is that so many people use MS stuff that they'll start thinking that days are supposed to be 12 hours long, and that everyone doing it the old 24-hour way is just being belligerent.
I can see the logic behind this gadget, though. MS is already like a metaphorical albatross/millstone around the neck already, so why not go the whole hog and do it for real?
You must think in Russian.
Hey, cool! Microsoft "invented" a time-lapse camera!
Would you therefore not end up spending your entire life reviewing those previous events in your life? To the point where you end up reviewing yourself reviewing previous events?
On the other hand, if you record all the events in your life for future generations, wouldn't those future generations care nothing about 99.99% of what you did?
Sure, I'd love to see a visual record of the battles of Alexander the Great but I'm not sure I'd give a damn about what time his daily bowel movements were or whether he liked his meat rare or well-done.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
In Earth Made of Glass John Barnes writes about something called an emblok which was used to store all of a person's memories. Other people could also contribute their memories of a person. If you were killed, the memories could be replayed into the developing brain of a cloned spare. Over time, it would become you again.