I agree that Yahoo! should obey the laws of the country in which it provides its service. However the same is not happening in Brazil with Google. There are lots of hate groups, pedophiles and other unlawful user groups with brazilian members, and the federal police - with warrants granted by brazilian judges - is unable to get the user information (IP addresses and other infos which could lead to a positive id of the perpetrator at his ISP) from Google. Yahoo's choice to obey is likely less because of the fear of breaking some chinese law, and more because of economic interests. Nothing else but hypocrisy, in other words.
I developed a system using AudioID technology (http://www.m2any.com) from IIS Fraunhofer (the people who created MP3) during the past year. I can assure you, a few distortions won't harm the audio recognition at all. The company I developed the project for works with commercials which should be aired several times each day by radio stations. To check if the commercials were actually broadcasted, the whole radio programming was recorded during 12 hours, and then analyzed with AudioID. Note that some radio stations (AM and FM) were pretty distant, so distortions were a given. And to keep the recording in managable sizes, the recording was sampled with "telephone" quality, keeping the 12 hours recording about 40 MB in size. The files were scanned with AudioID in about 5 minutes (or a bit more if the audio had lots of background noise), and was able to find commercial spots, most are only 30 seconds, with 100% confidence. The software uses overlapping time frames, and if the sound pattern of any part of the recording was similar to a fingerprint stored in the database, where we kept our commercials which should air during that day, a log was produced pointing where a spot was found. Naturally, if a spot uses a certain background music, and the radio station happens to play that music, an entry is created as well. However, the confidence will point out that this isn't the spot and it won't reach 100%. To evade the software, there can't be no 4-seconds interval where the song still sounds similar to the original, or else it will be matched against the fingerprint. I am not sure if the Gracenote software (licensed from Philips) is as powerful as the Frauhofer's product, though. It was too expensive to even consider it for testing.
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This is what I got very quickly with Alien Skin's Image Doctor: http://img530.imageshack.us/img530/1785/edited28142421.jpg
I agree that Yahoo! should obey the laws of the country in which it provides its service. However the same is not happening in Brazil with Google. There are lots of hate groups, pedophiles and other unlawful user groups with brazilian members, and the federal police - with warrants granted by brazilian judges - is unable to get the user information (IP addresses and other infos which could lead to a positive id of the perpetrator at his ISP) from Google. Yahoo's choice to obey is likely less because of the fear of breaking some chinese law, and more because of economic interests. Nothing else but hypocrisy, in other words.
I developed a system using AudioID technology (http://www.m2any.com) from IIS Fraunhofer (the people who created MP3) during the past year. I can assure you, a few distortions won't harm the audio recognition at all. The company I developed the project for works with commercials which should be aired several times each day by radio stations. To check if the commercials were actually broadcasted, the whole radio programming was recorded during 12 hours, and then analyzed with AudioID. Note that some radio stations (AM and FM) were pretty distant, so distortions were a given. And to keep the recording in managable sizes, the recording was sampled with "telephone" quality, keeping the 12 hours recording about 40 MB in size. The files were scanned with AudioID in about 5 minutes (or a bit more if the audio had lots of background noise), and was able to find commercial spots, most are only 30 seconds, with 100% confidence. The software uses overlapping time frames, and if the sound pattern of any part of the recording was similar to a fingerprint stored in the database, where we kept our commercials which should air during that day, a log was produced pointing where a spot was found. Naturally, if a spot uses a certain background music, and the radio station happens to play that music, an entry is created as well. However, the confidence will point out that this isn't the spot and it won't reach 100%. To evade the software, there can't be no 4-seconds interval where the song still sounds similar to the original, or else it will be matched against the fingerprint. I am not sure if the Gracenote software (licensed from Philips) is as powerful as the Frauhofer's product, though. It was too expensive to even consider it for testing.