Face

LAS VEGAS--Facebook's online privacy woes are well-known. But here's an offline one: its massive database of profile photos can be used to identify you as you're walking down the street.

A Carnegie Mellon University researcher today described how he assembled a database of about 25,000 photographs taken from students' Facebook profiles. Then he set up a desk in one of the campus buildings and asked willing volunteers to peer into Webcams.

The results: facial recognition software put a name to the face of 31 percent of the students after, on average, less than three seconds of … Read more

Swapping between the front- and rear-facing cameras on Apple's latest-generation iOS devices during a FaceTime call is currently a manual process, requiring users to tap an onscreen button. But that could become a thing of the past with a system Apple hopes to patent.

Patently Apple has unearthed a patent application Apple filed with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office in January of last year titled "automatic video stream selection." In short, it's a system for automatically swapping between the two captured video streams depending on what's happening in front of each lens. … Read more

One of Apple's latest iPhone commercials is capitalizing on the recent surge of interest in video calling.

One of its two new "If you don't have an iPhone" commercials focuses on the smartphone's FaceTime video-calling feature. The ad, which popped up on YouTube yesterday, shows how the feature lets people video-chat with anyone else with an iPhone, iPad, or Mac.

The timing of the ad might just be impeccable, considering video calling has been in the headlines lately.

Last week, Facebook announced a deal with Skype that brings video calling to the social network's … Read more

Some cool new gadgets aren't sold in stores. The D*Face Spray Paint Skateboard Interface took a year to create and won't be found on the shelves of your local skate shop.

Let's break down the D*Face Spray Paint Skateboard Interface. D*Face is a London-based street artist. Spray paint and skateboards are self-evident. The interface part refers to a remote control system that can trigger paints cans attached to the underside of skateboards.

This technology could easily be used for less-than-noble purposes, but D*Face created and harnessed the devices in the name of art. The canvas was a skateboarding pool in Southern California. The pool had previously been a site for a D*Face project that covered it with piles of painted skulls.

According to a behind-the-scenes look in Concrete Disciples skateboarding magazine, the chosen spray paint was a very fast-drying enamel. The cans are strapped under the deck with Velcro and are controlled by wireless remote.… Read more

It is our opinion that one of the biggest reasons that MySpace lost its popularity was the fact that it let users customize their profiles, turning the pages into unreadable, barely functional Web design disasters. We are thus wary of anything that threatens to disrupt the relatively functional design of Facebook. Fortunately, FaceFetti for Chrome is the best of both worlds; it lets users add customizations to their Facebook pages, but they're not disruptive and they're only visible to that particular user.

Like most Chrome extensions, FaceFetti installs easily. It appears on Facebook as an additional menu to … Read more

Sometimes seeing is believing. The FaceNiff Android app, released earlier this month, allows anyone to snoop on traffic on Wi-Fi networks and even hijack Facebook accounts. Sounds bad, but this video demo drives the message home by showing just how easy it is to do:

The app, which works on Android phones that have been rooted, offers "one-touch hacking," says Kevin Mahaffey, founder and chief technology officer at mobile security firm Lookout. The technique isn't new--it's akin to a mobile version of the Firesheep Firefox extension released last year--but it makes it super easy and mobile.… Read more

UPDATE 8:00 AM, May 7th: You asked for it, we are giving it to you... due to popular demand, KeyLemon has agreed to extend the offer through the weekend. This offer will now end at 11:59PM PDT on Sunday, May 8th.

Often in movies, we see a lot of bad guys breaking into someone else's computer to steal confidential information by somehow decoding the password. As much as we would like to believe that it will never happen to us, it can.

We all know how important security is these days, so for 24 hours only, we … Read more

Nero Kwik Media is a light and free media manager with which you can organize, edit, and share your music, photos, videos, and data. Imagine iTunes and iPhoto rolled into one, then trimmed in half. While this download is technically "free," there is one caveat: you'll have to purchase some of its functionality in the form of "apps" listed in Nero's built-in store. Sure, most of these add-ons aren't too expensive, but it's a shame that a few of them (like Nero Kwik Play, a video decoder) don't come with the … Read more

A small number of FaceTime users have complained of a "creepy" glitch with Apple's FaceTime video-conferencing platform.

According to a posting on the Apple discussion forums, iPhone users are seeing photos of themselves that they claim they had never taken show up on FaceTime when they try to place a video call to another user. One person said that her boyfriend saw a picture of himself at work displayed in FaceTime, even though he has never used the service in the office.

"When one of us is calling the other via FaceTime, an old picture freezes on our screen, while the person receiving the call only sees a black screen," a person using the name "kar0786" wrote on Apple's discussion forums. "It's kind of creepy, because it brought up photos of both of us at work, where I have used FaceTime a few times but he never has."

Apple did not immediately respond to a request for comment. However, in my tests with the two iPhone 4s in my home, I wasn't able to replicate the issue some users report having.… Read more