spriteleigh

This comic from Jeff Lofvers at Don't Hit Save is no joke. Beginning in 2015, Roombas have been sold with cameras and mapping technology. Your Roomba has been gathering information about your home, mapping out the shape and size of your rooms and the objects in them. This data could be more valuable to Roomba maker iRobot Corp than the sales of its vacuum cleaner. Gizmodo offers some ideas of how the data could be used.

If a company like Amazon, for example, wanted to improve its Echo smart speaker, the Roomba’s mapping info could certainly help out. Spatial mapping could improve audio performance by taking advantage of the room’s acoustics. Do you have a large room that’s practically empty? Targeted furniture ads might be quite effective. The laser and camera sensors would paint a nice portrait for lighting needs that would factor into smart lights that adjust in real time. Smart AC units could better control airflow. And additional sensors added in the future would gather even more data from this live-in double agent.

No matter how useful the data is, it gives one pause to realize that your vacuum cleaner knows so much about your private space. I am now glad that I opted for wood floors instead of a robotic vacuum cleaner for the carpets, even though it means my cats will never have free Roomba rides.

Your Roomba vacuum cleaner collects data about the size and geometry of your home as it cleans and transmits that data back to Irobot, Roomba's parent company -- and now the company says it wants to sell that data to companies like Apple and Google. (more…)

Eclectic Method has a new song for us, made from sound effects found in all eight Star Wars films. Nothing else was used, no instruments, rhythm tracks, or any kind of added music. Best of all, we can see where the sounds came from.

(YouTube link)

You can guess that the rhythm is a lot of fighting, various tuneful beeps come from the droids, and there's plenty of vroom and pew pew pew! -via Laughing Squid

I lived through the eighties and I approve of Trixi Studios’ "Take On Me" iOS (proof-of-concept only) app which turns your surroundings into a pencil-sketched, a-ha-style music video using augmented reality. The Chicago-based team created it with Apple's ARKit, which is a suite of developer tools launched in June that adds AR to apps.

Here's a-Ha's original music video, in case you're feeling as nostalgic as I am: https://youtu.be/djV11Xbc914

Thanks, Robert Scoble!

In 2005 a young man from England created a website called The Million Dollar Homepage and sold advertising space on it. The page is a 1000 × 1000 pixel grid (1,000,000 pixels) and he sold the pixels for $1 each. The page has 2,816 links in it. A recent analysis of all the links reveal that only 1,780 are still reachable.

From Harvard's Library Innovation Lab:

Over the decade or so since the Million Dollar Homepage sold its last pixel, link rot has ravaged the site’s embedded links. Of the 2,816 links that embedded on the page (accounting for a total of 999,400 pixels), 547 are entirely unreachable at this time. A further 489 redirect to a different domain or to a domain resale portal, leaving 1,780 reachable links. Most of the domains to which these links correspond are for sale or devoid of content.

The 547 unreachable links are attached to graphical elements that collectively take up 342,000 pixels (face value: $342,000). Redirects account for a further 145,000 pixels (face value: $145,000). While it would take a good deal of manual work to assess the reachable pages for content value, the majority do not seem to reflect their original purpose. Though the Million Dollar Homepage’s pixel canvas exists as a largely intact digital artifact, the vast web of sites which it publicizes has decayed greatly over the course of time.

[via Clive Thompson]

The Starcraft series presents intergalactic conflict to gamers in a fresh new way, and even though it hasn't inspired as many fan creations as other Blizzard franchises it has inspired a few pretty great fan films.

But none of those Starcraft fan films are as dark as Freddie Wong's The Rush, which gives us a ground view of what it feels like to be caught in the middle of a zerg rush. It made me feel bad for all the innocent digital people in video game land who lose their little virtual lives every time we play.

(YouTube Link)

-Via GeekTyrant

This is deeply weird but also makes perfect sense. Wow. (more…)

Information is Beautiful has updated their comparison of artist payments on streaming services, estimating that 2.4 million plays on YouTube will net a whopping $1,472 for an unsigned artist. That's $0.0006 per play!

(more…)

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WikiHow became "the world's most popular how-to website" by being a treasure trove full of useful illustrated tutorials, but it does have one major problem- the images make no sense without descriptive text.

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That's why the images are often turned into memes, using the expression on the character's face to tell a tale of heartbreak and/or heartburn we can all relate to.

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Looking through a collection of WikiHow illustrations without context quickly becomes a fun game of "WTF is this drawing trying to teach me?", with the occasional "WTF is this dog thinking?" for good measure.

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See 10 No Context WikiHow Illustrations That Raise A Lot Of Questions here

The International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions is the respected global body representing libraries all over the world; in an open letter to the World Wide Web Consortium, the organization says the recent decision to standardize DRM for the web has undermined the web's openness and the ability of libraries and other public institutions to fulfill their important social role. (more…)

This could have been up there with Rudy 😢

Yesterday's Net Neutrality day marked unprecedented public participation in the formerly fatally dull realm of telcoms policy, as 1.6 million Americans sent the FCC comments supporting Net Neutrality. (more…)

[[Update, July 13: After consultation with W3C CEO Jeff Jaffe on timing, we've temporarily withdrawn this appeal, for one week, for purely logistical purposes. I am teaching a workshop all next week at UC San Diego and will re-file the objection at the end of the week, so that I will be able to devote undivided attention to garnering the necessary support from other W3C members. -Cory]]

Five days ago, the World Wide Web Consortium announced that it would go ahead with its project of making DRM for web-video, and that the Director, Tim Berners-Lee had overruled or decided not to act further on all objections about the dangers this posed to legitimate and important activities including security audits, accessibility adaptation and competition. (more…)

On YouTube, Gangnam Style's been the most-played video for five years—a little-known testament to the grim reality of popular culture these days. But no longer! It has finally been dethroned, by Wiz Khalifa and Charlie Puth's See You Again. Moreover, Despacito, embedded above, seems likely to storm past it in due course.

Here's the top 10.

1) Wiz Khalifa, See You Again (ft Charlie Puth) - 2,895,373,709
2) Psy, Gangnam Style - 2,894,426,475
3) Justin Bieber, Sorry - 2,635,572,161
4) Mark Ronson, Uptown Funk (ft Bruno Mars) - 2,550,545,717
5) Luis Fonsi, Despacito (ft Daddy Yankee) - 2,482,502,747
6) Taylor Swift, Shake It Off - 2,248,761,095
7) Enrique Iglesias, Bailando - 2,232,756,228
8) Maroon 5, Sugar - 2,150,365,635
9) Katy Perry, Roar - 2,129,400,973
10) Taylor Swift, Blank Space - 2,101,607,657

I think the walls in our house have chicken wire in them because it acts like a Faraday cage. WiFi just doesn't penetrate walls. So I use power-over-ethernet to fill every room with wi-fi. I attached a power-over-ethernet unit to my cable internet modem and plugged it into an AC outlet. In the other rooms of the house, I use wi-fi power-over-ethernet adapters. The internet connection travels through the power wiring of the house. It's not as fast as a wired ethernet connection, but it works well for our purposes, including streaming video. Here's a good starter kit on Amazon.

It's the Day Against DRM, and EFF is celebrating by publishing the first public look at How Much Do Consumers Value Interoperability? Evidence from the Price of DVD Players, a scholarly economics paper that uses clever techniques to reveal some eye-popping number on the strangled market for DRM-free gadgets. (more…)

It's been nearly four months since the W3C held the most controversial vote in its decades-long history of standards-setting: a vote where accessibility groups, security experts, browser startups, public interest groups, human rights groups, archivists, research institutions and other worthies went up against trillions of dollars' worth of corporate muscle: the world's largest electronics, web, and content companies in a battle for the soul of the open web. (more…)

Animator Chad Essley writes, "The new MC Frontalot (previously) nerdcore video is out for the 4th of July! Celebrate our nation’s hostility toward the British crown by listening to Front rap about internet arguments over Free Software!" (more…)

Since Jurassic Park has been out for over 20 years, we all know exactly what those dinosaurs look like. But what if they weren't quite so accurate and instead looked like those lovably goofy dinosaurs from the 90s TV show, Dinosaurs?

Artist Jen Lewis took the steps neccessary to make the crossover none of us realized we needed. Personally, I just wish someone made this into a full video because that would be all too brilliant.

You can see the rest of the pics on Jen's Twitter.

Via Geek Tyrant

McMansion Hell is a hilarious blog where Johns Hopkins Peabody Institute graduate student Kate Wagner posts scorching critiques of the architecture of McMansions -- but this week, Wagner announced that she had shut down her blog after spurious legal threats from Zillow, which admits that it doesn't even hold the copyrights to the images it wants Wagner to stop using. (more…)

Kevan Davis's Wikitext is an incredibly clever mashup of Wikipedia and Infocom-style text adventure games: starting with a random Wikipedia entry, it gives you the article summary, an 8-bit-ified version of the main photo, and "directions" to the articles referenced by the one you've landed on. (via Waxy)

This month's US Copyright Office study on Section 1201 of the DMCA identified many problems with America's DRM laws, which ban bypassing DRM even when no copyright infringement takes place. (more…)

Update: Zillow has dropped all its absurd copyright claims after hearing from EFF and McMansion Hell is coming back!

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has published its letter to Zillow, explaining in eye-watering detail how wrong the company was to threaten the McMansion Hell blog over its use of realtors' glam-shots of shitty houses. (more…)

The SCP Foundation features unsettling horror and SF stories, all posed as the technical reports of a secret international consortium whose job is to secure, contain and protect the public from all manner of weird threats, from unnatural beasties to sentient buildings. Written in the dry language of officialdom, they're the perfect short fiction for the internet-era and often extremely clever. I think this one about being trapped in an infinite IKEA, by Mortos, is my favorite yet.

Description: SCP-3008 is a large retail unit previously owned by and branded as IKEA, a popular furniture retail chain. A person entering SCP-3008 through the main entrance and then passing out of sight of the doors will find themselves translocated to SCP-3008-1. This displacement will typically go unnoticed as no change will occur from the perspective of the victim; they will generally not become aware until they try and return to the entrance.

SCP-3008-1 is a space resembling the inside of an IKEA furniture store, extending far beyond the limits of what could physically be contained within the dimensions of the retail unit. Current measurements indicate an area of at least 10km2 with no visible external terminators detected in any direction. Inconclusive results from the use of laser rangefinders has lead to the speculation that the space may be infinite.

SCP-3008-1 is inhabited by an unknown number of civilians trapped within prior to containment. Gathered data suggests they have formed a rudimentary civilisation within SCP-3008-1, including the construction of settlements and fortifications for the purpose of defending against SCP-3008-2.

Don't miss the a recent escapee's journal, hidden behind a link near the end.

(I got sucked into SCP again when someone noted that my randomly generated catalog of creepily nondescript police state technology requires containment)

You'd think Goop, Gwyneth Paltrow's "lifestyle brand" for clean-freak whippies, and Infowars, Alex Jones' conspiracy compendium for seething fascists, wouldn't share much in common. But they both have exactly the same business model: selling wellness to people skeptical and fearful of mainstream medicine and healthcare. Nikhil Sonnad took a look at the ingredients on each site and found that it's all the same stuff.

We at Quartz have created a compendium, from Ashwagandha to zizyphus, of the magical healing ingredients both sides of the political spectrum are buying, and how they are presented to each. We looked at the ingredients used in products sold on the Infowars store, and compared them to products on the wellness shops Moon Juice and Goop. All make similar claims about the health benefits of these ingredients, but what gets called “Super Male Vitality” by Infowars is branded as “Sex Dust” by Moon Juice.

Call it horseshit theory: opposite extremes of lifestyle branding converging on a hidden axis of shared appreciation for their audiences.

[h/t Agies]