New App Measures iPhone Radiation

Asterios Kokkinos — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 14:00:38 +0000

Israeli startup Tawkon (get it? “talk on?”) has developed an iPhone app that claims to monitor the radiation emitted by your iPhone at any given point in time. The app, which is not a hilarious “joke app” designed to scare you about cancer, was apparently in development for 18 months, uses complex algorithms, and has some very scary graphics that essentially make the iPhone look like a cancer machine.

How exactly does the program claim to measure radiation? I’d explain it here, but it’s pretty complicated – here’s a list of the variables the program uses to judge radiation output:

distance from cellular towers
weather
proximity of the antenna from the body
the way in which you’re holding the iPhone
bluetooth
accelerometer
GPS
terrain
travel speed

I’ve got no idea if this thing works at all – and you may never find out, as the app’s been held up in iTunes App Store approval limbo for weeks. Still, if the program does come out, it’ll be in the $5-$10 dollar range. Additionally, android and blackberry versions are being developed, and the approval process for those stores is much less insane.

Source & Photo Source: TechCrunch

Porn Detection Device Created By Some Monster

Asterios Kokkinos — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 14:00:07 +0000

A company named Paraben has, for some god awful reason, created a device that searches your hard drive for illicit JPEGs. It’s a USB stick – just plug and play – and a report pops up, revealing the ugly truth to whomever happens to be conducting their search.

How’s the software work? Paraben says it scans images, then focuses on “flesh tones, shapes and curvatures, face detection, body part separation, and more” to separate out the guilty images.

In the test case used to sell the abomination, a 500-gigabyte hard drive with 70,000 images took about 90 minutes to scan, and yielded 400 false positive results – meaning, the system’s not perfect, but it’s pretty darn close.

The stick goes for about $100, but should be destroyed for the good of mankind. What’s next, some kind of stick that finds pornographic videos on our hard drives by analyzing sound patterns? Wait, don’t give them any ideas, me!

Source & Image Source: PCMag

Technomaly » detection

New App Measures iPhone Radiation

Porn Detection Device Created By Some Monster