Researchers develop a new technique to identify faces from reflections

Researchers conducted an experiment where image of bystanders were extracted from the corneal reflections of the photo images of an individual.

Scientists have developed a new forensics technique in which they were able to extract images from the corneal reflections of an individual of people standing nearby. The technique can be useful while conducting criminal investigations.Researchers Rob Jenkins from the University of York in Britain, and collaborator Christie Kerr, from the University of Glasgow, conducted the experiment in which they found that faces can be reconstructed from images taken of an individual with commercial digital cameras and enhanced with off-the-shelf image-processing software.

For the experiment, the scientists used a high-end digital camera and sat five volunteers for a passport-photo-like shot, using studio lighting. All the five people where in the room even when not being clicked and stood close to the photographer to be included in the reflection off the subject's corneas.

Then they asked the subjects to identify images from the reflections as well as the original digital images. Nine out of 10 volunteers were able to correctly identify from the corneal images. The group which was familiar with the five subjects were able to identify the persons with 84 percent success rate and those unfamiliar with the subjects in the photographs were able to identify with 71 percent success rate.

The researchers added that this forensics technology can be used in crimes where the victims are photographed, like abductions or child sex abuse. The reflections in the eyes of the photographic subject could help in identifying perpetrators. They added that the images of people retrieved from cameras seized as evidence during criminal investigations may be used to piece together networks of associates or to link individuals to particular locations.

"The pupil of the eye is like a black mirror. To enhance the image, you have to zoom in and adjust the contrast. A face image that is recovered from a reflection in the subject's eye is about 30,000 times smaller than the subject's face. Our findings thus highlight the remarkable robustness of human face recognition, as well as the untapped potential of high-resolution photography," Jenkins said.

"You could think of it as a foray into extreme facial recognition. Yes, the camera can resolve the face, and yes, the brain can identify it," he writes, "but both systems are pushed to their limits, and neither could perform the feat alone."

SMS to be soon accepted as official Docs in Govt dealings in India

MSs will soon be acceptable as "documentary proof" for a variety of citizen-services ranging from making payments to registrations.

  

People may soon be able to use SMSs as documentary proof with government departments. The government is launching a 'Mobile Seva' service with over 241 applications relating to health, Aadhaar, Education, RTI, and much more.

Launching the 'Mobile Seva' service, Department of Electronics and IT secretary J Satyanarayana said: "Like Railways, we have to bring in a system wherein by showing (transaction) SMS or, whatever be the case (like e-mail), the proof on mobile is accepted as valid document. To increase our reach we need to bring this kind of practice in mobile and e-governance."

India has over 90 crore mobile subscribers and with the launch of this app it will be easy for them to make transactions with various government departments. At present the digitally signed certificates are accepted as valid document and soon an SMS or a communication available on mobile phone will be accepted as valid proof.

Joint Secretary at DEITY Rajendra Kumar stated that the department is ready with digital signature for mobile phones that the government can use in messages that are to be sent to the citizens applying for a service. "We will start allocating digital signature (Public Key Infrastructure) to all government department on board in first quarter of 2014. Government departments can send communication on mobile of citizen seeking service," Kumar said. DEITY Additional Secretary Rajiv Gauba stated that about 830 departments from the Centre, state and local authorities have come on board, and the department is working on the third phase to further scale up the mobile governance platform and bring more services under its ambit.

"We have to go through inter-ministerial consultations to scale this m-governance store for launch of third phase. The third phase will have many more departments and capacity to add more services application on this store. Final shape of third phase can be known only after consultation process is complete," he said.

The app is available for Android and Java enabled phones for now. Kumar added that the department is aiming to bring all the applications to HTML5 standard which will make them compatible with all mobile platforms in the next six months.

Microsoft's Guardian App For Women's safety

Exclusively available for Windows Phone platform, the Guardian app sends alerts to select contacts, mails and posts to Facebook groups along with your location details.

The Guardian app has a 'track me' feature that allows select users in contact to track the user in real time, using Microsoft Windows Azure cloud services and Bing Map APIs. Users can also send an 'SOS' alert, connect to security agencies, police and hospitals in case of any emergency through this app.

To use the app, users need to add names of select contacts to the settings who can be reached out to in an emergency situation. Users can alert them through the SOS button. Clicking the SOS button will send a distress message to selected contacts, alerting them along with users' location. The SOS button also sends emails to select email ids and posts to private Facebook groups.

A group of Microsoft employees developed the Guardian app in a span of over six months. Microsoft's new distress app comes in the awake of recent cases of violence against women in the country, especially the last year's Nirbhaya case. So far, quite a few distress apps have been launched. Notion Ink recently launched “I'm Shakti” application for the Android platform.India’s first managed security company, SMART 24X7, recently launched ‘Panic’ Button, an Android operating system for smartphones. Some of the popular safety apps available for smartphones are Channel V's VithU, Me Against Rape, Fight Back by Whypoll, Street Safe and The Eye watch.

                     

"Our employees wanted to do something to enable people to feel safer in our cities. So they used their spare time to develop Guardian. It is a robust personal security app with more safety features and capabilities than any other comparable app available to Indian smartphone users today, Microsoft IT India Managing Director Raj Biyani is quoted as saying.

5 Top Social Media lessons to be learnt

It was a big year for social media. Twitter made its successful debut on the stock market while Facebook recovered from its troubled IPO a year earlier. We also saw the launch of Vine, the rise of Snapchat and the acceptance of social media by the SEC, which said public companies could use these sites to disclose information And that was just in the United States.

In China, which has the world's biggest population of Internet users, ecommerce giant Alibaba spent $586 million for a stake in Weibo, the country's top microblogging service and a rival to Tencent's popular WeChat instant messaging app. Meanwhile, in the Ukraine, mobile phone operators were expecting a boom in data traffic as protests against the country's president were organized over social networking sites, similar to the Arab Spring of 2011.

All of which is to say that if 2013 showed us one thing, it's that there's a growing global business in accumulating friends and followers. there's a growing global business in accumulating friends and followers.

Of course, similar to previous years, there were also social media gaffes and hacks mixed in, along with plenty of celebrity narcissism and, unfortunately, twerks. We still have a ways to go in understanding and applying social media to the business world, but there was no shortage of lessons to glean from 2013.

Social Media Can Move Markets

On April 23, the Associated Press’ Twitter account was hacked, sending a fake tweet that there were “two explosions in the White House and Barack Obama is injured.” In a matter of seconds, the Dow dropped 150 points. Then in June, activist investor Carl Icahn joined Twitter, first using it primarily as a megaphone in his battle with Dell and later to announce his stake in companies, most notably Apple. On Aug. 13, Icahn tweeted that he had a "large position" in the iPhone maker, pushing the shares of the tech titan up about 5%.

Witnessing a single tweet swing the pendulum of markets proved that social media is every bit as valuable to day traders as it is to newsmakers.

Social Media Is Increasingly Visual

Sure, you can say a lot in 140 characters, but a picture is still worth a thousand words. In January, Twitter-owned Vine launched as a mobile service for sharing six-second looping videos. Then, in June, Facebook responded by enabling video on Instagram. 

We also saw the rise of Snapchat, a service that allows users to share photos and videos without the permanency of other social networks. That’s because users control how long (one to 10 seconds) the recipients can see their "Snaps." Once the time is up, the photo or video disappears. The service has become so popular among young Internet users that Facebook reportedly recently offered to buy it for $3 billion. Snapchat declined.

And days before its IPO, Twitter launched a product update so that tweets with Twitter photos or Vine videos display a preview thumbnail. While this facelift is still in its early days, it's already made Twitter feel like a more visual and less-textual platform.

Social Media Isn’t Just for the Kids

From Warren Buffett joining Twitter to Jamie Dimon joining the LinkedIn Influencer program, 2013 showed us that global leaders are embracing social media. 

Sometimes, the business impact can be unpredictable, as Rupert Murdoch's tweets have shown.

Social Media Advertising Is Growing, Evolving

During the Super Bowl, the most talked about advertisement wasn’t a coveted 30-second TV commercial, but rather a tweet. After a power outage at the Superdome prompted a 34 minute break in play, Oreo responded by tweeting "No power? No problem" and an image of an Oreo with the text "you can still dunk in the dark." The tweet generated strong press and proved a turning point in the opportunities for advertising on social media. 2013 also showed how much money could be made from social media advertising. In the third quarter, Facebook reported revenue grew 60% compared with a year earlier, with a large piece of that from mobile advertising. Around the same time, Facebook-owned Instagram announced sponsored posts would be coming to user newsfeeds in the United States.

Social Media Could Be TV’s Best Ally

In October, Nielsen Ratings released an analysis showing a correlation between live-tweeting during TV and having a larger, more engaged audience.The data illustrated that 19 million people in the U.S. composed 263 million tweets about live TV in the second quarter of 2013.Social TV is still in the early days but with television as the home to coveted big dollar ads and social media as the venue for audience amplification and engagement, this could be the beginning of a long and beautiful relationship.

Android Malware discovered in Google Play, already downloaded millions of times

Lookout has posted on their blog to inform Android users of the new malware family, named 'BadNews' that has been lurking in Google's Play Store.

According to Google Play statistics, the malware has been downloaded millions of times and can be found in 32 apps across four different developer accounts.

Marc Rogers, Principal Security Researcher at Lookout, wrote on the blog to say, "We have notified Google and they promptly removed all apps and suspended the associated developer accounts pending further investigation.

The Android malware poses as advertisements with the ability to, "send fake news messages, prompt users to install applications and sends sensitive information such as the phone number and device ID to its Command and Control (C&C) server," Lookout states.

About half of the infected apps are in Russian and BadNews was recorded as sending AlphaSMS, premium rate SMS fraud in the Russian Federation, to infected devices.

The servers have been noted in Russia, Ukraine, and one in Germany. Lookout inform Android users to make sure the Android system setting 'nknown sources' is unchecked to prevent dropped or drive-by-download app installs and to download a mobile security app, like Lookout's.

A recent annual report, published by mobile security company NQ Mobile, has estimated that Android Malware has more than doubled worldwide last year with nearly 33 million devices infected, from 11 million in 2011.

32 apps infected with malware found on Google Play store

COMPANIES WARNS APP DEVELOPERS TO BE CAREFUL ABOUT THIRD PARTY CODE THEY USE IN APPS

Google has once again come under fire from security experts over its laissez-faire approach to its Play app store.

Security researchers at Lookout found 32 apps on Google Play that were infected by malware called BadNews.

The malware sends messages to premium rate text numbers. It is designed to lay dormant for weeks after being downloaded to avoid detection.

Premium rate malware is prolific in Eastern Europe and Russia.

Experts have warned that despite stronger regulation and monitoring, Western European and North American based criminals could still attempt to replicate the malware.

The malware specifically targeted Android owner in Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and a number of other Eastern European customers.

Lookout said it was difficult to estimate how many handsets could have been infected before Google finally removed the apps. It estimates between two and nine million infected apps may have been downloaded.

Amongst the apps BadNews was found in were recipe generators, wallpaper apps, games, and porn apps.

All of the infected apps were released by four separate accounts. They have since been suspended.

According to Lookout, the infected apps tricked users into installing what was described as an update for either Skype or popular Russian social network Vkontakte. It then started stealing credit by sending texts to premium rate numbers.

The firm also said it was concerned that many of the developers had included the code in their apps willingly. Lookout said many had been convinced BadNews was little more than a advert network.

It urged developers to be more careful about the third party code they use in their apps.

In the past, major security companies – including Russian firm Kaspersky – have criticised Google for putting its users at unnecessary risk.

Hand of Thief' Linux trojan steals Internet banking information

One of the benefits of using an obscure operating system like Linux is that, well, nobody uses it. That means you don’t really have to deal with all of the virus and malware associated with Windows and to a lesser extent, OS . Those times, however, may be changing as a new Linux trojan has been discovered in the wild. According to the RSA (the security division of EMC), a Russian-based cybercrime team has unleashed a banking trojan known as the Hand of Thief.

The trojan is said to be no different than what you’d find on a Windows machine. At its core, it consists of a “form grabber” designed to steal the login credentials of those using Internet banking. Specifically, the trojan captures the username and password in addition to the timestamp of when you logged in, the URL of the site you logged in to and perhaps even your web browser’s cookies.The collection of data is then sent to a command-and-control server at which time your information will likely be sold to the highest bidder. From there, a crook would begin to rack up charges on your behalf either until the account is drained or you notice the suspicious behavior.The trojan is said to work on 15 different Linux distributions including popular choices like Ubuntu, Fedora and Debian. It attacks the most common web browsers such as Firefox, Chrome, Aurora and Ice Weasel. The good news at this point is that there isn’t really a solid delivery mechanism for the package. The trojan’s “sales agent” suggests using e-mail and social engineering as methods of infection.

Smart trash cans collect more than your discarded garbage

A high-tech trash can from a UK startup by the name of Renew is up to more than just collecting your garbage. These Renew Pods, deployed around certain parts of London ahead of last year’s Olympic Games, were initially designed to serve up video advertisements thanks to large displays on either side.

A dozen units have since been retrofitted with what the company is calling Renew ORB, a device that uses Wi-Fi technology to quietly sniff out and collect information from nearby smartphones. Considering there are at least 100 of these recycling bins scattered across the city, there’s a wealth of data being mined without consent.

Specifically, the refreshed cans are able to capture the proximity of a smartphone to the ORB, how fast it is traveling (how fast you are walking) and how long it is within range. Additionally, Renew can even determine the manufacturer of your mobile device from its MAC address.

Why exactly would a company want to collection information like this from unsuspecting passersby? A statement on Renew’s website said the idea is to measure variables in market share between mobile handheld providers within the City’s Square Mile — the highest concentration of professionals in Europe.

In other words, they’re collecting your information for advertising purposes. Quartz suggests the data will be sold to advertisers in an effort to help them better target their campaigns – campaigns that would be run via video on the Renew Pods.

We’re told that users can “opt out” of being tracked by disabling Wi-Fi or filling out a form online. Those are both a bit of a hassle, especially when you consider that 80 percent of people in London leave Wi-Fi enabled on their mobile devices.

Samsung shows off Origami printer made from cardboard

In their latest bout of innovation, Samsung has decided to tackle the design of the home-office printer. With an aim of simplifying the manufacturing process and lowering costs for consumers, Samsung has unveiled a range of unusual printer designs, the most interesting of which is perhaps the Origami.

The latter features two pieces of corrugated cardboard that are folded into a box-like shape, which is then used to house a compact printer core. The idea is that this printer housing can be recycled once the printer has run its course, reducing waste material after it has been thrown away. The remarkably cool design is also fire and water resistant, according to Samsung, which should help improve the printer's durability.

Another one of Samsung's innovative designs is called Clip, a printer shell similar to the Origami design, albeit made of plastic instead of cardboard. Folded and clipped together from a single piece of compressed polyethylene, the Clip design is more sturdy than the Origami design, and should provide similar cost savings to consumers thanks to lower construction times.

The final design is the Mate, which focuses more on customizability than cost savings. It features a pre-constructed printer with several colorful, removable exterior panels that can be swapped and replaced, the idea here being you can fit the color scheme of the printer to the colors in the room.

For videos,

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=qfIg8oXDwx8

All the designs are currently still in the prototype phase, although the Clip is perhaps the closest to reaching store shelves. Senior Samsung designer Juehyun Jung says there's "no barrier for production" of the Clip after a "few engineering problems are solved", and that the unit could potentially cost 10% less than other similar products.

Liquipel -Literal shock absorbers for smartphones

Liquipel, The waterproof nanocoating that protects your smartphone from water and other liquids. With Liquipel 2.0, users could mail in their mobile devices to the company, and for $59.99, they would receive a waterproofing treatment that supposedly lasts forever. Not only is the coating nearly impossible to see with the naked eye, it offers an impressive protection rating of IPX7, allowing your smartphone to be immersed in liquids at depths of over 1 meter for 30 minutes at a time.

Although the “watersafe” coating is a nifty innovation, it offers little to no protection on a physical level. To address this concern, Liquipel has launched Skins, a new high-impact film that safeguards the device against both scratches and heavy blows.

To achieve this level of protection, Liquipel has opted for a four-layer system that reportedly serves as a system of “literal shock absorbers”. According to the official press release, the film can be installed in three easy steps and the silicon adhesive formula allows for a completely dry installation process, thus eliminating the need for annoying spray bottles and squeegees.

The Liquipel Skins are currently being offered for under $15 for the iPhone 4, 4S and 5. Skins for the Samsung Galaxy S3 and S4 should also be available at this time, but are currently listed as “out of stock”. Liquipel intends to diversify its list of compatible smartphone models over the next few months.

Those interested can check out the company’s webpage for more details about Liquipel Skins, as well as ordering information.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=lZJLdy_YeQg