JTxt

Yes me too. See also:

http://reversespeech.com/reversal/popular-reverse-speech-exa...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverse_speech

http://www.tcprs.com/evps.html (disembodied voice examples.)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observer-expectancy_effect

I agree with all of that except going into debt... When I can help it. (I can see having a car helping a social life though.) When I have a buffer of cash and food I feel more free and feel better about myself. When I'm happy with myself, others like me more too... but then I also start to care less of what most others think.

Edit: You edited out getting debt for a car? That may not be a bad idea for some.

Yes, even better.

Can you recommend a password manager that works on all browsers/devices that you trust?

I have not found that yet, so I use passphrases customized to the site.

Edit: Also fundamentally it means that to access a single site from a compromised device, I'm potentially giving a nice list of all of my credentials.

I agree! I've been using passphrases for about 12 years, but in this form:

Ia! Ibupfa1y,bitf:

(It's the first letter of every word in that sentence.)

A sentance relevant to me that also refers to the site is easier for me to remember than random words. But perhaps I could make it longer... Use the kxcd idea too.

The entropy is huge unless/until everyone starts making 3 word passphrases the same way with very common words.

There can also be dictionary attacks on common passphrases, especially after a large site is compromised.

Lately I've been changing it up by offsetting my fingers on the keyboard.

Unfortunately each password/phrase input has different requirements and limits, and there's many different confusing help texts for explaining it. And it's frustrating to find out the limits after committing to memory and submitting.

What's a good, plainly written ux standard that we can advocate?

The 'cloud' idea bothered me from the start. But not as much about bandwidth and latency, but a loss of control of private data and that the company and network become single points of failure.

It's about control of my data; I have to give it up to to benefit from a computing service.

Homomorphic encryption is an interesting thought: Allow my neighbors or a computing service to process my data without them able to see it. http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homomorphic_encryption

Oh, then it's much more of a management problem.

There's plenty of technical solutions already, you may just want a little glue with good ux design, fast internet, and good support staff, especially for the elderly.

In this example, someone setup a relationship between a retirement home and an English learning school. Outside of that, it would probably turn into a chatroulete.

Good point, added bigbluebutton.org

(EDIT: original title asked if there was something like this as open source.)

Nice. It's basicly a well managed chatroulette clone.

(EDIT: not quite, it also needs to record.)

Or try "web video conference server open source"

https://code.google.com/p/openmeetings/

http://bigbluebutton.org (can record too)

Greggman mentioned WEBrtc, that would probably be cleaner/simpler, but it's p2p right, so the server can't record? perhaps try https://www.webrtc-experiment.com/RecordRTC/ ?

Well, look for 'open source chatroulette clones' like https://code.google.com/p/camrumble/

With a set of photos of the same static scene, it's possible to figure out the camera position, angle, and focal length of every camera, sometimes to millimeter accuracy. You just have to correlate the same features in each frame, then solve it.

3d motion trackers do this. (Blender.org has one. You can solve this same problem using it. Bring in public and street view photos of the area. It's a bit of manual work to put all the images in a movie then go frame by frame and tag features... But you could get much more accurate than the article.)

The power is in having access to large databases of photos of everywhere, and even better if all the photos were taken the same way, like google's street view... and large amounts of computing resources to index and correlate all of the features from all of the images automatically.

I would be surprised if there is not a project in some huge company or lab that can identify features in nearly any public outdoor shot and determine exactly where it was taken. (perhaps for intelligence or forensics)

I believe this paper introduced me to the idea in 2006: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/redmond/groups/ivm/ph...

I literally used a slippery slope in that argument. :|

I'll try again:

No-one but ourselves should be able to brick our devices. We don't actually 'own' our property if we can't 100% control what and if it runs.

But that's a hard problem to solve in a secure and user friendly way.

...and there's not enough financial incentive by consumers (and certainly by device makers, cell networks, law makers...) to solve it yet.

Thanks for adding the link!

Here's the latest version: http://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml?...

A part I'm concerned about: "(d) Any request by a government agency to interrupt communications service utilizing a technological solution required by this section is subject to Section 7908 of the Public Utilities Code."

Skip to 7908 here: http://www.leginfo.ca.gov/cgi-bin/displaycode?section=puc&gr...

So, this kill-switch may not be 100% controlled by the device owner.

I'd be OK with a required/opt-out kill-switch only if I was the only person that could possibly brick my device with it. (That's a hard problem to make user-friendly and educate people about. A private key I create and store physically/securely somehow?)

Otherwise, I don't really own my device.

See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_Computing "TC is controversial as the hardware is not only secured for its owner, but also secured against its owner."

Where is this killswitch proposal? I'm curious who and how it could be activated and how you verify the owner.

The idea of a kill switch is great if it can only be controlled by the owner of the device. (The person that purchased it to use.) But we have not solved that problem yet.

We are still using short passwords instead of strong private keys; we give unencrypted access of our data to cloud providers to make things easier for us. How can ultimate authority/access of our property be made user friendly enough for joe user/sixpack?

Probably not, but who would have access to this kill switch/phone bricker?

The customer with a private key? (...with no way it could be activated by the phone manufacture/service provider/legally forced by governments.)

Probably not, because it's not user friendly enough, or some excuse. It's a problem that needs solving so we actually own and control our property.

That's correct. So, let's get further away from this cliff of not actually owning/controlling our property, not closer.

Edit: Down voting because you disagree? It's a problem that needs solving; I hope we can discuss it.

Reminds me: The days before 9/11 I played with some webcams that let you pan and zoom a cam and take turns if others were using it. There was one on the Empire State because I used it that day... There may have been one on a wtc tower, and I may have tried it too... Already down? Can't remember that well. Anyone else remember that? Or that type of webcam? Later on they got better, but have not looked into them any while. (I'll need to look into it.)

I'm about 98% certain:

Killwhite is identical to Gimp's "Color to Alpha" if you use white as source color.

In their example, it leaves a grey color background with a little alpha. They started with a brighter blue, and was dimmed by the their resulting image.

I'm guessing that in your example, you used the background grey as the input color, so it took the background to clear, then you used a color sample of Killwhite's background to use as the background of yours. ...but I may be wrong.

edit: I am playing with it, and if you use white as the color, then put the result on the white background, it's identical to the original., if you do the same with the grey color, same results. So "Color to Alpha" is the same, just allows you to pick a color.

If you download the pixel blender version of the kill white plugin, you can read the source. It looks pretty simple to implement; does just a little work while in the HSV color space.

Neato. This would work on iOS if it registered taps/clicks.

I have flux on my desktop, but I'll be looking for a filter for my iphone. (Edit: I like the orange glasses idea better.)

Here's what I do: an alarm goes off at 10:30pm and I take melatonin. If I actually shun devices, I can eventually sleep. But my brain is curious and wants to browse. I try to tell myself that I can in the morning. That sometimes works.

Lately I've been tracking my sleep with "sleep time". I also have a folder of sleeping and hypnosis apps that I cycle through. They talk me through relaxing muscles, calming my thoughts, deep breathing, binaral beats... I've sleeped better lately and actually look forward to it some.

Also exercise seems to help, if I do. (Edit: I'm enjoying the other tips here, thanks.)

Yes, search for interval timer, repeat timer... The closest free app I found for ios so far is "wake me up." It repeats forever but doesn't run in the background.

Interesting thought. Reminds me of when people around me had an hourly chime on their watch... Usually inadvertently.

I'm downloading a interval timer app to test it out. My guess is that it will drive me nuts soon.

Edit: I didn't find any good options free for ios yet. "Wake me up" works well, but not in the background.

Ha! I find that I can tap my fingers on a surface easier than pulling fingers down in many of those combinations. Perhaps it would be less distracting if they saw you just lowering the middle finger onto a table?

We can flag articles that we believe don't belong on the site.

Yes, it was just for fun, and to show my nieces and nephews that sound can be canceled.

Good tip.

I like to take a mono track, duplicate it, invert one of them, then make both of them into a stereo track.

Now play it and play with the proximity of the left and right speakers. When they're close, they cancel each other out. Similar principle of noise canceling headphones.

Since I'm on HN, I was expecting and hoping this to be about public-key cryptography.