A YouTube video suggesting that face recognition cameras installed in HP laptops cannot detect black faces has had over one million views. The short movie, uploaded earlier this month, features “Black Desi” and his colleague “White Wanda”. When Wanda, a white woman, is in front of the screen, the camera zooms to her face and [...]
Microsoft has indefinitely suspended its Chinese microblogging service MSN Juku after admitting that it “copied” code used to create the site. A vendor contracted to work for the software giant was caught lifting code from a rival Canadian start-up, Plurk. According to Plurk as much as 80% of the basecode was “stolen directly”. Microsoft apologised [...]
The Teletext information service on analogue and digital television will close across the UK on 16 December. Limited services including holidays, racing and bookmaking and the subtitles on analogue channels will remain available. Teletext’s chat and dating TV channels on Freeview will also be unaffected. Speaking to the BBC in Jersey, Karen Rankin, the Managing [...]
A staggering majority of UK consumers are not getting the best out of their high-definition (HD) televisions, according to a survey. Although 56% of UK households now have an HD television, 91% still watch standard DVDs and get their television through standard set-top boxes. Full HD broadcasting can be viewed from Sky, Virgin and Freesat [...]
The legal battle between Finland’s Nokia and its US rival Apple has taken a new turn, with Apple countersuing Nokia over alleged patent violations. The move follows a Nokia lawsuit filed in October accusing iPhone maker Apple of 10 Nokia patent infringements. Now Apple, in turn, is claiming that the Finnish phone firm is infringing [...]
The iPhone will be available at Tesco Mobile from 14 December, the company has announced. Its lowest monthly tariff will be £20 a month for the duration of a 12-month contract – but customers will have to pay £222 for a basic 3G 8GB handset. This works out over the course of the contract to [...]
Facebook is launching new privacy settings, designed to simplify the process for its 350 million users. It is the latest in a string of changes that have been made to its privacy policy this year. The site claims that only 15-20% of users have ever adjusted their settings. One new feature – the ability to [...]
Batteries made from plain copier paper could make for future energy storage that is truly paper thin. The approach relies on the use of carbon nanotubes – tiny cylinders of carbon – to collect electric charge. While small-scale nanotube batteries have been demonstrated before, the plain paper approach lends itself to making larger devices more [...]
Google has introduced so-called “real-time web” results into its search engine. It means that Google will display information from news organisations, blogs and platforms, such as Twitter, as soon as it is published. Google said it was “the first time” that a search engine had integrated the real-time web into its results page. The feature [...]
Intel has unveiled a prototype chip that packs 48 separate processing cores on to a chunk of silicon the size of a postage stamp. The Single-chip Cloud Computer (SCC), as it is known, contains 1.3 billion transistors, the tiny on-off switches that underpin chip technology. Each processing core could, in theory, run a separate operating [...]
Malware has been blamed for a problem with the Windows 7 operating system, dubbed the ‘Black Screen of Death’. Some Windows users are confronted by a totally black screen after they log on to their system. Initially it was thought that Microsoft’s own security update could have caused the problem but that has now been [...]
Microsoft has confirmed that it is investigating a problem described as the “black screen of death”, which affects its latest operating system. The error means that users of Windows 7 see a totally black screen after logging on to the system. The firm said it was looking into reports that suggest its latest security update, [...]