Boot up: Glass pain?, mobile wallet hassles, porn v copyright, and more

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/blog/2014/may/20/technology-links-newsbucket

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A burst of 8 links for you to chew over, as picked by the Technology team

Google's eye doctor admits Glass can cause pain, explains how >> Betabeat

Jack Smith:

At first, Google tried putting it straight ahead of the eye, and then below the eye — the first and second most comfortable places.

"The only people who look up a lot are some professionals like electricians and painters," Dr [Eli] Peli [of Harvard University, an optometrist whom Google consulted over eye discomfort] told Betabeat. "Most of us look either straight or down. It's well known that up is less comfortable."

When Google placed the display ahead of or below the eye, it obstructed the user's line of vision. To keep the user's head up, they placed it to the upper-right. While this positioning can keep the user from crashing into things, it can also cause sharp eye pain.

This is because usually, when we look to the left or right, our eye is only glancing for a quick moment before our head catches up — a second at most, Dr. Peli said. We almost never actually look to the side with just our eyes for long periods of time.

"You're on one leg [or the other] as you walk, but try to stand on one leg for a long time and you'll feel tension, because you're not using it how it's normally used," Dr. Peli said. "If you're looking at the Glass for a minute, you're holding it there for sixty times longer than normal."

The shame of being an early mobile wallet user >> PaymentsSource

Daniel Wolfe:

It's the same problem that arose back when banks introduced contactless cards. Years ago, after tapping my card to pay for a McDonald's meal, a cashier started screaming at me, insisting that I had to swipe my card or it wouldn't be valid. And years later, using a mobile wallet at Duane Reade — a store that has signs encouraging shoppers to tap their phones to pay — a similar event unfolded.

If I had just swiped my card to pay, I would have left the store without shame. But because I chose a mobile wallet, I had to first unlock my phone by typing a PIN, then open my wallet app and unlock that with a separate PIN.

(I'll leave it to the reader to decide whether this was Isis or Google Wallet. It doesn't matter; both apps follow the same process.)

To me, this was merely tedious. To the cashier, it looked like I was some jerk holding up the line by playing Candy Crush on my phone when I should have been swiping my card.

Tackling the limits of touch screens >> NYTimes.com

…typing on a flat surface with no physical keys to guide the fingers requires heightened visual attention to avoid typos, draining concentration from the thoughts being expressed.

Companies are trying to address these problems with new tools adapted from the analog world of three-dimensional typewriter keys, tactile paper pages, and pop quizzes on the blackboard.

Tactus Technology of Fremont, Calif., is developing a keyboard with shape-shifting keys that pop up from the screen's surface when needed, then recede so that the screen is flat and featureless again, said Craig Ciesla, co-founder. Fluid in tiny microchannels raises the keys up and later recedes, making it appear that the keys have melted away.

The technology will be offered later this year as an accessory to the iPad Mini, for $80 to $100, Mr. Ciesla said. Next year it will be included in many touchscreens produced for tablets and smartphones.

Included in "many" touchscreens?

One small chip - one giant leap forward for early cancer detection >> Eurekalert

Today, the majority of cancers are detected on the macroscopic level, when the tumour is already composed of millions of cancer cells and the disease is starting to advance into a more mature phase. But what if we could diagnose cancer before it took hold- while it was still only affecting a few localised cells? It would be like putting a fire out while it was still just a few sparks versus after having already caught on and spread to many areas of the house.

An international team of researchers, led by ICFO- Institute of Photonic Sciences in Castelldefels, announce the successful development of a "lab-on-a-chip" platform capable of detecting protein cancer markers in the blood using the very latest advances in plasmonics, nanofabrication, microfluids and surface chemistry. The device is able to detect very low concentrations of protein cancer markers in blood, enabling diagnoses of the disease in its earliest stages. The detection of cancer in its very early stages is seen as key to the successful diagnosis and treatment of this disease.

Telenav Scout for iOS now powered by OpenStreetMap >> TUAW

"As a mapping platform, OSM is a credible alternative to proprietary solutions, with the added advantage of instant updates, resulting in a more accurate and up-to-date map," said Steve Coast, founder of OpenStreetMap and Telenav's head of OSM. "Roads change, subdivisions are built, and freeways expand so, just like all other maps, it needs updates on an ongoing basis. Today's launch has effectively added millions of editors to the OSM global community, breathing even more life into an already exploding free and open-sourced project." Scout was a US-only navigation app, but with OSM Scout will now be able to compete globally.

The new street maps add even more to what is already a popular free navigation solution. Scout offers turn-by-turn voice directions, traffic reports, the ability to download regional maps to cut your data usage, and a Glympse-like feature that lets you show your position and arrival times to friends.

Voice control too.

Think local, act global >> Asymco

Google's US revenue percentage did drop from 47% to 43% but it's worth noting that not only is the drop slower than Apple's, the overall dependency of Google on the US for revenues is higher than Apple's.

A surprising observation as Apple's concentration of users, measured as market share for various products, is likely to be higher in the US than Google's distribution of users.

Put another way, Google is broadly popular worldwide (except for search in China, Korea and Russia) but its customers and hence profitability are highly concentrated.

Google's customers, of course, are advertisers. Do they just pay a lot more in the US to reach its relatively fewer users (only about 300m, compared to an internet population excluding China of over 2bn) or is there some other effect?

Conversnitch turns covert surveillance into an art form >> theguardian.com

ICYMI, because this deserves to be read:

In his new book, Nowhere to Hide, the journalist Glenn Greenwald explains how he and the NSA contractor turned whistleblower put their phones in a freezer with the batteries disconnected to thwart spooks' ability to operate phones remotely as microphones. But what would happen if the fridge itself was listening to your words?

Two American artists are now taking that concept to a logical conclusion. Using only a credit card-sized Raspberry Pi computer, a microphone and a Wi-Fi card hacked into a lightbulb fitting, and a piece of open source software hosted at Github, they have installed a listening device at an undisclosed spot in Manhattan, New York, and connected it to a Twitter feed.

The biggest filer of copyright lawsuits? This erotica web site >> The New Yorker

Having found a niche in the crowded world of online pornography, X-art.com still had tens of thousands of fans shelling out money for its movies. Quietly, the Fields were also making some extra money in another way: by becoming the biggest filer of copyright-infringement lawsuits in the nation. In the past year, their company Malibu Media LLC has filed more than thirteen hundred copyright-infringement lawsuits—more of these cases than anyone else, accounting for a third of all U.S. copyright litigation during that time, according to the federal-litigation database Pacer—against people that they accuse of stealing their films on the Internet.

Today, they average more than three suits a day, and defendants have included elderly women, a former lieutenant governor, and countless others.

You might be able to guess where this is going.

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