Jonathan Hensley | The Blog | JHensley.org

Tonight I flipped away from the Olympics during the trampolene competition and caught Lenovo’s new ‘Cast Away’ commercial featuring their new IdeaPad Y Series of notebooks.  This not so original commercial was however quite eye catching.

Lenovo is advertising their Veriface technology which is basically a facial recognition program that uses their built in webcam to automatically recognize the face of an enrolled user and log him/her on to the computer.  Pretty slick.

According to Notebooks.com, Veriface is quite secure and will only enroll, in the flesh, human faces and can’t be fooled by glossy photographs.  Veriface isn’t exactly new technology as IBM was bundling it with webcams years ago.  As cool as it is, I’m not sure it’ll actually sell any laptops but I can guarantee that anyone who puchases a Lenovo with Veriface will definitely use it.

Here’s the commercial.

Here are some interesting links from today:

• How I became a soldier in the Georgia-Russia cyberwar.
  After making sure that I wasn’t downloading a virus, I installed DoSHTTP and started playing around with it. Along with offering customizable options to advanced users, there was also a nice option for beginners like me. After entering a URL, I could initiate an attack by clicking something that said “Start Flood.” A flood did follow—war at the touch of a button.
• Dropped calls plague iPhone 3G, and not just in U.S.
  If you’re having problems with dropped calls on your new 3G Apple iPhone, you’re not alone.
  From New York to Stockholm, 3G iPhone owners are complaining loudly about connection failures – sometimes repeatedly – during calls. The problem typically occurs when the device attempts to move from 3G to another network.

Here are some interesting links from today:

• Sharing 2999 Songs, 199 Movies Becomes ‘Safe’ in Germany
  Prosecutors in a German state have announced they will refuse to entertain the majority of file-sharing lawsuits in future. It appears that only commercial-scale copyright infringers will be pursued, with those sharing under 3000 music tracks and 200 movies dropping under the prosecution radar.
• Network Access Control: Deploy Now or Wait?
  Network Access Control (NAC) sounds like something of a panacea—: technology that can not only authenticate who is using your company's network, but also ensure that users' methods of access are virus-free and fully comply with your company's corporate security policies. And NAC has been getting a lot of press lately—proponents tout its ability to keep corporate networks clean and healthy in ways that technologies of the past couldn't.
• VMware Bug is Worse Than a Glitch To Users Who Depend on It
  When VMware VI3 Update 2 was release, VMware placed incorrect sizes for the ISO images on their website, apparently due to some automation issue. However, a worse problem awaited people on August 12th; A problem that would disable licensing and keep new VMs from being booted. But already running VMs worked just fine.
• New PCs can wake up when they get phone calls
  Intel Corp. is unveiling new technology that will let computers wake up from their power-saving sleep state when they receive a phone call over the Internet.

Here are some interesting links from today:

• New Dell Latitude Notebooks: No More Business as Usual
  Today we’re officially unveiling our new line of Latitude laptops to the world. Based on the amount of internal buzz and the volume of work it took to get us here, this is about the biggest product rollout I can remember—
• HitMeLater Re-Sends Email When You Want It
  HitMeLater could be handy when you’re checking mobile email or need double-assurance that you’ll follow up on a message. No registration required.

Here are some interesting links from the past couple days:

• Behind NBC’s Olympics Website
  Four years ago there was just a few dozen hours of video up on the site. Thousands of machines are needed to encode and serve the video and the site. Interesting conversation, hope you enjoy a little look behind one of the people who worked behind the scenes for months on this site.
• 6 Reasons Today’s Olympic Swimmers are Breaking so many World Records
  For some reason every swim event in this Olympics is a record smasher. And it isn’t just Michael Phelps who’s seconds ahead of that daunting green world record line. Curious what’s making this year’s athletes so much faster? Here are 6 possible answers.
• Moving Beyond Passwords For Security
  The solution urged by the experts is to abandon passwords — and to move to a fundamentally different model, one in which humans play little or no part in logging on. Instead, machines have a cryptographically encoded conversation to establish both partie