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Yahoo to free up old usernames after a year of inactivity
Unless you're quick to sign up with new services, snagging a simple user ID with your name, or just about any word from the English dictionary, can be unlikely. If you're only first joining Yahoo today (for one reason or another), however, registering any account without a handful of random numbers tacked on at the end is downright impossible. That'll soon change. The internet giant has announced on Tumblr that come July 15th, IDs that have been inactive for more than a year will be released to the public, giving shoegurlmary1992@yahoo.com a chance to snag mary@yahoo.com, for example. The decision seems perfectly reasonable to us. We only hope that other sites (Twitter) follow suit.
WSJ: Facebook apps and games are dishing out your user ID to unauthorized third parties
So you thought tweaking your privacy settings could actually keep you private on Facebook? The Wall Street Journal has some sobering news for you and everyone else playing Farmville on the 'book: your favorite apps are transmitting your user ID to advertisers and other third parties, and there's pretty much nothing you can do about it. According to the WSJ, even users who set their privacy sliders to the most hermit-like setting are exposed to having their unique Facebook identifier served up to data collection and advertising agencies, who in turn have been connecting that ID with your name (and anything else you've set to "share with everyone" on your profile) and snowballing it into their archive on your habits and tastes. Even more unsettling, three of the top 10 most used apps, including Farmville, have been found to have dished out the IDs of their users' friends. For its part, the company that Mark Z built says it's "committed to addressing" the issue and a number of the offending apps have been noted as becoming unavailable following the WSJ report. Farmville is of course not among them, it'd be madness to ever yank that cash cow, but whatever happens, you should have already got the message: the internet and privacy don't mix well.
Apple granted patent for handheld that recognizes your hands
You could probably fill a book with Apple patent applications that never amounted to anything, but here's one that's at least been granted -- a "handheld device" that uses capacitive sensors to recognize your identity just by the way you hold it, and subsequently personalize the device's buttons and settings to your hand based on your user profile. That's all that's actually been patented here, but the general idea is a little more grand -- you could theoretically grip a handheld with either hand, and it would automatically generate "button zones" under each finger using sensors (or disappearing buttons, perhaps) baked right into the chassis, making cries of "you're holding it wrong" hopefully fade into obscurity. Still, it's not the first time we've seen Cupertino reaching for digit recognition and we're sure it won't be the last, so we'll just file away our enthusiasm until or unless Jobs announces it on stage.
Intel's smart TV remote will recognize you, tailor content to your wishes
It's all about how you hold it, apparently. Intel's Labs have churned out a proposal for a new user-identifying system to be embedded into remote controls. Given a bit of time to familiarize itself with particular users, this new motion sensor-equipped channel switcher is capable of correctly recognizing its holder just by the way he operates it. Taking accelerometer readings every 100 nanoseconds, the researchers were able to build a data set of idiosyncrasies about each person, which would then be applied the next time he picked up the remote. Alas, accuracy rates are still well short of 100 percent, but there's always hope for improving things and for now it's being suggested that the system could be employed to help with targeted advertising -- which is annoying anyway, whoever it may think you are.
