Annoyed by Google’s revised stance on “net neutrality“? Pissed off by the company’s power to collect personal data in applications like Buzz (which can show others who you Gmail the most) and Street View (which shows the locations of cars and faceless people)? Worried about the news that a Street View project gone awry mistakenly collected information from the Wi-Fi networks that Google’s mapping vehicles cruised past? The activist group Consumer Watchdog feels your pain. And to spread the anti-Google message further, the group is running the video ad below on a 540 square foot video billboard in Times Square.

The cartoon shows Google CEO Eric Schmidt giving children free ice cream, body-scanning them, and divulging their parents’ secrets. Consumer Watchdog hopes the video will inspire viewers to pressure Congress to make a ‘Do Not Track Me’ list, similar to the existing ‘Do Not Call List.’

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Don’t be fooled by the men taking solo vacation pictures and eating alone at the Japanese resort town of Atami. These guys may look lonely as they sit and poke at their video game devices, but love is in the air. In a promotion that ended yesterday, Atami teamed up with Konami, the manufacturer of the dating video game LovePlus+, to offer a place for players and their virtual girlfriends to get away.

The game, available on Nintendo’s handheld DS, allows players to win their girlfriend’s virtual heart by completing homework, working out, texting, kissing (using a stylus to touch the girl’s face), and calling (via the system’s built-in microphone). It made headlines last year when one player, SAL9000, decided to marry his virtual girl Nene Anegasaki (see video above, via Boing Boing).

Play the dating game just right and you win a virtual getaway to Atami. The recent promotion allowed players to visit the sites they’d seen in the game in real life, though with a little plus–their girlfriends’ faces plastered on everything from banners to fish cakes.

Atsurou Ohno, managing director of Atami’s Hotel Ohnoya, told the The Wall Street Journal in a video interview that Atami tried to create a real experience for the some 1,500 “couples” who flocked to the town.

“We place two of everything in the rooms, even if there is only one person.”

Some of the guests paid up to $500 for a night in Atami hotel rooms–which, we also note from the WSJ video, had two separate beds.

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Robots tend to do things a little differently. Though folding rectangular towels was a breeze for the Willow Garage’s PR2 programmable robot, UC Berkeley researchers had a bit more trouble coaxing it to match socks. A video (below) of their unconventional technique won a $10,000 prize from Willow Garage.

The trickiness comes from getting the sock right side out. The researchers decided to use a dowel, making otherwise clean laundry seem, well, a little dirty.

[via PopSci]

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Instead of going to the doctor’s office for simple health tests, some Japanese can now go to the bathroom. The “Intelligence Toilet” can measure blood pressure, body temperature, weight, and urine sugar levels, all while you… well.

The toilet is the latest in a family of smart loos called “washlets.” Other toilets in manufacturer Toto‘s fleet feature water jets for cleaning, warmers for comfort, driers for after the water jet, and “otohime” or “princess of sound” speakers for drowning out any unpleasant user noises.

The toilets also have automatically opening and closing lids, resetting after every use to keep his and her bathrooms in bliss and to help young children or elderly people who may have trouble reaching or bending down. In Japan, the toilets run for around 400,000 yen, about $5,000.

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A message from the Victorians: “I 1 der if you got that 1 I wrote 2U B4.” Helz ya, 1800s Brit10! We got it. Though they didn’t have cellphones or their 160-character limits, phrases like this one show nineteenth century English writers weren’t above an occasional stylistic shortcut.

The line comes from the poem “Essay to Miss Catharine Jay,” part of Charles Carroll Bombaugh’s 1867 Gleanings From the Harvest-Fields of Literature. The poem will appear in a forthcoming exhibit at The British Library as an example of “emblematic poetry.”

As Discovery News reports, such shortcuts appeared even before the Victorians; for example, the phrase IOU (for I owe you) originated in 1618. Txtese abbreviations appeared in literature from both sides of the Atlantic, with Americans also writing to Miss Catharine Jay, or Miss K T J.

Perhaps the proto-texts teach an important lesson: Lopping off word parts doesn’t mean you don’t have class. Another excerpt meant for Miss Catharine Jay:

But friends and foes alike D K,
As U may plainly C,
In every funeral R A,
Or Uncle’s L E G.

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Image: Wikimedia

How do you white balance your camera? Aim it at a piece of paper. How do you white balance an Earth-monitoring satellite? Aim it at a Turkish salt lake.

At least that’s the hope of scientists headed to southern Turkey to study a salt lake named Tuz Gölü (Turkish for “salt lake,” natch) later this month. During July and August, most of Lake Tuz evaporates into reflective white salt, making it perfect for satellite-calibration, the Committee on Earth Observation Satellites said, recently endorsing the spot as one of eight calibration sites.

Just as white balancing your camera is important to keep your friends from looking jaundiced, calibrating satellites makes sure that they can take accurate climate and coastal degradation measurements.

As Popular Science reports, the team led by the UK National Physical Laboratory will spend nine days at lake Tuz measuring the reflectance of test sites from a variety of angles. From above, several satellites will simultaneously take recordings of the white lake for comparison. The NPL hopes this will be the first step for an automated system “LandNET” using all eight sites.

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Image: NASA

One of the requirements for flying in a spaceship used to be near-perfect vision. When NASA relaxed its vision standards (to 20/200 or better uncorrected, correctable to 20/20 each eye for a mission specialist) they in turn created a new requirement–for near-perfect astronaut eyeglasses.

TruFocals (made by Zoom Focus Eyewear, LLC) might improve current astronaut spectacles by allowing space-travelers to focus mid-float on both near and far objects, whether they’re dealing with experiments or cooling loop warning indicators. As Scientific American reports, the glasses are currently undergoing NASA evaluation for space readiness–tests that include burning. The lenses will correct the condition known as presbyopia, in which aging people’s eyes lose focusing ability, making it difficult to see near objects. That’s the condition that causes people with good eyes to pick up reading glasses, and those with glasses to turn to bifocals.

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They only wanted to show their disapproval. Friends eager to counterbalance all those Facebook “Likes” rushed to “Download the official DISLIKE button now” as received in a message. But, sadly, no dislike button was in store. Instead, installing the application provided users with several surveys and left their profiles vulnerable to spammer control. If there was ever a time to unleash their Dislike, this was it.

Yet, as Graham Cluley of the security firm Sophos told the BBC–mentioning a similar ploy that offered Facebookers the chance to see an anaconda vomiting up a hippo–such “survey scam” applications are nothing new:

“Anyone can write a Facebook app–these scams are constantly springing up.”

Perhaps Facebook should take note: Users were willing to sacrifice their security for the mere power to express negative feedback. Or, at least, the mere power to express negative feedback without typing.

Perhaps a compromise is in order? Unfortunately, a new Meh button application seems to need some tweaking. As in the Atlantic Wire:

Turns out, every time you click the “meh” button it registers your vote—allowing an individual user to “meh” something 10,000 times or more. That’s a lot of indifference.

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Image: Facebook

That grease trail you’ve smeared on your smart phone’s touchscreen could give away more than your lightsaber skills or virtual girlfriend’s whims: Would-be smudge attackers, a recent paper argues, could follow your finger oils as a clue to your passcode.

In the paper “Smudge Attacks on Smartphone Touchscreens,” which we first saw on Gizmodo, a team in the computer science department at the University of Pennsylvania tried to pick out grease patterns from Android phones by photographing the phones and enhancing the patterns with photo-editing software. From the paper’s introduction:

“We believe smudge attacks are a threat for three reasons. First, smudges are surprisingly persistent in time. Second, it is surprisingly difficult to incidentally obscure smudges through wiping or pocketing the device. Third and finally, collecting and analyzing oil residue smudges can be done with readily-available equipment such as a camera and a computer.”

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Those subscribing to the iPad version of Playboy really will be reading it for the articles: The magazine has announced that it will forgo the naked women photos to conform to Apple’s stance against all apps deemed (pdf) obscene and pornographic.

The Telegraph reports that a “tasteful headshot” will greet iPad readers in place of the full glory of a playmate of the month, for example. Covering up (or cropping out) the skin will keep Playboy from that ever-growing list of app rejects, which formerly included one from a Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist.

Another app that escaped the banned list is My Virtual Girlfriend, which we found on the blog Neatorama. The game allows players to advance twenty “relationship levels” and apparently has a heart meter that you fill by engaging in activities like virtual hand-holding and virtual kissing. You can also thrill your virtual material girl by buying her shoes–she sounds like a real catch.

Though the Virtual Girlfriend disclaimer warns that the company is not responsible for any resulting marriages, we fear for anyone to whom that applies.

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Image: My Virtual Girlfriend