“Many of Britain’s most eminent medical scientists believe the birth of a cloned baby is inevitable despite
society’s current aversion to the idea.

More than half of a panel of 32 scientists surveyed by The Independent said “reproductive cloning” would be attempted within 20 years if the technical and safety issues could be overcome.”

“Mapping the Web is a huge field that falls into two main pieces: maps that show us something interesting about the Web, and maps that help us navigate the Web. These two need not be essentially connected.”

“There will be many solutions to this problem, and which ones we like will have everything to do with our personal way of thinking and the type of problem we’re trying to solve at the moment. But navigable maps of Web sites clustered by relevancy to our interests are of unique important to the Web because the Web space is itself organized not by uniform units of distance but by *interest* itself. Distance, on the Web, is measured by irrelevance. Navigable maps capture this essential fact of our new world, and thus not only map Web distance but conquer it.”

“The Theme Builder is a graphical tool made to simplify the creation of themes for Mozilla. This beta version of the tool gives users the ability to apply new graphic designs to the browser without changing its functionality. Individuals can use the tool to create their own personal themes while companies can “brand” the browser with their company colors and logo.”

“The general idea is pretty simple. We take the input audio. We condition it (adjust it to a known sampling rate and volume.) We pass it through the psychoacoustic model (it’s about a notch more complicated than what you’d see in a mp3 encoder, which ain’t saying much. This is all stuff that was mostly hashed out decades ago.) This model effectively strips the parts of the sound you can’t hear — the desired result being that even if the audio has been compressed or manipulated subaudibly, the
result is still the same. Okay, so the net result of all of this is a vector that covers a very small segment (fraction of a second) of audio. We stack several of these vectors (possibly separated in time by a bit) side-by-side to get a big vector. Then we do completely boring and standard and well-understood statistical and pattern-matching stuff on the vector to make it smaller and more palatable for the server — think of it as lossy compression. Then it goes off to the server. The server is about equal in
complexity to a text search engine. (I say this fully realizing that I have only a vague impression how Google works. It’s certainly a lot more complicated than the obvious hash-table-of-sorted-lists stuff.) It finds the database vector that’s the best match in a fairly boring but efficient way. (No, it does not involve searching through all tracks one by one, no more than Altavista searches through all web pages one by one every time you want to find some porn.) Call the result a submatch. Back at the client, the whole process is repeated a bunch more times, generating a stream of submatches (“Radiohead offset 0.. Radiohead offset 1024 or 16384.. Slashdot’s Gr34test Hits 5262324.. Radiohead offset 3072..”) from the input audio stream. Then, the client looks at the submatches and tries to figure out what the input audio was and where the song boundaries are (did somebody really stick in a sample from Slashdot’s Gr34test Hits, or was that just an unlucky match?)

See? Not magic. It’s a challenging problem, but not an impossible problem. The reason that this doesn’t exist right now is not that generations of scientists have tried and failed, but rather that people didn’t care too much until lately and nobody’s gotten off their ass and done anything about it yet. I like big but approachable problems, which is one of the reasons I’m excited about this.

FOR ALL OF YOU WHO FELL ASLEEP THROUGH THAT: YOU CANNOT ADD AN INAUDIBLE TONE TO THE MUSIC AND BREAK TUNEPRINT. THE FINGERPRINT IS BASED ON THE LARGE-SCALE PSYCHOACOUSTIC FEATURES OF THE MUSIC. IF MP3 ENCODERS CAN DO IT, SO CAN WE. Maybe not perfectly, but enough to have a fighting chance. THAT’S THE WHOLE POINT HERE. ”

“Tuneprint is an audio fingerprinting algorithm. It takes the unique ‘fingerprint’ of a sound clip, which can then be compared to a fingerprint database to get more information about the clip, like title and artist, lyrics, URLs, related music, copyright status, or almost anything else. The fingerprint doesn’t change even if the sound is compressed, converted to a different file format, broadcast over the radio, and so on.

Artists: You can use it to stop people from putting their name on your band’s mp3’s and distributing them as their own, or you can use it to embed lyrics, links to your homepage, and stupid banner ads in mp3’s.

Haxxors: You can use it to stop warez kiddies from uploading copyrighted mp3’s to your webserver, or you can use it to build the ultimate mp3 search engine.

Terrorists: You can use it as the foundation of an international fascist copy protection enforcement network, or you can use it to automatically rip, separate, categorize, and save to disk all songs played on all radio stations everywhere!!”