Crave

The 404 flirts with disaster almost every morning, but today we take it to new levels of destruction. That's right, folks, phone-smashing day is UPON US! Watch today's show to see Jeff's old phone rest in pieces. We also find out exactly how the Internet is ruining the nuclear American family and offer tips on teen tattoos.

The shape of things to come

(Credit: Flickr/Caffeineguy)

You're going to have to wait until the second half of the show to see the smashing, but that's OK, because we have a bunch of excellent stories in the news to talk about. First up is Wilson's revelation: the Internet is singlehandedly destroying family as we know it.

All right, we admit that this isn't exactly news, but it offers a great jumping-off point to a conversation about when and how Jeff will have a baby. Just kidding, but Jeff brings up a great point, that Facebook is not only destroying the way we interact with our families, but how we interact with high school classmates. He offers that high school reunions are becoming a thing of the past thanks to Facebook; social networks as a whole make it all too easy to find out where your old chums are living, what they do for money, their marital status, etc...do we even have a reason to go to a reunion anymore? Would you have gone to a high school reunion anyway, or are you still friends with the people you actually care about? Let us know what you think in the comments section.

All right, enough random news talk--let's get to the smashing. Jeff's HTC Mogul has been on the fritz for a while now, giving him a huge headache with constant freezing, hardware malfunctions, lagging OS, etc...so when he finally bought a Palm Pre, we collectively decided to put the HTC out of its misery in what we think is the first-ever on-the-air phone smashing. If all goes well (you'll have to watch to see how it turns out), we might even start a "Smash Club," wherein we'd take obsolete and frustrating tech (read: printers) and essentially "Office Space" it to death. Today was a lot of fun, but Jeff and I are a little worried about Wilson...it looks like had a little too much of a good time with the hammer. Smash it up, psycho!

Ace's smile is a lot like mine, except maybe slightly less dorky.

So many of us use Yahoo 360 these days that it's become almost a mainstay of our daily culture--wait what? You don't use it? You've never even heard of it? OK, I'll be honest, I'd never heard of it either until we recorded this week's podcast. Apparently, it's huge in Vietnam though. Dong talks about how it's shutting down and I wonder why I should care.

If there's anything I'm good at, it's waxing nostalgia about my childhood. And by "good" I mean I can talk about it to no end. Here, I get another chance to do so about old laser disc games and I pass the savings on to you. By savings, I mean white-hot, pure entertainment!

Live in Japan? No. Well this next story may make you wish you did. Dong talks about a university in Japan that's giving away free iPhones to students to keep track of their attendance. Talk about disposable income. These guys know we're still in a global recession don't they? Apparently not.

Also, in this episode, I talk about my very abridged experience with The Sims 3 at the Apple Store; how DRM is turning you and your children into thieving, brain-eating beasts; Dong's salute to the King of Thailand; and some impressive NYC breakers.

Whew! Now that that's out of the way, back to my E3 news conferences!

To subscribe to this podcast, visit us at our main page and click the podcast link on the right. Don't forget to leave us voice mail at 1-800-947-6399 or e-mail us at insidecnetlabs@cnet.com.

Listen now: Download today's podcast

Erica Boeke is on the show today to talk about her new book "GameFace: The Kick-Ass Guide for Women Who Seriously Love Pro Sports." On the show, we talk about women and their fascination with watching hockey players kick each others' ass. And Justin reveals that he has never played baseball, basketball, football, or hell, even played catch in his life.

Ericka Boeke in a 404 sandwich.

(Credit: Matt Fitzgerald/CNET)

We don't talk too much technology today, but we promise: we have a good time with sports and our general ability to turn any seemingly benign topic into a sexual innuendo. After Justin talks about men playing hockey, you'll never think about it in an unerotic way again.

Briefly on the show, we mention the war going on between Jon Stewart, host of Comedy Central's "The Daily Show," and Jim Cramer, host of CNBC's "Mad Money." Jon Stewart pretty much destroys Jim Cramer and the entire financial news media. We've never almost seen a grown man crying on cable television.

As usual, keep the voice mails coming: 1-866-404-CNET (2638). We still haven't found the right motto yet, but boy do we have a good time sorting through them. Or if you just want to leave a message about how Erica Boeke looks like Helen Hunt, that's fine too. Everyone have a great weekend, and you'll hear us next week when Jeff asks the Sleep Doctor Michael Breus how to stop farting in his sleep.

Face recognition technology isn't perfect yet.

That's certainly clear when using the "Faces" feature that is built into the recently released iPhoto '09.

Memo to iPhoto: Former colleague Joris Evers may be a great guy, but he's not the Great One.

(Credit: Ina Fried/CNET News)

Sure, the product does reasonably well at finding your friends and family in your photo collection. Tag a few photos by name and iPhoto comes up with other suggestions, often recognizing photos that are taken years apart and with vastly different looks. Heck, iPhoto even spotted me when I was a different gender.

The science behind face recognition is complex and still evolving. In general, face recognition software looks for predictable patterns--characteristics and proportions that stay constant from one photograph to another, things like the distance between the eyes or from the eyes to the mouth.

Even with things where the science is today, having help--any help--with the tedious task of tagging photos is welcome. And iPhoto can certainly find plenty of matches in your library, even if it won't spot them all.

But the real genius part is how Apple has made the process fun, even when the results aren't perfect.

Early speech recognition was also hit or miss, but it was painful to have to scream at a computer while it constantly misunderstood what you were trying to say. With face recognition, at least as built into iPhoto, the goofs are what make it fun.

The software frequently suggested that my contemporary friends and family were actually my 80-something cousin, my 90-something great aunt, or both. iPhoto also confused Bill Gates with our friend's 3-year-old. And among the suggestions for former CNET colleague Joris Evers was a shot of Wayne Gretzky that I had taken at the Hockey Hall of Fame in Toronto.

Wi-Fi paint? Bust warmer? Face slimming mask? Bandai telling women how to understand men? Why, that's just crazy talk! The Gadgettes are back in the saddle again, and this time, they ain't going anywhere anytime soon.

EPISODE 122

My new toy! The Nespresso Essenza Automatic Espresso and Coffeemakers with Nespresso Aeroccino Milk Frother!

Perfect Pod Maker

Made-in-Japan Wi-Fi blocking paint

British Airways to allow in-flight texting

Computer newbs kick QWERTY to the curb

Thanko’s new plug-in bust warmer… whatever next?

Bandai helps women understand men

Japanese face slimmer will definitely not work as advertised

This is me being enrolled by the Y430's Lenovo Veriface III authentication software to be a legitimate user of the computer.

(Credit: Dong Ngo/CBS Interactive)

Updated at 1:14 p.m. PST Friday, December 5 with comment from Lenovo.

Editor's note: CNET editor and Crave contributor Dong Ngo is spending the month of December in his homeland of Vietnam and plans to file occasional dispatches chronicling his impressions of how technology has permeated the culture there. Click here for more of Dong's stories from abroad.

HANOI, Vietnam--Regardless of what some people seem to think, we Asians do not all look the same. But according to the current face recognition algorithm used in laptops, our faces are all about as flat as a piece of paper.

That's according to BKIS, the Vietnamese Internetwork Security Center that makes the antivirus software I mentioned in a blog post Monday. At a press conference here Tuesday, the company demonstrated vulnerabilities in laptops' face recognition-based authentication mechanisms that let anyone log in to a computer easily with a "special" photo of the legit owner, even at the highest authentication level.

Using your face as the password to log in to a computer--an alternative to the fingerprint method or the traditional username and password--marks a new trend found in laptops from Lenovo, Asus, and Toshiba. As far as I know, only these three vendors currently offer this technology in their laptops. These computers come with a built-in Webcam that's used to capture and analyze faces.

I've been impressed by this new way to log in and have found it to be so much more convenient than the fingerprint reader of my Dell XPS 1330. The finger scanner is a pain when my finger is wet or dirty. Unfortunately, on Tuesday I discovered that this new and exciting technology may not be such an effective security measure.

I participated in a demonstration on a Lenovo Y430, running Windows Vista, and here's how it panned out:

It's all the goods from Crave. Crave's Brian Tong and Bonnie Cha talk about the new BlackBerry Storm, a reversible jacket for all conditions, and a Little Big Planet to play in.

Related stories:

Verizon officially debuts RIM BlackBerry Storm

The next time you stop to watch a big-screen advertisement, remember: it may be watching you back.

TruMedia provides retailers with a combination of iCapture video-capture hardware and Proactive Merchandising (PROM) software to build custom age-targeted advertising content to passers-by. How? Face detection. The software analyzes the video stream and--as we're increasingly seeing with consumer cameras and camcorders--can distinguish faces in a crowd.

It's been able to differentiate between adults and kids for a while, but the new development is the ability to identify seniors as well. As they're a distinct and significant marketing demographic, that's a nice capability. But also kind of a mixed blessing for the targetees; much as you probably don't want to be assaulted with Disney ads as you wander the mall, do you really want to be the reason it goes from Disney to Depends?

(Credit: Crave Asia)

We thought we'd seen it all with face, smile, and even blink detection. But Fujifilm surprised us once more (after face detection 2.0) with the "Couple Timer" in its new FinePix Z200fd.

Apparently, this feature is used in conjunction with face detection to gauge how close the two faces are in the frame. Depending on how intimate you are to the other subject, you can change the setting on the point-and-shoot from one heart to three. When the camera sees that the subjects are close enough, it will snap a shot automatically.

Also a new feature is the Group Timer. Once set, the shooter will wait for all the indicated faces (up to four) to be in the shot before it takes a picture.

Although the FinePix Z200fd is a slim shooter at only 19.8 millimeters thick, it also offers 5x optical zoom, a 10-megapixel sensor, and the usual features like image stabilization and automatic red-eye correction.

(Source: Crave Asia)