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The Blind Woman Developing Tech for the Good of Others

posted by mrpg on Saturday December 08 2018, @07:02AM   Printer-friendly
from the kono-hoshi-no-kibou-no-kakera dept.

Phoenix666 writes:

BBC:

[...] Dr Asakawa is behind early digital Braille innovations and created the world's first practical web-to-speech browser. Those browsers are commonplace these days, but 20 years ago, she gave blind internet users in Japan access to more information than they'd ever had before.

Now she and other technologists are looking to use AI to create tools for visually impaired people.

For example, Dr Asakawa has developed NavCog, a voice-controlled smartphone app that helps blind people navigate complicated indoor locations.

Low-energy Bluetooth beacons are installed roughly every 10m (33ft) to create an indoor map. Sampling data is collected from those beacons to build "fingerprints" of a specific location.

Daredevil should soon be available to help Dr Asakawa with her work.

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  • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 08 2018, @09:30PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 08 2018, @09:30PM (#771672)

    Because TBB's use of Private Mode causes it to retain cookies for the length of the session, and neither the built in Firefox tools, nor other cookie purge tools can look at and delete the private session cookies. When I filed a bug report on this on the torproject website it was closed as 'NOTABUG' because you should start a new identity each time you view a website with cookies. I didn't bother filing a bugreport with Mozilla, but if someone else wants to test this behavior and report it for me, they are welcome to. It should show up on any site that uses cookies after either deleting cookies via built in Firefox cookie purges, or third party tools like the uMatrix periodic cookie flush.

    Suffice it to say you are actually safer with non-Private mode and the right set of plugs than with TBB and private mode thanks to both the false sense of anonymity and the opaque retention of identifiable data in places you and your addons can't view, access, or delete.

    Be warned, and pass this information along. People using TBB need to be well aware of it.

    Starting Score:    0  points
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       Informative=1, Total=1
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  • (Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Sunday December 09 2018, @11:44AM

    by MichaelDavidCrawford (2339) Subscriber Badge <mdcrawford@gmail.com> on Sunday December 09 2018, @11:44AM (#771880) Homepage Journal

    What is most disturbing is that YouTube always plays the same set of videos in TBB, in Safari with its history pre-cleared as well as in Chrome, in which I only rarely delete my history.

    I figure I _might_ defeat YouTube's TBB SuperCookie by starting with a song that while at one time a favorite, has not been so for a number of years.

    --
    Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]