What to do if your identity is stolen

(via LifeHacker)
I read an article recently that said identity theft is significantly lower than most reported numbers indicate.  I wish I could find that to link to it.  Perhaps I can find it later and make mention of it.  Regardless, there is an article over at The Consumerist about what you should do if you are one of the folks who does get your identity stolen.

[tags]Identity theft[/tags]

Microsoft works to protect your sensitive ears

(via Engadget)
Microsoft has applied for a patent on technology to auto-censor audio streams.  Here’s the abstract:

An input audio data stream comprising speech is processed by an automatic censoring filter in either a real-time mode, or a batch mode, producing censored speech that has been altered so that undesired words or phrases are either unintelligible or inaudible. The automatic censoring filter employs a lattice comprising either phonemes and/or words derived from phonemes for comparison against corresponding phonemes or words included in undesired speech data. If the probability that a phoneme or word in the input audio data stream matches a corresponding phoneme or word in the undesired speech data is greater than a probability threshold, the input audio data stream is altered so that the undesired word or a phrase comprising a plurality of such words is unintelligible or inaudible. The censored speech can either be stored or made available to an audience in real-time.

[tags]Audio auto-censoring[/tags]