Wake up, Neo: Microsoft mulls using your brain waves or body heat to mine crypto-currency while viewing ads A Microsoft US patent application published last month describes a way to use body activity like brain waves as proof-of-work in a cryptocurrency system. One of the ways the Windows giant's inventors imagine using the technology is to award cryptocurrency when people's brain waves indicate they've viewed an ad. With a …
That is comparable with anything Feacebook or Gargle can come up with.
In the unlikely event that such technology could become real any time soon, there are too many possibilities to abuse it.
A pity these clever researchers can't put their skills to something more beneficial to mankind than an advertiser's stick and carrot.
In a sense, the technology is already here...
Any of the methods of measurement mentioned in the article , including the brainwaves, are established, if sometimes experimental, technology and have been demonstrated to work. Quite a lot of them actually are used in practical applications and research aimed at the Betterment of Mankind ( and as always, military applications..) . The aim there is usually control/interface, but something has to be measured to be used as an input...
Allowing for maturing of currently experimental/developing control tech, which we will see if this whole AR/VR thing really does become practical one day, and before that in gaming consoles ( of which quite a bit is there already..) it's simply like tracking the mouse cursor and registering clicks. The same kind of data.. Has a very legitimate purpose for the system, can very much be abused...
Which is why I wondered why they'd bother to patent this at all.. Until I realised we're dealing with the USPTO here.. The one allowing for Rounded Corners, and the addition of "on a mobile device" to well-established tech, and....
Do they really think one can be made to fit into anything Joe Punters going to buy?
If so, they should give theoretical physicists their research and get to work on anti gravity & a functioning warp drive because they've obviously got electro-magnetism licked!
8^)
If you pay me 100* the cost of Elecricity used in advance.
Otherwise they can take a running jump into a Volcano.
MS are getting really desparate for ideas these days. Strange that it usually revolves around slurping our lives or body heat or EEG data.
I am so gland that I stopped paying them any money in 2012.
Almost all of Microsoft's best ideas have always been someone else's ideas first. MS-DOS was not a Microsoft invention; the GUI was not a Microsoft invention; the word processor was not a Microsoft invention; the internet search engine was not a Microsoft idea. When Microsoft invents things, we get ideas like the ribbon -- something that is now everywhere when it should be nowhere. I would say the best thing Microsoft invented was the start menu, and even then the ignoramuses couldn't leave well enough alone and thus ruined something that was as close to perfect as you can humanely get in Windows 7.
One of the ways the Windows giant's inventors imagine using the technology is to award cryptocurrency when people's brain waves indicate they've viewed an ad.
Surely there are simpler methods of detecting anger than this. If humans can do it visually without even thinking about it without looking at electroencephalograms, is it really that hard? Getting people to wear electrodes on their scalp has got to be harder than using the webcam to detect angry expressions on the victim's face.
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