In a choice between thinking that a vending machine company put facial recognition technology into a vending machine or prankster students hacked the device to display a suspicious error message I would suspect the latter is the case.

However, watching the video and looking at the brochures on the manufacturer’s website, it looks like the manufacturer did indeed put rudimentary facial recognition in so they could gather demographic information on their customers like gender and approximate age for marketing purposes. Maybe the hole was damaged by curious students?

It’s been a long time since I had cable but at the time I bought a modem because I could get a really good one and not paying the cable company’s rental fee for a modem, it paid for itself in about a year or so. I seem to remember that the cable company still took control of updating firmware and such on it, though, to maintain compatibility. So I don’t know if it buys you much from a security standpoint, but that’s also an area where I have no expertise.

This looks interesting; is anyone here using it?

Years ago when my brother lived with me he started ripping DVDs and Blu-rays and running a Plex server that pulled them from a NAS. It worked great on the Xbox in the house. When I got married and he moved out it didn’t work as well, but that probably had more to do with his network connection than anything else. Haven’t even tried in years though.