DescriptionThis week, facial recognition goes to school, Xbox goes to the competition, and iTunes goes out to pasture.ParticipantsScott ErtzHostScott is a developer who has worked on projects of varying sizes, including all of the PLuGHiTz Corporation properties. He is also known in the gaming world for his time supporting the DDR community, through DDRLover and hosting tournaments throughout the Tampa Bar Area. Currently, when he is not working on software projects or hosting F5 Live: Refreshing Technology, Scott can often be found returning to his high school days working with the Foundation for Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology (FIRST), mentoring teams and judging engineering notebooks at competitions. He has also helped found a student software learning group, the ASCII Warriors.Avram PiltchHostAvram's been in love with PCs since he played original Castle Wolfenstein on an Apple II+. Before joining Tom's Hardware, for 10 years, he served as Online Editorial Director for sister sites Tom's Guide and Laptop Mag, where he programmed the CMS and many of the benchmarks. When he's not editing, writing or stumbling around trade show halls, you'll find him building Arduino robots with his son and watching every single superhero show on the CW.OpeningPowered by TeknoAXENifty GiftiesPowered by Microsoft StoreNew York school district is embracing facial recognition technologyOver the past few months, the public sentiment about facial recognition has shifted from neutral to against. This has been even more prominent in the public sector, as the public and employees alike have asked companies like Amazon to discontinue sales of their technology to the government. Despite these trends against trust in the government using facial recognition technology, Lockport City School District in New York has begun implementing facial recognition in their schools.read full articlePiltch Point with Avram PiltchPowered by Newegg.comExtra LifePowered by RazerMicrosoft commits itself to PC gaming with Steam and Game PassIt's no secret that Microsoft's relationship with PC gaming has been questionable over the years. More than once, the company has brought about a way for gamers to interact with their games and one another, only to see the closure of the platform. The Games for Windows Live platform was closed in 2013, to be replaced by Xbox for Windows, which Phil Spencer promised would not go the same way.read full articleNews From the TubesPowered by RiffTraxWikipedia's double-edged sword: The North Face uses it for advertisingIt was only a matter of time before Wikipedia's popularity and crowdsourced content encouraged a large company to use the platform for advertising. While companies have used the platform to increase their own Wikipedia page's visibility, The North Face took a unique approach to the goal. Rather than worrying about their own ranking, they used Wikipedia's own ranking on Google Image Search to place their brand all over the world.read full article* DRM Not IncludedPowered by Amazon PrimeDing dong, the witch is dead: iTunes is being replaced... sort ofThough theoretically a successful platform, iTunes has always been a hated part of the Apple ecosystem. It was introduced in 2001 as the legal alternative to Napster - a way to purchase and listen to digital music. It was the companion product to the first iPod devices, which were limited in capabilities and availability. As the platform grew, so did the capabilities of iTunes. Over time, they introduced podcasts to the platform, then videos. With the release of the iPhone, the company decided to incorporate all of the phone's capabilities into the same application. This has made it a very large, bloated piece of software that requires constant updates to support unrelated products and services.read full articleClosingPowered by Tech Podcast Network