This may well mark the strangest newsy bit I’ve ever brought your way, folks, and ESPECIALLY about a product!  I thought the lensless camera was weird, or the infrared camera that helped fight fires, but this takes the cake.

Allegations are being made, and we’ve got the video to show it, that HP webcams, and their face-following technology, won’t follow the faces of black people, but will follow the faces of white people just fine.

It’s kind of a stretch to call an inanimate object, which clearly has no emotional preferences in any race, racist, but the technology issue is a bit of a puzzler, until you hear from the crew out at HP who had this to say:

“The technology we use is built on standard algorithms that measure the difference in intensity of contrast between the eyes and the upper cheek and nose,” Welch explains. “We believe that the camera might have difficulty ’seeing’ contrast in conditions where there is insufficient foreground lighting.”

So it’s not that they hate black people, or irrationally prefer white people, but rather that they don’t recognize black people’s faces AS FACES.  This is of course a fundamentally different thing, but it still makes for great blogging.