Yesterday I walked from Cambodia into Thailand. On the way out of Cambodia, I was fingerprinted; on the way into Thailand, I was photographed. While I waited for the train to Bangkok I read legendary hacker Jamie Zawinski’s tale of how the powers that be “wanted to mandate that I surveil all of my customers, and turn that information over to the Government without a warrant” in exchange for… → Read More
Last week Wikileaks–remember them?–released a sheaf of documents about the Trapwire security system, which, depending on who you believe, is either a network of cameras being used to spy on everyone everywhere, or an ineffective bust more notable for shady business practices than any successful surveillance.
Is it being used for “monitoring every single person via facial recognition“? → Read More
Wikileaks‘ website is up again after over a week of denial of service attacks, though as of this writing I’m still seeing many errors on the site. On its Twitter account Wikileaks credited CloudFlare, a company that provides a web security service, for helping the organization get its site back online.
Earlier this month Wikileaks resumed publishing e-mails acquired (yes, illegally) by the… → Read More
The government of Syria uses made-in-California technology from BlueCoat Systems to censor the Internet and spy on its pro-democracy activists (who are regularly arrested and tortured, not to mention slaughtered wholesale.) McAfee and Nokia Siemens have done the same in Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. Amesys of France and FinFisher of the UK aided brutal dictators in Egypt and Libya. Sweden’s … → Read More
Your phone might be spying on you. The many cameras you pass every day can recognize your face. Facebook, despite its grudging concessions, still wants you to broadcast your personal life. “Eye in the sky” drones are already watching over borders; next, they’ll patrol the Olympics. It won’t be long before police drones are omnipresent in the skies over every major city, and then every town. → Read More
And so it begins. Carnegie Mellon researchers recently combined Facebook profile pictures and PittPatt‘s facial recognition software to identify supposedly-anonymous pictures from a dating site. Now they’re planning to demo a smartphone app that identifies faces by tapping into cloud-based image databases and recognition software. What’s next?
That’s a question I’ve been thinking about for a… → Read More
When I first wrote about Dropcam I was fairly excited. Why? Because I had been looking for a simple DVR/security system for my home so I could see if the FedEx guy was at the door. Dropcam appeared, disappeared, and then was launched a few months ago. In the interim I started using a Linksys wireless cam and Vitamin D and that has worked extremely well and then Logitech came out with their Alert… → Read More
Vitamin D Video has officially gone out of beta and is now available in 1.0. The basic, single camera version of the software is available now for free while a two camera version costs $49 and unlimited cameras costs $199. The software watches a web-based camera – including many popular models from Linksys and D-Link – and records motion as it it happens, even alerting you when humans step into… → Read More
Advanced Video Communications may have a winner on its hands with the internet-connected LiveLine video camera. Simple setup, a low $10-per-month access fee, and a fairly straightforward user experience make the LiveLine worth a closer look. Early beta testers got a free camera, which AVC claims to be a $299 value. And while the company has sold out of all its initial freebies, it’s… → Read More
Today Olympus Japan announced [JP] the development of a 360° lens and camera prototype. The technology is a world first. The company started working on the prototype last year. The camera covers a vertical angle of 180° now, while the old version only covered 45°. A special kind of glass is used for the lens, which has a diameter of 3cm. The picture on the right shows a conference room shot… → Read More
Y’all have probably heard of FISA, the part of the U.S. Code that deals with electronic surveillance and the like. We care here because good ol’ AT&T more or less bent over backwards for the federal government, letting the NSA eavesdrop on certain telephone calls. (Wikipedia has a tremendous amount of information on the subject.) Well guess what—the House of Representatives… → Read More
Normally, when it comes to personal freedoms, civil liberties, copyright law and the like, Sweden has historically been the progressive vanguard. And their women are statuesque and beautiful (but have self-esteem problems, I hear). But I was saying: Sweden has an excellent record on these things in my recollection (and correct me if I’m wrong), but today they made a Bush-administration-esque… → Read More
Oh, DARPA. Everything you touch turns to semi-gold. Really, though — DARPA is great because they throw money at practically every cool new technology and even if it doesn’t turn into a neat gun, the residual advances from studying it often yield other interesting technologies. These daysthey’re looking into terahertz waves, those knicker-viewers the Brits were into a few months… → Read More
[photopress:whalingrobot.jpg,full,center] What is it with Japan and whaling? There’s been plenty of international consternation over the country’s continued whaling policies but Japan, from what I’ve read, hasn’t been particularly cooperative. That’s where the tech comes in. Australia has deployed an AirBus A319 that’s loaded with specialized imaging and… → Read More
Unless you’re running a small security operation a la Tony Montana, you can probably safely steer clear of this new 1TB enterprise-level hard drive. What makes this noteworthy is that it’s the first 3.5-inch drive to have 1TB spread over only three platters, or 334GB per platter. (Compare that tolast year’s Hitachi’s 7K1000, which uses five platters, or 200GB per platter.)… → Read More
I was browsing Uncrate this morning when I stumbled upon the Spion Orbitor Electronic Listening Device. While it’s nothing new, it managed to call forward a horde of memories that were repressed somewhere between my first kiss (don’t ask) and my freshman P.E. class.(ditto). When I was a kid my uncle gave me one of these things and I used to terrorize the neighborhood with it. Long… → Read More
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