Knightscope officials envision its K5 system playing a role in
community policing...
“Knightscope’s autonomous technology platform is a fusion of
robotics, predictive analytics and collaborative social engagement
utilized to predict and prevent crime,” the company states on its
website. That means that in addition to sophisticated intelligence,
surveillance and reconnaissance capabilities, the K5 is equipped with
analytics enabling it to detect threats to people or property and summon
police.
• Able to scan an area in 270-degree sweeps to photographically map
it.
• Four mid-mounted cameras can scan up to 1,500 license plates per
minute
• 5-foot high, 300-lb.
• Equipped with optical character recognition,
omnidirectional imaging, thermal imaging, microphones, air quality
sensors, ultrasonic and infrared sensors, radar for determining the
range, altitude, direction or speed of objects and lidar technology for
measuring distance to an object. (more)
The European Union is secretly developing a "remote stopping" device to be fitted to all cars that would allow the police to disable vehicles at the flick of a switch from a control room.
Confidential documents from a committee of senior EU police officers, who hold their meetings in secret, have set out a plan entitled "remote stopping vehicles" as part of wider law enforcement surveillance and tracking measures.
"The project will work on a technological solution that can be a 'build in standard' for all cars that enter the European market," said a restricted document.
The devices, which could be in all new cars by the end of the decade, would be activated by a police officer working from a computer screen in a central headquarters. (more)
"Calling all hackers. Calling all hackers..."
Science fiction has long speculated what it would be like to peek inside a person's mind and find out what they are thinking.
Now scientists are one step closer to such technology after forging a new brain monitoring technique that could lead to the development of 'mind-reading' applications.
The breakthrough comes from a Stanford University School of Medicine study that was able to 'eavesdrop' on a person's brain activity as they performed normal functions by utilizing a series of electrodes attached to certain portions of the brain.
The process, called 'intracranial recording', was tested... (more)
The Federal Trade Commission says Atlanta-based furniture renter Aaron's Inc. has agreed to a settlement over allegations that it helped place spyware on computers that secretly monitored consumers by taking webcam pictures of them in their homes.
The FTC said in a Tuesday news release that Aaron's will be prohibited from using spyware that captures screenshots or activates the camera on a consumer's computer, except to provide requested technical support.
Aaron's officials previously blamed individual franchisees for the spyware. But the FTC said Aaron's knowingly played a direct role in the use of the spyware. (more)
What if any object around you could play back sound at the touch of your finger? That is the idea behind Ishin-Denshin, an electronic art project that has just won an honourable mention at the ARS Electronica festival in Linz, Austria.
Ishin-Denshin works by getting the user to whisper a message into a microphone, which encodes the sound and then converts it into an electrical signal which modulates an electrostatic field around the human body. When the charged person touches their finger to another person's earlobe, the field causes it to vibrate slightly, reproducing the sound for the touched person to hear. The name comes from a Japanese expression meaning an unspoken understanding. (more)
Reason 1. - iPhone's fingerprint biometrics defeated, hackers claim.
Just one day after the new fingerprint-scanning Apple iPhone-5s was released to the public, hackers claimed to have defeated the new security mechanism. After their announcement on Saturday night, the Chaos Computer Club posted a video on YouTube which appears to show a user defeating Apple’s new TouchID security by using a replicated fingerprint. Apple has not yet commented on this matter, and, as far as I can tell, no third-party agency has publicly validated the video or the hacker group’s claim. In theory, the techniques used should not have defeated the sub-dermal analysis (analyzing three dimensional unique aspects of fingerprints rather than just two-dimensional surface images) that Apple was supposed to have used in its fingerprint scanner. (more)
Reason 2. - Mythbusters.
Reason 3. - When You're Busted.
Police can't compel you to spill your password, but they can compel you to give up your fingerprint.
"Take this hypothetical example
coined by the Supreme Court: If the police demand that you give them
the key to a lockbox that happens to contain incriminating evidence,
turning over the key wouldn’t be testimonial if it’s just a physical act
that doesn’t reveal anything you know.
However, if the police try to force you to divulge the combination to
a wall safe, your response would reveal the contents of your mind — and
so would implicate the Fifth Amendment. (If you’ve written down the
combination on a piece of paper and the police demand that you give it
to them, that may be a different story.)" (more)
