Anti-Eavesdropping Just Became Kinky

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)

Researchers Grow Human Brains in a Lab

A team at the Institute of Molecular Biotechnology of the Austrian Academy of Sciences has succeeded in growing miniature human brains...
The team, led by Dr. Jürgen Knoblich, started by analyzing human stem cells – a cell type that has the capacity to change into any other type of cell found in the body. Specifically, the scientists were interested in discovering what growth conditions are required for such cells to differentiate into various types of brain tissue cells.

Once those conditions had been identified, stem cells were used to create neuroectoderm, a layer of cells which is the “starting material” from which all components of the nervous system (including the brain) are derived...

After spending 15 to 20 days in the reactor, the neuroectoderm fragments had formed into a piece of continuous brain tissue, known as a cerebral organoid. (more)

FutureWatch: Eavesdropping via Mind Reading

We continue to keep tabs on the next really big thing in eavesdropping - mind reading. Still way off in the future, advances are being made every year.  

Here is the latest...

By analyzing MRI images of the brain with an elegant mathematical model, it is possible to reconstruct thoughts more accurately than ever before. In this way, researchers from Radboud University Nijmegen have succeeded in determining which letter a test subject was looking at. The journal Neuroimage has accepted the article, which will be published soon. A preliminary version of the article can be read online.

‘In our further research we will be working with a more powerful MRI scanner,' explains Sanne Schoenmakers, who is working on a thesis about decoding thoughts. ‘Due to the higher resolution of the scanner, we hope to be able to link the model to more detailed images. We are currently linking images of letters to 1200 voxels in the brain; with the more powerful scanner we will link images of faces to 15,000 voxels.'  (more)

... thus, giving new meaning to a bright idea!

Optogenetics is the process by which genetically-programmed neurons or other cells can be activated by subjecting them to light. Among other things, the technology helps scientists understand how the brain works, which could in turn lead to new treatments for brain disorders.

Presently, fiber optic cables must be wired into the brains of test animals in order to deliver light to the desired regions. That may be about to change, however, as scientists have created tiny LEDs that can be injected into the brain.

The LEDs were developed by a team led by Prof. John A. Rogers from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and Prof. Michael R. Bruchas from Washington University. The lights themselves can be as small as single cells and are printed onto the end of a flexible plastic ribbon that’s thinner than a human hair. Using a micro-injection needle, they can be injected precisely and deeply into the brain, with a minimum of disturbance to the brain tissue. (more)

FutureWatch - Mico-sensors to allow downloading of consciousness - knowledge, visuals, ideas, etc..

Scientific Breakthrough Gives Paranoids Another Thing to Worry About

Click to enlarge.

A tiny ear-powered device extracts energy from an ear and transmits information wirelessly to a nearby radio. (more)

Interesting: Radar Tracks Your Sleep, Then Wakes You Up

via Robert E. Calem, techlicious.com
...there's a new alarm clock available that was designed to help you avoid sleep inertia by monitoring your sleep cycles—without a wearable sensor—and waking you up only when you're sleeping most lightly. It's called the Renew SleepClock by Gear4 ($199.95 on gear4.com) and combines a motion sensing iOS-device docking station-clock radio with a dedicated app that both wakes you and tracks your sleep habits over time. 

The hardware transmits two channels of 10GHz radio frequency signals in a 45-degree beam. These signals bounce off your body and are received back at the device by a sensor, which then processes them and passes the data to the app. 

The app uses the data to discern your breathing pattern and monitor your movements. Based on these interpretations, the app knows when you've fallen asleep, how long you've slept, when you're sleeping lightly or deeply, and when your sleep has been interrupted (for example, when you get out of bed for a 2 AM bathroom break). 

In the morning, the app uses all the captured data to determine the best time to wake you up within a one-hour time slot that you've preset in one of two built-in alarms. (more)

Psychopath Chat

To investigate whether there are actually “psychopathic tendencies” in the way a person talks, researchers at Cornell University compared stories told by 14 imprisoned psychopathic male murderers with those of 38 convicted murderers who were not diagnosed as psychopathic. 

Each subject was asked to describe his crime in detail; the stories were taped, transcribed and subjected to computer analysis.

The analysis showed that psychopaths are more likely than other criminals to use words that reveal a great degree of selfishness, detachment from their crimes and emotional flatness, the study found. These include conjunctions like “because,” “since” or “so that,” to imply that the crime “had to be done” to obtain a particular goal. 

Here are a few other notable differences:

• Psychopaths used twice as many words relating to physical needs, such as food, sex or money, while non-psychopaths used more words about social needs, including family, religion and spirituality.
• They were also more likely to use the past tense, suggesting a detachment from their crimes.
• They tended to be less fluent in their speech, using more “ums” and “uhs.” The exact reason for this is not clear, but the researchers speculate that the psychopath is trying harder to make a positive impression and needs to use more mental effort to frame the story. (more)

FutureWatch: Mindreading - Advances another step

Opening up the possibility that a sort of mind-reading might one day be possible, scientists say that through a kind of surgical wiretapping they were able to translate brain electrical signals back into single words overheard by patients, and to do it with 89 percent accuracy.

“We’re trying to figure out how the brain decodes acoustics into words,” says study senior author Bob Knight of the University of California-Berkeley...

“The real advance is that it shows we are closing in on the code that the brain uses to give meanings to words,” says New York University neuroscientist David Poeppel. (more) 

Meanwhile, at the Murray Associates, Countermeasures Compound lab... work is beginning on a new brain eavesdropping detection and prevention service.

One More Step Closer to Mind Eavesdropping

Less spooky than it sounds, but a concept which could be applied to more than just Hello Kitty ears...

(Japanese English from their web site.)

People think that our body has limitation, however just imagine if we have organs that doesn’t exist, moreover we can control that new body? We created new human’s organs that use brain wave sensor. (more)

---

“Neurowear” has developed a product called “necomimi” which takes brain signals from our emotions and turns them into visible actions rendering them in the form of wiggling cat ears.

Advertising it as a new communication tool that “augments the human body and ability”, the website introduces the product as a fashion item and gadget that uses brainwaves and other biosensors. Designed obviously for the cutesy Japanese market with its cat ear shape (neco and mimi being the words for cat and ear) the ears mimic a cat’s ears as they wiggle and rise with the wearers emotional state, for example rising in anticipation of eating a delicious cookie, or drop down when relaxed. (more)

Ok, stop laughing. Can't you see a version of this being mandated in classrooms so teachers can tell at a glance who's not paying attention? :)

Free CIA / Google App Tells Future

Google and the CIA are both investing in a company that monitors the web in real time.

The company is called Recorded Future, and it scours tens of thousands of websites, blogs and Twitter accounts to find the relationships between people, organizations, actions and incidents — both present and still-to-come. In a white paper, the company says its temporal analytics engine "goes beyond search" by "looking at the 'invisible links' between documents that talk about the same, or related, entities and events."

The idea is to figure out for each incident who was involved, where it happened and when it might go down. Recorded Future then plots that chatter, showing online "momentum" for any given event.

"The cool thing is, you can actually predict the curve, in many cases," says company CEO Christopher Ahlberg, a former Swedish Army Ranger with a PhD in computer science. (more) 

Want to see the future? Recorded Future will let you sign up for a free account ...but they already knew you would.

Inception - An Industrial Espionage Dream Job

Inception opens July 16th in theaters and IMAX

Dom Cobb is a skilled thief, the absolute best in the dangerous art of extraction, stealing valuable secrets from deep within the subconscious during the dream state, when the mind is at its most vulnerable. Cobb's rare ability has made him a coveted player in this treacherous new world of corporate espionage... (more) (more)

As we've been saying all along, the final frontier of eavesdropping is mind reading. Think of the movie Inception the same way you think of _this one_ ...just with a shorter flash to bang.

The Future of TSCM - Mind Reading

... Why is it so hard to know other people's minds?
Or, better yet, why is it so easy?

MIT neuroscientist Rebecca Saxe is trying to reconcile these two questions. She is studying the part of our brain called the right temporoprietal junction that is almost entirely specialized to think about and judge other people's thoughts.

Between age 3 and 5 children learn that people can have false beliefs, but only by age 7 have they developed the ability to apply moral judgments to other people's thoughts. It takes a while for the TPJ to develop, but by adulthood it lights up brightly in brain scanners when moral judgments run hot.

But Saxe's lab, using a machine called a transcranial magnetic stimulator, which applies an electromagnetic pulse to a targeted point in the brain, can temporarily disable the function in the TPJ and change what people think about someone else's actions.

Think of the possibilities for trial lawyers, spymasters and advertisers. The Pentagon has called Saxe, but she is not taking its calls. (more)

FutureWatch - Eavesdropping's Future, Mindreading

Researchers at ATR Computational Neuroscience Laboratories in Kyoto, Japan, say they've developed new analysis technology that can reconstruct the images inside a person's brain and display them on a computer screen, according to Pink Tentacle, an English-language blog that covers news from Japan. Pink Tentacle picked up the info from Japan's Chunichi Shimbun daily newspaper...

Although the technology is still in the early phases of development, it paves the way for applications that until now have only been the stuff of science fiction, such as reading minds for interrogation purposes, eavesdropping on dreams as people snooze... And researchers at the University of Sheffield in England believe that fMRI is more useful than polygraphs, which have been shown to have false positives and negatives, in determining whether someone is lying. (more)

The Future of Eavesdropping – Mind Reading

A Japanese research team has revealed it had created a technology that could eventually display on a computer screen what people have on their minds, such as dreams.

Researchers at the ATR Computational Neuroscience Laboratories succeeded in processing and displaying images directly from the human brain, they said in a study unveiled ahead of publication in the US magazine Neuron.

While the team for now has managed to reproduce only simple images from the brain, they said the technology could eventually be used to figure out dreams and other secrets inside people's minds. (more)

Real Thought Police at a Real University. Whowouldhavethunkitwouldreallyhappen?

via the National Post...
Canada - Just who is Queen's University trying to kid? The school may call its new political-correctness cops "facilitators." It may insist they will not be eavesdropping on private conservations, "preaching" to students they overhear using "offending terms," serving as "disciplinarians" or being judgmental. But administrators are simply deluding themselves with euphemisms if they swallow their own tripe.

The half-dozen speech monitors employed by Queen's dean of student affairs to wander campus and listen for mentions of racist, sexist, homophobic or other "non-inclusive" language, are nothing more than thought police.

The simple act of determining what terms are and are not "offending" is judgmental. Singling students out for "a respectful and educational dialogue" about how their "derogatory terminology" might lead to "marginalization or exclusion" of identifiable groups is the epitome of judgmentalism. Intruding on students' chats with dorm mates or interrupting their joke telling in the cafeteria is the very definition of eavesdropping, even if Queen's wants to insist it is not. (more)

From Queen's University website...
"Queen's is one of Canada's leading universities with an international reputation for scholarship, social purpose, spirit and diversity."

Spy gear used to cheat immigration test

UK - Two men have been jailed after using hi-tech hidden cameras, transmitters and surveillance gadgets to tell candidates sitting the exams the right answers.

The Life in the UK test is the last step towards earning citizenship and those who pass are then entitled to apply for a British passport.

But there are fears unsuitable candidates may have earned the right to settle here thanks to a highly sophisticated scam to cheat the questions.

Participants, who did not understand English, went in to a test centre in Wimbledon library, south west London, armed with a hidden shirt buttonhole camera, microphone and earpiece. In a scam akin to a scene in a James Bond movie, two fraudsters sat outside in BMW car packed with hi-tech equipment and a laptop and directed them to tick the right answers via the secret link.

When police first came across the pair they thought they were running a cashpoint fraud, skimming the cards of unsuspecting users.

But it emerged they were helping Chinese nationals undertake the multiple choice immigration tests in the nearby building. (more)

FutureWatch - Fingerprint 'developer' can read a letter from its envelope

UK scientists have discovered a fingerprint' “developer' which can highlight invisible prints on almost any surface – and read the text of a letter just from the envelope it was sent in.

Paul Kelly and colleagues at Loughborough University found that a disulfur dinitride (S2N2) polymer turned exposed fingerprints brown, as the polymer reaction was initiated from the near-undetectable remaining residues. Traces of inkjet printer ink can also initiate the polymer.

The detection limit is so low that details of a printed letter previously in an envelope could be read off the inside of the envelope after being exposed to S2N2. (more)

R ur kiz speken nkod? Du u fee eel <- awt?

Lingo2word is devoted to demistifying the new Internet shorthand language of Text messages, Chat rooms and Emails.
• Online Searchable Shorthand Dictionary.
• Translate to txtmsg lingo.
• Translate from Lingo to plain English.
• Emoticons.
• Txting words.
• Acronyms.
• And a searchable Text Message collection.

Industrial Espionage, Reverse Engineering or Just A Crappy Cheap Knockoff? You decide.

Over the years the Security Scrapbook has brought several blatant examples of industrial espionage to your attention. Take, for example, the...
• Space Shuttle (USA, Russia)
• iPhone
• Nokia phones
• Pocket cameras (pick any of them)
• Twin Magazine Covers

And remember?
• 9/30/02 - Nokia, the world's largest cell phone maker, on Thursday unveiled its first "third-generation" handset, which has a camera so users can view and edit video clips and send them to another phone or an e-mail address. ... Minutes after Nokia's announcement Thursday, rival manufacturer Motorola unveiled new details about its own equivalent handset.

• "The World's Smallest Camcorder." Sony DCR-IP1 MICROMV released. Tuesday, September 02 @ 11:15:00 PDT. Panasonic SV-AV100 camcorder debuted. Friday, September 05 @ 15:30:00 PDT

• 12/2/01 - Two major rivals announce look-alike products. Same size ad, same magazine - 4 pages away from each other - products offered the same benefits... "drug and explosive" detection, in one instrument.

What is the difference between espionage and a rip-off? Industrial espionage products hit the market at approximately the same time. There is a time-lag with reverse engineering and knockoffs.

See more! See more! See more!
Visit The Plagiarius Competitions and the Museum Plagiarius.

Yawn, and your laptop goes to sleep

What if you could simply think about an action, and the computer would respond?

Emotiv is currently fine-tuning a mind-reading headset called the Epoc, which should ship late this year. The $299 device purports to eavesdrop on your thoughts and translate them into computer instructions, so you can play a game or arrange photos without using your hands or speaking words.

Epoc "neuroheadset" has 16 sensors embedded in its crossbars that communicate wirelessly with your PC. There are no messy smears or tangles of wires. But in order to get correct readings, the sensors must make just the right contact with your scalp, which can take a fair amount of fiddling. And once the headset is in place, you have to be careful not to move around too much or the sensors will slip, preventing the computer from getting a clear signal. (more)
...and you were self-conscious about wearing your Bluetooth earpiece.
Seriously, you are witnessing the future of eavesdropping. Near-term... physical motion replacement, a boon to the seriously handicapped. Mid-term... Doors that auto-lock if the person approaching is of the wrong frame of mind. Far-term... TiVO your life whenever you want. I can't wait.