fuNctioN cReeP

NYPD Officers Testing Google Glass

2014-02-10T02:36:00.002-08:00

Some members of the New York City Police Department are having their official uniforms outfitted with a high-tech addition apparently as reports surface that the NYPD has acquired several pairs of Google Glass.

According to the website Venture Beat, a ranking member of the largest local law enforcement unit in the United States told reporters there that the NYPD is toying with the possibility of using the state-of-the-art gadgets for official police business.

“We signed up, got a few pairs of the Google glasses and we’re trying them out, seeing if they have any value in investigations, mostly for patrol purposes,” the unnamed NYPD officer said.

“We’re looking at them, you know, seeing how they work,” he added.

Venture Beat’s original article ended just about there, but the New York Post reported quickly after on Thursday this week that they have a source who says much of the same.

“A handful of people are testing it out,” that source said the Post, adding that the agency has only recently begun preliminary testing with the devices.

“If it works, it could be very beneficial for a cop on patrol who walks into a building with these glasses on,” the source said. “It would be like the Terminator. You walk past somebody and you get his pedigree info if he’s wanted for a warrant right on your eye screen...”
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New Pentagon Blueprint Sees Bigger Role For Robot Warfare

2013-12-29T04:08:00.000-08:00

(csmonitor)
At a NASCAR racetrack in Miami earlier this month, teams from NASA, Google, and 14 other groups of engineering gurus put cutting-edge robots through some challenging paces.

The aim was to see how well the robots could tackle tasks that may sound simple, but are tricky for nonhumans – including, say, climbing a ladder, unscrewing a hose from a spigot, navigating over rubble, and steering a car.

The contest was dreamed up by the Pentagon’s futuristic experimentation arm, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), and senior defense officials were watching it carefully – well aware that the Pentagon is growing increasingly reliant on robotics.

The Defense Department will become even more reliant on such devices in the decades to come. That’s the conclusion of a new blueprint quietly released by the Pentagon this week, which offers some telling clues about the future of unmanned systems – in other words, drones and robots.

The study, the Unmanned Systems Integrated Roadmap, is meant to provide the Pentagon with a “technological vision” for the next 25 years – a vision that will be “critical to future success” of the US military, according to its authors.

“Over the past decade, the qualities and types of unmanned systems acquired by the military departments have grown, and their capabilities have become integral to warfighter operations,” the study notes. “The size, sophistication, and cost of the unmanned systems portfolio have grown to rival traditional manned systems....”
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Intelligence Community Pushing Facial Recognition Upgrade

2013-11-17T18:53:00.003-08:00

(usatoday)
The U.S. intelligence community is pushing a leap forward in facial recognition software that will enable it to determine better the identity of people through a variety of photographs, video and other images.

Called Janus, the program run by the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Agency (IARPA), "seeks to improve face recognition performance using representations developed from real-world video and images instead of from calibrated and constrained collections. During daily activities, people laugh, smile, frown, yawn and morph their faces into a broad variety of expressions. For each face, these expressions are formed from unique skeletal and musculature features that are similar through one's lifetime. Janus representations will exploit the full morphological dynamics of the face to enable better matching and faster retrieval."

Documents released by IARPA over the weekend show that the Janus program will start in April 2014 and run for four years. During that time, the agency hopes to "radically expand the range of conditions under which automated face recognition can establish identity."

A division of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, IARPA was created in 2006 and modeled after DARPA, the Pentagon's agency that researches technology for future military uses. Another branch of the intelligence community, a venture capital firm run by the Central Intelligence Agency called In-Q-Tel, invests in companies that develop facial recognition software.

Civil liberties groups, such as the American Civil Liberties Union and the Electronic Privacy Information Center, have raised concerns about unchecked uses of facial recognition software....
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Former NSA Chief's Private Talk Gets Tweeted

2013-10-25T05:51:00.001-07:00

(usatoday)
Be careful what you say on the phone in a crowd of people.

Former National Security Agency director Michael Hayden learned that lesson on a train Thursday.

Hayden gave background interviews to reporters -- meaning he was not to be quoted by name -- but a fellow passenger on an Amtrak Acela train tweeted out his comments to the entire cyber-world.

"Former NSA spy boss Michael Hayden on Acela behind me blabbing 'on background as a former senior admin official,' sounds defensive," tweeted Tom Matzzie, founder of the Ethical Electric Company.

Matzzie, upset at criticisms of President Obama by the former George W. Bush administration official, also tweeted: "Michael Hayden on Acela giving reporters disparaging quotes about admin. 'Remember, just refer as former senior admin.'"

Another entry: "Hayden was bragging about rendition and black sites a minute ago."

Friends of Hayden no doubt alerted him to the broadcast of his background interviews, and he went over to talk to Matzzie.

Matzzie tweeted that out, too.

"I just had a very nice conversation with Michael Hayden," Matzzie wrote. "He was a gentleman and we disagree."
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Small Drone Crashes Into New York City Sidewalk

2013-10-03T04:50:00.001-07:00

(huffingtonpost)
A small camera-equipped drone reportedly crashed into a New York City sidewalk on Monday evening, narrowly missing a businessman who was heading home from work.

The unmanned aircraft, identified by ABC 7 New York as a "Phantom Quadcopter," was apparently zipping around taking scenic footage of Manhattan's skyscrapers before it plummeted into the pavement.

An anonymous financial analyst who was nearly hit by the radio-controlled craft removed its video card and provided it to ABC 7 on Wednesday.
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30,000 Cops Can Access Ohio's Facial Recognition Database Without Oversight

2013-09-23T18:29:00.001-07:00

(reason)
Last month came word that Ohio's sneaky Attorney General Mike DeWine had quietly integrated facial recognition software into the Ohio Law Enforcement Gateway, a state database that includes driver's license photos. Caught, the AG promised to create a commission to develop protocols for using the technology, tacitly admitting that no safeguards were in place on a system that turned every Ohio driver into a participant in a police line-up—if the system were used as intended—and a potential stalking target by any whack job with a badge. Now comes news that the ranks of potential whack jobs with access to the database are large, indeed—larger than in any other state, at least.

Ohio’s new facial recognition system has fewer restrictions for its use than similar systems in any other state in the U.S., an Enquirer/Gannett Ohio investigation has found.

No other such system in the nation allows 30,000 police officers and court employees to search driver’s license images, without audits or oversight.

By contrast, Kentucky allows 34 people the ability to run facial recognition searches. Twelve states don't have the technology, with Maine law forbidding its use by state agancies. Several states that do possess facial recognition technology for checking driver's licenses don't allow law enforcement to use it at all.

But Ohio has no such restrictions. "Ohio’s 30,000 users include local and state police, sheriffs, civilian employees of police departments, court employees – even out-of-state and federal law enforcement agencies,."

Beyond the obvious flaws in a system that compares everybody's driver's license photo to crime-scene snapshots of iffy quality and looks for matches via technology of unknown reliability, is the very real danger of unofficial use. Government databases have a history of such abuse. Minnesota cops cyberstalked a attorney, among others, inappropriately pulling up her driver's license data 700 times. Florida police were caught hate-stalking a colleague who arrested a fellow officer. They also trawled the database for potential dates and other petty (but creepy) purposes...
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iPhone 5's Fingerprint Scanner is Already Hacked

2013-09-23T18:13:00.000-07:00

(wsbtv)
Well, that didn’t last long. Less than 48 hours after Apple began selling its new iPhone 5s with the Touch ID fingerprint security system, someone’s managed to find a way around it.

A member of the German hacker organization Chaos Computer Club posted a video to YouTube Sunday showing one of the new iPhones being hacked with a lifted fingerprint.

Despite Apple’s claims about the advanced security of the Touch ID, the CCC says Apple’s sensor is just a high-res version of existing technology and can be cracked with a sharp photo of the fingerprint and a laser printer.

A spokesman for the organization says the speedy hack illustrates the inherent risks of using fingerprints as a security measure and urges Apple customers to return to numeric passcodes to protect their phones.

“We hope that this finally puts to rest the illusions people have about fingerprint biometrics. It is plain stupid to use something that you can’t change and that you leave everywhere every day as a security token...”
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DHS to Test Facial Recognition Technology at Hockey Game

2013-09-19T11:09:00.001-07:00

(rt)
Hockey fans in Washington state will have more to worry about this weekend than avoiding a puck to the face: the Department of Homeland Security will be testing out a new facial recognition system at an arena this Saturday.

The 6,000 seat Toyota Center in Kennewick, Washington will be the site on Saturday for more than just the Tri-City American’s season opener. In addition to hosting a junior ice hockey game, the arena will also facilitate the testing of a DHS program that’s raising concerns among privacy advocates.

Homeland Security will have a presence at Saturday’s game, but won’t be conducting any pat-downs on patrons or even rooting for the home team. Instead, DHS will utilize a sophisticated system of cameras to collect pictures of attendees in real-time from as far away as 100 meters and then match them up with images of faces stored on a database.

The exercise will mark the latest drill for the DHS’ Biometric Optical Surveillance System, or BOSS, and when it’s fully operational it could be used to identify a person of interest among a massive crowd in the span of only seconds.

With assistance from researchers at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, DHS will attempt to quickly compare faces caught on camera with the biometric information of 20 volunteers. The other faces in the crowd — potentially 5,980 hockey fans — will exist as background noise to see how accurate BOSS is when it comes down to locating a person of interest...
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Don't go to this fucking game. Send a message to these fuckers.

NSA Can Bypass Online Encryption, New Snowden Leak Reveals

2013-09-05T23:06:00.001-07:00

(rt)
The latest top-secret documents leaked to the media by former intelligence contractor Edward Snowden reveal that United States and British spy agencies have invested billions of dollars towards efforts to make online privacy obsolete.

The New York Times, the Guardian and ProPublica all reported on Thursday that newly released Snowden documents expose the great lengths that the National Security Agency and Britain’s Government Communications Headquarters, or GCHQ, have gone to in order to eavesdrop on encrypted Internet communications.

According to the latest Snowden leak, the NSA and its British counterpart have circumvented the encryption methods used to secure emails, chats and essentially most Internet traffic that was previously thought to be protected from prying eyes.

The price tag for such an endeavor, the Guardian reported, is around a quarter-of-a-billion dollars each year for just the US, and involves not just intricate code-breaking, but maintaining partnerships with the tech companies that provide seemingly secure online communication outlets.

“The files show that the National Security Agency and its UK counterpart GCHQ have broadly compromised the guarantees that Internet companies have given consumers to reassure them that their communications, online banking and medical records would be indecipherable to criminals or governments,” James Ball, Julian Borger and Glenn Greenwald reported for the Guardian...
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Facebook Will Be Adding Your Profile Pic to Facial Recognition Database

2013-08-29T21:12:00.000-07:00

(nbcnews)
Facebook is considering incorporating most of its 1 billion-plus members' profile photos into its growing facial recognition database, expanding the scope of the social network's controversial technology.

The possible move, which Facebook revealed in an update to its data use policy on Thursday, is intended to improve the performance of its "Tag Suggest" feature. The feature uses facial recognition technology to speed up the process of labeling or "tagging" friends and acquaintances who appear in photos posted on the network.

The technology currently automatically identifies faces in newly uploaded photos by comparing them only to previous snapshots in which users were tagged. Facebook users can choose to remove tags identifying them in photos posted by others on the site.

The changes would come at a time when Facebook and other Internet companies' privacy practices are under scrutiny, following the revelations of a U.S. government electronic surveillance program...
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Feds Spending Over $5.1M on Facial Recognition Surveillance Program

2013-08-26T05:11:00.002-07:00

(arstechnica)
If you thought that license plate readers were fun, just wait until facial recognition gets better. Recall, facial recognition technology famously failed to catch the two Boston bombing suspects earlier this year, and it remains difficult to actually pull off quickly, accurately, and at a distance.

But according to new documents published by The New York Times on Wednesday, the tech is likely to improve in the near future. The documents show that the United States Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has a contract worth more than $5.155 million to create what’s been dubbed the “Biometric Optical Surveillance System (BOSS) at Stand-off Distance.” Included in the 67-pages worth of documents is a “statement of work”:

The DHS is responsible for the biometric identification of persons to determine if persons entering areas are currently on federal watch lists. To accomplish this task, DHS components require the ability to positively identify/screen individuals in a secure, efficient, accurate, and timely manner. This ability encompasses the collection, storage, transmission, and receipt of biometric and biographic data to support the component missions. The resulting capability will be portable and operable in a wide variety of areas and conditions (i.e. day/night, arid/humid climates, hot/cold temperature extremes.)

The output from these acquisition databases must be usable for searches of large-scale biometric databases (1 to many) and/or verification against a previously taken biometric sample (1 to 1).

The software will generate and identify a human subject 3-Dimensional facial biometric signature at stand-off distances up to 100 meters.

The primary contractor is Electronic Warfare Associates, a military contractor based in Kentucky. The contracted work took place between October 12, 2010 and November 16, 2012, although the document notes that the DHS “may give subsequent extension notices to the contractor in Writing for further performance in accordance with the contract.” The Times noted that a DHS official said that “research was continuing.”

However, if the government's current path down license plate reader deployment is any indication, once this technology becomes good enough, there will likely be federal grants to encourage local law enforcement to use such capabilities. Currently, license plate data is often pooled together into regional "fusion centers," which can then be more easily accessed by federal authorities. And if law enforcement agencies claim the authority to capture and store license plate data en masse for great periods of time, it doesn't take a great leap of logic to foresee this capability extended to facial recognition as well...
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When Cars Crash Like Computers

2013-08-13T18:34:00.000-07:00

(theatlantic)
Yesterday, Daimler's Car2Go, which offers on-demand, one-way rentals to its users, crashed.

Not physically, but in the code that powers the ridesharing service and controls the cars. Would-be drivers in Washington, Los Angeles, Vancouver, Portland, and other cities could not couldn't access the fleet of vehicles, leaving the service's customer-service crews scrambling on social media to explain what was going on. Starting at 2pm, the service's city-level Twitter accounts started warning people that they were experiencing, "a partial interruption and are quickly working to resolve the issue." For about 12 hours, the service appears to have been completely down down.

For those who remember Twitter's fail-whale, it was a familiar scene. But the difference between not being able to send tweets and not being able to drive home from work or pick up your kids is huge.

As with the hackable toilet we reported on last week, when we make pieces of our infrastructure "smart" with computers, we also give them the other characteristics of computers, like bugs, crashes, hackability, and downtime. These tradeoffs might be worth it -- after all, trains and cars break down for all sorts of reasons already -- but the ways that things don't work will be novel.

In this case, Car2Go's Vancouver branch responded to a tweet asking if they'd gotten hacked by saying, "We are still identifying root causes but are taking this very seriously."

Whether it was a bug or an attack, this is also part of the future of mobility, along with the gee-whizness of picking up a car off the street with your phone...
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And what will happen when we have all those Google Driver-Less vehicles on the road soon?

London Orders End to Spying Trash Bins

2013-08-13T18:27:00.000-07:00

(nationalpost)
An advertising firm in Britain has stopped using “spy bins” after an outcry from privacy watchdogs and the City of London.

The ad firm Renew was using a network of high-tech trash cans to track people walking through London’s financial district. It has been using technology embedded in the hulking receptacles to measure the Wi-Fi signals emitted by smartphones, and suggested that it would apply the concept of “cookies” — tracking files that follow Internet users across the Web — to the physical world and advertising.

“We will cookie the street,” Renew chief executive Kaveh Memari said in June.

The prospect has caused outraged and drew comparisons to the creepy “Good evening, John Anderton” ads from the Tom Cruise thriller Minority Report.

Britain’s data protection watchdog said it would investigate, while Nick Pickles of the privacy advocacy group Big Brother Watch said questions need to be asked “about how such a blatant attack on people’s privacy was able to occur.”

The City of London Corporation has insisted that Renew pull the plug on the program.

“Anything that happens like this on the streets needs to be done carefully, with the backing of an informed public,” read a statement from the City of London Corporation, which is responsible for the city’s historic “square mile,” home to financial institutions, law firms and tourist landmarks...
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XKeyscore: NSA Tool Collects 'Nearly Everything a User Does on the Internet'

2013-07-31T16:39:00.001-07:00

(guardian)
A top secret National Security Agency program allows analysts to search with no prior authorization through vast databases containing emails, online chats and the browsing histories of millions of individuals, according to documents provided by whistleblower Edward Snowden.

The NSA boasts in training materials that the program, called XKeyscore, is its "widest-reaching" system for developing intelligence from the internet.

The latest revelations will add to the intense public and congressional debate around the extent of NSA surveillance programs. They come as senior intelligence officials testify to the Senate judiciary committee on Wednesday, releasing classified documents in response to the Guardian's earlier stories on bulk collection of phone records and Fisa surveillance court oversight.

The files shed light on one of Snowden's most controversial statements, made in his first video interview published by the Guardian on June 10.

"I, sitting at my desk," said Snowden, could "wiretap anyone, from you or your accountant, to a federal judge or even the president, if I had a personal email".

US officials vehemently denied this specific claim. Mike Rogers, the Republican chairman of the House intelligence committee, said of Snowden's assertion: "He's lying. It's impossible for him to do what he was saying he could do."

But training materials for XKeyscore detail how analysts can use it and other systems to mine enormous agency databases by filling in a simple on-screen form giving only a broad justification for the search. The request is not reviewed by a court or any NSA personnel before it is processed...
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Function Creep: When Everything Is Terrorism

2013-07-16T18:32:00.002-07:00

(theatlantic)
One of the assurances I keep hearing about the U.S. government's spying on American citizens is that it's only used in cases of terrorism. Terrorism is, of course, an extraordinary crime, and its horrific nature is supposed to justify permitting all sorts of excesses to prevent it. But there's a problem with this line of reasoning: mission creep. The definitions of "terrorism" and "weapon of mass destruction" are broadening, and these extraordinary powers are being used, and will continue to be used, for crimes other than terrorism.

Back in 2002, the Patriot Act greatly broadened the definition of terrorism to include all sorts of "normal" violent acts as well as non-violent protests. The term "terrorist" is surprisingly broad; since the terrorist attacks of 9/11, it has been applied to people you wouldn't normally consider terrorists.

The most egregious example of this are the three anti-nuclear pacifists, including an 82-year-old nun, who cut through a chain-link fence at the Oak Ridge nuclear-weapons-production facility in 2012. While they were originally arrested on a misdemeanor trespassing charge, the government kept increasing their charges as the facility's security lapses became more embarrassing. Now the protestors have been convicted of violent crimes of terrorism -- and remain in jail.

Meanwhile, a Tennessee government official claimed that complaining about water quality could be considered an act of terrorism. To the government's credit, he was subsequently demoted for those remarks...
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British Cops Admit They Monitor Facebook, Twitter

2013-06-28T04:45:00.000-07:00

(technewsdaily)
Users of social media are constantly warned to watch what they reveal online. You never know who might read your postings, the argument goes — your grandmother, your boss, potential employers.

To that list of potential readers, you'll have to add the police, at least if you live in Britain.

Wired UK reports that London's Metropolitan Police, or Scotland Yard in popular parlance, has admitted the existence of a team dedicated to monitoring the social media postings of some 9,000 people for signs of political unrest.

The unit has 17 officers and uses what it calls Social Media Intelligence, or SocMint, to scan Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and other social media services 24 hours a day, Wired UK said, adding that the team is developing special tools to smooth the process.

As part of the Metropolitan Police, the unit has jurisdiction in all of England and Wales, and some jurisdiction in the legally distinct "countries" of Scotland and Northern Ireland.

At a security conference in Australia last month, a Scotland Yard official, Umut Ertogral, spoke freely during what he thought was a closed-door meeting.

Social media "almost acts like CCTV [closed-circuit television] on the ground for us, really," Ertogral said, according to the Australian Financial Review.
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Even Law-abiding People Should Oppose Surveillance

2013-06-10T06:16:00.000-07:00

(washingtonexaminer)
"If you have something that you don't want anyone to know," Google CEO Eric Schmidt said in 2009, "maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place."

This line was creepy enough coming from one of President Obama's confidants and fundraisers. It takes on added weight now that the Washington Post and the Guardian have reported that the National Security Agency's Prism program, in the days before Obama was sworn in, tapped into Google's servers, gaining access to every message sent or received over Gmail.

Google spokesmen, like spokesmen from all the tech companies, deny participating in any such program. So Americans are left to wonder: Was this corporate-government collusion? Was this federal hacking or infiltration of corporate servers?

These are murky questions, so let's return for the time being to Schmidt's point, and the question it raises: If you're upset about the government reading your emails, or knowing whom you call -- when, from where, and for how long -- then what are you hiding?

In other words, why should law-abiding citizens mind federal surveillance?

The answer begins with this distressing reality: None of us scrupulously obeys the law. Technically speaking, we're all criminals.

Federal and state criminal statutes have multiplied like rabbits over the decades, and so now everyone breaks the law, probably every day.

Copy a song to your laptop from a friend's Beyonce CD? You just violated the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Did you buy some clothes in Delaware because they were tax free? You're probably evading taxes. Did you give your 20-year-old nephew a glass of wine at dinner? Illegal in many states.

Citizens that the federal government wants to indict, the federal government can indict if it monitors them closely enough. That's why it's so disturbing to learn that the federal government doesn't need to obtain a warrant on us in order to get our emails and phone records.

But these surveillance powers are used only for hunting terrorists, Obama says. Even if you take him at his word, because so far there is no evidence to the contrary, think about the capabilities you give to government when it can snoop on your phone records and emails.

Maybe Obama hunts only terrorists with it. But our next president could expand it to follow violent felons -- without having to get specific warrants. Why not drug dealers and sex offenders? Tax evaders come next.

One threat to privacy is Congress expanding the use of these Big Brother tools. Another threat is an administration using it illegally. This happens. President Bush used surveillance powers inappropriately. New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer targeted political opponents with state surveillance.

So what's next? A president targeting hard-core environmentalists or pro-life activists on the suspicion they'll carry out terrorist attacks? This may not sound likely, but recall scare stories about "ecoterrorists," and how Obama's Department of Homeland Security has warned that Tea Partiers are serious threats...

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Facial Recognition Software is Coming to Google Glass

2013-05-29T03:56:00.001-07:00

(foxnews)

Google won’t -- but they will.

Amid growing privacy concerns and repeated statements from Google that its futuristic wearable computer can’t recognize faces, a California software developer has done just that, releasing facial recognition software for Google Glass.

Lambda Labs software lets anyone wearing Google Glass look up faces in a crowd against a computer database, instantly showing someone’s name and any other vital bits of data contained in the app. And even the app developer acknowledges the implications for privacy.

“We have no plans to provide a global facial recognition database,” Stephen Balaban, founder of Lambda Labs, told FoxNews.com. “That’s probably not a good idea.”

Instead, Balaban’s technology is an API intended to allow other software developers working with early versions of Glass to write their own apps. Those software developers will provide databases of faces, which Glass will use to identify a face in a photo. Picture a doctor with 1,000 patients who could quickly look up the name and medical history of his patients while doing rounds, thanks to a custom medical app using the tech.

But Lambda Labs will put out its own app around the consumer launch of Glass to show off the technology, Balaban said.

“There isn’t much point in putting out an app at present; pretty much no one has Glass,” Balaban told FoxNews.com....
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Biometric Database of All Adult Americans Hidden in Immigration Reform

2013-05-12T02:49:00.001-07:00

(wired)
The immigration reform measure the Senate began debating yesterday would create a national biometric database of virtually every adult in the U.S., in what privacy groups fear could be the first step to a ubiquitous national identification system.

Buried in the more than 800 pages of the bipartisan legislation (.pdf) is language mandating the creation of the innocuously-named “photo tool,” a massive federal database administered by the Department of Homeland Security and containing names, ages, Social Security numbers and photographs of everyone in the country with a driver’s license or other state-issued photo ID.

Employers would be obliged to look up every new hire in the database to verify that they match their photo.

This piece of the Border Security, Economic Opportunity, and Immigration Modernization Act is aimed at curbing employment of undocumented immigrants. But privacy advocates fear the inevitable mission creep, ending with the proof of self being required at polling places, to rent a house, buy a gun, open a bank account, acquire credit, board a plane or even attend a sporting event or log on the internet. Think of it as a government version of Foursquare, with Big Brother cataloging every check-in.

“It starts to change the relationship between the citizen and state, you do have to get permission to do things,” said Chris Calabrese, a congressional lobbyist with the American Civil Liberties Union. “More fundamentally, it could be the start of keeping a record of all things.”

For now, the legislation allows the database to be used solely for employment purposes. But historically such limitations don’t last. The Social Security card, for example, was created to track your government retirement benefits. Now you need it to purchase health insurance.

“The Social Security number itself, it’s pretty ubiquitous in your life,” Calabrese said...
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Surveillance Cam Network Seen as Way of Future

2013-05-05T05:51:00.001-07:00

(reporternews)
Police and politicians across the United States are pointing to the example of surveillance video that was used to help identify the Boston Marathon bombing suspects as a reason to get more electronic eyes on their streets.

From Los Angeles to Philadelphia, efforts include trying to gain police access to cameras used to monitor traffic, expanding surveillance networks in some major cities and enabling officers to get regular access to security footage at businesses.

Some in law enforcement, however, acknowledge that their plans may face an age-old obstacle: Americans’ traditional reluctance to give the government more law enforcement powers out of fear that they will live in a society where there is little privacy.

“Look, we don’t want an occupied state. We want to be able to walk the good balance between freedom and security,” said Los Angeles police Deputy Chief Michael Downing, who heads the department’s counterterrorism and special operations bureau.

“If this helps prevent, deter, but also detect and create clues to who did (a crime), I guess the question is can the American public tolerate that type of security,” he said...

(reporternews)

Researchers Build Miniature Flying Robots

2013-05-02T17:01:00.002-07:00

(arstechnica)
It's relatively easy to get something big and heavy to fly. With enough equipment, it's possible to load the object with lots of energy to power the flight, specialized parts to control it, and the computers (or people) needed to direct the flight. But things get challenging as you make things smaller, and it gets harder to squeeze all the requisite parts into an ever-shrinking space. In that, nature has us beat, since something like a fruit fly crams all the energy, control systems, and specialized hardware into an extremely compact form.

We may not be at fruit fly level yet, but researchers are giving the insects some competition. Today's issue of Science reports on miniature flying robots that aren't much bigger than a coin. The power and control are handled externally, but the tiny robots can still perform basic maneuvers, and they have enough lift to spare that they could fly under their own power for a few minutes if the right power storage were developed.

The authors are all from the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard, and they clearly find insects inspirational, noting that, despite their simple nervous systems, "flying insects are able to perform sophisticated aerodynamic feats such as deftly avoiding a striking hand." So they set out to build their own.

Simply scaling down mechanics that work for flight on larger objects wouldn't do. Scaling things down just results in too little force, or it creates a situation where surface interactions between the parts inhibit flight, as things like friction begin to dominate. Rather than taking the traditional route to get something tiny aloft—attaching it to some form of rotary engine—they returned to the fly for inspiration, making a pair of flapping wings.

On the fly, the wings work because the angle they take when moving upwards is different from the one they take when flapping down. The authors set that up so it happened passively; as the wings swept in opposite directions, the hardware at the joint where they met the robot's body forced them to rotate.

To get the wings to beat fast enough, the authors created two "muscles" made from a piezoelectric material, which changes shape when a voltage is applied. These flapped the wings at 120 beats a second. Not only is this rate similar to a fly's, but it also created a resonance in the robot's body that amplified the force of each beat. That resonant frequency was so important that the flight control system never changed it, even when it needed to change the force generated by the wing (to fly up or drop lower, for example). Instead, the force was controlled by changing how far the wing traveled with each beat...
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Bill Gates' $5 Billion Plan To Put Cameras In Every Classroom

2013-04-15T12:03:00.001-07:00

(fastcompany)
Actors do it. Professional athletes do it. Now Bill Gates wants the country to spend $5 billion for every teacher in every classroom in every district to be filmed in action so they can be evaluated and, maybe, improve.

Among all his foundation's educational initiatives for things like smaller schools and new technology, Gates has increasingly zeroed in on effective teaching as the key lever to improve education, as he discusses in an exclusive interview in Fast Company this month.

But how do you know effective teaching when you see it? Judging teachers by their students' test scores is crude and incomplete. In a talk he gave for a TED / PBS special to be aired May 7, Gates discussed a pilot program, the Measures of Effective Teaching, with 3,000 teachers in seven districts. They reported three years of findings in January on a teaching evaluation system that combines test scores, student evaluations, and classroom assessments, where teachers are graded by impartial observers.

The idea of reevaluating how we test teachers is spreading, but remains controversial--even without the privacy issues involved in filming the classroom. "I know some teachers aren’t immediately comfortable with a camera in the classroom," Gates acknowledged, then said that could be overcome by allowing teachers to pick which lessons they want filmed--which would seem to undermine the validity of any findings.

States and districts have already spent millions of dollars overhauling teacher evaluation systems, only to have districts rating 97, 98, or 100% of teachers as "satisfactory" or better.

In his talk, Gates emphasized the idea of using this feedback system to help teachers do their job better. "We need a system that helps all our teachers be as good as the best," he said. "Our teachers deserve better feedback." He clearly wants to be seen as a friend, not an enemy, of teachers. However, the MET project, at least, has done nothing to demonstrate that these evaluations can actually help teachers improve--rather than just weed out the good from the bad...
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Google Revolution Isn’t Worth Our Privacy

2013-04-06T03:45:00.002-07:00

(ft)
Let’s give credit where it is due: Google is not hiding its revolutionary ambitions. As its co-founder Larry Page put it in 2004, eventually its search function “will be included in people’s brains” so that “when you think about something and don’t really know much about it, you will automatically get information”.

Science fiction? The implant is a rhetorical flourish but Mr Page’s utopian project is not a distant dream. In reality, the implant does not have be connected to our brains. We carry it in our pockets – it’s called a smartphone.

So long as Google can interpret – and predict – our intentions, Mr Page’s vision of a continuous and frictionless information supply could be fulfilled. However, to realise this vision, Google needs a wealth of data about us. Knowing what we search for helps – but so does knowing about our movements, our surroundings, our daily routines and our favourite cat videos.

Some of this information has been collected through our browsers but in a messy, disaggregated form. Back in 1996, Google didn’t set out with a strategy for world domination. Its acquisition of services such as YouTube was driven by tactics more than strategy. While it was collecting a lot of data from its many services, from email to calendar, such data were kept in separate databases – which made the implant scenario hard to accomplish.

Thus, when last year Google announced its privacy policy, which would bring the data collected through its more than 60 online services under one roof, the move made business sense. The obvious reason for doing so is to make individual user profiles even more appealing to advertisers: when Google tracks you it can predict what ads to serve you much better than when it tracks you only across one such service.

But there is another reason, of course – and it has to do with the Grand Implant Agenda: the more Google knows about us, the easier it can make predictions about what we want – or will want in the near future. Google Now, the company’s latest offering, is meant to do just that: by tracking our every email, appointment and social networking activity, it can predict where we need to be, when, and with whom. Perhaps, it might even order a car to drive us there – the whole point is to relieve us of active decision-making. The implant future is already here – it’s just not evenly resisted.

This week, data protection authorities from six European countries showed some such resistance when they announced an effort to investigate if Google’s policy violates their national privacy laws. This announcement follows several months of consultation – preceded by a letter that EU data regulators sent to Mr Page in October – which yielded little response from Google. The letter urged the company to disclose how it processes personal data in each service and to clarify why and how it combines data that come from its multiple services...
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Obama Unveils Human Brain-Mapping Initiative

2013-04-02T16:23:00.000-07:00

(washpost)
President Obama on Tuesday outlined a government-sponsored initiative to map the human brain, casting the proposal as a way to discover new cures for neurological disease and strengthen the economy.

“Ideas are what power our economy,” Obama said as he announced the proposal from the East Room of the White House. “When we invest in the best ideas before anybody else does, our businesses and our workers can make the best products and deliver the best services before anybody else.”

The project would use about $100 million in federal money over the next fiscal year to begin a long-term effort to better understand the brain. Those funds will be included in Obama’s budget proposal, scheduled for release next week, and would be combined with annual private-sector investments of roughly an equal amount.

Obama has spoken frequently during his presidency, including in his most recent State of the Union address, about using federal money in partnership with academia and business to foster projects with broader economic and social benefits. And the Brain Research Through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies (BRAIN) Initiative represents one of Obama’s most ambitious efforts to do so...
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Brown University Creates First Wireless, Implanted Brain-Computer Interface

2013-03-04T19:30:00.004-08:00

(extremetech)

Researchers at Brown University have succeeded in creating the first wireless, implantable, rechargeable, long-term brain-computer interface. The wireless BCIs have been implanted in pigs and monkeys for over 13 months without issue, and human subjects are next.

We’ve covered BCIs extensively here on ExtremeTech, but historically they’ve been bulky and tethered to a computer. A tether limits the mobility of the patient, and also the real-world testing that can be performed by the researchers. Brown’s wireless BCI allows the subject to move freely, dramatically increasing the quantity and quality of data that can be gathered — instead of watching what happens when a monkey moves its arm, scientists can now analyze its brain activity during complex activity, such as foraging or social interaction. Obviously, once the wireless implant is approved for human testing, being able to move freely — rather than strapped to a chair in the lab — would be rather empowering.

Brown’s wireless BCI, fashioned out of hermetically sealed titanium, looks a lot like a pacemaker. Inside there’s a li-ion battery, an inductive (wireless) charging loop, a chip that digitizes the signals from your brain, and an antenna for transmitting those neural spikes to a nearby computer. The BCI is connected to a small chip with 100 electrodes protruding from it, which, in this study, was embedded in the somatosensory cortex or motor cortex. These 100 electrodes produce a lot of data, which the BCI transmits at 24Mbps over the 3.2 and 3.8GHz bands to a receiver that is one meter away. The BCI’s battery takes two hours to charge via wireless inductive charging, and then has enough juice to last for six hours of use.

One of the features that the Brown researchers seem most excited about is the device’s power consumption, which is just 100 milliwatts. For a device that might eventually find its way into humans, frugal power consumption is a key factor that will enable all-day, highly mobile usage. Amusingly, though, the research paper notes that the wireless charging does cause significant warming of the device, which was “mitigated by liquid cooling the area with chilled water during the recharge process and did not notably affect the animal’s comfort.” Another important factor is that the researchers were able to extract high-quality, “rich” neural signals from the wireless implant — a good indicator that it will also help human neuroscience, if and when the device is approved...
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