Tag Archives | Technology

NYPD’s New Facial Recognition Unit Using Instagram And Facebook Photos To Identify Suspects

By on March 28, 2013 in News 0

Social networking sites are a great way to meet and connect with new people, such as cops. DNAinfo New York writes:

Police are searching for suspects’ photos on Instagram and Facebook, then running them through the NYPD’s new Facial Recognition Unit to put a face to a name, DNAinfo New York has learned.

Detectives are now breaking cases across the city thanks to the futuristic technology that marries mug shots of known criminals with pictures gleaned from social media, surveillance cameras and anywhere else cops can find images.

[An] official explained how the new technology worked after a recent street robbery where a woman reported her jewelry stolen by her gal pal’s boyfriend. She did not know his name, only that he was likely in photos on his girlfriend’s Facebook page. “We did not have his name, but we found a photo and the Facial Recognition Unit got a hit.”

The new investigative entity was formally launched late last year, with eight cops working in teams of four manning the operations.

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Ken Goldberg’s Seismic Signals

By on March 25, 2013 in News 0

Screenshot of Bloom, 2013, by Ken Goldberg, Sanjay Krishnan, Fernanda Viégas, and Martin Wattenberg.

Venue interviews one of the more interesting professors you’ll run into at any university, Ken Goldberg:

The Hayward Fault runs through the center of the UC Berkeley campus, famously splitting the university’s football stadium in half from end to end. It has, according to the 2008 Uniform California Earthquake Rupture Forecast, a thirty-one percent probability of rupturing in a magnitude 6.7 or greater earthquake within the next thirty years, making it the likeliest site for the next big California quake.

Nonetheless, for the majority of East Bay residents, the fault is out of sight and out of mind—for example, five out of six Californian homeowners have no earthquake insurance.

Meanwhile, three-quarters of a mile north of Memorial Stadium, and just a few hundred yards west of the fault trace, is the office of Ken Goldberg, Professor of Industrial Engineering and Operations Research at Berkeley.

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Scientists Invent Self-Healing Computer Chips That Repair Themselves

By on March 25, 2013 in News 0

Great, the evil supercomputers in our future now will be able to immediately heal themselves if you attempt to damage their circuits, Phys.org reports:

Imagine that the chips in your smart phone or computer could repair and defend themselves on the fly, recovering in microseconds from problems ranging from low battery power to total transistor failure. It might sound like the stuff of science fiction, but a team of engineers at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), for the first time ever, has developed just such self-healing integrated chips.

In perhaps the most dramatic of their experiments, the team destroyed various parts of their chips by zapping them multiple times with a high-power laser, and then observed as the chips automatically developed a work-around in less than a second.

By showing that the self-healing capability works well in such an advanced system, the researchers hope to show that the self-healing approach can be extended to virtually any other electronic system.

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Wind Turbine Syndrome is Bullshit

By on March 24, 2013 in News 0

Peter Sinclair writes at Climate Denial Crock of the Week:

All manner of vapors, demonic possession, bad juju, soured milk and frightened horses have been blamed on wind turbines, especially by phony, fossil funded “grass roots” organization that are, let’s say, tea party top-heavy in their views. If a fraction of it were true, we’d be seeing thousands of body bags coming out of Germany and Denmark.

Fortunately and, you already knew this – its all bullshit.

Guardian:

Sickness being attributed to wind turbines is more likely to have been caused by people getting alarmed at the health warnings circulated by activists, an Australian study has found.

Complaints of illness were far more prevalent in communities targeted by anti-windfarm groups, said the report’s author, Simon Chapman, professor of public health at Sydney University. His report concludes that illnesses being blamed on windfarms are more than likely caused by the psychological effect of suggestions that the turbines make people ill, rather than by the turbines themselves.

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How Your Social Media Score Will Shape Your Life Options

By on March 22, 2013 in News 0

On the intertwining of social capital and literal capital, the Economist reveals:

Facebook data already inform lending decisions at Kreditech, a start-up that makes loans in Germany, Poland and Spain. Applicants are asked to provide access for a limited time to their account on Facebook or another social network. Much is revealed by your friends, says Alexander Graubner-Müller, one of the firm’s founders. An applicant whose friends appear to have well-paid jobs and live in nice neighbourhoods is more likely to secure a loan. An applicant with a friend who has defaulted on a Kreditech loan is more likely to be rejected.

An online bank that opens in America this month will use Facebook data to adjust account holders’ credit-card interest rates. Based in New York, Movenbank will monitor messages on Facebook and cut interest rates for those who talk up the bank to friends. If any join, the referrer’s interest rate will drop further.

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DisinfoTV: Duncan Laurie’s Radionic Landscape

By on March 20, 2013 in News 0

Early in our TV series at the turn of the Millennium we took a road trip to artist Duncan Laurie‘s glass-and-steel laboratory on the coast of Rhode Island, where he conducts experiments that test the limits of human perception. Watch as he demonstrates plant communication and the astonishing, outlawed science of radionics.

Taken from DisinfoTV on DVD, available now.

Subscribe to Disinformation’s YouTube channel.

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Supermarket Giant Uses Wristband Trackers To Monitor Employees’ Every Move

By on March 17, 2013 in News 15

If other corporations follow the example of British mega-chain Tesco, the future of working retail will become increasingly similar to being imprisoned. Via Technoccult:

The former Tesco employee said the device provided an order to collect from the warehouse and a set amount of time to complete it. If workers met that target, they were awarded a 100 per cent score, but that would rise to 200 per cent if they worked twice as quickly. The score would fall if they did not meet the target.

If, however, workers did not log a break when they went to the toilet, the score would be “surprisingly lower”, according to the former staff member, who worked in an Irish branch of Tesco. He said the devices put staff under huge pressure and many of his colleagues using them in Ireland were eastern Europeans, with limited English. Tesco confirmed that the devices were also in use across its UK stores.

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The Original Cypherpunk Manifesto

By on March 16, 2013 in News 2

Via Activism.net, in 1993, UC Berkeley mathematician Eric Hughes penned this manifesto for the so-called cypherpunk movement which he had helped invent:

Privacy is necessary for an open society in the electronic age. Privacy is not secrecy. A private matter is something one doesn’t want the whole world to know, but a secret matter is something one doesn’t want anybody to know. Privacy is the power to selectively reveal oneself to the world.

If two parties have some sort of dealings, then each has a memory of their interaction. Each party can speak about their own memory of this; how could anyone prevent it?

Since we desire privacy, we must ensure that each party to a transaction have knowledge only of that which is directly necessary for that transaction. When I purchase a magazine at a store and hand cash to the clerk, there is no need to know who I am.

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On The Reputation Score You Will Soon Be Assigned

By on March 14, 2013 in News 29

Via the The New Inquiry, Rob Horning on how Facebooking will be mandatory:

There is good reason to be concerned about the various data pools of personal information being gathered by communications and social-media companies. It’s used to shape the material conditions of our lives — what we see, what we’re permitted to do, who will talk to us, what sort of service we’ll receive.

It’s no coincidence that [social media management site] Reputation.com is joining forces with the credit-score agencies, as the Economist reports. It’s an extension of the same racket, to create a reputation score that is as actionable as a credit score.

If the reputation score is applied to you, you will have to pay to try to improve it or “clean it up.” But for others, such a score can be used to guide decisions about whether you are worth knowing, worth having as a roommate, worth friending on Facebook, worth offering a microloan to, worth renting a space on Air BnB to, etc., etc.

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Brazilian Doctor Arrested For Using Silicone Fingers To Fool Fingerprint-Based Biometric Check-In

By on March 13, 2013 in News 5

Our key-less and password-less future will hinge on being identified via our fingerprints, irises, and vocal tones. The problem is, someone else may have a copy of your finger. Via the BBC:

A Brazilian doctor faces charges of fraud after being caught on camera using silicone fingers to sign in for work for absent colleagues, police say.

Thaune Nunes Ferreira, 29, was arrested on Sunday for using prosthetic fingers to fool the biometric employee attendance device used at the hospital where she works near Sao Paulo. She is accused of covering up the absence of six colleagues. Her lawyer says she was forced into the fraud as she faced losing her job.

Police said she had six silicone fingers with her at the time of her arrest, three of which have already been identified as bearing the fingerprints of co-workers.

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