Archive for the 'Surveillance' Category
64 Drone Bases on American Soil
June 14th, 2012Via: Danger Room: There are 64 drone bases on American soil. That includes 12 locations housing Predator and Reaper unmanned aerial vehicles, which can be armed. Public Intelligence, a non-profit that advocates for free access to information, released a map of military UAV activities in the United States on Tuesday. Assembled from military sources — […]
Britain: Government Wants Records of All Internet Activity Kept for One Year
June 14th, 2012Via: BBC: Details of internet use in the UK will have to be stored for a year to allow police and intelligence services to access it, under government plans. Records will include people’s activity on social network sites, webmail, internet phone calls and online gaming. Home Secretary Theresa May said the change was needed to […]
Gates Grants: Galvanic Bracelets that Measure Student Engagement
June 12th, 2012Ok, kids, time for school. Don’t forget your GPS trackers, breakfast sticks, RFID cards and… Via: Washington Post: In the ‘you-can’t-make-up-this-stuff’ category, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is spending about $1.1 million to develop a way to physiologically measure how engaged students are by their teachers’ lessons. This involves “galvanic skin response” bracelets that […]
Flame and Stuxnet Share Common Origin
June 12th, 2012Via: Threat Post: Researchers digging through the code of the recently discovered Flame worm say they have come across a wealth of evidence that suggests Flame and the now-famous Stuxnet worm share a common origin. Researchers from Kaspersky Lab say that a critical module that the Flame worm used to spread is identical to a […]
Flame Operators Command Software to Remove Itself from Infected Machines to Make Further Analysis More Difficult
June 8th, 2012Via: CIO: The creators of the Flame cyber-espionage threat ordered infected computers still under their control to download and execute a component designed to remove all traces of the malware and prevent forensic analysis, security researchers from Symantec said on Wednesday. Flame has a built-in feature called SUICIDE that can be used to uninstall the […]
Cryptanalist Discovers New MD5 Attack Variant in Flame
June 7th, 2012Via: CWI: Using our forensic tool, we have indeed verified that a chosen-prefix collision attack against MD5 has been used for Flame. More interestingly, the results have shown that not our published chosen-prefix collision attack was used, but an entirely new and unknown variant. Therefore it is not unreasonable to assume that the particular chosen-prefix […]
‘Mass Transit Cameras Spot Bad Guys, No Human Judgment Required’
June 7th, 2012And while we’re at it, how about using Google searches to identify pre-crime? Via: Fast Company: A new breed of security cameras can supposedly detect terrorism and crime without a human judgment call–and mass transit agencies are shelling out big bucks for the product. San Francisco’s Municipal Transit Authority, which oversees the city’s MUNI trains, […]
RAND Suggest Reality TV Style Control Room Layout to Deal with Military Drone Data Glut
June 6th, 2012In a weird case of life imitating art, the film, Sleep Dealer, depicts a grim future in which drone missions are broadcast on a reality TV show. Via: Wired: Turns out, reality TV control rooms and Air Force ground stations actually have more in common than you might surmise. The volume of footage exploited in […]
Google Creating 3D Models of Metropolitan Areas
June 6th, 2012Via: Google: An important next step in improving all of these areas—comprehensiveness, accuracy, and usability of our maps—is the ability to model the world in 3D. Since 2006, we’ve had textured 3D buildings in Google Earth, and today we are excited to announce that we will begin adding 3D models to entire metropolitan areas to […]
New Hydrogen Powered Drone Can Fly for Four Days
June 5th, 2012Via: Los Angeles Times: A massive experimental drone designed by Boeing Co. engineers to fly for up to four days at a time completed its first test flight above the Mojave Desert at Edwards Air Force Base. The drone, called Phantom Eye, and its hydrogen-fueled propulsion system have the potential to vastly expand the reach […]
