Coming Soon, a Night Watchman with Wheels?
November 30th, 2013I liked being a security guard in the early 1990s. haha. I wore a polyester uniform that made me look like like ten pounds of shit in a five pound sack. I think it paid $7 per hour. I had near zero contact with any other human beings the whole night. Now, why was this a good job? I was mostly able to read the whole time.
A couple of decades later, subtract 75 cents per hour and the pesky human and what do you get?
Via: New York Times:
The night watchman of the future is 5 feet tall, weighs 300 pounds and looks a lot like R2-D2 – without the whimsy. And will work for $6.25 an hour.
A company in California has developed a mobile robot, known as the K5 Autonomous Data Machine, as a safety and security tool for corporations, as well as for schools and neighborhoods.
If You’re Fed Up with the Total Disaster That Is Facebook, Syme Deserves Consideration, Just Don’t Trust It Too Much
November 29th, 2013Syme looks like it could be useful for small, private groups looking for social networking functionality. Do not, I repeat, DO NOT believe any claims that they can’t access your material. Maybe that’s true, and even if it is, I wouldn’t assume that others can’t read it. I tend to believe that these guys are sincere. At a minimum, they are being up-front with users about the limitations.
While Syme might only introduce a few additional speed bumps to state surveillance, it looks great compared to Facebook, where the only good thing about Facebook is that a lot of people are on it. Every other aspect of Facebook is rat poison.
Via: ComputerWorld:
With the look of Google Plus and Facebook-like elements, a new social network named “Syme” feels as cozy as a well-worn shoe.
But beneath the familiar veneer, it’s quite different. Syme encrypts all content, such as status updates, photos and files, so that only people invited to a group can view it. Syme, which hosts the content on its Canada-based servers, says it can’t read it.
“The overarching goal of Syme is to make encryption accessible and easy to use for people who aren’t geeks or aren’t hackers or who aren’t cryptography experts,” said co-founder Jonathan Hershon.
Typhoons Spread Fukushima Fallout
November 29th, 2013Via: AFP:
Typhoons that hit Japan each year are helping spread radioactive material from the Fukushima nuclear disaster into the country’s waterways, researchers say.
Contaminated soil gets washed away by the high winds and rain and deposited in streams and rivers, a joint study by France’s Climate and Environmental Science laboratory (LSCE) and Tsukuba University in Japan showed.
Billionaire Bunkers: Beyond the Panic Room, Home Security Goes Sci-Fi
November 29th, 2013Via: Forbes:
Al Corbi’s residence in the Hollywood Hills has the requisite white walls covered in artwork and picture windows offering breathtaking views of downtown Los Angeles, but it has more in common with NSA headquarters than with the other contemporary homes on the block. The Corbi family doesn’t need keys (thanks to biometric recognition software), doesn’t fear earthquakes (thanks to steel-reinforced concrete caissons that burrow 30 feet into the private hilltop) and sleeps easily inside a 2,500-square-foot home within a home: a ballistics-proof panic suite that Corbi refers to as a “safe core.”
Paranoid? Perhaps. But also increasingly commonplace. Futuristic security technologies–many developed for the military but sounding as though they came straight from James Bond’s Q–have made their way into the home, available to deep-pocketed owners whose peace of mind comes from knowing that their sensors can detect and adjust for, say, a person lurking in the bushes a half-mile away.
“If you saw this stuff in a movie you would think it is all made up,” says Corbi, whose fortress-like abode doubles as the demonstration house for his firm, Strategically Armored & Fortified Environments (SAFE).
…
Biometric technologies are becoming more prevalent, too. Moving beyond a fingerprint scan, some programs don’t require a homeowner to touch anything at all. Former Israeli major general Aharon Ze’evi-Farkash, onetime head of the Israeli Military Intelligence Directorate, has spent the past three years with his company, FST21, creating a software product that merges facial, voice and behavioral recognition technology into a keyless entry system. “It transforms you into the key for your building in under two seconds,” he says.
China Sends Warplanes to Newly Declared Air Zone
November 28th, 2013Via: BBC:
China has sent warplanes to its newly declared air defence zone in the East China Sea, state media reports.
The vast zone, announced last week, covers territory claimed by China, Japan, Taiwan and South Korea.
China has said all planes transiting the zone must file flight plans and identify themselves, or face “defensive emergency measures”.
But Japan, South Korea and the US have all since flown military aircraft through the area.
The new dispute in an already tense region has raised concerns it could escalate into an unplanned military incident.
Renault Will Remotely Lock Down Electric Cars
November 28th, 2013Via: FSFE:
For a long time, cars were a symbol of freedom and independence. No longer. In its Zoe electric car, car maker Renault apparently has the ability to remotely prevent the battery from charging. And that’s more chilling than it sounds.
When you buy a Renault Zoe, the battery isn’t included. Instead, you sign a rental contract for the battery with the car maker. In a Zoe owner’s forum, user Franko30 reports that the contract contains a clause giving Renault the right to prevent your battery from charging at the end of the rental period. According to an article in Der Spiegel, the company may also do this when you fall behind on paying the rent for the battery.
This means that Renault has some way of remotely controlling the battery charging process. According to the Spiegel article, the Zoe (and most or all other electric cars) collect reams of data on how you use them, and send this data off to the manufacturer without your knowledge. This data tells the company where you are going, when, and how fast, where you charge the battery, and many other things besides. We already knew that Tesla was doing this with its cars since the company’s very public spat with a journalist who reviewed one of their cars for the New York Times. Seeing the same thing in a mass market manufacturer like Renault makes clear just how dangerous this trend is.
This sort of thing fits well into the dystopian picture which Cory Doctorow paints in his 2011 talk “The coming war on General Computation” (which you really must watch, if you haven’t already), where he argues that “we don’t have cars anymore, we have computers we ride in”. The question then becomes who is in control of this computer: You, the manufacturer, or someone else?
“Ninja Polymers” vs. MRSA?
November 28th, 2013Via: IBM:
In earlier chip development research, IBM researchers identified specific materials that, when chained together, produced an electrostatic charge that allows microscopic etching on a wafer to be done at a much smaller scale.
This newfound knowledge that characterization of materials could be manipulated at the atomic level to control their movement inspired the team to see what else they could do with these new kinds of polymer structures. They started with MRSA.
The outcome of that experiment was the creation of what are now playfully known as “ninja polymers” – sticky nanostructures that move quickly to target infected cells in the body, destroy the harmful content inside, and then disappear by biodegrading without causing damaging side effects or accumulating in the organs.
As a bonus, all of this occurs without damaging healthy cells in the area.
“The mechanism through which [these polymers] fight bacteria is very different from the way an antibiotic works,” explains Jim Hedrick, a polymer chemist in IBM Research. “They try to mimic what the immune system does: the polymer attaches to the bacteria’s membrane and then facilitates destabilization of the membrane. It falls apart, everything falls out and there’s little opportunity for it to develop resistance to these polymers.”
What Happens When Big Data Meets Human Resources?
November 27th, 2013In the mid 1990s, I worked for FedEx and even back then, every minute of the work day had to be accounted for by noting activity codes and times on our timesheets. At random intervals, the bean counters would light fires under our managers’ tails and the managers would get on our cases about, “Productivity.” In short, all the couriers would be brought before their managers and shown a printout of their activity. Faster, faster, faster. Work smarter not harder. And, oh yeah, safety first. *pfft* Yeah, right.
So what would happen is that newbies would actually try to go faster than they already were, they would cause vehicle accidents, sort packages to the wrong containers and get injured; and then the pressure on the managers from above would stop… for a while. This is how they would find the new maximum setting every several months. Anyone with half a clue, that is, those who had been around for a few years, would nod their heads politely, sign the paper and silently think things like, “Blow it out your ass.”
The logic is like this: Keep increasing the pressure on a steam calliope—with the dial already well into the red—until it starts throwing pipes and decapitating onlookers. Now you know how much pressure it can really take.
As for the people who get killed or injured in the process… You gotta break a few eggs to make an omelet.
Safety first!
Anyway, so that was the good old days.
Via: The Atlantic:
Torrents of data are routinely collected by American companies and now sit on corporate servers, or in the cloud, awaiting analysis. Bloomberg reportedly logs every keystroke of every employee, along with their comings and goings in the office. The Las Vegas casino Harrah’s tracks the smiles of the card dealers and waitstaff on the floor (its analytics team has quantified the impact of smiling on customer satisfaction). E?mail, of course, presents an especially rich vein to be mined for insights about our productivity, our treatment of co-workers, our willingness to collaborate or lend a hand, our patterns of written language, and what those patterns reveal about our intelligence, social skills, and behavior. As technologies that analyze language become better and cheaper, companies will be able to run programs that automatically trawl through the e-mail traffic of their workforce, looking for phrases or communication patterns that can be statistically associated with various measures of success or failure in particular roles.
Human Portable Tripwire System
November 27th, 2013Via: Fast Company:
Location-based services are great for things like discounts at nearby restaurants, or a heads-up for traffic, or tracking a morning jog. But what if your phone could take action on your behalf in the event you drove past (say) a rogue nuclear weapon?
Last month on the U.S. government’s Federal Business Opportunities page, a Request for Information was posted for what’s being referred to as a Human Portable Tripwire system. The request serves as a sort of tentative inquiry–it’s not so much a positive indication that the federal government will move ahead with a project as it is an opportunity for private citizens to mentally prepare themselves to become de facto bomb sniffers.
Theoretically, the Human Portable Tripwire system would involve a wearable device that would passively scan for radiation and relay any discoveries of radioactive material back to Homeland Security via satellite phone or Internet connection. As the project calls for a passive system, it would function much like Near-Field Communication (NFC) or any other location-aware tech–once you turn it on, you don’t have to do anything else.
Italy’s Senate Expels Ex-PM Silvio Berlusconi
November 27th, 2013Via: BBC:
The Italian Senate has voted to expel ex-Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi from parliament with immediate effect over his conviction for tax fraud.
Berlusconi, who has dominated politics for 20 years, could now face arrest over other criminal cases as he has lost his immunity from prosecution.
