Posts Tagged ‘crime’
Unabomber-Inspired Group Sends Bombs to Nanotechnology Researchers
So far, the group, which posts screeds online under the name Individualities Tending Toward Savagery, has mailed a handful of bombs to nanotechnology professors at Mexican universities, so far injuring two (and thankfully killing none). According to criminologists, the writer of the site seems to have some academic background--he references journals and even singles out specific scientists for quotes.
Why ? A quote from the terrorists' website: "The ever more rapid acceleration of this technology will lead to the creation of nanocyborgs that can self-replicate automatically without the help of a human." It's a claim the nanoscientists dismiss as science fiction, with the coordinator of the University of the Americas-Puebla's nanotech department noting that "in our country, and in the whole Latin American region, we put more faith in the supernatural than in reason."
Nanotech researchers in America and Europe don't seem particularly worried about the threat, and even in Mexico the precautions are limited to some common-sense warnings about not opening mysterious packages.
[]
As Kidnappings Increase, Mexicans Get Dubious RFID Tracking Chips Implanted In Their Arms
The chip, implanted in the tissue between the shoulder and elbow, sends a signal to an GPS device that the wearer carries. But Xega, the company that manufactures many of the chips, says that they can track clients even without the GPS unit, by sending radio signals directly to the implanted chip. This claim seems very unlikely to be true.
RFID researchers say that Xega’s claim that it can still find clients even if their external GPS unit has been lost is ludicrous. The technology that would allow remote tracking of RFID signals is still far off, they say. Although Xega says they have helped to rescue 178 people in the past ten years, an executive acknowledged that the implant would likely not work without the external GPS.
Mexicans have good reason to be frightened, with abductions having jumped 317 percent in the past five years. One fifth of instances have involved police officers or soldiers, which leads to a mistrust of authority figures. Xega has seen its sales increase by 40 percent in the past two years.
Other companies are selling external GPS trackers equipped with panic buttons, disguised as keychains, watches, or bracelets in the hopes of fooling kidnappers. This approach at least is not technologically impossible, although emitting a regular distress signal could quickly drain the battery of such a device.
NYPD Creates Facebook-Police Task Force to Mine Social Media for Clues
The department has put one of its more tech savvy officers (he’s previously had success catching sexual predators and monitoring for gang activity on the Tubes) in charge of this new juvenile justice unit, which will mine Twitter, Facebook, Myspace and other social sites for signs of impending mayhem or bragging about past lawbreaking.
It’s an appropriate week to implement something like this. As I write this, rioters in the UK are using social media to coordinate their chaos and warn other rioters about police actions. And police are using social media to figure out where the rioters are headed next.
Such use of technology has been used by the NYPD specifically in the past to track down everything from unruly house parties to murder suspects, so the tactic isn’t really new. But the institutionalization of a dedicated police unit to patrol social networks marks a shift in priorities and in the value the NYPD places on this kind of policing. So is it Big Brother or sound police practice? That probably depends on which side of the law you are on. Guess it’s time we pulled down the video of our editors popping off firecrackers somewhere in the greater NYC area, lest we finally have to own up to the act.
[]
Blood Simple: Improving Crime-Scene Analysis Techniques
Where
Investigators use spray-on reagents to locate blood spatter that’s too small to see. But chemicals can contaminate evidence or give false positives. Stephen Morgan and Michael Myrick of the University of South Carolina have developed an infrared camera system that exposes microscopic traces of blood without using chemicals. The device targets blood proteins, which remain long after visible blood has been wiped away, filtering background infrared to reveal blood residue that can’t be seen with the naked eye.
How
Detectives use spatter reconstructions to piece together what a crime might have looked like as it happened. Typically, investigators pin string from blood stains to a possible point of origin, but this method overlooks the fact that blood drops arc through the air. Forensic-surveying engineer Ursula Buck and her team at the University of Bern in Switzerland use laser scanners and imaging software to re-create accurate spatter trajectories. First, digital photographs of the crime scene are stitched into a panorama that shows blood-stain size and location, while the laser scanner creates a 3-D rendering of the room. The mass of each droplet is then calculated based on the size of the stain. Finally, using an algorithm developed by the Swiss team, every drop of blood has its path re-created, no string attached.
Who
Forensic scientists had no reliable method for establishing age using blood samples before last November, when Manfred Kayser and his colleagues at Erasmus MC University Medical Center Rotterdam in the Netherlands announced that they had developed a process to determine age, plus or minus nine years. The test examines white blood cells called T cells by looking for the snippets of DNA that form inside newly made T cells as they fight infections. As we age, our bodies create fewer T cells (a reason the elderly are more susceptible to colds). The more of these DNA snippets, the younger the perp. “Police are desperate to get information,” Kayser says. “We’re mining human biology to give them a new tool.”
Video: Android App Hacks Into Cardkey-Protected Doors With One Click
The app (which is not in the Android Market, so don't even bother looking for it) is called Caribou, and relies on a vulnerability in these sorts of security systems that allows them to be unlocked remotely. It's actually a surprisingly lo-fi sort of app: You have to input the IP address of the system you're trying to hack, and then the app will perform a brute force attack (basically trying every single possible combination) until it lands on the correct one. Then the app will unlock the door for 30 seconds while you scoot inside the not-so-secure door.
This isn't exactly cause for panic--more of a warning to those in charge of security system upkeep to make a few easy changes to block this sort of attack. For one thing, if the data the app needs to access is simply behind a firewall, the app won't be able to access it. Some lackadaisical systems make the error of leaving it out in the open for anyone to swipe, which this app does ably.
There's also the small problem of the app needing the IP address of the door it's trying to unlock. It's not clear whether that information is easily obtained, but the fact is that it has to be obtained, somehow. You can't just walk up to any door and hit a button; there needs to be some recon work to secure the IP addresses first. Still, it's a nice illustration of a weakness in this sort of security system, and the team is actually working with US-CERT (the U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team) to ensure that the loophole is patched.
[ via ]
Archive Gallery: Science Solves Crimes
How earographs, invisible ink detectors, and the famed "Stamp Detective" used science to catch unsuspecting crooks.
Nowadays, we're so used to seeing forensics dramatized on TV that we take criminology for granted, but for a generation raised on Edgar Allan Poe, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie, these developments were nothing short of marvelous.
Like the first article in our series says, science has trumped Sherlock Holmes as the most trustworthy detective. It takes a clever man to detect circumstantial evidence, but a few damning clues can't compare to solid proof that a week-old bloodstain comes from a particular person. To help our readers understand how the scientists glean knowledge from trace evidence, we visited experts like firearms identification pioneer Calvin Goddard, who used his helixometer, to show us how uses microscopic grooves to differentiate between bullets.
Sometimes we covered cases that were less violent. In a feature called "Hidden Crime Clues Bared by Chemist's Magic," we described how scientists could decode messages written in invisible ink by dipping them in various fluids. A couple of years later, police squads nationwide intercepted similar messages by using amphibian airplanes to trail carrier pigeons owned by the underworld. If that sounds a little quaint, you'll laugh at gems like our feature that lauded earography, the science of identifying criminals by their ears.
As silly as it sounds, the earograph apparatus isn't the strangest tool detectives-turned-scientists used during the early days of modern forensics. Click through our to see what else we have in store.
‘Questionable Observer Detector’ Finds Habitual Bystanders at Crime Scenes
The QuOD, as it's called, comes from the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Notre Dame, is essentially 3-D facial recognition software. It creates "face tracks," some kind of recognizable pattern in a face, to pick individual people out of a crowd. The interesting part is that it works from any video stream, a big bonus in a world where our first impulse at seeing a crime is to whip out our smartphones and document it on video.
That means that the QuOD is useful for picking out those who show up at crime scenes repeatedly, but also at picking out faces in areas documented with multiple security cameras or personal video recordings. The software counts the number of times a particular face pops up, and if it's more than a certain amount (set by the operating authorities), it'll present that person as a possible person of interest--though it doesn't seem to link to any database, like this FBI face detector does.
Luckily, that's all it does--there's no Minority Report-style motive assessment. It's simply a shorthand for a formerly tedious and arduous task, that of scanning through footage to try to find any recognizable faces. The QuOD hasn't as yet been picked up for use by any police force, but we could see it being a useful timesaver.
[Kurzweil]