Web Concepts

Posts Tagged ‘security’

Clickhere to launch a gallery of auto-gyros, gyroplanes, autogiros, or whatever they're called, from the PopSci archives

The MTOsport is headquartered in Tomball, Texas, and at $75,000 costs a fraction of what a police force would spend on a helicopter. Operating costs are low too, at just $50 an hour, largely because it runs on regular pump gas.

The roofless, doorless contraption uses a rear-mounted propeller for speed, and an unpowered, angled rotor, spinning at 80 to 120 RPM, uses the air pushed into the blades from forward motion to create lift. It needs a little more than a hundred yards to take off, and then climbs into the air at a rate of 13 feet per second, eventually hitting speeds of up to 115 mph. Despite the lack of roof, the auto-gyro is arguably safer than a helicopter because it's always in autorotation. If power is lost, helicopter pilots have to ease their aircrafts down and hope that autorotation engages. The MTOsport would just glide down gently.

On the downside, no roofs or doors means riding in bad weather will be rough, and without thermal imaging cameras or large light beams, auto-gyros are best flown during the day. Even with these limitations though, the cost and efficiency of the auto-gyro makes it incredibly helpful for police forces in underserved areas like Tomball. The MTOsport can be in the air and on a mission within 10 minutes, and, in terms of coverage, is equal to the deployment of 20 officers, according to Tomball's chief of police.

[Jalopnik]

But while its easy enough for a criminal type to determine the digits in your pin with an IR camera, it’s fairly difficult to determine the order. And the hack only seems to work on plastic keypads--metal returns too much heat noise for the IR camera to reliably discern with keys were just pressed.

Then there’s the fact that an IR camera isn't exactly an implement of petty crime. By the time one amassed the princely sum (around $18,000 to buy a good rig--the $150 Midnight/Shot won't cut it) necessary to acquire one, he or she probably wouldn’t need to steal ATM PINs anymore.

But none of that changes the fact that a security scheme on which most people regularly rely has a fairly exploitable hole. And it doesn’t just go for ATM machines--keypad safes, security doors, keypad activated garage doors, even the keypads that open up some car doors are susceptible to the IR hack, particularly where plastic keypads are involved.

Of course, to thwart the scheme you could simply place your hand over the entire keypad to impart heat to every key after you punch in your PIN. And if that doesn’t jive with you germophobic readers, you can always just preemptively Mace the person behind you in line each time you visit the ATM. Better safe than sorry.

[Technology Review]

Naturally, the system is raising privacy concerns of its own. But the aptly named Dr. James Orwell, who works on the team that is developing the system, says it will actually reduce the amount of Big Brother-ism associated with municipal CCTV systems by helping law enforcement focus on what’s criminal--and delete the rest of the footage of law abiding citizens going about their lives.

The system works by recognizing actions rather than individuals. Some behaviors--crowds running or converging in certain places, for instance--are known as “trigger events” and they set off a chain of events within the system. So say someone pulls a gun; people tend to scatter haphazardly in that situation, and the system can recognize that as a trigger event indicative of some kind of civil problem.

So aside from alerting authorities, the system would also reach back and begin collating footage from that camera and nearby cameras from the minutes before the crime began unfolding. It can also follow a person suspected of criminal activity from camera to camera, so police could track a criminal after the fact. The end result is a more complete video composite of a crime from the minutes leading up to the act and through the minutes following it.

And should no crime be committed at a certain place at a certain time--as is usually the case--the system knows that it can hold the footage for only the minimum required time and then delete it. This, Dr. Orwell says, directly addresses the privacy concern that people are being monitored by the state all the time.

Naturally, privacy groups and gun-brandishing criminals aren’t so much digging the idea.

[BBC]

These scanners aren't new; they've been used elsewhere in the world at airports like Amsterdam's Schiphol for years, and we've seen similar ideas before. It shows only a featureless body shape (which looks sort of like a gingerbread man), and if it finds any forbidden objects during the scan, it projects them onto the corresponding location on the gingerbread drawing as yellow "hot spots." Then the offender is hustled out for the regular invasive body scan. Nobody said this new system was perfect, but it does reduce the number of invasive scans: if you're clean and the scanner realizes it on the first try, your body will remain unseen by humorless TSA types.

The new scanners are rolling out to 40 domestic airports at first, for a total of about 240 machines at a cost of $2.7 million. We're not sure exactly which airports are getting the scanners, though the Baltimore-Washington and Tampa airports seem a lock.

[Jaunted]

Researchers at Rice University claim in a recent paper that they’ve created just such a system. Called Theia, their phone searching scheme works via a voluntarily downloaded app that allows their search tools to access the photo libraries on participating phones. When a user submits a query--say for a particular face or a particular background--Theia directs the apps on all participating phones to begin searching their photo libraries for those query subjects.

To keep things efficient and avoid overloading phones, the search is two-tiered. First, Theia uses a set of broader search parameters to determine, wholesale, which pics might be worth a closer look (these parameters can include meta data associated with images as well as the images themselves). Images that are deemed worthy of a closer look are then uploaded to Theia’s servers and subjected to greater scrutiny. Theia users can specify a processing budget on their phones so the system doesn’t dominate their processing power and slow other functions.

The idea here, of course, is to enable realtime searching of the physical world via image data provided by the crowd. Say a child is abducted; Theia springs into action searching phones near the place where the child was last seen for images that may have inadvertently captured the child, allowing authorities to begin combing through crowdsourced evidence long before images get posted to Flickr or Facebook. If it finds a positive match, it can zero in on a geographic area by focusing on other searchable cell phones in the same general area. In some cases, Theia might even allow for realtime or near-realtime tracking of a person or object through the physical world via the images snapped by multiple different cell phones.

And all it requires is that you grant some faceless entity access to the data on your smartphone. What objections could you possibly have?

[I Programmer]

A prelude to the 2012 Olympic Games?

But not more promising than simply disseminating photographs to the general public, which is still far cheaper and more effective than using the nascent facial recognition technology. In an effort to finger those rioters wanted for some more egregious crimes (like assault), the police have released some two dozen photos and videos to Flickr, where 40,000 viewers have looked them over for familiar faces.

Moreover, independent sites like LondonRioters.co.uk have popped up, asking the public to identify people captured on camera while engaging in “thuggery.”

But unfortunately, the images released by the police are mostly grainy pics snapped by CCTV cameras--images too distorted for the software to make use of. And therein lies the problem for this kind of technology: the images need to meet certain standards of quality, and the system has to have something to match against--if a perp has no past record with police, the system comes up empty. Well, that and the fact that facial recognition technology is about the biggest, scariest Big Brother-ish technology taking shape out there right now.

Still, it’s a test run that could help developers tweak the tech for 2012, where it very well may be rolled out. The people that Olympic security forces will be looking for at the Summer Games are the kind that have a record of past misdeeds, and therefore in many cases will have a good photo on file. In that case, Scotland Yard might be onto something.

[AP]

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.

[NY Daily News]