The year, 2060. Elect a robot to Congress or President! Can’t be worse than the human ones we elected in the past.

PROTECT IP / SOPA Breaks The Internet from Fight for the Future on Vimeo.

At the end of October, DARPA (the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) launched its Shredder Challenge contest. The objective: create a system for reconstructing shredded papers, then demonstrate it by piecing together five documents, the shredded remains of which were posted on the contest’s website.

Although the contest had a December 4th deadline, the “All Your Shreds Are Belong to U.S.” team correctly reassembled all five documents with two days to spare.

The San Francisco-based team, which beat out approximately 9,000 competitors, used “custom-coded, computer-vision algorithms to suggest fragment pairings to human assemblers for verification.” Members of the team spent approximately 600 man-hours developing algorithms and otherwise working on the challenge, completing everything within 33 days. Because it was able to reconstruct all five documents posted in the contest, the team was able to claim the complete prize of $50,000.

DARPA hosted the contest both to develop methods of reading shredded documents left behind by enemies in war zones, and to identify ways in which U.S. shredded documents could be read by other parties, so that countermeasures could be developed.

So, when you’re through shredding – burn!

Suppose a government wanted to monitor it’s citizens — for their own good, of course — at home. Suppose MS was required to put in a backdoor into its new Xbox’s software to allow access to the Kinect at all times to allow watching what’s happening and being said… Naw. That’s crazy, paranoid, 1984 talk.

Microsoft plans to release a next-generation Kinect device so accurate it can lip read, sources have told Eurogamer. Kinect 2 will come bundled with future Xbox consoles, we understand.

The intention is that Kinect 2 will offer improved motion sensing and voice recognition. One development source told Eurogamer that Kinect 2 will be so powerful it will enable games to lip read, detect when players are angry, and determine in which direction they are facing. Kinect 2 can track the pitch and volume of player voices and facial characteristics to measure different emotional states.

Earlier this year, the International Air Transport Association (IATA) demonstrated its vision for the “checkpoint of the future” — a series of neon-lit tunnels, each equipped with an array of eye-scanners, x-ray machines, and metal and liquid detectors. Heralding an end to “one size fits all screening,” the association says that passengers will be assigned a “travel profile” and ushered into one of three corridors accordingly.
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Feeling guilty? Got something to hide? A team of UK-based researchers claim to have developed a thermal lie-detection camera that can automatically spot a burning conscience.
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But it’s not just contraband smugglers who should fear the arrival of this sniffing super-breed. Lee’s next clone will be a high-performance “quarantine dog” — gifted with an enhanced capacity for detecting the presence of disease in humans.

Don’t you feel safer already?

I can’t even remember the last time I saw a dialup modem, much less used one. When was the last time you used one? Still use one?

Laugh all you want, but as of the end of September, AOL still had 3.5 million subscribers to its dialup Internet access service — a lot more than the number of people who pay for, say, Spotify. And the decline from last year — about 630,000 subs — was AOL’s smallest Q3 shrinkage yet. (AOL credits a “price rationalization program” last quarter that helped them convert 200,000 people to an AOL access subscription.) This time in 2006 and 2007, AOL was losing 5 million customers a year.

For you young’uns who have never experienced a modem, click pic to see and hear what dialing with a modem is like.

You just know the tech will get better, so get ready for getting a tickets for distracted driving for picking your nose.

Developed by Simicon, this new speed sensor promises to take highway surveillance to new heights of precision. Unlike most photo radar systems, which track only one violator at a time, Simicon’s device can simultaneously identify and follow up to 32 vehicles across four lanes. Whenever a car enters its range, the Cordon will automatically generate two images: one from wide-angle view and one closeup shot of the vehicle’s license plate. It’s also capable of instantly measuring a car’s speed and mapping its position, and can easily be synced with other databases via WiFi, 3G or WiMAX.

Plus, this device is compact and durable enough to be mounted upon a tripod or atop a road sign, making it even harder for drivers to spot. Fortunately, though, you still have time to change your dragster ways, as distributor Peak Gain Systems won’t be bringing the Cordon to North America until the first quarter of 2012. Cruise past the break to see some footage of a field trial that’s currently underway — cars tagged with a green dot are traveling below the speed limit, those with a yellow marking are chugging along within an acceptable range above the limit, while vehicles with a red tab are just asking for trouble.

Is anybody surprised?

South Texas gets second drone for patrolling – The Brownsville Herald: South Texas’ second unmanned aerial vehicle was expected to arrive at its base station in Corpus Christi Wednesday night and will begin operations in a couple of days.
Texas Congressional members Henry Cuellar, D-Laredo, Blake Farenthold, R-Corpus Christi, and Mike McCaul, R-Houston, announced the arrival of the second UAV earlier this week.

The Predator UAV is equipped with an electro-optical/infrared sensor system that is suitable for flights in darkness and bad weather.
Cuellar has pushed for more drones for the Texas-Mexico border and earlier said the bipartisan effort between Democrats and Republicans was the key factor for South Texas receiving second UAV.

Meet the Roberts electric car. Built in 1896, it gets a solid 40 miles to the charge — exactly the mileage Chevrolet advertises for the Volt — the much-touted $31,645 electric car General Motors CEO Dan Akerson called “not a step forward, but a leap forward.”

An internal U.S. Department of Homeland Security document indicates that a controversial program designed to predict whether a person will commit a crime is already being tested on some members of the public voluntarily, CNET has learned.

If this sounds a bit like the Tom Cruise movie called “Minority Report,” or the CBS drama “Person of Interest,” it is. But where “Minority Report” author Philip K. Dick enlisted psychics to predict crimes, DHS is betting on algorithms: it’s building a “prototype screening facility” that it hopes will use factors such as ethnicity, gender, breathing, and heart rate to “detect cues indicative of mal-intent.”

The latest developments, which reveal efforts to “collect, process, or retain information on” members of “the public,” came to light through an internal DHS document obtained under open-government laws by the Electronic Privacy Information Center. DHS calls its “pre-crime” system Future Attribute Screening Technology, or FAST.

“If it were deployed against the public, it would be very problematic,” says Ginger McCall, open government counsel at EPIC, a nonprofit group in Washington, D.C.
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Elsewhere in the document, FAST program manager Robert Middleton Jr. refers to a “limited” initial trial using DHS employees as test subjects. Middleton says that FAST “sensors will non-intrusively collect video images, audio recordings, and psychophysiological measurements from the employees,” with a subgroup of employees singled out, with their permission, for more rigorous evaluation.

An update on the article has this:

A Homeland Security spokesman has just provided this additional statement to CNET: “The FAST program is entirely voluntary and does not store any personally-identifiable information (PII) from participants once the experiment is completed. The system is not designed to capture or store PII.”

Just like how they told us info can’t be/isn’t stored by the airport naked body scanners?

The “Mobile Informational Call Act” is an amendment to the Communications Act of 1934 and will allow political organizations, committees, and action groups to contact you on your mobile phone. The new bill…would allow political organizations to use automated dialers and robocall-systems to dial your cell phone and hand you off to a live person or play automated messages asking you to contribute to political campaigns or take surveys.

The result, should the bill pass and become law, is that you’ll be able to opt-out of specific campaigns and group calling lists, but political organizations that get your number through petitions, calling lists, or affiliated organizations will be able to call your mobile phone whenever they choose.

With the fall political campaign heating up and next year’s campaign starting over a year early, that can add up to a lot of unsolicited phone calls from various campaigns and political action committees, all looking for your help or money…

That includes you being charged for the minutes used.

As always, the best thing to do is contact your congressional representatives and let them know that you oppose the bill and would like them to oppose the bill as well. The National Political Do Not Contact Registry has a petition that you can sign to make your opposition to the bill known to your specific representatives…

Beyond signing the petition, standard rules for contacting your Congressional representatives apply: even if you sign the petition, you’ll have the most success if you reach out to your specific representatives and senators with a personal message (the petition linked to above allows you to personalize the message you send for this purpose).

Congress-critters are getting hip to the cyberworld. Some of them can even send and receive their own email without clicking on the link to Nigeria. Now, the self-serving creeps want you to pay for a new intrusion.

Thanks, Ursarodinia

“We keep wiping it off, and it keeps coming back,” says a source familiar with the network infection, one of three that told Danger Room about the virus. “We think it’s benign. But we just don’t know.”

Military network security specialists aren’t sure whether the virus and its so-called “keylogger” payload were introduced intentionally or by accident; it may be a common piece of malware that just happened to make its way into these sensitive networks. The specialists don’t know exactly how far the virus has spread. But they’re sure that the infection has hit both classified and unclassified machines at Creech. That raises the possibility, at least, that secret data may have been captured by the keylogger, and then transmitted over the public internet to someone outside the military chain of command.

Someone needs to figure out how this malware got on the network in the first place.