A used government surveillance van is for sale in Chicago: So how was this van turned into a mobile spying center? Well, let’s start with how it has more LCD monitors than a Counterstrike LAN party. They can be used to monitor any of six different video inputs including a videoscope camera. A videoscope and … Read More “Own Your Own Government Surveillance Van” »
Month: August 2023
Interesting story of an Apple Macintosh app that went rogue. Basically, it was a good app until one particular update…when it went bad. With more official macOS features added in 2021 that enabled the “Night Shift” dark mode, the NightOwl app was left forlorn and forgotten on many older Macs. Few of those supposed tens … Read More “When Apps Go Rogue” »
Interesting story: Napoleon Gonzalez, of Etna, assumed the identity of his brother in 1965, a quarter century after his sibling’s death as an infant, and used the stolen identity to obtain Social Security benefits under both identities, multiple passports and state identification cards, law enforcement officials said. […] A new investigation was launched in 2020 … Read More “Identity Theft from 1965 Uncovered through Face Recognition” »
Turns out that it’s easy to broadcast radio commands that force Polish trains to stop: …the saboteurs appear to have sent simple so-called “radio-stop” commands via radio frequency to the trains they targeted. Because the trains use a radio system that lacks encryption or authentication for those commands, Olejnik says, anyone with as little as … Read More “Remotely Stopping Polish Trains” »
China imposed a “pilot program banning fishing in parts of the south-west Atlantic Ocean from July to October, and parts of the eastern Pacific Ocean from September to December.” However, the conservation group Oceana analyzed the data and figured out that the Chinese weren’t fishing in those areas in those months, anyway. < blockquote>In the … Read More “Friday Squid Blogging: China’s Squid Fishing Ban Ineffective” »
This article talks about new Mexican laws about food labeling, and the lengths to which food manufacturers are going to ensure that they are not effective. There are the typical high-pressure lobbying tactics and lawsuits. But there’s also examples of companies hacking the laws: Companies like Coca-Cola and Kraft Heinz have begun designing their products … Read More “Hacking Food Labeling Laws” »
The Guardian is reporting about microchips in wheels of Parmesan cheese as an anti-forgery measure. Powered by WPeMatico
Imagine that we’ve all—all of us, all of society—landed on some alien planet, and we have to form a government: clean slate. We don’t have any legacy systems from the US or any other country. We don’t have any special or unique interests to perturb our thinking. How would we govern ourselves? It’s unlikely that … Read More “December’s Reimagining Democracy Workshop” »
License plate scanners aren’t new. Neither is using them for bulk surveillance. What’s new is that AI is being used on the data, identifying “suspicious” vehicle behavior: Typically, Automatic License Plate Recognition (ALPR) technology is used to search for plates linked to specific crimes. But in this case it was used to examine the driving … Read More “Applying AI to License Plate Surveillance” »
At Black Hat last week, the White House announced an AI Cyber Challenge. Gizmodo reports: The new AI cyber challenge (which is being abbreviated “AIxCC”) will have a number of different phases. Interested would-be competitors can now submit their proposals to the Small Business Innovation Research program for evaluation and, eventually, selected teams will participate … Read More “White House Announces AI Cybersecurity Challenge” »