nova lounge

Mobiles used to surveil shoppers..

2008-06-03T15:35:00.000-07:00

Times Online: "Customers in shopping centres are having their every move tracked by a new type of surveillance that listens in on the whisperings of their mobile phones.

The technology can tell when people enter a shopping centre, what stores they visit, how long they remain there, and what route they take as they walked around.

The device cannot access personal details about a person’s identity or contacts, but privacy campaigners expressed concern about potential intrusion should the data fall into the wrong hands."

Seems like this would be easy enough to correlate with time-coded surveillance video on premises... Speaking of which, aren't they already doing this with the cameras?

Terrorists have officially won.

2008-02-13T19:40:00.000-08:00

27BStroke6: "The Senate overwhelming voted Tuesday evening to legalize President Bush's warrantless wiretapping program and grant amnesty to the phone companies that helped out with the domestic spying..

The 68 to 29 vote is a major step in radically re-configuring 30 year-old limits on how the nation's spying services operate inside America's borders. The vote also deals a severe blow to civil liberties groups that are suing companies such as AT&T and Verizon for turning over millions of American's phone records to the government, and for helping the government wiretap American's phone and internet communications without a court order."

Sad. Predictable, but sad.

FBI data mines consumer grocery records for 'signs of terrorists'

2007-11-07T17:07:00.000-08:00

CQ Politics: "Like Hansel and Gretel hoping to follow their bread crumbs out of the forest, the FBI sifted through customer data collected by San Francisco-area grocery stores in 2005 and 2006, hoping that sales records of Middle Eastern food would lead to Iranian terrorists.

The idea was that a spike in, say, falafel sales, combined with other data, would lead to Iranian secret agents in the south San Francisco-San Jose area. The brainchild of top FBI counterterrorism officials Phil Mudd and Willie T. Hulon, according to well-informed sources, the project didn’t last long. It was torpedoed by the head of the FBI’s criminal investigations division, Michael A. Mason, who argued that putting somebody on a terrorist list for what they ate was ridiculous — and possibly illegal.

A check of federal court records in California did not reveal any prosecutions developed from falafel trails. "

As 27BStroke6 points out - "It's not clear how the FBI got the records to sift through in the first place - did grocery stores volunteer the data or get served with national security letters or the dread Section 215 of the Patriot Act."

Not going to say we told you so...

Really.

Pope John Paul II, on fire, waves from beyond the grave

2007-10-16T09:59:00.000-07:00

the Daily Mail: "This fiery figure is being hailed as Pope John Paul II making an appearance beyond the grave. The image, said by believers to show the Holy Father with his right hand raised in blessing, was spotted during a ceremony in Poland to mark the second anniversary of his death. Details appeared on the Vatican News Service, a TV station in Rome which specialises in religious news broadcasts. "

The Vatican offered no explanation as to why the former Pope might have chosen to appear wrapped in burning, hellish flames.

RFID implants linked to animal tumors

2007-09-10T19:08:00.000-07:00

AP: "When the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved implanting microchips in humans, the manufacturer said it would save lives, letting doctors scan the tiny transponders to access patients' medical records almost instantly. The FDA found 'reasonable assurance' the device was safe, and a sub-agency even called it one of 2005's top 'innovative technologies.'

But neither the company nor the regulators publicly mentioned this: A series of veterinary and toxicology studies, dating to the mid-1990s, stated that chip implants had 'induced' malignant tumors in some lab mice and rats. 'The transponders were the cause of the tumors,' said Keith Johnson, a retired toxicologic pathologist, explaining in a phone interview the findings of a 1996 study he led at the Dow Chemical Co. in Midland, Mich."

Um. Whoops. More on the back-story, including hints of political corruption and coverup of the risks at 27bStroke6... Un-chip your pets.

Salt water to replace oil?

2007-09-10T16:47:00.000-07:00

AP: "An Erie cancer researcher has found a way to burn salt water, a novel invention that is being touted by one chemist as the 'most remarkable' water science discovery in a century. John Kanzius happened upon the discovery accidentally when he tried to desalinate seawater with a radio-frequency generator he developed to treat cancer. He discovered that as long as the salt water was exposed to the radio frequencies, it would burn. The discovery has scientists excited by the prospect of using salt water, the most abundant resource on earth, as a fuel."

Bad. Ass. Yay science!

Face Police coming to US Airports...

2007-08-17T16:50:00.000-07:00

Newsweek: "Specially trained security personnel" will be watching passengers for "micro-expressions" that will reveal treacherous agendas and insidious intentions at airports around the country. These agents, who may literally hold your fate in their hands have been given a lofty, Orwellian name: 'Behavior Detection Officers.'"

"So while TSA employees are confiscating our scissors and water bottles, they’re going to secretly be staring at us, looking for some telltale sign of terrorist intent in a grimace, a sigh, a crinkled nose"

Creepy, yes. But probably more effective than strip searching toddlers based on inaccurate name matches from a super-duper-secret watchlist, or taking our water away. Can we just be free and get on with it? Take our chances? Not be anal probed OR terrorized?

Wikipedia spin-detector online

2007-08-15T11:56:00.000-07:00

27B Stroke6: "Caltech graduate student Virgil Griffith just launched an unofficial Wikipedia search tool that threatens to lay bare the ego-editing and anonymous flacking on the site. Enter the name of a corporation, organization or government entity and you get a list of IP addresses assigned to it. Then with one or two clicks, you can see all the anonymous edits made from those addresses anywhere in Wikipedia's pages."

This is absolutely brilliant.. Corporations, governments, individuals caught in the act of "anonymously" editing unfavorable entries. Hats off Mr. Griffith. You have added to our world. :)

U.S. to Expand Domestic Use Of Spy Satellites

2007-08-15T11:51:00.000-07:00

Wall Street Journal: "The U.S.'s top intelligence official has greatly expanded the range of federal and local authorities who can get access to information from the nation's vast network of spy satellites in the U.S. The decision, made three months ago by Director of National Intelligence Michael McConnell, places for the first time some of the U.S.'s most powerful intelligence-gathering tools at the disposal of domestic security officials.

The move was authorized in a May 25 memo sent to Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff asking his department to facilitate access to the spy network on behalf of civilian agencies and law enforcement.

Until now, only a handful of federal civilian agencies, such as the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and the U.S. Geological Survey, have had access to the most basic spy-satellite imagery, and only for the purpose of scientific and environmental study. "

When did the people represented by the government become separated from it? Why have they become the enemy, to be tagged, cataloged, monitored and watched? Why are we wasting resources watching ourselves? Do you, personally, need to be watched? If the answer is 'no', then any time spent watching you is wasted, and time that could be spent watching someone who needs watching. Why would you support a plan to watch yourself, at great cost and exactly zero impact? Lame.

So Democrats and Republicans both hate freedom after all...

2007-08-06T11:04:00.000-07:00

27bStroke6: "A new law expanding the government's spying powers gives the Bush Administration a six-month window to install possibly permanent back doors in the nation's communication networks. The legislation was passed hurriedly by Congress over the weekend and signed into law Sunday by President Bush."

"In short, the law gives the Administration the power to order the nation's communication service providers -- which range from Gmail, AOL IM, Twitter, Skype, traditional phone companies, ISPs, internet backbone providers, Federal Express, and social networks -- to create possibly permanent spying outposts for the federal government."

Let the Noise to Signal ratio increase in 3...2...1... now. Not even going out on a limb to say that this infrastructure will absolutely be used in routine wholesale surveillance of US citizens, our actions, our thoughts, and our interconnections.

So the meta-theme is that people want freedom, and governments want control. Looks like we're well on our way to joining the ranks of nations we would have ridiculed as being 'not free' even 20 years ago.

Question: Why do we feel like the 'war on terrr' is merely a pretext? Why do those charged with preserving individual freedom seem driven to curtail it at every available opportunity? Republican. Democrat. Doesn't seem to matter. The motivations and actions of our elected representatives appear counter to what they should be as leaders of a free society.

Unless we're over that?

Warning Label Generator

2007-07-05T16:08:00.000-07:00

What more to say? It's a warning label generator! Pick the ominous tone of your warning template, pick your universal symbol, then pop in up to 6 lines of poetic-scary text.

Fun for literally everyone.

Windows Vista streams personal data to Microsoft

2007-07-02T18:44:00.000-07:00

Softpedia: "Are you using Windows Vista? Then you might as well know that the licensed operating system installed on your machine is harvesting a healthy volume of information for Microsoft. In this context, a program such as the Windows Genuine Advantage is the last of your concerns. In fact, in excess of 20 Windows Vista features and services are hard at work collecting and transmitting your personal data to the Redmond company. "

So on the plus side, Microsoft is pretty open about the fact that they're watching you - although we'd wager that most Vista users are utterly unaware that a steady stream of personal info is phoning home. Is it a spyware OS? Maybe. Maybe not. We're not using it, so we don't really care.

The real question is "who does your computer, your property, serve? You, or others?"

Scientists to create artificial life

2007-06-29T09:29:00.000-07:00

Telegraph: "Scientists could create the first new form of artificial life within months after a landmark breakthrough in which they turned one bacterium into another.

In a development that has triggered unease and excitement in equal measure, scientists in the US took the whole genetic makeup - or genome - of a bacterial cell and transplanted it into a closely related species.

This then began to grow and multiply in the lab, turning into the first species in the process.

The team that carried out the first “species transplant” says it plans within months to do the same thing with a synthetic genome made from scratch in the laboratory."

File under "What could possibly go wrong?"

NYC Trying to Regulate Photon Detection and Recording

2007-06-29T09:28:00.000-07:00

New York Times: "Some tourists, amateur photographers, even would-be filmmakers hoping to make it big on YouTube could soon be forced to obtain a city permit and $1 million in liability insurance before taking pictures or filming on city property, including sidewalks."

..meanwhile installing their own surveillance cameras on every corner.

'Dark galaxy' found. Stars not included.

2007-06-20T10:02:00.000-07:00

New Scientist: "The Hubble Space Telescope has failed to reveal the expected number of stars in the mysterious, galaxy-sized cloud of hydrogen known as VIRGOHI21. The research bolsters the idea that the gas cloud is the only known example of a 'dark galaxy' that never kick-started star birth.

Galaxies are thought to coalesce from normal, or baryonic, matter that has collected in clouds of hypothetical dark matter. But surveys have turned up fewer galaxies than expected, suggesting that – for unknown reasons – some galaxies are stillborn, and simply fail to form stars."

Fascinating.

AT&T expands domestic surveillance to include 'copyright violations'...

2007-06-13T16:40:00.000-07:00

Via 27BStroke6: "AT&T, one of the nation's largest ISPs and internet backbone providers, is now working with Hollywood and the recording industry to create a network-based solution to police copyright infringement, according to the Los Angeles Times."

Well, since they have the deep packet inspection technologies riding on the backbone, and since their collaboration with the NSA (and the tech used) is in the open, why not resell the service... Discounting the invasive nature of sniffing customer's (and potentially non-customer's) internet traffic, there's the issue of privacy, security, false positives, and of course, the ever-present issue that an IP address doesn't equal identity. Will they start filtering porn next? Or spam? Or offers from competing ISPs?

Once they've demonstrated the capability, will they be compelled to try to identify and block fraud, threats, or other activities? What about corporate data? What about legitimate fair use of copyright works (e.g. streaming MP3s of CDs you own from your home PC to your work PC? Or, god forbid Trent Reznor tries to upload one of his own tracks to his web site)...

And will it all be moot once this hits the public eye, and session encryption tools like Tor become more mainstream? Blah.

AT&T sucks. Seriously. They should be ashamed of spying on their own customers - and AT&T customers suck too. At least the ones who continue to subscribe to AT&T services knowing the open hostility that AT&T exhibits toward its customers.

Oh, and in related AT&T wholesale surveillance news, The SpyRoom docs have been released. Also from Wired: "A civil liberties group suing telecom giant AT&T for allegedly installing illegal secret surveillance rooms in its internet facilities at the behest of the National Security Agency published substantial portions of long-sealed case documents Tuesday."

Now even the ads are watching us...

2007-06-12T10:54:00.000-07:00

Wired: "The eyebox2 from xuuk is a palm-size video camera surrounded by infrared light-emitting diodes. It can record eye contact with 15-degree accuracy at a distance of up to 33 feet. A simple glance from a passerby scores an impression, providing a tally that enables new Google-like measurement metrics that real-world advertisers could only dream about until recently."

Peachy.

Scientists claim discovery of 'wireless power' 100 years too late

2007-06-08T09:55:00.000-07:00

Daily Mail: "Scientists have sounded the death knell for the plug and power lead. In a breakthrough that sounds like something out of Star Trek, they have discovered a way of 'beaming' power across a room into a light bulb, mobile phone or laptop computer without wires or cables. In the first successful trial of its kind, the team was able to illuminate a 60-watt light bulb 7ft away."

Um. No. Had the journalist done any research whatsoever, he would have found what many already know - Nicola Tesla had discovered and used this principal over a century ago.

Even holding a fluorescent tube near a Tesla Coil will cause it to light up. Research, people.

Google spy-vans

2007-05-31T12:23:00.000-07:00

Roundup of the Google residential and vehicle spy-van stories... For those not yet in the loop, Google Maps has rolled out a new 'feature' where you can click on a street and get a 360 degree view of that location - including whatever happened to be there when the shots were taken.

People and their faces. Car make, model, and license plates. Through open windows... While it shows what anyone would see while sitting on the street at that moment in time, it's now available to any interwebs user, including stalkers, thieves, or profile builders. (Nice new Mercedes in this driveway, next to house address, including license plate - And hey - there's the owner's face.. Seems to have a nice plasma on the living room wall... etc.)

Here's BoingBoing's look at the spy vehicles being used to make the photos.

And 27StrokeB6's running log of interesting street level views (bikini-clad sunbathers, dude walking out of strip club, etc)...

And the appropriately named "streetviewer"

While limited to major metro areas (SF, NYC, Vegas), the goal is probably to capture everything. They do have a 'this invades my privacy' button, but we're not sure what it does. Here's a flash-back to keeping your house out of the photo database, using the DMCA and a wall sized original poem.

And we're still holding our breath hoping that Elinor Mills of CNet will follow up last year's CNet / Google spat by posting a street level view of the homes of Google's founders.

Terrorism stats database - moving beyond hype

2007-05-24T13:14:00.000-07:00

LiveScience: "The majority of terrorist attacks result in no fatalities, with just 1 percent of such attacks causing the deaths of 25 or more people.

And terror incidents began rising some in 1998, and that level remained relatively constant through 2004.

These and other myth-busting facts about global terrorism are now available on a new online database open to the public.

The database identifies more than 30,000 bombings, 13,400 assassinations and 3,200 kidnappings. Also, it details more than 1,200 terrorist attacks within the United States.

The unclassified Global Terrorism Database (GTD) will give anyone interested the opportunity to peruse through the actual details of global terror attacks. The online terror rap sheet is expected to be a critical tool for researchers and policy-makers who can use it to improve responses to terrorism."

Objective reality should get more airtime... Link to the database web-front-end...

The Monkeysphere. This explains literally everything.

2007-05-23T13:48:00.000-07:00

Inside the Monkeysphere: "That's the whole thing, right here. Life on Earth, in a nutshell. We are hard-wired to have a drastic double standard for the people inside and out of our Monkeysphere and those outside make up 99.999% of the world's population. "

Step 1. Aquire ad companies. Step 2. Wholesale surveillance. Step 3. Profit.

2007-05-23T12:53:00.000-07:00

Interesting duo-fecta of announcements this week from two competing retardo-level market cap companies in the computing world. Both Micro$oft and Google have acquired ad-serving companies that extend reach beyond their own properties - and curiously, both have plans to do the deep cross-property profiling of individuals and their online activities.

From the Financial Times, on Google's 'do no evil' plan: "Google’s ambition to maximise the personal information it holds on users is so great that the search engine envisages a day when it can tell people what jobs to take and how they might spend their days off. Eric Schmidt, Google’s chief executive, said gathering more personal data was a key way for Google to expand... Fears have been stoked by the potential for Google to build up a detailed picture of someone’s behaviour by combining its records of web searches with the information from DoubleClick’s “cookies”, the software it places on users’ machines to track which sites they visit."

From New Scientist on Micro$oft's continued push to assimilation: "If you thought you could protect your privacy on the web by lying about your personal details, think again. In online communities at least, entering fake details such as a bogus name or age may no longer prevent others from working out exactly who you are. That is the spectre raised by new research conducted by Microsoft. The computing giant is developing software that could accurately guess your name, age, gender and potentially even your location, by analysing telltale patterns in your web browsing history. But experts say the idea is a clear threat to privacy - and may be illegal in some places."

Spiffy. Inescapable pervasive wholesale surveillance, by Micro$oft, Google, the federal government, and ISPs.. Let the countdown to investigative subpoenas begin? Pleh. Time to start a new internet. This one's been infected.

Rhesus monkey genome sequenced.

2007-04-13T12:56:00.000-07:00

Chron.com: "An international team of 170 scientists led by Baylor College of Medicine has sequenced the genome of the rhesus monkey, an important research animal and the most wide-ranging primate aside from humans."

Yes, but does the rhesus monkey really taste like peanut-butter and chocolate?

So... everything really tastes like T-Rex?

2007-04-12T14:43:00.000-07:00

CNN: "Tiny bits of protein extracted from a 68-million-year-old dinosaur bone have given scientists the first genetic proof that the mighty Tyrannosaurus rex is a distant cousin to the modern chicken.

"It's the first molecular evidence of this link between birds and dinosaurs," said John Asara, a Harvard Medical School researcher, whose results were published in Friday's edition of the journal Science."

I think we're going to need a bigger ziplock...

Is dark energy an illusion?

2007-03-30T12:04:00.000-07:00

New Scientist: "The quickening pace of our universe's expansion may not be driven by a mysterious force called dark energy after all, but paradoxically, by the collapse of matter in small regions of space.

Astronomers were astonished to discover in 1998 that the expansion of the universe is happening at an ever-increasing rate. The mysterious repulsive force responsible for this was dubbed dark energy, though scientists still do not know what it is (see Dark energy: seeking the heart of darkness).

Now, physicist Syksy Rasanen of CERN in Geneva, Switzerland, says we might not need dark energy after all. As counter-intuitive as it sounds, the increasing rate of expansion might be due to the collapse of small regions of the universe under gravity, he says."

Not sure how this impacts the math, but it does make an intuitive sort of sense that the voids would have less gravitational resistance to expansion.. Also explains the filament-like nature of matter distribution throughout the universe...