Technology Impacts

NEWPORT BEACH, Calif. - A Southern California man accused of killing a pedestrian while driving and text messaging has been ordered to stand trial for gross vehicular manslaughter.

Superior Court Commissioner James Odriozola denied a defense motion Monday to lessen the charge to a misdemeanor after determining there was evidence the crash was caused by more than ordinary carelessness.

Authorities say Martin Kuehl struck and killed nanny Martha Ovalle as she walked in an Orange County crosswalk on Aug. 29, 2008.

Man faces manslaughter trial in texting case - Wireless- msnbc.com.

As part of a major research project, scientists are currently working on a closed-circuit television (CCTV) system that could be able to predict suspicious behavior usually associated with crime in bus travelers. The cameras would relay information back to a control room, where operators would be able to watch suspicious characters, and then intervene even before an attack happens. If emergency-response units cannot get to the bus on time to prevent the harmful actions, then they will be just in time to catch the perpetrators, the creators of the new system believe. According to scientists at the Queens University Belfast – who are in charge of developing the system, and the software associated with it –, the CCTV cameras could lead to a significant curbing in the rate of public-transportation attacks, to which many innocent travelers fall victim, the BBC News reports. Although the new system is still in its theoretical stage, the scientists say they could have it ready for implementation within five years. By that time, every person that boards a bus could be profiled when they climb the stairs. The work is being conducted at the QUB’s newly founded Center for Secure Information Technologies.
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Experts at the University of California in San Diego (UCSD) have recently reaffirmed their role as leading experts in the field of electronics. Last summer, they created an integrated circuit capable of working at 1.5 degrees Kelvin above absolute zero. Those temperatures are colder than most places in the Universe, and can only be achieved under very special conditions. Now, the team has announced the creation of an integrated circuit capable of operating at 125 degrees Kelvin, a temperature that can be achieved with commercially available liquid nitrogen.
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The worst Microsoft ads of all time

A cringe-inducing Microsoft advert has been doing the rounds this week - but there are plenty of other skeletons in the company’s closet

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The Home Office is to spend over £500,000 this year on a marketing campaign for the identity card which features cartoon fingerprints

A departmental spokesperson told GC News that it is planning a public information campaign to alert businesses on the need to prepare for the introduction of the card, which will initially be made available on a voluntary basis.

It will be focused primarily on the north-west of England, reflecting plans to make the card available to residents of Greater Manchester later this year, with some nationwide marketing.

The campaign, one advert for which features a cartoon fingerprint unveiling the identity card to an admiring audience of other fingerprints, is expected to cost £544,000 between September and December.

“This will help businesses with ‘know your employee’ and ‘know your customer’ checks,” the spokesperson said. “The National Identity Card may be presented to businesses across the country any time after launch, as proof of identity. Businesses need to ensure that their staff are ready to recognise the National Identity Card, and know how to check the security features.” Read the rest of this entry »

A California federal judge has ordered Google to temporarily de-activate a Gmail account after a bank mistakenly sent sensitive data to the account.

U.S. District Judge James Ware also ordered Google to disclose the identity of the Gmail account holder.

The Rocky Mountain Bank of Wyoming sued Google to obtain the account holder’s name after a bank employee erroneously e-mailed an attachment to the account containing sensitive information on 1,325 individual and business bank customers. The attachment contained customer names, addresses, Tax ID and Social Security numbers and loan information. Read the rest of this entry »

The Department of Homeland Security has pushed hard for the past few years to make sure it retains the right to search your laptop at the border with no real limitations. It is, indeed, (as defenders of this policy always like to point out) established law that the border is not in the country, so Constitutional 4th Amendment rights do not apply. That still doesn’t make it right. I, like many others, would not have a problem with searches due to probable cause. Nor do we have any real problem with searches of physical luggage at the border. But a blank slate, seems like a bit much — for a few reasons. First, the purpose of a border search is to see what you’re bringing into the country. But, when it comes to digital data, no one’s bringing it across the border to get it into the country. You could just send it over any number of internet protocols to get it into the country without using a laptop. So, the very rationale doesn’t make sense. Second, when people travel, they specifically pick and choose what physical goods to put into their luggage. With a computer, the situation is the opposite. You automatically bring everything (including, potentially access to remote drives). Read the rest of this entry »

The Daily Telegraph has a disturbing report about an alleged compulsory plan to insert RFID microchip transponders in all dogs in the UK, and Yet Another National Database of human names, addresses and telephone numbers, which will not solve the underlying problems, and which will pose a Privacy and Security risk to millions of innocent people.

All dogs to be microchipped with owner’s details to ‘help track pets’

All dogs in Britain will be fitted with microchips which contain their owner’s details, under cross party plans designed to track family pets.

By Andrew Hough
Published: 7:00AM BST 28 Sep 2009

Owners will be forced to install the microchip containing a barcode that can store their pet’s name, breed, age and health along with their own address and phone number.

barcode ? Surely not ! How exactly do you read one of those opticaly, when it is implanted under the skin and fur ?

Presumably the author means an implantable RFID transponder chip

This sort of glass encapsulated RFID transponder chip implant, designed for animal tagging, uses a low frequency of around 125KHz, with a reading range of about a metre. High or microwave frequency, faster data rate, longer range RFIDchips etc. are of no use for implants, as those radio frequencies are strongly absorbed by living tissue.

The barcode’s details would then be stored on a national database which local councils could access in a bid to easily identify an owner’s pet.

What is the justification for this being a national database ? Read the rest of this entry »

Robots are getting smarter.

Back in 2002, science fiction author Robert J. Sawyer wrote an essay about the trade-off between privacy and security, and came out in favor of less privacy. I disagree with most of what he said, and have written pretty much the opposite essay — and others on the value of privacy and the future of privacy — several times since then.

The point of this blog entry isn’t really to debate the topic, though. It’s to reprint the opening paragraph of Sawyer’s essay, which I’ve never forgotten:

Whenever I visit a tourist attraction that has a guest register, I always sign it. After all, you never know when you’ll need an alibi.

Since I read that, whenever I see a tourist attraction with a guest register, I do the same thing. I sign “Robert J. Sawyer, Toronto, ON” — because you never know when he’ll need an alibi.

Schneier on Security: Robert Sawyer’s Alibis.