Technology Impacts

The days of being able to walk through airport security checkpoints while wearing shoes and a jacket could return if an experimental program proves successful, some Department of Homeland Security officials say.

Project officials hope various sensors, such as this one that tracks eye movement, can help security screeners.

The Homeland Security-funded project is Future Attribute Screening Technology, or FAST. Instead of focusing on whether you have hidden explosives or whether you’re carrying a weapon, sensors and cameras located at security checkpoints would measure the natural signals coming from your body — your heart rate, breathing, eye movement, body temperature and fidgeting.

Those physiological signs, measured together, will indicate whether you might have the desire or intent to do harm, project manager Robert Burns said.

“There’s been a large field of research that ties your physical reactions to your mental state, your emotional state. We’re looking for those signals that your body gives off naturally,” Burns said. Read the rest of this entry »

A robotics expert, a physicist, a bioethicist and a philosopher have founded the International Committee for Robot Arms Control (ICRAC) to campaign for limits on robotic military hardware.

Roboticist Noel Sharkey at the University of Sheffield, UK, and his colleagues set up ICRAC after a two-day meeting in Sheffield earlier this month. Sharkey has spoken before of ethical concerns about military systems that make their own decisions.

“Robot weapons are likely to change the character of warfare,” Sharkey told New Scientist. “We seem to be rushing headlong into the development of autonomous weapons systems without any real concern for the long-term impact on civilian populations.”

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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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Robots are getting smarter.

For a security manager, even a test environment could be too vulnerable when it’s located in the Web-accessible cloud.

Computerworld - What great timing! I had no sooner returned from the RSA Conference, where my focus was on cloud computing, than I was invited to a meeting to discuss our first venture into “the cloud.”

The IT department has decided to contract with an infrastructure-as-a-service provider to host a portion of our development environment. If this trial is successful, some of our production environment could be next. Having read up on the subject in white papers and attended seminars at RSA, I felt informed enough to ask the questions that needed to be answered before I could feel comfortable about an initiative that was going to open new portals to our network and our data.

And there’s no question that this could expose us to new dangers. Read the rest of this entry »