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Category: law enforcement – Page 17

Shocking invention: A Tesla lightning gun

If 150,000 volt stun guns aren’t enough to deter criminals, law enforcement might want to give Rob Flickenger a buzz.

The IT expert, who also has a bit of a reputation as a DIY mad-scientist, has a shocking new invention: a real-life lightning gun. Built over a period of at least 10 months, the zapper is the end result of combining the aim-and-shoot functionality of an aluminum-encased Nerf gun with the electrical power supplied by an 18V drill battery.

The gun, which some of you might have guessed, is essentially a weaponized version of a Spark Gap Tesla Coil. To generate a high-voltage discharge, Flickenger designed a system that channeled the power drill’s 18V of power into a ZVS driver circuit, which in turn drives a flyback transformer, thereby raising the voltage to about 20,000V. All of this is admitted pretty technical, so if you want a detailed explanation of how it works, check out his site Hackerfriendly.com, where he goes through the finer points of the technology.

Cell-Site Simulators/IMSI Catchers

NLP.

Cell-site simulators, also known as Stingrays or IMSI catchers, are devices that masquerade as legitimate cell-phone towers, tricking phones within a certain radius into connecting to the device rather than a tower.

Cell-site simulators operate by conducting a general search of all cell phones within the device’s radius, in violation of basic constitutional protections.


Law enforcement use cell-site simulators to pinpoint the location of phones with greater accuracy than phone companies. Cell-site simulators can also log IMSI numbers (unique identifying numbers) of all of the mobile devices within a given area. Some cell-site simulators may have advanced features allowing law enforcement to intercept communications or even alter the content of communications.

Criminal defense attorney?

The Crazy V-Bat Vertical Takeoff And Landing Drone Could Be A Game Changer

The Navy sent its expeditionary fast transport ship USNS Spearhead to sea to experiment with a number of cutting-edge technologies last week, including MartinUAV’s novel V-Bat drone. V-Bat is capable of infrastructure-independent vertical takeoff and landings while also retaining the high efficiency of a fixed-wing aircraft for long-endurance missions. Seeing as it can be launched and recovered in a nine square meter area and even in dense urban terrain, as well as on the tight decks of ships, the drone could have a lot of applications in the military, law enforcement/first responder, industrial, and environmental monitoring sectors.

Signaling a ‘new era’ in forensic investigation, a man caught through genetic genealogy gets life in prison for 1987 double murder

In a milestone for forensic criminal investigators, a convicted killer received two life sentences on Wednesday for a 1987 double slaying after becoming the first person arrested through genetic genealogy to be found guilty at trial.

“The conviction and sentencing of William Earl Talbott II marks a new era for the use genetic genealogy for identifying violent criminals since it has now been tested and tried in a court of law,” geneology expert CeCe Moore told ABC News.

William Earl Talbott II was arrested in May 2018 and charged with aggravated murder for the Washington state cold case killings of 20-year-old Jay Cook and 18-year-old Tanya Van Cuylenborg, authorities said. A jury found Talbott guilty last month.

Is artificial consciousness the solution to AI?

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is an emerging field of computer programming that is already changing the way we interact online and in real life, but the term ‘intelligence’ has been poorly defined. Rather than focusing on smarts, researchers should be looking at the implications and viability of artificial consciousness as that’s the real driver behind intelligent decisions.

Consciousness rather than intelligence should be the true measure of AI. At the moment, despite all our efforts, there’s none.

Significant advances have been made in the field of AI over the past decade, in particular with machine learning, but artificial intelligence itself remains elusive. Instead, what we have is artificial serfs—computers with the ability to trawl through billions of interactions and arrive at conclusions, exposing trends and providing recommendations, but they’re blind to any real intelligence. What’s needed is artificial awareness.

Continue reading “Is artificial consciousness the solution to AI?” | >

Denver Voters Support ‘Magic’ Mushrooms

Voters in Denver, a city at the forefront of the widening national debate over legalizing marijuana, have become the first in the nation to effectively decriminalize another recreational drug: hallucinogenic mushrooms.

The local ballot measure did not quite legalize the mushrooms that contain psilocybin, a naturally occurring psychedelic compound. State and federal regulations would have to change to accomplish that.

But the measure made the possession, use or cultivation of the mushrooms by people aged 21 or older the lowest-priority crime for law enforcement in the city of Denver and Denver County. Arrests and prosecutions, already fairly rare, would all but disappear.

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