Lifeboat Foundation

Everyone knows prevention is better than a cure, and that’s as true for law enforcement as it is for medicine. But there’s little evidence that a growing trend towards “predictive policing” is the answer, and it could even bake in racial bias.

Police departments faced with tight budgets are increasingly turning to machine learning-enabled software that can sift through crime data to help predict where crimes are likely to occur and who might commit them.

Using statistics in law enforcement is nothing new. A statistical system for tracking crime called Compstat was pioneered in New York in 1994 and quickly became popular elsewhere. Since then, crime has fallen 75 percent in New York, which has been credited by some to the technology. But while Compstat simply helped identify historical hotspots, “predictive policing” uses intelligent algorithms to forecast tomorrow’s hotspots and offenders.

Continue reading “Could Predictive Policing Lead to a Real-Life Minority Report?” »

Glad I wasn’t on TOR for a while.

Visitors to more than 10,000 Tor-based websites were met with an alarming announcement this morning: “Hello, Freedom Hosting II, you have been hacked.” A group affiliating itself with Anonymous had compromised servers at Freedom Hosting II, a popular service for hosting websites accessible only through Tor. Roughly six hours after the initial announcement, all the sites hosted by the service are still offline.

In the message, the group offers to sell the compromised data back to Freedom Hosting II in exchange for 0.1 bitcoin, or just over $100, although it is unclear whether the offer is in earnest.

Continue reading “An Anonymous group just took down a fifth of the dark web” »

And, the laws are slowly try to catch up to tech.

SANTA FE, N.M. (Jan. 27, 2017) – A bill introduced in the New Mexico Senate would limit the warrantless use of surveillance drones. The legislation would not only establish important privacy protections at the state level, it would also help thwart the federal surveillance state.

Sen. Gerald Ortiz y Pino (D-Albuquerque) introduced Senate Bill 167 (SB167) on Jan. 19. Titled The Freedom from Unwanted Surveillance Act, the legislation would prohibit federal, state and local law enforcement from using a drone with the intent to gather evidence on private property without a warrant in most cases.

Continue reading “New Mexico Bill Would Place Limits on Drones; Hinder Federal Surveillance Program” »

Luv the map; however, missing a lot of info. Namely, many decades and contributors. QC officially recorded to start in 1960 with Stephen Wiesner discovery of a cryptographic tool. And, even modern day QC such as a QC Net has been in existence since late 90s with Los Alamos.

Still nice colored map for a limited view of 2014, 2015, and current. However, I don’t see the ORNL, Oxford, U. of Sydney, China, USC, MIT, etc. breakthroughs most importantly the scalable Quantum, syn. diamonds contribution to enable stable QC and QC Net.

From law enforcement to criminals, governments to insurgents, and activists to Facebook dabblers, many people have come to rely on encryption to protect their digital information and keep their communications secure. But the current forms of encryption could be obsolete the moment anyone succeeds in building a quantum computer. A what! Read on about the brave new world awaiting us.

Continue reading “Quantum Computers and the End of Privacy #Infographic ~ Visualistan” »

Tune in tomorrow (Thursday, Nov 10, 2016) at 4:30PM Eastern. Find out what Edward Snowden has to say on the future of the US. _{[Source: StartPage via Engadget]}

Continue reading “Edward Snowden will discuss Trump & privacy: Nov 10th” »

A Chinese man has been sentenced to three years in a U.S. prison for conspiring to steal high-tech U.S. corn seeds with the intention of transporting them to China, the U.S. Justice Department said on Wednesday.

Mo Hailong, 46, pleaded guilty in January in federal court in Iowa to conspiring to steal patented corn seeds from DuPont Pioneer and Monsanto Co. Mo was employed as director of the international business of the Beijing Dabeinong Technology Group Co Ltd.

(Reporting by Eric Beech; Editing by Mohammad Zargham)

Continue reading “Chinese man gets three years in US prison for theft of corn secrets” »

SEOUL: China is investigating executives of a North Korean bank believed to finance the illicit procurement of arms and materials related to the isolated country’s banned nuclear programme, South Korea’s JoongAng Daily reported on Monday.

China and the United States have agreed to step up cooperation in the U.N. Security Council and in law enforcement channels after North Korea’s fifth nuclear test on Sept. 9, the White House said last week.

While China is North Korea’s sole major ally, it disapproves of its nuclear and missile programmes.

Continue reading “China probes North Korea bank suspected of nuclear link — South Korea paper” »

My new story for VentureBeat on the coming of robot bodyguards. I’ll be speaking about this next week at RoboBusiness 2016, a major robotics conference in San Jose:

I recently consulted with the US Navy on all things “transhuman.” In those conversations about how science and technology can help the human race evolve beyond its natural limits, it was clear that military is keen on replacing human soldiers with both fighting and peacekeeping machines so American military lives never have to come under fire or be in harm’s way.

However, it’s the peacekeeping technology that is particularly interesting for many civilians. While you wouldn’t want an armed Terminator in your home, you might like a robot that travels with you and offers personal protection, like a bodyguard. In a survey by Travelzoo of 6,000 participants, nearly 80 percent of people said they expect robots to be a significant part of their lives by 2020 — and that those robots might even join them on holidays.

Continue reading “The robot bodyguard is coming — and you’ll want one” »

Interesting — imagine now how this can be used in so many areas (legal/ law enforcement, government, etc.)

Because that’s basically what researchers from MIT and Georgia Tech are able to do with a new imaging system that can read individual pages without opening the cover.

So far the system, designed by researchers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), has been able to distinguish the lines on the first nine pages in a stack of paper.

Continue reading “Scientists Can Now Read Books Without Opening Them” »