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Category: privacy – Page 24

You got to luv this one.

The security agency must defend itself in a US appeals court for violating the rights of a convicted bomber by supposedly illegally spying on him.

A US appeals court will weigh a constitutional challenge on Wednesday to a warrantless government surveillance program, brought by an Oregon man found guilty of attempting to detonate a bomb in 2010 during a Christmas tree-lighting ceremony.

The case before a three-judge panel of the 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals is the first of its kind to consider whether a criminal defendant’s constitutional privacy rights are violated under a National Security Agency (NSA) program that allows spying on Americans’ international phone calls and internet communications.

Continue reading “NSA to stand trial for spying on convicted bomber without warrant” | >

Glad they are doing something on this because my biggest concern on biometrics and systems storing other people’s DNA/ bio information is criminals hacking in and collecting bio information on people and reselling it on the Dark Web. With this type of information; criminals can do many interesting things especially if they have access to a gene editing kit, or 3D printers, etc. We have seen how easy it is to create gene editing kits and selling them on the net for $129 each. And, how 3D printers can replicate synthetic skin, contacts mimicking eye structures, etc. So, criminals can do some amazing things once they have access to anyone’s biometrics information.

A biometric system to verify travelers exiting the country could be in effect as soon as 2018.

By Kayla Nick-Kearney.

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Biometrics using DNA along with other recognition technology brings additional identity protection; however, is it just me or are others understanding the risk with our DNA and other bio info being online given the existing weak infrastructure and under pinning technology. Without a QC secured internet and infrastructure; I would hesitate having my bio/ DNA information online for hackers and terrorists.

Once your identity with the DNA is online; it will be extremely hard to do a reset button on your identity because things like an id number such as a US Social Security number, etc. can be changed; but DNA identity is not that achievable even with CRISPR.

The official Yili Daily reported that from the first of June, residents of the Yili Kazakh Autonomous Prefecture in China’s far northwest must present the police with DNA samples, fingerprints, voice prints and a “three-dimensional image” when applying for travel documents.

Members of the majorly Muslim Uighur community in Xinjiang complain of discrimination, especially facing denials of passport applications including limits placed on their culture and religion.

Based on the paper, the new policy that came into effect before the commencement of the holy month of Ramadan which started on Monday, refers to applications for and renewals of passports, entry permits to Taiwan and two-way permits to Hong Kong and Macau.

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All is promising for Biometrics and biometric informatics; however, the technologies to date leveraged in IoT and other environments for parsing, analysis (especially predictive analysis), as well as better presented needs to be improved to be of value. We have seen great progress in the collection of the information and for some basic identification capabilities it looks good; however, to truly be effective and of value we need a lot more work done in this space especially when you look at today’s landscape of collecting information in areas of IoT and processing/ analysis with big data.

The global biometrics market is projected to cross US $ 24.8 billion by 2021. Fingerprint recognition biometric systems are the most preferred type of biometric systems used across the globe, owing to their ease of use, low cost, high speed and accurate results.

Biometric systems are used across various public as well as private offices for enhancing the security of data and information, as these systems provide an accurate validation as compared to traditional methods such as ID cards, PINs, passwords, etc. Increasing use of biometrics in e-commerce and cloud computing solutions, coupled with initiatives taken by the government of various countries across the world to adopt biometrics systems for identification and verification purposes are some of the major factors driving demand for biometric solutions, globally.

Moreover, introduction of e-passports and e-visas, use of biometrics in criminal identification, increasing demand for smartphones integrated with biometric technologies and implementation of biometric technology in election administration are anticipated to drive the global biometrics market over the next five years.

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With the element of terrorists in society today; things like video data/ information and biometrics will grow increasingly in demand within the immediate years a key peice that will require improvements in the timely performance and interpretation of the information via the technologies used to collect, analyze, interpret, and present the information to users as well as respecting the privacy of innocent civilians. However, Civilians will also need to do their own part in reasonableness of when and why certain sets of data must be collected.

The Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA), a division of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, will host a Proposers’ Day Conference for the Deep Intermodal Video Analytics (DIVA) program on July 12, 2016, in anticipation of the release of a new broad agency announcement (BAA) solicitation.

The purpose of the conference, which will be held in Washington, DC, will be to provide information on DIVA and the research problems the program aims to address, to address questions from potential proposers and to provide a forum for potential proposers to present their capabilities for teaming opportunities.

The DIVA program will be designed to develop robust automated activity detection for a multi-camera streaming video environment. As an essential aspect of DIVA, activities will be enriched by person and object detection, as well as recognition at multiple levels of granularity. DIVA is anticipated to be a three-phase program.

Continue reading “U.S. intelligence community examining video analytics” | >

Over the next 3 to 5 years you will see more and more in tech (medical/ bio, chip/ semiconductors, software, AI, services, platform, etc.) adopting QC in their nextgen products and services. We’re (as in Vern B. — D-Wave co-founder and CEO terms) in the Era of Quantum Computing. I highly urge techies to learn about QC so that you remain relevant.

Google is being driven by need to prevent the NSA from breaking into its system to access confidential personal data of its millions of users. On the other hand, the NSA is bent on cracking the tough encryption systems Google and other tech firms use to shield their information from them. Quantum computers will attain this aim for both Google and the NSA.

Google recently said it’s gotten closer to building a universal quantum computer. A team of Google researchers in California and Spain has built an experimental prototype of a quantum computer that can solve a wide range of problems and has the potential to be scaled up to larger systems.

The Google prototype combines the two main approaches to quantum computing. One approach constructs the computer’s digital circuits using quantum bits or qubits in specific arrangements geared to solve a specific problem. The other approach is called adiabatic quantum computing (AQC).

Continue reading “Google and NSA Competing to Build World’s Most Powerful Quantum Computer” | >

Computers can identify you based on your butt and your walk, not to mention your smell…

Around half of consumers would “choose anything but a traditional username and password account registration when given the option”, according to identity management firm Gigya.

But would they choose these truly bizarre password alternatives that have been proposed over the years, and would your business be safer switching to them? 1. Biometric Buttocks.

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1st, this article is full of inaccuracies such as 15 years away reported by NIST. Well, maybe 2 years ago they said this; however, in Jan. they and the NSA both stated that QC was less than 10 years away and a huge threat given the advancements by China. Also, this author writes that a hybrid system will be fine to withstand an attack by a hacker on QC. And, that s incorrect.

Also, if this article looks like another article published over a week ago by someone on Forbes; well it is because the author looks like copied word-for-word from the article in Forbes.

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