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Archive for the ‘surveillance’ category: Page 26

May 29, 2019

Video of a 5G-powered police chase triggers concern in China

Posted by in categories: internet, surveillance

5G means faster video streaming… and stronger surveillance.

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May 13, 2019

How facial recognition became a routine policing tool in America

Posted by in categories: government, robotics/AI, surveillance

The technology is proliferating amid concerns that it is prone to errors and allows the government to expand surveillance without much oversight.

Police are increasingly using facial recognition to solve low-level crimes and to quickly identify people they see as suspicious. Claire Merchlinsky / for NBC News.

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May 9, 2019

We Were Really Overdue For Laser Jackets

Posted by in categories: computing, media & arts, neuroscience, surveillance

Depending on who you talk to, everything is either fine, or we’re living in an oppressive cyberpunk dystopia in which we forgot to drench everything in colored neon lighting. There’s little to be done about the digital surveillance panopticon that stalks our every move, but as far as the aesthetic goes, [abetusk] is bringing the goods. The latest is a laser jacket, to give you that 2087 look in 2019.

The build starts with a leather jacket, which is festooned with 128 individual red laser diodes. These are ganged up in groups of 4, and controlled with 32 individual PWM channels using two PCA9685 controllers. An Arduino Nano acts as the brains of the operation, receiving input from a joystick and a microphone. This allows the user to control lighting effects and set the jacket to respond to sounds and music.

Continue reading “We Were Really Overdue For Laser Jackets” »

May 6, 2019

Everything we know about the mysterious SR-72 — Lockheed Martin’s successor to the fastest plane ever

Posted by in categories: surveillance, transportation

In 2013, Lockheed Martin announced development of the successor to the SR-71 Blackbird spy plane.

The SR-71 was capable of reaching speeds over three times the speed of sound, and the SR-72 is intended to have even more impressive specs. Following is a transcript of the video.

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Apr 30, 2019

How Big Tech is struggling with the ethics of AI

Posted by in categories: ethics, military, robotics/AI, surveillance

The companies that are leading research into AI in the US and China, including Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Baidu, SenseTime and Tencent, have taken very different approaches to AI and whether to develop technology that can ultimately be used for military and surveillance purposes.


Companies criticised for overruling and even dissolving ethics boards.

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Apr 25, 2019

How to hide from the AI surveillance state with a color printout

Posted by in categories: government, robotics/AI, surveillance

AI-powered video technology is becoming ubiquitous, tracking our faces and bodies through stores, offices, and public spaces. In some countries the technology constitutes a powerful new layer of policing and government surveillance.

Fortunately, as some researchers from the Belgian university KU Leuven have just shown, you can often hide from an AI video system with the aid of a simple color printout.

Who said that? The researchers showed that the image they designed can hide a whole person from an AI-powered computer-vision system. They demonstrated it on a popular open-source object recognition system called YoLo(v2).

Continue reading “How to hide from the AI surveillance state with a color printout” »

Apr 13, 2019

Transhumanism Becoming the ‘Relentless Drumbeat’ Shaping Our Future

Posted by in categories: bioengineering, cryptocurrencies, economics, geopolitics, security, surveillance, transhumanism

Following recent trends in state-of-the-art developments, from cryptocurrencies and universal basic income to biohacking and the surveillance state, transhumanism has been moved into the limelight of political discourse to reshape humanity’s future.

Andrew Vladimirov, Information security specialist, biohacker and one of the original members of the Transhumanist Party UK, spoke in-depth with Sputnik about the rise of transhumanism and its implications.

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Apr 2, 2019

China Is Installing “AI Guards” in Prison Cells

Posted by in categories: law enforcement, robotics/AI, surveillance

Inmates will be under surveillance 24 hours a day.

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Mar 23, 2019

Why a Humanist Ethics of Datafication Can’t Survive a Posthuman World

Posted by in categories: ethics, information science, surveillance

https://paper.li/e-1437691924#/


Geoffrey Rockwell and Bettina Berendt’s (2017) article calls for ethical consideration around big data and digital archive, asking us to re-consider whether. In outlining how digital archives and algorithms structure potential relationships with whose testimony has been digitized, Rockwell and Berendt highlight how data practices change the relationship between research and researched. They make a provocative and important argument: datafication and open access should, in certain cases, be resisted. They champion the careful curation of data rather than large-scale collection of, pointing to the ways in which these data are used to construct knowledge about and fundamentally limit the agency of the research subject by controlling the narratives told about them. Rockwell and Berendt, drawing on Aboriginal Knowledge (AK) frameworks, amongst others, argue that some knowledge is just not meant to be openly shared: information is not an inherent good, and access to information must be earned instead. This approach was prompted, in part, by their own work scraping #gamergate Twitter feeds and the ways in which these data could be used to speak for others, in, without their consent.

From our vantage point, Rockwell and Berendt’s renewed call for an ethics of datafication is a timely one, as we are mired in media reports related to social media surveillance, electoral tampering, and on one side. Thanks, Facebook. On the other side, academics fight for the right to collect and access big data in order to reveal how gender and racial discrimination are embedded in the algorithms that structure everything from online real estate listings, to loan interest rates, to job postings (American Civil Liberties Union 2018). As surveillance studies scholars, we deeply appreciate how Rockwell and Berendt take a novel approach: they turn to a discussion of Freedom of Information (FOI), Freedom of Expression (FOE), Free and Open Source software, and Access to Information. In doing so, they unpack the assumptions commonly held by librarians, digital humanists and academics in general, to show that accumulation and datafication is not an inherent good.

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Mar 8, 2019

Another wave of severe flu infections is coming warns CDC

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, surveillance

In its most recent weekly US influenza surveillance report, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention revealed that flu activity remains high across the nation. According to the agency, both the influenza A viruses H1N1 and H3N2, as well as influenza B viruses, are still making rounds through the population, with H3 viruses more frequently reported than H1N1.

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