Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: surveillance – Page 29

China isn’t the only country with a draconian “social credit score” system — there’s one quite a bit like it operating in the U.S. Except that it’s being run by American businesses, not the government.

There’s plenty of evidence that retailers have been using a technique called “surveillance scoring” for decades in which consumers are given a secret score by an algorithm to give them a different price — but for the same goods and services.

But the practice might be illegal after all: a California nonprofit called Consumer Education Foundation (CEF) filed a petition yesterday asking for the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to look into the shady practice.

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New 3D-printed materials are going to space thanks to a recently funded partnership between Israel’s NanoDimension and Florida’s Harris Corp.

The companies plan to create new materials to reduce the manufacturing of small satellites, an exceedingly popular market right now for applications ranging from weather observations to remote surveillance.

They aim to fly their materials on an external platform of the International Space Station for a year. The goal is to better understand how 3D-printed components (such as circuits and materials) withstand the space environment, which includes extreme temperature swings and high radiation. The launch date of the project was not disclosed.

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Gone are the days when a store’s security cameras only mattered to shoplifters.

Now, with the rising prevalence of surveillance systems constantly monitored by artificial intelligence, ubiquitous security systems can watch, learn about, and discriminate against shoppers more than ever before.

That’s the gist of a new ACLU report titled “The Dawn of Robot Surveillance,” about how emerging AI technology enables security companies to constantly monitor and collect data about people — opening new possibilities in which power is abused or underserved communities are overpoliced.

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This technology is also used for surveillance.

We might be one step closer to an Internet-of-things reality.

University of Washington engineers have created a new wireless communication system that allows devices to interact with each other without relying on batteries or wires for power.

Continue reading “Wireless devices go battery-free with new communication technique” | >

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.

[abetusk] does a great job of conveying the tricks needed to successfully pull this off. The instructions should allow any curious maker to replicate the build at home, and code is available on Github to help run the show. There’s lots of detail on proper enclosures, connectors, and cabling techniques to avoid the wearer inadvertently pulling everything to bits when wearing the garment to the club. Remember, there’s nothing more punk than educating your friends.

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