Often funded by federal grant programs and even operated out of federally-designated fusion centers, “predictive policing” software is showing up in more and more local law enforcement agencies. Learn what it is and how it’s used.
In practice, it’s little more than a dystopian pre-crime government credit score.
A new study published in Nature entitled “Power generation from ambient humidity using protein nanowires” has discovered an interesting way to harvest energy from the environment, creating the potential for another clean power generating system that is self-sustaining. According to the authors,
“thin-film devices made from nanometre-scale protein wires harvested from the microbe Geobacter sulfurreducens can generate continuous electric power in the ambient environment. The devices produce a sustained voltage of around 0.5 volts across a 7-micrometre-thick film, with a current density of around 17 microamperes per square centimetre. We find the driving force behind this energy generation to be a self-maintained moisture gradient that forms within the film when the film is exposed to the humidity that is naturally present in air.”
The study also mentions that “connecting several devices linearly scales up the voltage and current to power electronics” and that their results “demonstrate the feasibility of a continuous energy-harvesting strategy that is less restricted by location or environmental conditions than other sustainable approaches.”
So, how is this all possible? Well, more than three decades ago a “sediment organism” was discovered in the Potomac river that could do things nobody had ever observed before in bacteria. The microbe belonged to the Geobactergenus, and over time scientists discovered that it could make bacterial nanowires that conduct electricity.
“Technology is both a tool for helping humans and for destroying them. This is the paradox of our times which we’re compelled to face.”
Frank Herbert
What is the Internet of Bodies (IoB)?
When the Internet of Things (IoT) connects with your body, the result is the Internet of Bodies (IoB). The Internet of Bodies (IoB) is an extension of the IoT and basically connects the human body to a network through devices that are ingested, implanted, or connected to the body in some way. Once connected, data can be exchanged, and the body and device can be remotely monitored and controlled.
There are three generations of Internet of Bodies that include:
· Body external: These are wearable devices such as Apple Watches or Fitbits that can monitor our health.
· Body internal: These include pacemakers, cochlear implants, and digital pills that go inside our bodies to monitor or control various aspects of our health.
· Body embedded: The third generation of the Internet of Bodies is embedded technology where technology and the human body are melded together and have a real-time connection to a remote machine.
Progress in wireless connectivity, materials, and tech innovation is allowing implantable medical devices (IMD) to scale and be viable in many applications.
Allowing law enforcement access to a vehicle’s authorization is just a fancy way of saying they want backdoor access to an owner’s personal information.
If you thought license plate readers were invasive before, just wait until a year or two from now, when they send officers all kinds of personal information related to the vehicle’s owner[s].
Stakeholder Communication Needs:
Police working with auto manufacturers to help them identify which embedded telematic surveillance devices they should have access to is not about public safety: it’s about money.
A South Carolina-based surveillance firm that has sold services to the U.S. military is promoting its ability to provide real-time location information about 15 billion cars every month.
The company, called The Ulysses Group, says it can monitor vehicles in every country in the world, except North Korea and Cuba.
The claims come from a document obtained by the office of U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) in which the company has detailed its capabilities. Wyden is investigating companies that sell the data of consumers.
The company says it can track cars through sensors in vehicle parts – either installed by the car company, or by the Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) – the company that provided the components.
The sensors collect information such as airbag and seatbelt status, engine temperature, and location, and then transmit that information either back to the car maker or to third parties.
Aggregator companies also purchase or obtain this data, repackage it, and then sell that data or products based on it to their own clients, Vice News reported on Wednesday.
Clients could include insurance companies, anti-terrorism agencies and the military
For decades, science has been trying to unlock the mysteries of how a single cell becomes a fully formed human being and what goes wrong to cause genetic diseases, miscarriages and infertility.
Now, scientists have created living entities in their labs that resemble human embryos; the results of two new experiments are the most complete such “model embryos” developed to date.
The goal of the experiments is to gain important insights into early human development and find new ways to prevent birth defects and miscarriages and treat fertility problems.
But the research, which was published in two separate papers Wednesday in the journal Nature Portfolio, raises sensitive moral and ethical concerns.
“I’m sure it makes anyone who is morally serious nervous when people start creating structures in a petri dish that are this close to being early human beings,” says Dr. Daniel Sulmasy, a bioethicist at Georgetown University.
“Americans deserve the freedom to choose a life without surveillance and the government regulation that would make that possible. While we continue to believe the sentiment, we fear it may soon be obsolete or irrelevant. We deserve that freedom, but the window to achieve it narrows a little more each day. If we don’t act now, with great urgency, it may very well close for good.”—Charlie Warzel and Stuart A. Thompson, New York Times
Databit by databit, we are building our own electronic concentration camps.
With every new smart piece of smart technology we acquire, every new app we download, every new photo or post we share online, we are making it that much easier for the government and its corporate partners to identify, track and eventually round us up.
Saint or sinner, it doesn’t matter because we’re all being swept up into a massive digital data dragnet that does not distinguish between those who are innocent of wrongdoing, suspects, or criminals.
This is what it means to live in a suspect society.
The right-to-repair movement is poised to explode in 2021. When your stuff breaks, you should be able to fix it yourself. Tech manufactures want to control the methods of repair and companies such as Apple and John Deere do so at the detriment of their customers. But people across the world are tired of it and 25 states in the U.S. are considering right-to-repair legislation in 2021.
“Right to Repair is unstoppable and coming to a state near you. Lawmakers everywhere are seeing that Right to Repair is common sense: You buy a product, you own it, and you should be able to fix it,” Kerry Maeve Sheehan, the U.S. policy lead for the repair community iFixit, said in a press release. “With 25 states considering Right to Repair legislation in the U.S., it’s only a matter of time before Right to Repair is the law of the land.”
Right-to-repair is a problem bigger than Apple charging $300 to replace a cracked iPhone screen. Covid-19 put hospitals in a desperate situation. Patients needed ventilators to survive and there weren’t enough to go around. When one broke down, it often required a special technician to repair. Manufacturers made it impossible for hospital staff to do simple repairs to life saving equipment. The right-to-repair medical equipment is the subject of California’s SB 605 and Hawaii’s SB 760.
In other parts of the country, farmers are unable to till fields because their fancy new John Deere tractors won’t start until a technician clears out error codes in its software. John Deere promised it would provide the equipment and documentation farmers would need to make their own repairs by 2021. It lied. Now Arkansas, Kansas, Nebraska, Vermont, South Carolina, and Missouri are looking to make the right-to-repair agricultural equipment the law of the land.
The pandemic made the world reliant on technology for work and human connection. As the lockdowns came, Apple shut down many of its repair centers and it became hard, if not impossible, for people to get simple repairs for this stuff. The independent repair business boomed, but the people trying to fix had to work around draconian systems built into machines meant to keep out anyone but the original manufacturer. “I was fixing people’s devices that were under warranty because these people couldn’t wait 4 to 8 weeks for Apple to fix their stuff,” 17-year old repair entrepreneur Sam Mencimer told Motherboard in February.
Connecticut, Colorado, Delaware, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Missouri, Minnesota, Montana, Nevada, New Jersey, New York, Oklahoma, Oregon, and Washington state are all considering broad laws that would apply to most of the stuff we use everyday.
Hellbound and Down 
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