Tag: technology

Futuristic device from Israeli firm puts music in your head, without headphones

Imagine a world where you move around in your own personal sound bubble. You listen to your favorite tunes, play loud computer games, watch a movie or get navigation directions in your car — all without disturbing those around you.

That’s the possibility presented by “sound beaming,” a new futuristic audio technology from Noveto Systems, an Israeli company. On Friday it will debut a desktop device that beams sound directly to a listener without the need for headphones.

The company provided The Associated Press with an exclusive demo of the desktop prototype of its SoundBeamer 1.0 before its launch Friday.

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Secret Facial Recognition Program Could Cover Every State

America’s law enforcement has been secretly using a facial recognition program that can be used to ID activists and protesters.The first-ever acknowledgement of the program was recently revealed by the Washington Post.

“The court documents are believed to be the first public acknowledgment that authorities used the controversial technology in connection with the widely criticized sweep of largely peaceful protesters ahead of a photo op by President Trump.”

What makes this so troubling are two things. One, it appears to be used by law enforcement nationwide.

As the Washington Post explains, “the case is one of a growing number nationwide in which authorities have turned to facial recognition software to help identify protesters accused of violence.”

And two, this secret law enforcement facial recognition database contains images of at least 1.4 million Americans.

“The case also provides the first detailed look at a powerful new regional facial recognition system that officials said has been used more than 12,000 times since 2019 and contains a database of 1.4 million people but operates almost entirely outside the public view. Fourteen local and federal agencies have access.”

The name of this new facial recognition program is called the “National Capital Region Facial Recognition Investigative Leads System” (NCRFRILS).

A thousand law enforcement agencies could have access to a billion public records.

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The Space Force Has Created an “Orbital Warfare” Unit, and Now Has Its Own Spaceship

It’s not specifically a TIE fighter or X-Wing from the “Star Wars” series, but The Drive reported last week that Trump’s recently created Space Force is now in charge of the experimental X-37B spacecraft. A craft that was prior in the ownership of the Air Force, which should turn many heads.

The unit is also precariously known as Delta 9, according to the service. Military.com reports:

Space Operations Command was activated last month during a ceremony at Peterson Air Force Base, Colorado. Under the field commands are deltas and squadrons, according to the Space Force’s command hierarchy.

Delta 9’s Detachment 1 “oversees operations of the X-37B Orbital Test Vehicle, an experimental program designed to demonstrate technologies for a reliable, reusable, unmanned space test platform for the U.S. Space Force,” according to the unit’s fact sheet.

Delta 9 consists of three active-duty squadrons headquartered at Schriever Air Force Base, Colorado: 1st Space Operations Squadron, 3rd Space Operations Squadron and 750th Operations Support Squadron, along with Detachment 1. The three squadrons conduct “protect-and-defend operations from space and provide response options to deter and defeat adversary threats in space,” according to the chart.

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Smart TV hackers are filming people having sex on their sofas – and putting it on porn sites

Next time, you’re snuggling up to your other half on the sofa, imagine that some sweaty, sex-pest nerd might be watching you through your TV’s webcam. Horrifyingly, it’s actually true: hackers HAVE ‘watched’ couples making love on their sofas via webcams built into smart TVs – and put the video on porn sites. Many ‘smart TVs’ have poor security, and hackers can take over various functions – including webcams built for Skype. Laura Higgins of the Revenge Porn Helpline told the Daily Mail, ‘We have dealt with one couple who were filmed making love in their living room through their smart TV by someone who had taken control of it. ‘The footage just appeared on a website.

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The First Thing Sold On The Internet Was A Bag Of Weed

Several researchers have pointed to a drug deal that took place in 1971 or 1972 as the first online transaction made on the internet. As the legend goes, Stanford students using Arpanet accounts at Stanford University’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, used the network to sell some cannabis to other tech students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

The historic event was detailed in two books, “What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry”, which was released in 2005 by John Markoff, and “The Dark Net,” which was released more recently by Jamie Bartlett.

In “What The Dormouse Said,” Markoff Writes: “In 1971 or 1972, Stanford students using Arpanet accounts at Stanford University’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory engaged in a commercial transaction with their counterparts at Massachussetts Institute of Technology. Before Amazon, before eBay, the seminal act of e-commerce was a drug deal. The students used the network to quietly arrange the sale of an undetermined amount of mariju**a.“

Bartlett gives a nearly identical description in his book ‘The Dark Net’, which discusses online marketplaces that have made headlines in recent years.

The Silk Road, which launched in 2011, was the first truly anonymous online marketplace, and it quickly became a target for politicians and law enforcement because of the large volume of drugs that were being sold through the site. On the Silk Road, drug users and vendors were able to trade anonymously using Bitcoin, making it one of the first major commerce platforms to adopt the cryptocurrency. The website’s alleged creator, Ross Ulbricht, is currently serving a double life sentence with no possibility of parole for operating the online marketplace.

One important point that was heavily overlooked by the media during the Ulbricht trial was the fact that the Silk Road actually made the world a safer place by undermining prohibition. Even though drugs are illegal, large numbers of people still use them on a regular basis and these people are often put in dangerous situations because of these prohibitions.

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Unit 8200: Israel’s cyber spy agency

In a searingly hot afternoon at a campuslike new science park in Beer Sheva, southern Israel, I watched as a group of bright, geeky teenagers presented their graduation projects. Parents and uniformed army personnel milled around a windowless room packed with tables holding laptops, phones or other gadgets. There was excited chatter and a pungent smell of adolescent sweat. This was a recent graduation ceremony for Magshimim (which roughly translates as “fulfilment”), the three-year after-school programme for 16 to 18-year-old students with exceptional computer coding and hacking skills. Magshimim serves as a feeder system for potential recruits to Unit 8200, the Israeli military’s legendary high-tech spy agency, considered by intelligence analysts to be one of the most formidable of its kind in the world. Unit 8200, or shmone matayim as it’s called in Hebrew, is the equivalent of America’s National Security Agency and the largest single military unit in the Israel Defence Forces. It is also an elite institution whose graduates, after leaving service, can parlay their cutting-edge snooping and hacking skills into jobs in Israel, Silicon Valley or Boston’s high-tech corridor. The authors of Start-up Nation, the seminal 2009 book about Israel’s start-up culture, described 8200 and the Israeli military’s other elite units as “the nation’s equivalent of Harvard, Princeton and Yale”.

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The Threat Of “Killer Robots” Is Real And Closer Than You Might Think

From self-driving cars, to digital assistants, artificial intelligence (AI) is fast becoming an integral technology in our lives today. But this same technology that can help to make our day-to-day life easier is also being incorporated into weapons for use in combat situations.

Weaponised AI features heavily in the security strategies of the US, China and Russia. And some existing weapons systems already include autonomous capabilities based on AI, developing weaponised AI further means machines could potentially make decisions to harm and kill people based on their programming, without human intervention.

Countries that back the use of AI weapons claim it allows them to respond to emerging threats at greater than human speed. They also say it reduces the risk to military personnel and increases the ability to hit targets with greater precision. But outsourcing use-of-force decisions to machines violates human dignity. And it’s also incompatible with international law which requires human judgement in context.

Indeed, the role that humans should play in use of force decisions has been an increased area of focus in many United Nations (UN) meetings. And at a recent UN meeting, states agreed that it’s unacceptable on ethical and legal grounds to delegate use-of-force decisions to machines – “without any human control whatsoever”.

But while this may sound like good news, there continues to be major differences in how states define “human control”.

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