Tag: technology

Amazon patents show new level of surveillance

Amazon has registered 17 new patents for biometric technology intended to help its doorbell cameras identify “suspicious” people by scent, skin texture, fingerprints, eyes, voice, and gait.

The tech giant has been developing its doorbell security camera system since 2018, when Amazon acquired the firm named Ring and, with it, the original technology. According to media reports, Jeff Bezos’ company is now preparing to enable the devices to identify “suspicious” people with the help of biometric technology, based on skin texture, gait, finger, voice, retina, iris, and even odor.

On top of that, if Amazon’s new patents are anything to go by, all Ring doorbell cameras in a given neighborhood would be interconnected, sharing data with each other and creating a composite image of “suspicious” individuals.

One of the patents for what is described in the media as a “neighborhood alert mode” would allow users in one household to send photos and videos of someone they deem ‘suspicious’ to their neighbors’ Ring cameras so that they, too, start recording and can assemble a “series of ‘storyboard’ images for activity taking place across the fields of view of multiple cameras.”

Aside from the possible future interconnectivity among the Ring devices themselves, Amazon’s doorbell cameras, as it stands now, already exchange information with 1,963 police and 383 fire departments across the US, according to Business Insider. Authorities do not even need a warrant to access Ring footage.

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Could nano-bionics make plants replace light bulbs, and talk to us? 

In December of 2017, researchers at MIT announced they had found a way to create light-emitting plants. They achieved this by embedding specialized nanoparticles into the leaves of watercress plants that allowed them to give off a very dim light for nearly four hours.

It was believed that with further optimization, these plants could one day be bright enough to illuminate a home or office.

Today, MIT engineers have upgraded their light-emitting plants to be able to be charged by a LED in just 10 seconds, glow 10 times brighter than their first generation of plants, and last for several minutes. They can even be recharged repeatedly.

The specialized nanoparticles contain the enzyme luciferase, a substance found in light-emitting fireflies. This process is an example of the emerging field of “plant nano-bionics,” wherein researchers develop ways to augment plants with novel features. 

In order to make their plants glow longer, MIT created and used a “light capacitor,” which is normally the part of an electrical circuit that can store photons and release them when needed.

The researchers showed that after 10 seconds of blue LED exposure, their plants could emit light for about an hour. The light was brightest for the first five minutes and then gradually diminished. The plants can be continually recharged for at least two weeks.

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U.S. blacklists 34 Chinese entities, citing human rights abuses and ‘brain-control weaponry’

The Biden administration said Thursday it imposed trade restrictions on more than 30 Chinese research institutes and entities over human rights violations and the alleged development of technologies, such as brain-control weapons, that undermine U.S. national security.

The Commerce Department accused China’s Academy of Military Medical Sciences and 11 of its research institutes of using biotechnology “to support Chinese military end uses and end users, to include purported brain-control weaponry,” according to a notice in the Federal Register.

The notice does not elaborate further on the alleged brain-control weaponry.

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New Artificial Intelligence System Enables Machines That See the World More Like Humans Do

A new “common-sense” approach to computer vision enables artificial intelligence that interprets scenes more accurately than other systems do.

Computer vision systems sometimes make inferences about a scene that fly in the face of common sense. For example, if a robot were processing a scene of a dinner table, it might completely ignore a bowl that is visible to any human observer, estimate that a plate is floating above the table, or misperceive a fork to be penetrating a bowl rather than leaning against it.

Move that computer vision system to a self-driving car and the stakes become much higher — for example, such systems have failed to detect emergency vehicles and pedestrians crossing the street.

To overcome these errors, MIT researchers have developed a framework that helps machines see the world more like humans do. Their new artificial intelligence system for analyzing scenes learns to perceive real-world objects from just a few images, and perceives scenes in terms of these learned objects.

The researchers built the framework using probabilistic programming, an AI approach that enables the system to cross-check detected objects against input data, to see if the images recorded from a camera are a likely match to any candidate scene. Probabilistic inference allows the system to infer whether mismatches are likely due to noise or to errors in the scene interpretation that need to be corrected by further processing.

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China Creating ‘Humanized Pigs’ with Gene Editing Then Infecting Them with Coronavirus

China’s state-run Global Times newspaper celebrated on Thursday the alleged discovery of a scientific process to create a “humanized pig” more susceptible to severe Chinese coronavirus cases, which scientists could infect and use for research.

The propaganda outlet attributed the scientific achievement to the Institute of Microbiology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (IMCAS). The CAS, a research institution, is the world’s largest organization of its kind and a formal arm of the Chinese government. The Times published an illustrative figure on the development of “humanized” pigs that appears to have first surfaced in a study published in August that promoted the use of genetically modified pigs for Chinese coronavirus research based on how rapidly scientists could generate them and their heightened similarities with the human body.

The August study – published in Cell Discovery, a journal sponsored by the CAS, revealed that Chinese scientists had attempted to use CRISPR gene-editing technology to remove the genetic protective shields that make Chinese coronavirus not a significant threat to most pigs. CRISPR technology became the source of global controversy in 2018 after a Chinese scientist, He Jiankui, claimed to have used the method to genetically modify unborn baby twins to make them immune to HIV. The Communist Party sentenced He to three years in prison for conducting the human experiment without the full approval of the Party.

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You’d Better Watch Out: The Surveillance State Has a Naughty List, and You’re On It

“He sees you when you’re sleeping
He knows when you’re awake
He knows when you’ve been bad or good
So be good for goodness’ sake!”

—“Santa Claus Is Coming to Town”

Santa’s got a new helper.

No longer does the all-knowing, all-seeing, jolly Old St. Nick need to rely on antiquated elves on shelves and other seasonal snitches in order to know when you’re sleeping or awake, and if you’ve been naughty or nice.

Thanks to the government’s almost limitless powers made possible by a domestic army of techno-tyrants, fusion centers and Peeping Toms, Santa can get real-time reports on who’s been good or bad this year. This creepy new era of government/corporate spying—in which we’re being listened to, watched, tracked, followed, mapped, bought, sold and targeted—makes the NSA’s rudimentary phone and metadata surveillance appear almost antiquated in comparison.

Consider just a small sampling of the tools being used to track our movements, monitor our spending, and sniff out all the ways in which our thoughts, actions and social circles might land us on the government’s naughty list.

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Your Next Smartphone Could Have an “Always-on” Snooping Camera

Qualcomm Technologies recently announced their newest high-end smartphone processor, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1. This processor has a very controversial feature — it has always-on camera capabilities and will be used in high-end Android smartphones that will be released early 2022.

Qualcomm Vice President of product management Judd Heape  said the following about the new always-on camera capabilities of the processor: “Your phone’s front camera is always securely looking for your face, even if you don’t touch it or raise to wake it.”

Qualcomm touted the new always-on camera during their Snapdragon Tech Summit.

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Finally, a Fusion Reaction Has Generated More Energy Than Absorbed by The Fuel

A major milestone has been breached in the quest for fusion energy.

For the first time, a fusion reaction has achieved a record 1.3 megajoule energy output – and for the first time, exceeding energy absorbed by the fuel used to trigger it.

Although there’s still some way to go, the result represents a significant improvement on previous yields: eight times greater than experiments conducted just a few months prior, and 25 times greater than experiments conducted in 2018. It’s a huge achievement.

Physicists at the National Ignition Facility at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory will be submitting a paper for peer review.

“This result is a historic step forward for inertial confinement fusion research, opening a fundamentally new regime for exploration and the advancement of our critical national security missions. It is also a testament to the innovation, ingenuity, commitment and grit of this team and the many researchers in this field over the decades who have steadfastly pursued this goal,” said Kim Budil, director of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

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Researchers shrink camera to the size of a salt grain

Micro-sized cameras have great potential to spot problems in the human body and enable sensing for super-small robots, but past approaches captured fuzzy, distorted images with limited fields of view.

Now, researchers at Princeton University and the University of Washington have overcome these obstacles with an ultracompact camera the size of a coarse grain of salt. The new system can produce crisp, full-color images on par with a conventional compound camera lens 500,000 times larger in volume, the researchers reported in a paper published Nov. 29 in Nature Communications.

Enabled by a joint design of the camera’s hardware and computational processing, the system could enable minimally invasive endoscopy with medical robots to diagnose and treat diseases, and improve imaging for other robots with size and weight constraints. Arrays of thousands of such cameras could be used for full-scene sensing, turning surfaces into cameras.

While a traditional camera uses a series of curved glass or plastic lenses to bend light rays into focus, the new optical system relies on a technology called a metasurface, which can be produced much like a computer chip. Just half a millimeter wide, the metasurface is studded with 1.6 million cylindrical posts, each roughly the size of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV).

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South Korea: Hackers Steal ‘Naked Photos’ from over 700 Smart Home Devices, Sell for Bitcoin

An unknown party recently hacked at least 700 smart home devices across South Korea and sold explicit images and videos accessed through the devices on the dark web, South Korea’s National Police confirmed Monday when announcing a criminal investigation into the incident.

“After receiving a call from the Korea Internet & Security Agency and starting an inspection, it seems that there were about 700 shootings [recordings],” Nam Gu-Jun, the chief of South Korea’s National Investigation Headquarters — which is a branch of South Korea’s National Police Agency — told reporters on November 29.

“The police have requested the removal of the video from the website where it was posted,” Nam said, as quoted by South Korea’s Kukmin Ilbo newspaper.

“However, since it is a website with a server in a foreign country and a privately operated website, it is unclear whether the request for deletion will be accepted,” the official acknowledged.

“For this reason, the police are also discussing ways to prevent exposure on the domestic Internet with relevant domestic agencies,” he revealed.

The South Korean tech news website IT Chosun exclusively reported on November 15 that hundreds of smart home devices in apartments across Seoul, South Korea’s national capital, and on the southern Korean island of Jeju were recently hacked. Some of the video footage filmed during the hacking was later sold for “‘0.1 BTC” on the dark web. BTC stands for Bitcoin, a type of cryptocurrency. A sum of 0.1 BTC equals about 8 million South Korean won, or roughly USD $6,717.

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