Guerillartivism.net

From spacing montreal's article:

London’s Metropolitian Police are looking into taking its use to an even higher level by using video software — designed by a firm called “OmniPerception” — that can pick out suspects based on what they are wearing. The technology can “see” specific brands in a crowd and is currently used to identify company logos in TV broadcasts of sporting events to check the prominence of brand images.

read here and here

Some news from ArsTechnica catched my attention this morning:
This first one about Net Neutrality debate in the UK over the BBC's new streaming service. It's incredebly stupid to try and charge both ways when you can just sell the bandwidth at the rate you want. I hope ISPs will fail in this and not start to try and control what you see at the link level and thus balkanising the internet even more.

The second news about a hostility detector in crowds for the US surveillance state where they hope to catch criminal before they are identified. I'm sure everyone has plenty of hostile intents every minutes but that doesn't make you a criminal to think about killing your neighbors for a sec because you couldn't sleep.

In any case, someone has flunked their statistic class. if you have a 10% failure rate on this thing (which i would doubt even possible) and you have 100k person a day going through security and 10 of them being evil doers, you'll catch 9 of them but you'll have 10k false positive to check... what's the point again?

.

.

.

I saw this site via Cyberpunk Reviews (a good site to checkout :-).

.

.

.

If you're against the idea of human as cattle, check it out.

On July 19, electronics giant NEC announced it has developed the world’s first automated border control system that uses facial recognition technology capable of identifying people inside their automobiles. The system is already in operation at checkpoints on the Hong Kong - Shenzhen border.

Read more at Pink Tentacle

See this CNN report on a surveillance camera network coming to NYC.

In Montreal, the number of surveillance cameras keep growing as the city deploys them strategically on busy streets of the entertainment districts to monitor bar fights and acts of vandalism. Hopefully, no terrorist incident happened here yet, so theres no excuse to be used to deploy such a surveillance network. Still, I'm dreaming about an IR-emitter covered jacket to blank out a whole street of cameras.

over and out.

Mind Children author Hans Moravec goes on to posit that what we need to "take advantage" of human mobility and computer calculating power is a "high-tech" wardrobe that will eventually lead to the conscious computer. Note the move from a cyborg concept that could allow the human to explore new ways of being, to a computer creature that simply replace the human being as the more perfect citizen of the police state. These are the defense department and company-sponsored thinkers at the frontline of robotics who, in their enthusiasm for creating robot servants to do our bidding, utterly fail to encompass the future of human possibility that sees the cyborg as an end, not a means by which humanity can be bypassed or enslaved.

Cyborg, Steve Mann, page 50

BigBrotherState released a nice video in the same style as the trusted computing one.
Pass it to friends :)

Have you read any good research lately? Well, i stumbled upon an article a while back in FreeHaven's bibliography and it catched my attention:

The Economics of Mass Surveillance and the Questionable Value of Anonymous Communications by George Danezis.

Today we heard on /. by the timesonline that "Almost 450,000 requests were made to monitor people’s telephone calls".

Now, if we put the two very quickly and blatantly together, it would mean that somewhere around 25M people are being spied on in the UK. That's just 42% of the population, fieeww, and i though we'd have more than half! What a relief, so yeah forget about it, it's a non-news. I'm sorry. ;-)


In the mean time, I'll do my homework and watch Every Step You Take.


The FreeHaven link was added to the guerilla backpack bibliography.

You really can't escape the surveillance society can you? Wireless communication is the new form of private speech, extending the normal ability of human communications.

Makes you reconsider town owned networks... Until we convince people that privacy is important, that people may actually be willing to share cheap access and that we should build stronger communities, well, we have to encourage less efficient but more privacy driven networks like people owned/operated ones...

The Infomation Liberation Front ran this story yesterday. Here's few excerpts:

As many as 3,500 schools are taking fingerprints from pupils, often without their parents' permission, a new poll revealed yesterday.

Soaring numbers require pupils to undergo biometric identity checks before they can register in the mornings, buy canteen meals and use the library.
[...]
The Leave Them Kids Alone group said the schools had purchased the technology from two DfES-approved suppliers, suggesting the true figure could be even higher.

The Gardian released this article on brain scanning techniques to read your mind.

[...]
During the study, the researchers asked volunteers to decide whether to add or subtract two numbers they were later shown on a screen.

Before the numbers flashed up, they were given a brain scan using a technique called functional magnetic imaging resonance. The researchers then used a software that had been designed to spot subtle differences in brain activity to predict the person's intentions with 70% accuracy.