NEWS : TECH (NFPC)

Oh, I WILL Find My iPhone!

If you've ever had your iPhone stolen, you have have erased it completely using Apple's "Find my iPhone." This feature, which can be accessed online or through another iOS device, allows you to remotely lock your missing device with a four-digit passcode. You can even go so far as to delete your personal data and restore your iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, or Mac to its factory settings.

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Yesterday, Apple quietly released an update to the app that will show user's a road map to the exact location of a missing iPhone, iPad or iPod. When searching for the device's location on another iOS device, a tiny car icon will show up on the screen and when prompted, will provide directions to the lost device's whereabouts. The feature is only available on Apple device running iOS 6, so if you haven't already, bite the bullet and upgrade, if this kind of thing is important to you.

One would like to think this feature was added to serve as a memory jogger for those who may have left their phone somewhere and not as a tracker for a potential thief. Just be sure to have a cool head if you decide to hunt down your iPhone. It may be best to let the authorities handle it, or bring a big friend.

via PCMag

Credit: Rob Pegoraro / Discovery

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Burglars Hacking Hotel E-Doors: DNews Nugget

Burglars Hacking Hotel E-Doors: At the Black Hat hacker conference this past July, independent security researcher Cody Brocious provided details about how to exploit a hardware bug in electronic doors used by many hotels. The technique allows a person to unlock the door and break into a hotel. The Houston Hyatt as well as three other hotels in Texas have been hit using this technique and at least one man has been arrested and charged. The technique involves inserting a digital probe into a small hole on the door lock mechanism, which reveals the combination for the lock.The Hyatt Houston said it had taken steps to harden doors against attack by filling the tiny hole with thick glue. via BBC News

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Bill Gives Feds Warrantless Email Surveillance

A Senate proposal originally drafted to protect American's email privacy has taken a dramatic detour. In fact, it's turning around and heading in the opposite direction.

The original bill, backed by Democratic chairman of the Senate Judiciary committee Patrick Leahy, required that government agencies obtain search warrants before accessing email accounts. According to CNET's Declan McCullagh, a new version of the bill does away with all the middle men and actually gives government agencies warrantless access to Americans' email accounts. The bill is up for vote next Thursday (November 29.)

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Leahy's revision would give more than 22  government agencies access to email, Google Docs files, Facebook posts, even Twitter direct messages, without probable cause. In some scenarios, the bill also gives the FBI and Homeland Security full access to Internet accounts without the approval of the owner or a judge.

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Law enforcement groups, such as the National District Attorney's Association, and Justice Department officials objected to Leahy's original bill. Detractors worried that requiring a warrant to access email accounts could impede criminal investigations.

Citing ongoing legislature discussions, an aide to the Senate Judiciary committee declined CNET a comment on the matter. In light of former CIA director David Petraeus' email scandal, Marc Rotenberg, head of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, did tell CNET that "even the Department of Justice should concede that there's a need for more judicial oversight," not less.

Agencies granted this warrantless surveillance power include any executive department, military department, government corporation, government-controlled corporation or other establishment in the executive branch of the government. Also included is a long list of independent regulatory agencies, such as the Federal Reserve System, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and the Federal Communications Commission, just to name a few.

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Such a hodgepodge list has rankled Markham Erickson, a lawyer in Washington D.C. who has kept a close eye on the legislation. Speaking not for his corporate clients, Erickson aired his concerns to CNET:

There is no good legal reason why federal regulatory agencies such as the [National Labor Relations Board], [Occupational Safety and Health Review Commission], [Securities and Exchange Commission] or FTC need to access customer information service providers with a mere subpoena. If those agencies feel they do not have the tools to do their jobs adequately, they should work with the appropriate authorizing committees to explore solutions. The Senate Judiciary committee is really not in a position to adequately make those determinations.

In many cases, police will still be required to obtain search warrants -- except when an "emergency" situation is declared -- but the new bill is in stark contrast to the original draft. Tech companies are likely to furrow their brow over these new proposals. What about you?

via CNET

Credit: Images.com/Corbis

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McAfee Wanted for Murder: DNews Nugget

McAfee Wanted for Murder:

The 67-year-old John McAfee, who made millions when he sold his anti-virus software company in the early 1990s and retired to Belize in 2008, is wanted for the murder of his neighbor Gregory Faull.

Florida native Faull, 52, was found face up in a pool of blood at his home by his housekeeper Sunday morning.

At the crime scene, investigators found a single Luger brand 9mm expended shell, "consistent with the wound in the back of Faull's neck," said National Security Ministry spokesman Rafael Martinez.

Police raided McAfee's mansion on Ambergris Caye, an island off the northeastern coast of Belize, late Sunday to question him about the Faull's murder. But McAfee hid, burying himself in the sand with a cardboard box over his head so he could breathe, he told Wired on Monday.

"Under no circumstances am I going to willingly talk to the police in this country," he told Wired. "You can say I'm paranoid about it but they will kill me, there is no question. They've been trying to get me for months. They want to silence me. I am not well liked by the prime minister. I am just a thorn in everybody's side."

via AFP

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3-D Printing Pirates Paused: DNews Nugget

3-D Printers to Have Digital Rights Management: Digital Rights Management (DRM) is the music and film industry's way of keeping you from illegally sharing their content, and now it may be coming to 3-D printing, reports TorrentFreak.

3-D printers, with the right printer cartridges, could ostensibly be made to print anything from a complete shoe to parts for a battleship. Their versatility allows 3-D printers to create any shape, including copyrighted works. This has some worried about printing piracy.

In response to an announcement from the popular piracy forum, PirateBay, a patent has surfaced outlining the methods to secure three-dimensional printed designs.

Essentially the patent says, "a digital fingerprint of 'restricted items' will be held externally and printers will be required to compare the plans of the item they’re being asked to print against those in a database. If there’s a match, printing will be disallowed or restricted," explains TorrentFreak.

Whether this new DRM for printing will stop piracy is unknown, but as 3-D printing becomes more mainstream, the lawyers and rights-holders are already preparing for battle. via TorrentFreak

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Internet Pirates: Your Days Are Numbered

Lend me thine ears ye scurvy pirates pillaging the World Wide Web, a vigilant armada will soon be on thy trail. By year's end, the nation's major Internet service providers will launch a six-strikes-an-you're-out initiative that may put a damper on your plundering days of wide-spread downloading.

The "Copyright Alert System" strategy (CAS), backed by the Obama administration, Hollywood and major record labels, aims to disrupt and potentially terminate Internet access for those who continually infringe upon copyright laws.

The program, which monitors peer-to-peer file-sharing services, includes participation by AT&T, Cablevision Systems, Comcast, Time Warner Cable and Verizon.

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First offenders will receive an email alert from their Internet service provider saying their account may have been misused for online piracy. After a second offense, the alert could contain an educational message about online copyright laws.

After the third and fourth strikes, users could receive a pop-up notice "asking the subscriber to acknowledge receipt of the alert."

After four alerts, the warnings stop and the real punishments come to the surface...kind of.

The CAS program calls these "mitigation measures," which could include "temporary reductions of Internet speeds, redirection to a landing page until the subscriber contacts the ISP to discuss the matter or reviews and responds to some educational information about copyright, or other measures (as specified in published policies) that the ISP may deem necessary to help resolve the matter."

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Gigi Sohn, president of digital rights group Public Knowledge, and an adviser to the Center for Copyright Information, the group behind the program, told Wired that offenders won't be penalized each time an infringement is detected.

"Each strike is not one infringement," Sohn said. "Each strike is dozens or scores or hundreds of infringements."

Considering that, after the first infringement is detected, strikes will only be counted every seven days and that there's a grace period between each alert, this dragnet sounds like it has some pretty big holes for occasional pirates to easily slip through.

Forgive my skepticism, but '600-strikes and you're out' seems like a long leash, not to mention a very passive-aggressive way to project authority.

via Wired

Credit: Images.com/Corbis

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RoboCops May Patrol The Future

"Part man. Part machine. All cop. The future of law enforcement." So read the original movie poster for RoboCop. While taglines like that might inspire you to break out your best movie-trailer voice-over impersonation, know that there may be some truth to your narration.

That's because researchers at Florida International University's Discovery Lab are working with Lieutenant Commander Jeremy Robins of the U.S. Navy Reserves to build patrolling, telepresent robots that could be remotely controlled.

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"We want to use telebots to give disabled military and police veterans an opportunity to serve in law enforcement," explained Robins in a university press release. "With telebots, a disabled police officer will be capable of performing many, if not most, of the functions of a normal patrol office[r] -- interacting with the community, patrolling, responding to 911 calls, issuing citations."

To manifest his vision, Robins donated $20,000 of his own money to Discovery Lab and borrowed two robots valued at $50,000 from the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition (IHMC). Built under IHMC's Urban Warrior Robot program, a $2 million DARPA initiative, the two-wheeled robots will be the basis for the telecop prototypes.

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"The telebot has to look intimidating and authoritative enough so that people obey its commands -- because of course it's not the telebot telling you what to do, it's the disabled police officer controlling the telebot who's telling you what to do," Robins said, according to CNET.

"On the flip side, it has to be approachable enough so that a lost three-year-old feels comfortable coming up to the telebot and asking for help finding her mother. That's a challenging design problem, and one which I'm sure will take many iterations before we get it perfectly right."

via CNET

Credit: Florida International University

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RNC Fortified by Behavior-Recognizing Cameras

As the nation shifts its gaze to Tampa, Fla., host of the Republican National Convention, another set of eyes has been installed to monitor any suspicious activity that could go down as Mitt Romney accepts his party's nomination for President of the United States.

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Tampa spent more than $2 million installing approximately 90 high-tech security cameras that use behavior recognition software designed to study body language and movement.

BRS Labs, developer of the AISight software used in the cameras, says it's system perpetually learns what activities commonly occur in a particular environment. When somethings occurs that is out of the ordinary, authorities receive real-time alerts.

"AISight works with patented learning and analysis engines that enable the system to observe events, analyze them, and remember them similarly to how [a] human brain makes and stores memories," explains the company's website. "When new events differ from AISight’s memories, it determines that a suspect event is occurring and alerts security personnel."

For example, the system could differentiate between a uniformed police officer carrying a weapon and a civilian carrying a weapon.

Just as frequent observation of objects and events reinforces AISight’s memories, memories that aren’t reinforced degrade. This means that AISight not only learns about commonly occurring activity but also “forgets” when that activity becomes less frequent, enabling it to alert on events that are no longer commonplace. Because of this unique ability to learn, remember and forget, AISight’s ability to provide currently relevant, accurate alerts evolves alongside the environment. It adapts to moving vegetation, lighting changes, repositioning of furniture, weather patterns and myriad other environmental aspects that challenge video analytic systems.

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If you're feeling less patriotic about this platform, Web developer Jon Gales created an app that has mapped out all of the cameras.

"We have concentrated on mapping the cameras meant to watch you," explains Gales' website. Log on to rncctv.com to download the app and learn more about the cameras.

via ABC

Credit: RNCCTV

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Fingerprints Could Glow for Future Forensics

That classic TV crime drama scene where the plucky forensic scientist dusts for fingerprints may become a thing of the past. Researchers from China’s Zhejiang University in Hangzhou have created a technique that makes fingerprints -- both old and new -- glow in exquisite detail without destroying them.

The method enlists electrochemiluminescence, a phenomenon that causes a chemical solution to light up when hit with an electrical charge. 

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A fingerprint is pressed onto an electrode that's either in the form of indium tin oxide glass or a stainless steel sheet. The electrode is dipped into a specialized chemical solution. Oils, dirt and other particles in the fingerprint inhibit the electrochemiluminescence reaction, but the reaction could occur in the spaces in between. When a suitable voltage is applied to the electrode, the bare electrode surface, including the fingerprint's grooves, light up and can be imaged using a CCD camera sensor. A different chemical solution that sticks to the amino acids of the fingerprint does the opposite, causing the fingerprint's ridges to light up and not the areas in between.

Bin Su, the lead author on the research paper, which was published in the journal Angewandte Chemie, told Discovery News, "We can either make the substrate glow or the fingerprint glow."

Making the substrate glow produces a negative image; making the fingerprint glow produces a positive image. In either one, fine details in the fingerprints, like ridge patterns, branches and ends of lines and even pore size can be seen through this process.

The researchers tested this in a lab, but Bin Su said that the technique could be used in real life: "Fingerprints on real life substrates can be transferred by lifting them from the substrates to electrodes using a special tape. The process is simple and handy." Su said that his team also experimented with transferring fingerprints from different substrates including a coin, a desk, a computer screen and a disk.

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The researchers also found that their method could be used to determine whether the owner of the fingerprint had been using drugs. Because the signature of metabolized drugs are secreted through the pores in the hand, a solution designed to reveal them could be used to analyze the fingerprint for illegal substances.

This process is still being tested and isn’t ready for real-life implementation yet. Which gives studios plenty of time to adapt it into their next crime scene investigation show...CSI: China, anyone?

via PhysOrg 

Credit: Paul Taylor/Corbis

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Wi-Fi Sees Movement Through Walls

Your Wi-Fi router helps out in a lot of situations, mostly pertaining to surfing the Web for info or connecting with other people. However, researchers from the University College in London have created a detector that uses Wi-Fi to detect movement through a brick wall that’s one-foot thick.

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As Popular Science explains, Wi-Fi radio signals are found in 61 percent of households nationwide. Researchers Karl Woodbridge and Kevin Chetty developed a suitcase-size device that can use these signals along with the Doppler effect to detect movement. The Doppler effect happens when a radio wave reflects off a moving object. When it does, the wave’s frequency changes.

The device reads these frequency changes and calculates not only when an object is moving, but also its speed, location and the direction it’s going. For example, if a person is moving toward the Wi-Fi source, the frequency of waves increases; if a person is moving away from the source, the frequency of the waves decreases.

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Despite all of this wave reading and frequency changing, the device itself gives off zero waves, making it impossible to detect. The most interesting potential use of the device would be for security purposes like scanning buildings during hostage situations or war torn cities where insurgents might be hiding.

Woodbridge and Chetty hope to fine tune the device to include the ability to pick up subtle movements like the rise and fall of one’s chest when breathing, in order to sense someone even if they are standing still.

via Popular Science

Credit: Kevin Chetty / University College London

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