Seen today on my commute to Emmanuel College, via Mattapan and JP. (Click to enlarge.)
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Tag Archives: massachusetts
Now it's barcodes that can be read at a distance
Radio frequency identification tags are not fully catching on, thanks to objections from Alan Watt, Katherine Albrecht, and others who have been hammering away for years at RFID’s threats to privacy and civil liberties.
For global corporations and the US Department of Homeland Security, who remain eager to track individuals, that means it’s time to shift their efforts back to barcodes.
MIT scientists last week said they’ve overcome the barcode’s strongest privacy protections–its close read range, and fussy need to be scanned, line-of-sight. Now, using the camera in a mobile phone, a spy, or hacker, will be able to scan the barcode label on any object, or person, at an angle, and up to 60 feet away.
The MIT scientists are working with grants from Nokia, Samsung, and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation–named for its founder, the ruthless auto industry chief that one reporter counts among “Hitler’s carmakers.” Sloan is also a creator–through his strategy of “planned obsolescence”–of our modern, consumerist culture.
The new barcode labels, called bokodes, can be made “tiny, and imperceptible“–each is about three millimeters in diameter.
Here’s an excerpt from the BBC:
“For traditional barcodes you need to be a foot away from it at most,” said Dr Mohan.
The team has shown its barcodes can be read from a distance of up to 4m (12ft), although they should theoretically work up to 20m (60ft).
“One way of thinking about it is a long-distance barcode.”
Morgue: final resting place for the cash-strapped
Photo: Pavel Tcholakov/Flickr CC
A Massachusetts woman can’t afford to give her brother a proper sendoff, the LA Times reports.
She’s just one of many Americans who can’t even afford to dig a ditch for their departed family members.
This is the kind of story that might one day persuade folks to donate their bodies “to science,” rather than die, horrified, knowing that a hospital might just toss your body in the trash.
Last month, the coroner called his sister, Tarnya Baker, 41, of Amesbury, Mass., to notify her that Agosta, 43, of West Hollywood, had shot himself in the head. Although Baker was her brother’s next of kin, they had not spoken since he left Massachusetts for California 15 years ago. Only after he died did she learn that he was in debt. He shot himself as sheriff’s officials attempted to evict him. He left a note giving his possessions to the local AIDS clinic.
Baker said she wants to claim his ashes, but she and her husband have two children and a struggling glass-glazing business. During the last two years, they have had to lay off their two employees.
via More bodies go unclaimed as families can’t afford funeral costs – Los Angeles Times.
Boston: Price of cheap wireless may be less privacy and security
Photo: CC/Niall Kennedy
Universal Hub relays the news that Boston’s languishing municipal Wi-Fi project–that is, its government-run wireless internet service–has been reinvented as an ad-hoc, mesh network:
The effort initially focused on traditional wireless access points (like the ones you can see on lightpoles all over Brookline), but organizers realized that would prove impossibly expensive and so are now using a “mesh” approach, in which each subscriber’s computer is essentially equipped to act as an access point through a cheapo router. The result: Free WiFi in parts of the Fenway.
This is not likely to be good news for individual privacy and security.
First, consider the following:
- Muni Wi-Fi projects in other cities have been marred by conflicts of interest and mismanagement
- Users in other cities are already being charged for what they were told was going to be “free” access
- Boston is among the cities planning to piggyback police and other government communications onto its muni Wi-Fi network. (This “dual use” for the network has the potential to bring Homeland Security dollars into the city’s coffers.)
Now, for the “ad-hoc” piece:
- Some of the equipment Boston will be using was developed with money from sources with direct ties to the intelligence community.
- Ad-hoc networks were not created with privacy and security in-mind. Rather, the technology was first deployed in vineyards and parking lots.
- Ad-hoc wireless networks are more prone to unreliable connections and speeds–which means the folks on Mission Hill, and in Boston’s other poor neighborhoods, will be getting less service for their money.
- Cheap wireless equipment might also be more vulnerable to backdoor attacks.
Birth of a fetish: Boston's Girls 4 Ganja
One of the Girls 4 Ganja. Photo: Scott Gacek
Scott Gacek has a stoner’s dream job: Taking pictures of attractive young women, and getting blazed with them on New England’s beaches, and in other interesting spots around Boston.
Gacek started his website to raise money for MassCann and others fighting to legalize pot in Massachusetts.
But Gacek, a professional photographer who’s shot for virtually every major Boston news outlet, is just not doing Girls 4 Ganja for the money–at least not for himself.
Gacek wants folks to know that the “girl next door” might just be a toker, too:
New additions to the G4G lineup. Photo: Scott Gacek
“They are courageous, willing to come out of the “cannabis closet” and tell the world “I SMOKE MARIJUANA”. And hell, they look great doing it.
The models featured on Girls4Ganja come from all walks of life. Some are students, some are working professionals. Like most marijuana smokers, they are contributing members of society, who are viewed as “criminals” only because of the plant they choose to smoke
Gacek is also working on a 2010 G4G calender, which will feature a mix of his own photos, and self-submissions.
Intruder alert: Milton
My fellow Miltonians: Lock your doors, draw your blinds. Scam artists, or worse, are about.
From an e-mail, yesterday:
Public Service Announcement
Town of MiltonThere have been recent episodes on the south shore of individuals claiming to be Public Works employees in an attempt to gain access to homes. If someone comes to your door claiming to be a Public Works employee and does not have identification, please do not grant them access. Call Kathy Bowen at 617.898.4974 to confirm that they are in fact a Public Works employee.
Could be the Travelers, or local druggies.
Milton has hired some shady characters to install updated meters in homes, so it could be those guys, as well, coming around to loot what they consider to be the softer targets in town.
Alas, the town provides no description of the scam artists in the e-mail.
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Flash: Plowed snow flattens two cars on Storrow Drive
The clods!
Just off the police scanner:
Snowplows on the Mass Pike overpass dumped snow and ice onto two cars on Storrow drive this afternoon, smashing their windshields, according to police on the scene….
That is all.
Christmas fright
Photo: CC/Tamara Del Valle
A Milton woman is reportedly wielding a knife, and threatening to hurt herself. Hubby says she’s in her car, heading north to New Hampshire.
Milton police and the husband are trying to talk the woman into returning home, on Woodland Road.
My wife asks, “Is the woman home for a week with a bunch of kids, who aren’t in school?”
Live ammo in Milton Street
Cops have found 18 live rounds in the street, along Brush Hill Road, near the Discovery School.
Maybe a hunter dropped a box of ammo?
Lesbian mom again says daughter is being abused
Police in Milton this morning received word from Virginia Gaffey that her kid is being abused at the Glover School in Milton. I am guessing her girl’s been moved from the Tucker School.
Here’s a previous report:
When Virgina Gaffey’s 8-year-old daughter was surrounded, smacked and shoved around by six boys and girls at recess last month, it wasn’t the first time she had been harassed at the Tucker Elementary School.
It was a new school year, but the torment that started the year before when she transferred from a Catholic school escalated into a gang assault.
Her mother, who is a lesbian, said that was the reason for the attack.