Tag Archives: Privacy

Nanny State trash sniffers root out "unauthorized" waste

Posted on by
Reply

Too much confusion. Waste at the Boston Farmer's Market. Photo: Morris K. Udall Foundation. Flickr/CC

Never mind that there is absolutely no shortage of landfill space, and recycling programs waste energy. Hingham residents who toss a beer can, here-and-there, into the wrong barrel, risk sanctions:

To minimize problems, the town has adopted a “three strikes and you are out’’ program. Residents who put recyclables in the trash get a “friendly letter’’ about the rules, said Sylvester. More problems result in a suspension of trash privileges until the resident speaks with a member of the staff and signs a statement saying he or she understands the rules. A third infraction means suspension for a year.

via Less trash adds up to more cash – The Boston Globe.

Here in Milton, we’ve been unable at times to get legitimate trash (with a $3 sticker affixed to it), picked-up. (Try calling the DPW in the a.m., and see who they’re really working for.)

Really, we should burn our trash. (Link via Alan Watt.)

New passports: wirelessly skimmed at distances up to ∞

Posted on by
Reply
Photo: Ken Mayer. Flickr/CC

Photo: Ken Mayer. Flickr/CC

E-passports will go down as a big win for the companies mad to chip human populations, despite objections such as this:

“the U.S. government (is) promoting itself a technology that has known privacy and security issues when there appear to be equally if not better, more effective alternatives.”

via FOXNews.com – U.S. Allies Begin Issuing High-Tech Passports for Travelers – Politics | Republican Party | Democratic Party | Political Spectrum.

The concerns of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (above) reflect those that I reported for Wired back in 2005.

Facebook meets RFID in marketers' dreams

Posted on by
Reply

Technologists and marketers are getting excited at the prospect of tying individuals to retail items, through social networking and RFID tags.

This tech blogger (excerpt and link, below) says, “applying collective intelligence to sensor data will be a rich vein of opportunity in the coming years.”

The opportunities he’s talking about, I suspect, are for corporations and governments.

Let’s face it, a ‘smart’ RFID chip on a bottle of wine – one that knows its production and travel history, its temperature, its price relative to similar bottles of wine, etc – will beat human hacking anytime. But, as the report rightly notes, don’t expect that level of automation via RFID any time soon. Our recent post examining the current state of RFID clearly showed that it’s years away.

via Web Squared: When Web 2.0 Meets Internet of Things.

RFID minds aussie ag workers

Posted on by
Reply
Photo: martin1print. Flickr/CC

Photo: martin1print. Flickr/CC

A large Australian tomato grower will use RFID to squeeze more productivity out of its migrant workers:

d’Vineripe maintains four 80,000-square-foot greenhouses (known as glasshouses) in Two Wells, South Australia. Within those structures, thousands of plants need to be tended to as the tomatoes grow and ripen. Between 50 and 120 employees typically work on the plants each day, performing a variety of tasks, including pruning, pollinating, deleafing, pest and disease control, and picking. The laborers are often Cambodian immigrants with limited or no English language skills, who work for a subcontractor hired by d’Vineripe.

via RFID Helps Improve Agricultural Worker Productivity – RFID Journal.

Now it's barcodes that can be read at a distance

Posted on by
3

_46116184_-3Radio 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.”

via BBC NEWS | Technology | Barcode replacement shown off.

Boston: Price of cheap wireless may be less privacy and security

Posted on by
1
Photo: CC/Niall Kennedy

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.

via Universal Hub | All Boston, all the time.

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.

Cops scour the land for angels of death

Posted on by
Reply
Photo: CC/tanya petrova

Photo: CC/tanya petrova

The “death with dignity” crowd in the US is in a state over law enforcement’s efforts to quash would-be Jack Kervorkians:

The internet is being kept under close watch by law enforcement to find more victims to back up their dubious prosecutions in Georgia and Arizona. Thus this is a time to be extra cautious and discreet. At trial, the defendants will be rigorously defended.

This harassment is most likely a right-wing backlash to our movement’s law reform successes in Oregon, Washington and Montana. We shall proceed.

via Law enforcement searching America for ‘assisted suicide’ cases | Assisted-Suicide Blog.

HomeSec: The shvitz is in

Posted on by
Reply

The sheen of a terror suspect. Photo: CC/Kenneth Freeman

TSA to sniff pits for potential enemies of the state

Forget your face, or your fingerprint. Homeland Security hopes to discern your identity and intentions by sniffing your sweat. Given the unreliability of field assays for chemical and biological weapons (rule of thumb: the quicker you canget the results, the less reliable they are), and the cloddish efforts of poorly trained TSA workers trying to foil terrorists,

While a million dollar industry already exists to mask that noxious smell that permeates armpits, the DHS said it would conduct an “outsourced, proof-of-principle study to determine if human odor signatures can serve as an indicator of deception. … As a secondary goal, this study will examine … human odor samples for evidence to support the theory that an individual can be identified by that individual’s odor signature.”

via The Escapist : News : We Can Smell If You’re Lying To Us.

Taser: Axon device "protects truth" (and "covers ass")

Posted on by
3

Update: My favorite feature on the Axon: its “Privacy Mode” switch, which automatically suspends recording during an arrest.

Because dashboard cameras catch only a part of the beat-down action, cops now use a new technology, from the makers of the not-so-less-than-lethal Taser: the Taser Axon. A cop wears the Axon over his ear, super soldier-style, while a device on his chest records the action, including all police radio calls. More on this to come.

On the street, law enforcement officers have seconds to make life-and-death decisions. In the courtroom, lawyers, administrators and jurors have years to analyze and second-guess those decisions. How do you protect the truth when officers have to defend their actions? The AXON (Autonomous eXtended On-Officer Network) by TASER. Only AXON protects the truth … because it provides a full-motion recording of exactly what the officer saw and heard, from the officer’s visual perspective. AXON offers audio-video recording of an incident from the point of view of the officer with pre-event video capture. AXON’s evidence-gathering capabilities can help streamline report documentation to maximize police-work efficiency.

Kill your phone

Posted on by
1

Apple and Google aim to track users’ phones with GPS and W-Fi trangulation.

Photo: CC/husin.sani

Google’s new service, Latitude, lets people spy on each other, by tracking their target’ GPS receivers. Now Apple is rumored to be adding Wi-Fi triangulation to the Mac OS.

OS X Snow Leopard to get WiFi triangulation, more multitouch control? – SlashGear

Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard could introduce WiFi triangulation, used to estimate geographical location, in a crossover of the technology from the iPhone to the MacBook range. The system- which is part of the CoreLocation framework in the iPhone SDK – will presumably be used to give general location information to navigation software such as Google Maps, as the first-generation iPhone did to compensate for its lack of true GPS.