Life as an Artificial Lifeform

TASER International teams with EVIDENCE.com to create the AXON a secure police recording system that is fully portable and strapped on the head. Now there is multiple things going on here why this is noteworthy. For one it sends (streams?) the data directly to the servers of evidence.com in an encrypted secure way. That means nobody (also not the cops themself) can temper the footage. That means it could be an effective tool to watch the watchers and make them accountable for "mistakes" that might happen when an arrest or house search or such is being made. That of course would mean that evidence.com makes the videos available to the public at large but I think this might be even a business model for them so I actually do seem to think this is likely. Now there needs to be a law that prohibits the nice policemen from turning these things of in the heat - make it a felony punishable with a prison sentence or immediate suspension from the job to avoid the "oh I forgot to turn it back on" kind of moments that these fellow friends would likely have at times.

Now that this is covered I would like to raise a voice that this whole system needs to make it to the general market for everyone and the next best VJ to wear all day. Imagine not having to worry about how long the memory stick in your pocket has capacity but instead you can record you whole day onto a server of your choosing (probably your own home server for the more intimate moments) all wirelessly and you wear just a black blob over your ear - no fugly sunglasses or baseballcaps or fake eyes or such - yes that clearly means I WANT ONE :) but I am sure the bright people at Taser int. have figured that out already and present us a mass market version (probably sans encryption so to give back big brother what has been taken from him).

via engadget

Posted by fALk at 19:05 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Amazing Todd when he was here showed me a link to a website that has the weirdest collection of audioables ever seen on the web. Irdial is apparently a former record label gone bust putting all their content on the web for anyone to enjoy. If you are into noise and other ambient stuff you will loose a couple of days on the site. For example there is a CD with just sonar sounds or space weather. Generally a lot of mostly field recorded soundwaves sometimes put together with music sometimes just standing on their own.
What for me really stood out has not much to do with noise or ambience but with a phenomenon that I have never heard before but when I heard it I actually remembered listening to it in my childhood -> Number Radio Stations.
These are radio stations that consist of nothing more then a person reading seemingly random numbers. I had no clue about the history of them or what their purpose is or where they come from or why they exist. But luckily there is a whole book(let) that comes with the CDs nicely downloadable in PDF format that teaches us about the intrinsic function of number stations - it reads like a fiction novel if you are a geek type of person its pure number pr0n. Matter of fact its the most secure form of passing on encoded information that exists.

What Numbers Stations are.
Numbers Stations are radio broadcasts that appear in the Shortwave bands twenty-four hours a day, on many different frequencies. They are used to transmit short text messages. There are three different types of broadcast; voices reading groups of numbers or phonetic letters, Morse transmissions sending groups of numbers or letters and noise stations, transmitting several different types of noise.
What Numbers Stations are not.
Numbers Stations are not licensed in the conventional sense, and there is no easy to find information on any aspect of Numbers Stations from the government agencies that are concerned with radio use/misuse. They are not weather forecasts, or shipping broadcasts.

If that hooks you, you oughta read the rest of the booklet (pdf).
It has lots of very deep indepth information in it that you didn´t know that you always wanted to know. Especially for people interested in crypto and number crunching.

If you are more into making music or just like to listen to numbers/letters beeing spelled seemingly randomly by nice haunting voices for hours or maybe wanna crack some of the code:
There are 1 2 3 4 CDs in The Conet Project full of number station recording in different languages different presenters. A remix is in order! - *eyes glancing over to certain musicians....*

Posted by fALk at 18:45 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Well I have this orphaned category called "personal spyware" for times when you need to do any counteract surveillance. Today I found something very worthy to put in this drawer again. Digital Cowboys Spy Camera Pen. Thats a pen with a camera (obviously). The pen is fully functioning as a pen too (duh) it also sports a build in USB connector to just transfer over those nasty videos of the guy that just sold you a contract that ripped you off. Good to show the kids to learn on how not to do business... ;) Oh and you can take the mini tiny camera module out of the pen and use it on its own (like put it on a helicopter and make cool arial videos as this is light enough to be fitted on those ultra cheap mini helis?

The translated (from Japanese) product page

Posted by fALk at 8:48 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The dream of many media gangstas is it to have a constant record of the world surrounding, visual as well as audible (and possible in holographic quality). This "Feed" has been featured in quite a few science fiction writings (gibson etc pp) and as beeing heralded as the ultimate truth tool it is also a privacy fear device par excelance. Even if a camera inside your eyes and a direct soundfeed straight out of your brain would be feasable you still have that enormous amount of data where only a fraction would be interesting - sleeping would just produced a noozle sound and black pictures after all - and you sleep at least 1/2 of the time during the day (daydreaming included). This part of the problem seems to be solved by the Japanese Manabe Hiroyuki working for communication giant NTT DoCoMo. The device trains itself by looking at your attention peaks. Means when you daydream the device turns off an audio/video recording and saves the environmental setting as preset - so when you next encounter a similar situation it turns on automatically without consulting your brain. As anyone can see - this will probably stay away from massmarket at the moment. Original story found at engadget.

Posted by fALk at 9:51 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Even so this has been all over the place I still would like to share that very interesting body modification. What they do is implant a rare-earth magnet into your finger tip and all of the sudden you can feel electricity or when your harddrive is spinning up. Not for the soft spirited souls as it is dangerous as any "art" implant. The story writers implant got infected and when trying to remove it at a professional doctor it broke in pieces and was lost inside the finger - after a while it reassembled (as magnets tend to do) inside the finger and the ferro-magnetic sense is back. Read more at wired.

Posted by fALk at 10:30 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

or anyone who leaves his phone out of sight for five minutes

Since yesterday more and more stories appear on the net on cellphone tracking services - mostly in the UK. One particularly scaring such service in the UK lets a user automatically plot a map over a day of some ones cellphone location - basically letting a couple track each other without each others consent - or a robber track your movement to clean out your house while you are away, or a government agency picking you when you are on the way to a antigovernment possible terroristic demonstration or a terrorist tracking someone for best placement of bombs along the way or... well the possibilities are endless and most are scary thoughts. Read the story how a journalist tracks his girlfriend over at The Guardian.

Posted by fALk at 13:54 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Just in case you ever go into the underground and need to defend yourself from evil governments there is nothing like launching a satellite into space orbit. For that you need a rocket capable carrying a payload - how to build just that is explained in a 1971 manual about rocketbuilding. I would think papers like that will be worth quite much as soon as the "democratic governments" of the world consider the net a world threat and censor it out of existence - so grab it while its hot - you never know if you might need to launch that precious satellite into orbit for the survival of sane mankind.

Posted by fALk at 13:07 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I have this catagory "Personal Spyware" and for a long time its been dormant as there wasn´t much news for the private hobby agents. Yet today I stumbled across the the first commercially available spyplane. Its not very expensive either with $150 you get the plane with a digital camera on board that can shoot up to 26 pictures and has a wingspan 140 cm and can fly as high as 300 meters. Impressive indeed.

Posted by fALk at 12:47 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

oh yeah I will jam you too....

now cellphone jamming can be bought for $169. The Jammer looks like an old ericson handy with two antennas and can jam any cellphone signal in an area around 15m. I guess it will be not too hard to extend this range with some proper gear(antenna amplifier) and more power toward 100 meters (just a thought driving in front of a bussiness building and blocking the whole building from cellphone reception) anyway this is from the "cool spyware available to you" department which I now open as a new category :)

http://www.globalgadgetuk.com/Personal.htm

Posted by fALk at 23:30 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)