Several companies are raking in the dough selling plastic bracelets. Power Balance one of the most popular of the so called performance bands is manufactured in China and sells for more than $30.
After a little testing it is easy to figure out that the only this the plastic jewelry is doing for you is making you poorer.
Maybe it helps by balancing your wallet by removing all of your hard earned cash.
The personal effects of Ted Kaczynski, aka the Unabomber, will be sold via an online auction by the U.S. Marshals beginning May 18. U.S. District Judge Garland Burrell of the Eastern District of California ordered the sale in August 2010. Proceeds from the auction will be used to compensate Kaczynski’s victims.
The auction will run from May 18 to June 2. The online catalog, which will include approximately 60 lots of property, will be on gsaauctions.gov beginning May 18. Items to be sold include personal documents, such as driver’s licenses, birth certificates, deeds, checks, academic transcripts, photos, and his handwritten codes; typewriters; tools; clothing; watches; several hundred books; and more than 20,000 pages of written documents, including the original handwritten and typewritten versions of the “UnabomManifesto.”
“The U.S. Marshals Service has been given a unique opportunity to help the victims of Theodore Kaczynski’s horrific crimes,” said U.S. Marshal Albert Nájera of the Eastern Districtof California. “We will use the technology that Kaczynski railed against in his variousmanifestos to sell artifacts of his life. The proceeds will go to his victims and, in a very smallway, offset some of the hardships they have suffered.”Photos of selected auction lots are available at www.flickr.com/photos/usmarshals/(click on “Sets”). The catalog, photos and descriptions of all the lots will be available at www.gsaauctions.gov when the auction goes live on May 18.
See: US Marshall Service Press Release
Wired and iFixIt have teamed up to dismantle an FBI tracking device. These are the ones that the FBI surreptitiously places in the bumper of your car so they can track your movements.
This is what they found:
We partnered with Wired to bring you a peek inside an FBI car-tracking device. The device is similar to the one Yasir Afifi found underneath his car. If you’re curious where this one came from, Wired has posted a writeup about Karen Thomas, the woman who found this tracker under her car. They’ve also posted a video of Kyle doing the teardown.
The device comprises of a GPS unit for receiving the car’s position, an RF transmitter for relaying your location to the interested authority (aka the FBI), and a set of sweet D-cell batteries that power the whole enchilada. But we didn’t stop there, of course. Read on to find out exactly what components make this secretive device tick.
Disclaimer: We love the FBI. We’ve worked with them on several occasions to fight crime and locate criminals. We’ve helped them with instructions on gaining entry into certain devices. We have nothing against them, and we hope they don’t come after us for publishing this teardown.
Did you know that police cars these days are now outfitted with cameras that can automatically scan all license plates within their visual range? Cameras mounted on a patrol car driving 80 mph can capture plates from cars driving the opposite way traveling at the same speed. Side-mounted cameras can be used to collect plates in a parking lot as the officer cruises leisurely back and forth through the lanes! Automated License Plate Recognition (ALPR) technologies mounted on police cars and various stationary sites are vastly improving the monitoring capabilities of the police force, and pissing off civil rights groups just as effectively.
The goal behind using ALPR monitoring is to track criminals. A “hot list,” provided by the FBI, is downloaded every day. The list includes perpetrators of all kinds, including illegal drivers such as those with suspended licenses or without insurance, but also more hardened criminals with warrants. They even track sex offenders. If a wanton criminal or a stolen vehicle turns up, the system notifies police who can then react quickly. In addition to spotting criminals, the data collected by the cameras can be mined in the event of a major incident such as a terrorist attack. Law enforcement officials could go back and see who was in the area at the time of the attack. The automated system is capable of scanning 10,000 license plates per hour and running checks on 2,000 to 2,500 of them against the “hot list” in a 10 hour shift. By comparison, the fastest police officers run about 100 plates per 10 hour shift. And the cameras are better at their job–they don’t tire at the end of their shift. Cruise shotgun with British Columbia’s Sergeant Rick Stewart in the video below for a demonstration of ALPR technology. Awesomely, he actually gets a hit during the taping: a stolen vehicle involved in an armed robbery.
The plate trackers were developed in 1992 at Cambridge University in the United Kingdom to help track terrorists. Several different technologies are combined to produce the system’s automated sophistication. A platefinder firmware continually searches the camera’s field of view for license plates. Once a license plate is detected the dual lens camera is activated, capturing images in both visible and infrared light. The infrared lens enables the camera to capture the plate in all kinds of weather conditions and even in complete darkness. A triple flash technology is also used that varies the flash, shutter, and gain settings over multiple images to adjust to different light and weather settings. A computer selects the best image for processing and that image is then read by an optical character recognition engine. The OCR engine can be generic or customized to the style of license plate found in a particular state or country. Because plates come in all shapes and sizes a good OCR engine will be flexible, reading plates from skewed and off-axis angles, and having different sizes, syntax rules, and designs. Processors will then take the data and store it in multiple formats for different types of downstream analyses.
Along with police vehicles, the cameras are also being mounted onto stationary sites such as toll booths and speed monitors: those roadside panels that tell you, “You’re driving this fast.” During last year’s World Series, San Francisco’s law enforcement used ALPR to monitor cars in the vicinity of AT&T Park. The San Francisco Chroniclerecently reported that the city’s crime fighters have placed the cameras on six of their cruisers–that’s adding to the ten which already had them. As of this time last year,Los Angeles had 26 cameras.
At $20,000 a pop, the plate scanners aren’t cheap. But the increased monitoring efficiency and accuracy make them well worth the cost to law enforcement personnel. A study performed by the Association of Chief Police Officers concluded that using the cameras increased arrest rates in the UK ten times the national average.
Big Brother Never Sleeps
Not surprisingly, the increasing use of automated plate recognition to track drivers has raised the ire of the ACLU and other privacy advocate groups. In addition to a general distaste for being monitored all the time, the major objection being brought against plate recognition technology is the possibility that the data might be used for purposes other than tracking criminals. A recent article in Time described a hypothetical divorce case where the movements of a person could be used as circumstantial evidence to argue adultery. Law enforcement officals everywhere are doing their best to assuage these sorts of fears. Sergeant Dan Gomez, who runs the LAPD’s Tactical Technology Unit, emphasized that their license plate data is heavily guarded with strict protocols that an investigator must go through if he wants to follow up on a particular car.
Given such famous privacy gaffe’s like President Bush’s wire-tapping and, most recently, the discovery that Apple iPhones and iPads are storing data on their customers’ whereabouts, I really can’t blame anyone for crying foul as the scanners show up on our neighborhood police cars and street corners. It seems like we’re constantly having to assess the sincerity of our technocrats when they tell us, “Honestly, there’s nothing to worry about.” Didn’t we all kind of know that Google was keeping tabs on what we asked them to look up for us? But even as the details of our lives are ever more embedded into our hard drives we continue sit back and trust the powers that be to not take advantage of us (Intriguingly, if you Google the words “Google” and “privacy,” the first four hits are google.com statements detailing their privacy policy. Suspicious, no?).
Look, I think the technology is great. By all means, nab the bad guys. But I’m also thankful that we have groups like the ACLU that raise these important questions that I’m sure most of us share. If science is too important to be left to scientists, technology is too important to be left to those who make it. In my opinion, the world really is looking more and more like Orwell’s “1984.” It’s probably a good thing, from time to time, to give Big Brother a punch in the nose.
Source: Singularity Hub
Part 1
Part 2
