Encryption Scheme Makes Artificial Organs Hack-Proof

Ultrasound Encryption Scheme Makes Artificial Organs Hack-Proof

PopSci | Nov 10, 2009

By Clay Dillow

Securing Implantable Devices: Researchers are testing their system using an implanted device in the abdominal wall of a cow.

Think about it: Would you want someone launching the equivalent of a denial-of-service attack on the device that keeps your heart beating properly?

In an effort to ensure control of implantable devices remains in the proper hands, researchers at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology and the French National Institute for Research in Computer Science and Control are developing a security scheme based on ultrasound that determines the exact distance between a medical device and the device attempting to access it. Under the scheme, devices will be accessible to devices up to 10 meters away that complete the required series of authentication procedures. In emergency situations — a heart attack for instance — it will grant access to any device within close proximity to the patient. Otherwise, any device asking for personal data or giving commands to your implant would essentially have to be in the room with you.

Previous security schemes based on proximity have been proposed using standard radio signals, but researchers worry that proximity can be mimicked by an attacker using a radio signal booster. Ultrasound waves layered on top of radio signals ensure that implanted devices can gauge true distance; since the speed of sound is constant, devices can calculate with extreme accuracy the distance between implant and any device attempting access.

While researchers acknowledge that the current risks of attacks on medical devices are relatively small, in the future they will become more and more important as novel new ways to exploit implantable technologies are approved and implemented. Creating the bionic human is only as good as science’s ability to ensure that technology is safe. Because Rickrolling is funny; burning up the batteries in someone’s pacemaker is decidedly not.

Intel Wants Brain Implants in Its Customers’ Heads by 2020

Matrix creep: Mind Trip Intel wants into your brain. (Image Warner Bros.)

Researchers expect brain waves to operate computers, TVs and cell phones

PopSci | Nov 20, 2009

By Jeremy Hsu

If the idea of turning consumers into true cyborgs sounds creepy, don’t tell Intel researchers. Intel’s Pittsburgh lab aims to develop brain implants that can control all sorts of gadgets directly via brain waves by 2020.

The scientists anticipate that consumers will adapt quickly to the idea, and indeed crave the freedom of not requiring a keyboard, mouse, or remote control for surfing the Web or changing channels. They also predict that people will tire of multi-touch devices such as our precious iPhones, Android smart phones and even Microsoft’s wacky Surface Table.

Turning brain waves into real-world tech action still requires some heavy decoding of brain activity. The Intel team has already made use of fMRI brain scans to match brain patterns with similar thoughts across many test subjects.

Plenty of other researchers have also tinkered in this area. Toyota recently demoed a wheelchair controlled with brainwaves, and University of Utah researchers have created a wireless brain transmitter that allows monkeys to control robotic arms.

There are still more implications to creating a seamless brain interface, besides having more cyborgs running around. If scientists can translate brain waves into specific actions, there’s no reason they could not create a virtual world with a full spectrum of activity tied to those brain waves. That’s right — we’re seeing Matrix creep.

Government considers cutting home internet service during pandemic

U.S. pandemic options include crippling home modems

computerworld.com | Oct 30, 2009

The U.S. has a dark box of options for keeping Internet traffic flowing during a pandemic, including restricting the bandwidth capability of home modems.

The feds have already shown their willingness to impose their power on carriers because of national security, something that happened after 9/11 with the Patriot Act. If a pandemic keeps large numbers of the workforce at home and causes network congestion, the U.S. government will likely act again.

Most businesses and government agencies have diverse routing and pay carriers handsomely for bandwidth rich connections. But if a pandemic keeps 30% or more of the population at home, the so-called low bandwidth “last mile” to homes will be critical but in trouble as legions of at-home employees attempt work along with those playing networked games and streaming video.

Voluntary appeals to reduce Internet use will likely be the first option for policy makers. But if that doesn’t work, the U.S. General Accountability Office report this week on pandemic planning and networks, outlined some of the other possibilities.

One “technically feasible alternative,” wrote the GAO, is to temporarily cripple home user modems…

Full Story

CIA Invests In Social Media Monitoring Technology

Investment arm In-Q-Tel is funding Visible Technologies, making its online brand analysis capabilities available to U.S. intelligence agencies.

InformationWeek | Oct 22, 2009

By J. Nicholas Hoover

Businesses are increasingly looking to social media to monitor and manage their brands online. U.S. intelligence agencies now have similar capabilities as part of their technology portfolios.

In-Q-Tel, the investment firm established by the CIA to support U.S. intelligence agencies, has invested in Visible Technologies, a start-up that monitors social media content on the Web.

Visible Technologies’ software-as-a-service apps are used by companies to monitor and manage their brands by observing and analyzing public opinion on the Web in real-time.Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT), Hormel Foods, Xerox (NYSE: XRX), Panasonic, and marketing and public relations firms are among its customers.

U.S. intelligence organizations could use Visible Technologies’ service to monitor and analyze public opinion on the Web, much as private sector companies do.

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Visible Technologies’ TruCAST engine “casts a net on whatever the client wants to know more about,” said senior VP Blake Cahill. TruCAST pulls information from blogs, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, news sites, and Web forums, though it can’t reach into places like Facebook and MySpace where users have set privacy controls. Using that information, companies can run sentiment and relevancy analysis, look at a commenter or blogger’s level of influence, and search for posts based on defined criteria.

CIA invests in firm that monitors Internet

Visible Technologies has been focusing increasingly on the government sector, and it has done some work through the General Services Administration, according to Cahill. Concepts & Strategies, a consultancy that advises the Department of Defense, is one of its partners.

In-Q-Tel has invested in more than 175 companies, including ArcSight (security information management), Lucid Imagination (open source search), Endeca (search), Adapx (smart pens) and Keyhole, the developer of foundational technology used in Google Maps.

Visible Technologies has raised $23.5 million in funding since its inception in 2005, including $8 million since December. Terms of In-Q-Tel’s investment weren’t disclosed.

Big Brother Britain: £380 a MINUTE spent on tracking your every click online

An astonishing £380 a minute will be spent on surveillance in a massive expansion of the Big Brother state.

Daily Mail | Oct 21, 2009

By James Slack

The £200million-a-year sum will give officials access to details of every internet click made by every citizen – on top of the email and telephone records already available.

It is a 1,700 per cent increase on the cost of the current surveillance regime.

Last night LibDem home affairs spokesman Chris Huhne described the sum as ‘eye-watering’.

‘There is already enough concern at the level of Government snooping,’ he said.

‘In an era of tough spending choices, it cannot be a justified response to the problems we face as a country to lavish millions of pounds a year on state spying.

‘The increase in money spent on tapping phones and emails is all the more baffling when Britain is still one of the few countries not to allow intercept evidence in court, even in terrorist cases.’

State bodies including councils are already making one request every minute to spy on the phone records and email accounts of members of the public.

The number of snooping missions carried out by police, town halls and other government departments has rocketed by 44 per cent in two years to a rate of 1,381 new cases every day.

Ministers say the five-year cost of the existing regime is £55.61million, an average of £11million a year.

This is paid to phone companies and service providers to meet the cost of keeping and providing private information about customers.

The cost of the new system emerged in a series of Parliamentary answers.

It is to cover payments to internet service providers so they can store mountains of information about every customer for a minimum of 12 months, and set up new systems to cope.

The actual content of calls and emails is not be kept – only who they were from or to, when they took place and where they were sent from.

Police, security services and other public authorities can then request access to the data as part of investigations.

Some 653 bodies are currently allowed access, including councils, the Financial Services Authority, the Ambulance Service and fire authorities and prison governors.

The new rules allowing access to internet records will be introduced by Parliament before the end of the year.

They are known as the Intercept Modernisation Programme.

Ministers had originally wanted to store the information on a massive Government-run database, but chose not to because of privacy concerns.

Yesterday Alex Deane, director of campaign group Big Brother Watch, said: ‘The Government is preparing to make British people pay through the nose so that they can track our movements online.’

But a Home Office spokesman said the costs involved were entirely separate from those necessary to comply with the European Data Retention Directive, which requires the storage of phone and email records.

‘Communications data is crucial to the fight against crime and keeping people safe,’ he added.

‘We have made clear that there are no plans to collect and hold the content of everyone’s communications.’

There were 504,073 made last year to intercept email and telephone records under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act. It was passed ostensibly to fight terrorism.

But it has been used to spy on people suspected of putting their bins out on the wrong day, dropping litter and attempting to cheat school catchment area rules.

British scientists develop ‘brain to brain communication’

A system that creates “brain to brain communication” has been developed by British scientists, it has been claimed.

Telegraph | Oct 15, 2009

By Andrew Hough

The system, developed by a team at the University of Southampton, is said to be the first technology that would allow people to send thoughts, words and images directly to the minds of others, particularly people with a disability.

It has also been hailed as the future of the internet, which would provide a new way to communicate without the need for keyboards and telephones.

“This could be useful for those people who are locked into their bodies, who can’t speak, can’t even blink,” said the lead scientist Dr Christopher James.

The scientists claimed the research proved it could eventually be possible to create a system where people sent messages through their thoughts alone, although they conceded it was many years away.

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Scientists used “brain-computer interfacing”, a technique that allows computers to analyse brain signals, that enabled them to send messages formed by a person’s brain signals though an internet connection to another person’s brain miles away.

According to Dr James, during transmission two people were connected to electrodes that measure activity in specific parts of the brain.

The first person generated a series of zeros and ones, where they imagined moving their left arm for zero and right arm for one.

After the first person’s computer recognises the binary thoughts, it sends them to the internet and then to the other person’s PC.

A lamp is then flashed at two different frequencies for one and zero, the Times reported.

The second person’s brain signals are analysed after staring at this lamp and the number sequence is picked up by a computer.

“It’s not telepathy,” Dr James told the paper.

“There’s no conscious thought forming in one person’s head and another conscious thought appearing in another person’s mind.

“The next experiments are to get that second person to be aware of the information that is being sent to them. For that, I need to get my thinking cap on, so to speak.”

New “Game” Encourages Secret Police-Style Spying

Players of Internet Eyes will monitor “thousands” of CCTV cameras, watching for crimes and reporting them to the authorities in hopes of winning monthly cash prizes.

escapistmagazine.com | Oct 9, 2009

by Andy Chalk

A new online “game” called Internet Eyes is about to launch, offering players a chance to earn money by spying on people through closed-circuit television cameras and reporting them to the police – for real.

Players of Internet Eyes will monitor “thousands” of CCTV cameras, watching for crimes and reporting them to the authorities in hopes of winning monthly cash prizes of up to £1,000 (roughly $1600). The game’s website will also feature a gallery of the people busted by Internet Eyes users along with a breakdown of their crimes and which user caught them. Tony Morgan, one of the men behind the scheme, said he and his partners were inspired to launch Internet Eyes by the fact that while the U.K. has roughly 4.2 million CCTV cameras installed throughout the country – a per-capita rate that easily outpaces even that of China – only “one in a thousand” actually gets watched.

“This could turn out to be the best crime prevention weapon there’s ever been,” Morgan said. “I wanted to combine the serious business of stopping crime with the incentive of winning money.”

The game will be free to play, while anyone who wants a camera monitored by Internet Eyes will pay £20 per week for the service. Morgan said he hopes that businesses, “local authorities” and even police forces will eventually take advantage of the service. The game will use cameras in the town of Stratford-upon-Avon when it launches in November, with a country-wide rollout expected soon after.

“Crimes are bound to get missed but this way the cameras will be watched by lots of people 24-hours-a-day. It gives people something better to do than watching Big Brother when everyone is asleep,” he said, apparently without a trace of irony. “We’ve had a lot of interest from local businesses and hope to roll it out nationwide and then worldwide.”

Not everyone is as enthusiastic about the plan as Morgan, however. Charles Farrier of the group No-CCTV called it “an appalling idea” and said, “It is something which should be nipped in the bud immediately. It will not only encourage a dangerous spying mentality by turning crime into a game but also could lead to dangerous civil rights abuses.”

I think “appalling” is a pretty good word for it. In the latter half of the 20th century, East Germany suffered under the incredibly repressive thumb of the Ministry for State Security, better known as the Stasi, a secret police agency famous for the extent to which it monitored the lives of everyday German citizens. Citizen-spies employed by the Stasi reported on each other to such an extent that two decades after reunification, the nation is still struggling to come to terms with the extent of the collusion. And now somebody wants to turn that sort of self-inflicted surveillance into a game?

On the other hand, maybe “appalling” isn’t strong enough.

U.S. relaxes control over ICANN, opens it to global governance

themoneytimes.com | Oct 1, 2009

by Jaspreet

New York, October 1 — As the ongoing agreement between Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) and the U.S. Commerce Department’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration ended Wednesday, ICANN, the net regulator, has finally got the autonomy to run its own affairs.

As the ongoing agreement between Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) and the U.S. Commerce Department’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration ended Wednesday, ICANN, the net regulator, has finally got the autonomy to run its own affairs. Icann will now be reviewed by a larger body, representing foreign governments with specific focus on security, accountability and transparency

ICANN, an organization set up in 1998 by the Clinton administration to regulate the functioning of Internet, has constantly been governed the U.S. government, which has over the years conducted regular reviews of its work.

The U.S. administration has signed a four-page “affirmation of commitments” brief document with ICANN and relaxed control over the functioning of Internet.

The agreement comes exactly 40 years after the underlying technology that makes the Internet run as developed by Department of Defense.

A larger governing body
The net regulator will now be reviewed by a larger body, representing foreign governments with specific focus on security, accountability and transparency.

“We’ve become an organization accountable solely to the Internet community,” ICANN’s Vice President Paul Levins said. “We will have review teams made up of people from all over the globe, not just a government sitting on Pennsylvania Avenue, although they will continue to play a crucial part.”

The agreement has come months after many countries raised objection, saying that the governance setup was improper. Countries like France, China, Libya, Brazil had argued that since majority of the Internet users reside outside U.S., there is a need to set up a multinational body to govern how the Internet works.

Relaxation of strict rules
The move is expected to lead to relaxation of strict rules concerning top-level domain (TLD) name system, using brand names as web addresses, launching domain names in Asian, Arabic or other languages etc.

Further, ICANN is also planning to expand available suffixes to variety of words like dot.football. dot.softdrink, dot.food etc.

This could prove very expensive and unleash a war between suffix owners and infringers in the long run. Many analysts have questioned the implications of creation of unlimited number of global top level domains.

The new agreement states, “Nothing in this document is an expression of support by [the Department of Commerce] of any specific plan or proposal for the implementation of new generic top level domain names or is an expression by DOC of a view that the potential consumer benefits of new gTLDs outweigh the potential costs.”

It’s not completely clear what will the domain expansion implicate, but the recent development is sure to pacify critics who had objected to U.S. dominance in governing ICANN.

EU funding ‘Orwellian’ artificial intelligence plan to monitor public for “abnormal behaviour”

The European Union is spending millions of pounds developing “Orwellian” technologies designed to scour the internet and CCTV images for “abnormal behaviour”.

Telegraph | Sep 19, 2009

By Ian Johnston

A five-year research programme, called Project Indect, aims to develop computer programmes which act as “agents” to monitor and process information from web sites, discussion forums, file servers, peer-to-peer networks and even individual computers.

Its main objectives include the “automatic detection of threats and abnormal behaviour or violence”.

Project Indect, which received nearly £10 million in funding from the European Union, involves the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) and computer scientists at York University, in addition to colleagues in nine other European countries.

Shami Chakrabarti, the director of human rights group Liberty, described the introduction of such mass surveillance techniques as a “sinister step” for any country, adding that it was “positively chilling” on a European scale.

The Indect research, which began this year, comes as the EU is pressing ahead with an expansion of its role in fighting crime, terrorism and managing migration, increasing its budget in these areas by 13.5% to nearly £900 million.

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‘Project Indect’: An A.I. to police all of Europe

The European Commission is calling for a “common culture” of law enforcement to be developed across the EU and for a third of police officers – more than 50,000 in the UK alone – to be given training in European affairs within the next five years.

According to the Open Europe think tank, the increased emphasis on co-operation and sharing intelligence means that European police forces are likely to gain access to sensitive information held by UK police, including the British DNA database. It also expects the number of UK citizens extradited under the controversial European Arrest Warrant to triple.

Stephen Booth, an Open Europe analyst who has helped compile a dossier on the European justice agenda, said these developments and projects such as Indect sounded “Orwellian” and raised serious questions about individual liberty.

“This is all pretty scary stuff in my book. These projects would involve a huge invasion of privacy and citizens need to ask themselves whether the EU should be spending their taxes on them,” he said.

“The EU lacks sufficient checks and balances and there is no evidence that anyone has ever asked ‘is this actually in the best interests of our citizens?’”

Miss Chakrabarti said: “Profiling whole populations instead of monitoring individual suspects is a sinister step in any society.

“It’s dangerous enough at national level, but on a Europe-wide scale the idea becomes positively chilling.”

According to the official website for Project Indect, which began this year, its main objectives include “to develop a platform for the registration and exchange of operational data, acquisition of multimedia content, intelligent processing of all information and automatic detection of threats and recognition of abnormal behaviour or violence”.

It talks of the “construction of agents assigned to continuous and automatic monitoring of public resources such as: web sites, discussion forums, usenet groups, file servers, p2p [peer-to-peer] networks as well as individual computer systems, building an internet-based intelligence gathering system, both active and passive”.

York University’s computer science department website details how its task is to develop “computational linguistic techniques for information gathering and learning from the web”.

“Our focus is on novel techniques for word sense induction, entity resolution, relationship mining, social network analysis [and] sentiment analysis,” it says.

A separate EU-funded research project, called Adabts – the Automatic Detection of Abnormal Behaviour and Threats in crowded Spaces – has received nearly £3 million. Its is based in Sweden but partners include the UK Home Office and BAE Systems.

It is seeking to develop models of “suspicious behaviour” so these can be automatically detected using CCTV and other surveillance methods. The system would analyse the pitch of people’s voices, the way their bodies move and track individuals within crowds.

Project coordinator Dr Jorgen Ahlberg, of the Swedish Defence Research Agency, said this would simply help CCTV operators notice when trouble was starting.

“People usually don’t start to fight from one second to another,” he said. “They start by arguing and pushing each other. It’s not that ‘oh you are pushing each other, you should be arrested’, it’s to alert an operator that something is going on.

“If it’s a shopping mall, you could send a security guard into the vicinity and things [a fight] maybe wouldn’t happen.”

Open Europe believes intelligence gathered by Indect and other such systems could be used by a little-known body, the EU Joint Situation Centre (SitCen), which it claims is “effectively the beginning of an EU secret service”. Critics have said it could develop into “Europe’s CIA”.

The dossier says: “The EU’s Joint Situation Centre (SitCen) was originally established in order to monitor and assess worldwide events and situations on a 24-hour basis with a focus on potential crisis regions, terrorism and WMD-proliferation.

“However, since 2005, SitCen has been used to share counter-terrorism information.

“An increased role for SitCen should be of concern since the body is shrouded in so much secrecy.

“The expansion of what is effectively the beginning of an EU ’secret service’ raises fundamental questions of political oversight in the member states.”

Superintendent Gerry Murray, of the PSNI, said the force’s main role would be to test whether the system, which he said could be operated on a countrywide or European level, was a worthwhile tool for the police.

“A lot of it is very academic and very science-driven [at the moment]. Our budgets are shrinking, our human resources are shrinking and we are looking for IT technology that will help us five years down the line in reducing crime and combating criminal gangs,” he said.

“Within this Project Indect there is an ethical board which will be looked at: is it permissible within the legislation of the country who may use it, who oversees it and is it human rights compliant.”

Augmented Reality Soon to Change Our View of the World

digitaljournal.com | Sep 2, 2009

By Kevin Jess

Augmented reality is heading our way, and this new generation of software has the potential to change our lives and how we view the world around us.

Computer graphics have become much more sophisticated since Pong entered the arcades and our homes in the early 1970’s. Since then, computer graphics have steadily improved and have become very realistic and soon they will become very real.

Imagine computer generated graphics being integrated and applied to the real world as you are walking down the street.

For instance, you might be on vacation in Halifax, Nova Scotia and while on a walking tour you stop in front of Government House. You want to know more about it, such as what it is used for and it’s history.

Today we would use our guide book that we picked up at a local tourist information center. With augmented reality applications you wouldn’t need these soon to be relics.

Instead, you would use your cell phone. By focusing your camera phone on Government House you would see all of this information on screen, clicking on links for more information, or quickly accessing a map.

The idea isn’t new, but with the latest generation of mobile phones, many of which have a compass and GPS, 3G mobile internet access and a growing range of mobile applications, there is nothing to stop augmented reality from entering the mainstream.

Google’s Android phones can already use some of the best augmented reality applications. One of those now available is Wikitude, which overlays what you are looking at with information about points of interest based on where the user points the phone’s camera. Simply by activating the phone’s camera mode and then panning it across buildings and locations, Wikitude pulls in information based on where you are located.

The technology even works with people. A Swedish company is working on an application called Augmented ID, which puts facial recognition and photo tagging together to provide personal information. You could use your phone’s camera to frame someone’s face in order to bring up details of their social networking profiles, their business card, or even a criminal record such as a sex offender reports the Telegraph.

Augmented reality displays, one of which is a cell phone will eventually look like a normal pair of glasses,or even contact lenses, where informative graphics will appear in your field of view, and audio will coincide with whatever you see. Graphics, audio and other sense enhancements would, in fact be superimposed over what you are looking at in the real world, in real time reports HowStuffWorks.

Toymakers are also getting in on the action. Mattel is building the technology into a line of action figures to tie in with Avatar, the upcoming 3D film directed by James Cameron. Each toy will come with an iTag; a small plastic card that children can hold up to their web cam. When the computer recognizes the card, a three-dimensional image is superimposed over the card on the computer screen, giving the child information about their action figure’s character and even the ability to “manipulate” the character or vehicle on-screen by pushing virtual “buttons”.

Other applications now available are Twittaround, Traffic Views, Layar and Nearest Tube.

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