Tag: SURVEILLANCE

Share On Monday, Boeing revealed its newest unmanned spy plane, a boomerang-shaped, drool-inducing object that looks straight out of a Michael Bay film. The sleek Phantom Ray is 36-feet long with a 50-foot wingspan, and takes off this December. This bad boy can hit 614 mph while hovering around 40,000 feet, but its purpose seems a bit obscure. Fast Company reports that, aside from being ...

For some time, businesses have used digital video surveillance for security and other purposes. But there's been a problem with this system; the footage is often cumbersome to search. Now, a company has developed a search engine for archived digital video surveillance footage, making it much easier to peruse. According to Scientific American, the tool, which was developed by 3VR Security, Inc., ...

Share According to a new study from the London School of Economics, the University of Oxford, and Nottingham Trent University, you're all a bunch of snoops. The three schools surveyed 1,000 married British couples and found that in one-third of the relationships, at least one partner admitted to having spied on their spouse's electronic activities. One fifth of respondents had read their ...

If you thought the U.S. was turning into a police state, just count your 50 lucky stars you don't live in the U.K. where, according to The Guardian, civilian police forces are planning on employing military-like unmanned drones to keep aerial tabs on "antisocial motorists, ­protesters, agricultural thieves(?) and fly-tippers(??)." The Guardian managed to get their hands on documents outlining ...

Since James Cameron completed 'Avatar' he's probably looking for another project to occupy years of his life. (We're sorry if it makes you depressed to hear that it's really over). Instead of wasting time on another overrated technology demo posing as cinema, we think Cameron should use his talents for something a little more worthwhile. What could be better than a government-funded military ...

E-mails recently obtained by The Washington Post confirm what we've all known for a while now: the FBI stockpiled private phone records for years, and violated civil liberty laws in the process. According to the Post, FBI officials collected over 2,000 U.S. phone call records between 2002 and 2006, all in the name of counter-terrorism. More troubling, though, is the underhanded way in which the ...

When Google launched its service in China back in 2006, the search giant came under intense criticism for caving to government demands to filter and censor search results. Google originally defended its decision by saying that the benefits of granting access to a wealth of information outweighed the the company's discomfort with being forced to censor the results. But something has changed. ...

On July 23rd, the British Children's Secretary, Ed Balls, announced a plan to spend a potential £400 million (over $675 million) on the installation of closed circuit cameras (CCTVs) in the homes of 20,000 "problem families" -- which include homes with truant children, alcohol abuse, or reports of malnutrition -- according to the Daily Express. The program would put the families under ...

During World War II, amphibious vehicles played a key role in battles throughout every theater of war (most famously the D-Day landings), revolutionizing modern military tactics. In the ongoing shift toward a military that is more dependent on technology and surveillance than sheer human numbers, the Navy has revealed that it is currently developing the futuristic (and awesomely intimidating) ...

Police in Arlington County, Virginia are looking for a suspect in a botched robbery and shooting at an area Apple Store. It's currently unclear what the thief was after, but authorities have released surveillance footage from the store's security cameras and posted it to YouTube, in hopes that someone will be able to identify the shooter. The suspect can be seen leading a female employee through ...

Okay, Switched readers, here's a great debate. Lancaster, Pennsylvania is known as the home of Hershey's corporate, the town where Peeps was invented (not made -- that's Bethlehem), and the American city with the highest amount of surveillance per capita. Lancasterians have been subjected to a community-wide program that installs closed-circuit cameras on nearly every street, hosting more outdoor ...

If you've got a lot of enemies (or watch too many spy movies), you've probably noticed those online ads for cell phone bugging software and thought: "Hey, I wonder if my phone is bugged?" Fortunately, the news crew at Fox 26 in Houston shares your paranoia: it recently tested out some cellular spyware to figure out if your ex-girlfriend or ex-boyfriend is listening in. After dropping $250 for ...

Hard-scrabbled, bourbon-swilling private investigators may soon go the way of newspapers, as in forced out of business by advances in technology. With GPS tracking software and other monitoring devices readily available and increasingly affordable, a growing number of people are doing the dirty work themselves. Therefore, the era of sweat-stained PIs eating burgers in rundown cars while they ...

The Air Force has announced that it will do its part for economic stimulus by spending $400 million on a dirigible designed to float 65,000 feet above the Earth, where it will provide constant surveillance of an area (such as the Afghanistan-Pakistan border). ISIS (Integrated Sensor Is the Structure) is being billed as a cross between a satellite and a spy plane, kept aloft by helium and powered ...

It's something we never really appreciated when waltzing into class way back when, but the ability to show up at your leisure without having to "clock in" and "clock out" was awesome. If you agree, you'll probably want to shred that application for City of Ely Community College in the UK, which has become one of the first UK schools to trial a new facial recognition technology from Aurora. ...