Security

Wondering where you left your dang car keys this time? Well, you might not be if you were using BiKN. Pronounced “beacon,” this tracking system consists of an iPhone case, an app, and up to eight tags that can be attached to items of your choice. Should you not be able to find one of those items, BiKN will help you relocate it. The system will also give you a holler should a particular "item" wander away on its own. Read More

Fingerprints have been used to confirm or determine peoples' identities for over one hundred years now, but new technology is allowing them to be put to another use - drug testing. Intelligent Fingerprinting (a spin-off company affiliated with the UK's University of East Anglia) has just unveiled a prototype portable device that can detect the presence of illicit drugs or other substances in a person's system by analyzing the sweat in their fingerprints. Read More

Do you like puzzles? If you’re good enough at solving them, it could win you up to US$50,000. That's the maximum prize that DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) is offering in its Shredder Challenge. The agency is trying to develop methods of reconstructing shredded documents that U.S. soldiers could use when gathering intelligence in war zones – it also wants to identify shredded-document-reading strategies that could be used against the U.S., so that it can take preemptive measures against them. What better way to do it than by crowd-sourcing? Read More

Remote-controlled unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs) have proven exceptionally useful in military applications, but according to Swedish company Rotundus, they can be equally well applied to civil security. Rolling through mud, sand, snow, or even floating in the water, the Rotundus GroundBot spherically-shaped robot is equipped with a pair of cameras, providing its remote operator with a live video feed in 3D. Read More

If you're looking for a reason to buy an iPhone 3GS as opposed to an iPhone 4, besides the lower price, here's one: it's technically possible that malware on an iPhone 4 – if that phone were placed beside its user's computer keyboard – could be used to deduce what the user was typing. Once that data was stored on the phone, it could then be transmitted to another party. According to researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology, who were able to use one of the phones for this purpose, any smartphone made within the past two years should be capable of doing so. Read More

When people are looking into buying an electric vehicle, they typically ask questions like “What sort of range does it get?”, “How big is its battery?” or “How long does it take to charge?”. They don't usually ask “How many guns does it have?”. In the case of T3 Motion’s new T3 Non-Lethal Response Vehicle (NLRV), however, that would be a legitimate inquiry. The three-wheeled stand-up EV is designed for police use in riots or violent protests, and it in fact has two semi-automatic launchers, capable of shooting non-lethal ammo at a rate of 700 rounds per minute. Read More

There are plenty of situations in which it’s convenient for people to be able to receive sensitive data on their smartphones – one example could be a nurse at a clinic, who needs a doctor’s office to email over a patient’s immunization records. The problem is, those confidential records will still be on her phone, when she leaves work with it at the end of the day. A new system developed at Virginia Tech, however, offers a solution to that problem. It allows mobile phones to access certain data only when they’re in a given physical location, and wipes that data from their memories when they leave. Read More

Chances are, you’ve seen at least one or two TV shows in which the police examine news footage shot at several different crime scenes, and recognize the same person’s face showing up repeatedly in the crowds of onlookers ... the ol’ “criminal returning to the scenes of their crimes” scenario. Realistically, it’s pretty hard to believe that one person could look through all that footage, and remember all those faces. It turns out that a computer could do it, however, as scientists at Indiana’s University of Notre Dame have illustrated with their “Questionable Observer Detector," or QuOD. Read More

Bike locks ... they’re very necessary items, but are sometimes a hassle to carry when you’re riding. U-locks can be clipped into a frame-mounted bracket, but not everyone wants a big plastic bracket permanently installed on their prized two-wheeler. They can also be stuffed in a backpack, although that can be a challenge if space in said backpack is already at a premium. Alternatives include a lock that you wear like a belt, and a lock that straps onto the bicycle’s top tube. Now, there’s another option – a lock that has the form of a water bottle, so it can sit in your bottle cage. Read More