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Reka makes a “decorative Santa cam,” meaning that it’s not a real camera. Instead, it just gets children used to being under constant surveillance.
Our Santa Cam has a cute Father Christmas and mistletoe design, and a red, flashing LED light which will make the most logical kids suspend their disbelief and start to believe!
Shonin is a personal bodycam up on Kickstarter.
There are a lot of complicated issues surrounding bodycams—for example, it’s obvious that police bodycams reduce violence—but the one thing everyone is certain about is that they will proliferate. I’m not sure society is fully ready for the ramifications of this level of recording.
The website key.me will make a duplicate key from a digital photo.
If a friend or coworker leaves their keys unattended for a few seconds, you know what to do.
EDITED TO ADD (7/20): Another article.
It was easy:
The hackers took a medium range photo of their subject with a digital camera’s night mode, and printed the infrared image. Then, presumably to give the image some depth, the hackers placed a contact lens on top of the printed picture.
The radio signals emitted by a commercial Wi-Fi router can act as a kind of radar, providing images of the transmitter’s environment, according to new experiments. Two researchers in Germany borrowed techniques from the field of holography to demonstrate Wi-Fi imaging. They found that the technique could potentially allow users to peer through walls and could provide images 10 times per second.
News article.
ProofMode is an app for your smartphone that adds data to the photos you take to prove that they are real and unaltered:
On the technical front, what the app is doing is automatically generating an OpenPGP key for this installed instance of the app itself, and using that to automatically sign all photos and videos at time of capture. A sha256 hash is also generated, and combined with a snapshot of all available device sensor data, such as GPS location, wifi and mobile networks, altitude, device language, hardware type, and more. This is also signed, and stored with the media. All of this happens with no noticeable impact on battery life or performance, every time the user takes a photo or video.
This doesn’t solve all the problems with fake photos, but it’s a good step in the right direction.
Brian Krebs has a really weird story about the built-in eavesdropping by the Chinese-made Foscam security camera:
Imagine buying an internet-enabled surveillance camera, network attached storage device, or home automation gizmo, only to find that it secretly and constantly phones home to a vast peer-to-peer (P2P) network run by the Chinese manufacturer of the hardware. Now imagine that the geek gear you bought doesn’t actually let you block this P2P communication without some serious networking expertise or hardware surgery that few users would attempt.
There’s a lot out there:
The feed includes images of marijuana plantations, back rooms of banks, children, kitchens, living rooms, garages, front gardens, back gardens, ski slopes, swimming pools, colleges and schools, laboratories, and cash register cameras in retail stores….
Slashdot thread.
This is an interesting story. Someone posts a photograph of herself holding a winning horse-race betting ticket, and someone else uses the data from the photograph to forge the ticket and claim the winnings.
I have been thinking a lot about how technology is messing with our intuitions about risk and security. This is a good example of that.
Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.