Thieves Use Video Camera to Stake Out Properties
If the police can use cameras, so can the burglars.
Entries Tagged "cameras"
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Anti-Cheating Security in Casinos
With over a thousand cameras operating 24/7, the monitoring room creates tremendous amounts of data every day, most of which goes unseen. Six technicians watch about 40 monitors, but all the feeds are saved for later analysis. One day, as with OCR scanning, it might be possible to search all that data for suspicious activity. Say, a baccarat player who leaves his seat, disappears for a few minutes, and is replaced with another player who hits an impressive winning streak. An alert human might spot the collusion, but even better, video analytics might flag the scene for further review. The valuable trend in surveillance, Whiting says, is toward this data-driven analysis (even when much of the job still involves old-fashioned gumshoe work). “It’s the data,” he says, “And cameras now are data. So it’s all data. It’s just learning to understand that data is important.”
Camera Jammer that Protects Licence Plates
noPhoto reacts to a camera flash, and then jams the image with a bright light.
The website makes the point that this is legal, but that can’t last.
Video Filter that Detects a Pulse
How long before someone claims he can use this technology to detect nervous people in airports?
Camera-Transparent Plastic
I just wrote about the coming age of invisible surveillance. Here’s another step along that process.
The material is black in color and cannot be seen through with the naked eye. However, if you point a black and white camera at a sheet of Black-Ops Plastic, it becomes transparent allowing the camera to record whatever is on the other side.
What this means is you can hide a camera inside an object made of this special plastic and no one will know it is there. But the camera is free to record without having its view blocked.
The article doesn’t talk about the technology.
The Banality of Surveillance Photos
Interesting essay on a trove on surveillance photos from Cold War-era Prague.
Cops, even secret cops, are for the most part ordinary people. Working stiffs concerned with holding down jobs and earning a living. Even those who thought it was important to find enemies recognized the absurdity of their task.
I take photos all the time and these empty blurry frames tell me that they were made intentionally. Shot out of boredom, as little acts of defiance, the secret police wandered the streets of Prague for twenty years taking lousy pictures of people from far away because a job is a job.
Occasionally something interesting happened, like spotting a hot stylish, American made Ford Mustang Sally. However, it must have been an awful job, with dull days that turned into months and years, of killing time between lunch and dinner.
Dance Moves As an Identifier
A burglar was identified by his dance moves, captured on security cameras:
“The 16-year-old juvenile suspect is known for his ‘swag,’ or signature dance move,” Heyse said, “and [he] does it in the hallways at school.” Presumably, although the report doesn’t make it clear, a classmate or teacher saw the video, recognized the distinctive swag and notified authorities.
But is swag admissible to identify a defendant? Assuming it really is unique or distinctive—and it looks that way from the clip, but I’m no swag expert—I’d say yes.
Dumbest Camera Ban Ever
In London:
While photography bans are pretty common, the station has decided to only ban DSLRs due to “their combination of high quality sensor and high resolution”. Other cameras are allowed in, as long as they don’t look “big” enough to shoot amazing photos.
The iPhone 4S camera is pretty amazing.
Cheating at Casinos with Hidden Cameras
Sleeve cameras aren’t new, but they’re now smaller than ever and the cheaters are getting more sophisticated:
In January, at the newly opened $4-billion Cosmopolitan casino in Las Vegas, a gang called the Cutters cheated at baccarat. Before play began, the dealer offered one member of the group a stack of eight decks of cards for a pre-game cut. The player probably rubbed the stack for good luck, at the same instant riffling some of the corners of the cards underneath with his index finger. A small camera, hidden under his forearm, recorded the order.
After a few hands, the cutter left the floor and entered a bathroom stall, where he most likely passed the camera to a confederate in an adjoining stall. The runner carried the camera to a gaming analyst in a nearby hotel room, where the analyst transferred the video to a computer, watching it in slow motion to determine the order of the cards. Not quite half an hour had passed since the cut. Baccarat play averages less than six cards a minute, so there were still at least 160 cards left to play through. Back at the table, other members of the gang were delaying the action, glancing at their cellphones and waiting for the analyst to send them the card order.
Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.