Hollywood movies often depict high-tech biometric systems that can scan your face, eyes, or fingerprints from a surveillance camera and instantly pull up all of your information. Most people take this type of technology to be science fiction, doubting that the technology that we have today is cable of such feats. However, the truth is that it is not only capable, but this technology already exists. [...]
Californians may have started celebrating their cellphone privacy too soon. After talk of passing a law to make warrantless searches of cellphones during arrests illegal, California Gov. Jerry Brown vetoed the law, giving officers the power to snoop through your cell phone as they wish for whatever reason they deem reasonable. [...]
Whenever you call an emergency response number, police want to track your location so that they know where send responders. During the time when most people relied on landline phones, it was easy for police and emergency response units to find the location that the call was being made from and to be able to arrive in time. [...]
Gone are the days of clicking a Facebook link and hoping that the innocent-looking website your friend sent you to isn’t anything dangerous or inappropriate. Thanks to Facebook teaming up with the security firm Websense, all of the links that you click on from Facebook will now be scanned in real-time for anything that can harm your computer, expose your personal information, or mentally scar you. [...]
Apparently having too much to drink and getting some liquid courage going, 19-year-old Wilnelia Rivera Caraballo decided that she was going to rob a store. Seeing as she didn’t have any real weapons or the creativity of our favorite stick up man, Ricky New, she decided to use a toy gun as her weapon of choice. [...]
You may have heard about the Conficker Worm from way back in 2008. It caused quite a scare as it was infecting a huge amount of computers, was able to spread on it’s own, and no one knew how to stop it. Well, at this point this worm isn’t as popular or thought of as much, especially as there are now patches and protections from it, however, this worm is still alive and well with an estimated 12 million computers under its control. [...]
Facebook is planning on rolling out yet another feature which will make sharing that much easier for its users. However, security specialists are concerned that this new feature might make the sharing of personal information too easy, leading to an increase in hacking and harassment. [...]
Car owners read carefully: if your car was ever signed up for OnStar, even if that means you might have bought a pre-owned vehicle where the previous owner was an OnStar subscriber, the car tracking and communications service is about to start tracking your vehicle once again. [...]
Internet security company McAfee conducts an annual study that classifies the top celebrities that might be harmful to your computer’s health. By harmful we don’t mean that the celebrities themselves might wreak havoc on your system, but instead that searching for websites or images of these people might bring up malware-loaded websites specifically created to look like innocent celebrity content. [...]
After a series of break-ins in Hockley, Birmingham, UK that all seemed to be carried out by the same serial burglar, local authorities decided not to leave his arrest up to chance and to instead set a trap. We’re not sure exactly how the police knew that this trap would work or just how quickly it would catch the crook, but it sure did get the job done. [...]
Emile Pratt Jr., a 28-year old Sharon, Pa. man had successfully robbed a jewelry store of about 100 pieces and sold them to various pawn shops across Pennsylvania. He was in the clear and could have most likely remained free, but the money from the heist wasn’t enough, and he decided he wanted to get more from the store. [...]
GPS accuracy and lock-on speed depends on how many GPS satellites have a clear view of your device at any moment of the day, however, what most people aren’t aware of is that there are plenty of non-GPS satellites oribiting Earth that are capable of doing the exact same job of providing location. It only makes sense that U.S. cell providers would eventually tap into these additional satellites. [...]
Lately, we have been hearing a lot about people getting into legal trouble for recording on-duty police officers with their cell phones or camcorders. Not only are these people being harassed, having their cameras and other recording equipment confiscated, but in some cases they’ve been arrested and jailed. The interesting thing here is that these people were not breaking any laws, but were in fact entitled to recording police by the first amendment. This right was confirmed by a federal appellate court last week. [...]
Surveillance security systems and smart DVRs have come a long way in the past decade with the invention of features such as motion detection, scheduled recording, and live video streaming over the web. The lastest development, however, not only surpasses these features in usefulness, but downright puts their technological breakthroughs to shame. [...]
