On the side of a building in Madrid, the Spanish artist SpY recently installed 150 CCTV cameras with, in the artist’s words, "the intention of not watching over anything." It kind of makes us long for the days when CCTV was the most threatening symbol of the surveillance state
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One of the most significant controversies of recent years has been the NSA’s mass surveillance of individuals via telecommunications and internet data monitoring. And while the ‘bots which are watching us are not much more than bits of data coursing through CPUs and electronic storage devices, it’s sometimes easier to imagine a physical manifestation of such unseen evils.
What we have here is just that. Technabob friend and artist Metin Seven designed this satirical, physical version of one of the NSA’s all-knowing, all-seeing spybots, rendering it in 3D. And if you really want one, you can have it 3D printed over at Shapeways. A 4-inch-high full color sandstone print will set you back about $25(USD), though it’ll be rough, not shiny like the rendering above. It’s also available in a variety of other materials, including steel and brass.
Just be careful when you order one, you never know who might be monitoring your purchases.
As reporters at the New York Times, the Guardian and ProPublica dig deeper into the documents leaked by Edward Snowden, new and disturbing revelations continue to be made. Two programs, dubbed Bullrun (NSA) and Edgehill (GCHQ), have just come to light, that focus on circumventing or breaking the security and encryption tools used across the internet. The effort dwarfs the $20 million Prism program that simply gobbled up data. Under the auspices of “Sigint (signals intelligence) enabling” in a recent budget request, the NSA was allocated roughly $255 million dollars this year alone to fund its anti-encryption program.
The agencies’ efforts are multi-tiered, and start with a strong cracking tool. Not much detail about the methods or software are known, but a leaked memo indicates that the NSA successfully unlocked “vast amounts” of data in 2010. By then it was already collecting massive quantities of data from taps on internet pipelines, but much of it was safely protected by industry standard encryption protocols. Once that wall fell, what was once simply a torrent of scrambled ones and zeros, became a font of “exploitable” information. HTTPS, VoIP and SSL are all confirmed to have been compromised through Bullrun, though, it appears that some solutions to the NSA’s “problem” are less elegant than others. In some cases a super computer and simple brute force are necessary to peel back the layers of encryption.
Filed under: Internet
Source: New York TImes, Guardian, ProPublica
“Moshi Moshi Watch”, just released by Thanko, could be very interesting product for people who like spy movies and have ever wished you were a spy.
“Moshi Moshi Watch” is a wristwatch. But it’s not just a regular wristwatch. It enables you to answer an incoming call on your bluetooth compliant smartphone with “Moshi Moshi Watch”. It vibrates to let you know somebody is calling your smarphone and you can answer the call on the wristwatch and talk. You can even make a phone call with the wristwatch.
Price: ¥7,980
Size: 46 x 51 x 13 mm
Weight: 26 g
Battery charge: By USB
Normally if you want to take a picture of someone, it is pretty obvious by how you are holding the camera and where it is pointed. Everyone knows that you are doing it and they know who the target is. This iPhone periscope will help you keep things undercover.
The idea is that you install a sticky metal ring on your phone, so when you want to use the periscope and be sneaky about taking pics, just place the periscope on the metal ring. There’s no need to install any software or anything else. A mirror inside the gadget just reflects the image into the lens of your camera.
So you just pretend that you are playing with your smartphone, while you are really taking pictures. It is only $22.45(USD) from allputer. Hopefully that sticky ring is strong enough not to make you look like a bumbling inept spy when the periscope falls off.
[via bookofjoe]
Dom Del Torto is an animator currently living in the UK. Dom Del Torto’s laptop is a MacBook Pro currently living 3,000 miles away in Iran. This was not a planned separation. More »
Just what is the biggest jellyfish that you have ever come across whenever you are at the seaside, or traveling on a boat over a body of seawater? Well, most of these tend to be small, and the general rule of thumb is this – the smaller they are, the more poisonous it is. Should you come across this five-and-a-half-foot robot jellyfish, surely you would be astonished, and trust the military to be among the first few folks to come up with a use for it – to perform Navy underwater surveillance down the road, of course.
The idea of the Cyro jellyfish robot was realized thanks to the efforts of the team of engineers over at Virginia Tech, and Cyro will be autonomous in nature, sporting eight mechanical legs that ring its metal chassis. Specially designed to mimic the unique, efficient underwater propulsion of a jellyfish, Cyro will come covered in silicone so that it looks just like the real deal when moving underwater, but one thing’s for sure – Cyro lacks the killer instinct, and is extremely heavy, – 170 pounds to be exact.
By Ubergizmo. Related articles: CHIMP Robot: Move Like A Tank, Act Like A Primate, Robot Octopus Developed By Army, 
Drones have often been used in war theaters, but that doesn’t stop this little military drone from being pretty cute. It was deployed by the British Army in Afghanistan and it measures only four inches by two inches.
The PD-100 Black Hornet Nano Unmanned Aerial Vehicle is small enough to fit in the palm of a child’s hand, and comes with a tiny camera that will allow soldiers to use it to surveil what happens on the ground before entering hostile areas.
It’s small enough that it can even peek around corners before turning. The drone has an autonomy of up to 30 minutes at a time, and has a range of about half a mile. Here’s some video of an earlier prototype of the PD-100 in action:
[via Animal NY]
The ready availability and widespread usage of surveillance technology is enough to drive most level-headed people paranoid. Drones, hidden and visible security cameras, sensors, communications tracing systems… they’re all around us and at any given moment, they could be used to track your whereabouts and monitor your every move.
People have been protesting these technologies for use, with news that various government organizations employ them on a regular basis. No one has been more vocal about them than designer Adam Harvey, who made his stand clear through his newest fashion collection called ‘Stealth Wear.’
The pieces in his collection stay true to his message, with one them being dubbed as the ‘anti-drone hoodie’, which is crafted from a metalized material that makes it impossible for drones to detect your thermal image with their sensors. Then there’s the ‘XX-shirt’, which I presume protects against X-rays since it’s supposed to “protect your heart from X-ray radiation.”
Harvey explains: “Military technology is coming home from the war. These pieces are designed to live with it, to cope with it–to live in a world where surveillance is happening all the time.”
I think it’s an awesome thing that he’s doing with ‘Stealth Wear.’ What do you think?
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