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Posts Tagged “

Surveillance

advertising

Creepy Corporate Data-Sucking Machines of the Future

It's time to monetize your datastream. You're generating all this data while you surf the web: what you buy, what you read, where you work, where you vacation, your current favorite music/video, where you bank, and of course what you're talking about in email. Shouldn't there be some way to commoditize all that? I mean, shouldn't you be putting all your personal web data together into a handy UDP, or unified data profile, and selling it to the highest bidder? Absolutely. And in the year 2024, a nice company called Datapoints wants to help you to do just that. The Datapoints site, written in hilarious biz-speak, is one of the only deliberately science fictional corporate websites I've ever seen. More »

predictions

The Video Surveillance Market Is About to Explode!

Video surveillance is the hot new thing. Tech market think tank ABI Research has just come out with a new study predicting that the global video surveillance market will "expand from revenue of about $13.5 billion in 2006 to a remarkable $46 billion in 2013." In a press release only Philip K. Dick could love, ABI gushes excitedly about all the fun new uses of the vidcams and databases you could be manufacturing, buying, and selling to the surveillance-craving masses. More »

dystopia

Satellite-Eye-View of People Evacuating in Chad

This is what a mass evacuation from a city looks like from space. Using satellites orbiting over Africa, human rights groups published UNOSAT satellite imagery to show, in very simple terms, the human cost of violence in the Chadian capital city of N'Djamena. Over 10,000 people are crammed on a bridge, trying to escape into the neighboring nation of Cameroon. The black dots are people, and the yellow dashes are vehicles, most likely trucks and buses. It's a chilling portrait of the human future, wracked with violence and recorded via space-based surveillance devices, taken on February 27. See the full map below. More »

surveillance

The Art of Monitoring New York City's Telephone Conversations

You can gage how busy New York City is by looking at all the people swarming in the streets, or by smelling the giant piles of trash they've left at the curbs. But there are ways to take stock of the city's populace that are far more revealing. For a new MoMa exhibit this month, MIT's Senseable City Lab chose to expose how talkative New York is by tracking lines of electronic communication into and out of the city. Their project is aptly named the New York Talk Exchange (NYTE). It's also inadvertently a portrait of digital surveillance, showing exactly how easy it is for people to use phone records to monitor which countries New Yorkers are ringing up. More »

social control

The Authorities Have Your Skeleton On File

Security checkpoints could do a full-body scan and check your skeleton against the bone structures of known terrorists in a few years. A new patent, issued on Friday, covers a system that would scan some, or all, of your skeleton and compare it with a database of skeletons. The database would also pull up data such as your name, address, social security number, and passport number. Worst of all, you might not even know your skeleton is being scanned from a distance. More »

social control

Beware Google's Surveillance Death-Ray

What happens when Google street view is no longer content with showing incredibly detailed pictures of the outside of your house? This hilarious science fiction video by the Vacationeers follows Google's omni-cam to its most invasive extreme... and of course they posted it on YouTube. More »

technology

Spy Satellite Diagnoses Cancer

Satellites will soon capture ultrasound images of unborn children in rural Nunavut and beam them all the way to Ontario. It's just part of a new pilot program which uses technology developed for diagnosing astronauts from Earth. Already, doctors in Calgary can look at real-time ultrasounds of patients in Banff and figure out what ails them. How long will it be before the satellite itself can scan your body from space? More »

surveillance

Three Ways To Escape High-Tech Surveillance

In our surveillance-obsessed era, it's no surprise that science fiction is packed with stories about people going to extreme measures to escape being tracked. Just think about Tom Cruise's character in Minority Report, swapping out his eyeballs and taking a pill that transforms his facial features in an incredibly painful process. It seems like every dystopian tale these days has to have at least one biological implant that functions as a location device, and our hero must dig around in her body to get rid of it. Here are a few of the best "kill the spybot" scenes in recent years: More »