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The EU’s data protection agencies on Monday called for an outright ban on using artificial intelligence to identify people in public places, pointing to the “extremely high” risks to privacy.

In a non-binding opinion, the two bodies called for a “general ban” on the practice that would include “recognition of faces, gait, fingerprints, DNA, voice, keystrokes and other biometric or behavioural signals, in any context”.

Such practices “interfere with fundamental rights and freedoms to such an extent that they may call into question the essence of these rights and freedoms,” the heads of the European Data Protection Board and the European Data Protection Supervisor said.

Forget flexible, get stretchable.

We’ve had curved displays for a while now, but what about stretchy ones? Samsung says it’s making progress building screens “that can be stretched in all directions like rubber bands,” and that the first applications for this material could be in building flexible health tech.

The company’s researchers recently created an OLED display that can be stretched by up to 30 percent while operating as normal. As a proof of concept, engineers integrated this display into a stretchable heart rate monitor that can be stuck onto the skin like a Band-Aid.

Continue reading “Samsung shows off stretchable OLED screen in prototype heart rate monitor” »

Fully autonomous exploration and mapping of the unknown is a cutting-edge capability for commercial drones.

Drone autonomy is getting more and more impressive, but we’re starting to get to the point where it’s getting significantly more difficult to improve on existing capabilities. Companies like Skydio are selling (for cheap!) commercial drones that have no problem dynamically path planning around obstacles at high speeds while tracking you, which is pretty amazing, and it can also autonomously create 3D maps of structures. In both of these cases, there’s a human indirectly in the loop, either saying “follow me” or “map this specific thing.” In other words, the level of autonomous flight is very high, but there’s still some reliance on a human for high-level planning. Which, for what Skydio is doing, is totally fine and the right way to do it.

Continue reading “Exyn Brings Level 4 Autonomy to Drones” »

Microsoft Patch Tuesday, April 2021 – NSA Discovers New Vulnerabilities Affecting Microsoft Exchange Servers.

Monitoring your vital signs is becoming easier and easier these days, critical if you want to keep track of your general health and well being, and incredibly useful if you want to see how a life style, or dietary, change is playing out. In this video I look at two new companies that are utilising mobile phones to measure a whole raft of biometric data, simply and easily, and clinically tested to deliver medical-grade accuracy. And these are just first generation versions, who knows where this will take us, and what we will be able to monitor quickly and easily in the next few years.

Medical Diagnosis Software With Just A Smart PhoneIn the near future, your phone or a wearable of some description, will constantly be able to monitor all your health signs continuously ready to alert you to any worrying signs, and what they can do today is just the beginning of where we are heading.

Continue reading “Medical Diagnosis Software With Just A Smart Phone — The Future Is Arriving” »

Quantum Encryption, Privacy Preservation, And Blockchains — Dr. Vipul Goyal, NTT Ltd. Cryptography & Information Security Labs

Dr Vipul Goyal is a senior scientist at NTT Research (a division of Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation, a telecommunications company headquartered in Tokyo, Japan.) and an Associate Professor in the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), where he is part of the Crypto group, the theory group, a core faculty at CyLab (CMU security and privacy institute) and the faculty advisor of CMU Blockchain Group.

Continue reading “Dr Vipul Goyal — NTT Research — Quantum Encryption, Privacy Preservation, And Blockchains” »

The security company FireEye was breached by a sophisticated attack that stole multiple red team assessment tools. Malwarebytes customers are safe.

Hello folks! If you have not heard yet, the security firm FireEye has had a breach of many red team assessment tools used for identification of vulnerabilities to help protect customers.

While it is not known exactly who was behind this attack, a big concern is the sharing and use of these stolen red team tools by both sophisticated and non-sophisticated actors, similar to what we saw in 2017 with the ShadowBrokers group breach of the NSA’s Equation Group.

There is also the fact that privacy crusader Max Schrems undercut Apple’s holier-than-thou privacy image last month when his digital rights group Noyb targeted the tech giant in Germany and Spain, claiming that Apple’s “Identifier for Advertisers” (IDFA) tracking ID, which is automatically generated on every iPhone during setup, allows Apple, app makers and ad networks to follow an individual user’s activities and use that data to show them ads targeted at their interests. Apple has said those claims are “factually inaccurate”.

Fundamentally though, the underlying message of Federighi’s keynote today was clear: Apple is not budging on its new privacy standards, they will come at the start of 2021, and it will play hardball with other tech giants if necessary, at least in certain markets.

Continue reading “Apple fires warning shot at Facebook and Google on privacy, pledges fight against ‘data-industrial complex’” »

Today we are going to discuss the topic drug enforcement from a very interesting technological angle.

Brian Drake, is the Director of Artificial Intelligence for the Defense Intelligence Agency’s (DIA) Directorate of Science and Technology. Mr. Drake works with the DIA’s Future Capabilities and Innovation Office, and he also leads an initiative to test the effectiveness of different applications of artificial intelligence at solving various mission problems, including using AI to combat the opioid crisis with a DIA program known as SABLE SPEAR.

Continue reading “Fighting The Opioid Epidemic with AI — Brian Drake, Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) — Sable Spear” »